"For years, we said even mentioning it would make programmers cry"
Sci-fi 4X strategy game Stellaris is getting a Nomads expansion on June 15th that lets you jettison traditional ideas about territory and play as a wholly mobile civilisation - travelling around the galaxy in Arkships that serve as colonies, shipyards, and military or science vessels. You know the old Terran saying: home is wherever you park your trillion tonne hermetically sealed artificial habitat. Here's another, related Terran saying: a trillion tonne hermetically sealed artificial habitat parks wherever the hell it pleases.
The expansion will launch alongside free Stellaris update 4.4, named Pegasus. Developers Paradox have put together a choice of nomadic lifestyles, with inspirations that appear to range from the Mongolian Empire through Eldar Craftworlds to the work of Douglas Adams.
Pick the Heirs of the Khan origin, and you'll play the outcast successor to a murdered Space Genghis, which means you'll be spending a lot of your journey dodging assassins. The Sacred Path, meanwhile, sends you on a pilgrimage between holy sites; this Origin transforms your regular civilians into priests and zealots, but also seemingly gives you the option of deciding that all of the ancestral prophesies were made up, once your voyage is done.
And then there's Forever Cruise, in which you effectively transport a bunch of retired aristocrats to all the major galactic landmarks, straining your crew to breaking point so that the bigwigs can swill and shag the cosmos away. I have a friend who worked on a cruise liner once. The way he tells it, they're floating Bingo parlors with very crowded waterslides.
Stellaris Game Director Stephen Muray has written a long blog about the Nomads expansion on Steam, focussing on the Sacred Path origin. "For years we have said that moving planets are impossible," he writes. "For years, we said even mentioning it would make programmers cry. We like to do the impossible, and we also (apparently) like to make our programmers cry. Despite having to change the carpets twice due to water damage, colonies have been separated from planets! (This is gonna break your mods.)"
Ho ho ho! We do love a comedian, even those of us who make mods. In all seriousness, I'd love to read a longer account of why nomad civs were so hard to implement. In the meantime, here is a brutish drive-by distillation of Muray's post.
Pick a Nomad civ, and you'll start by choosing between a civilian, scientific and military arkship, with associated specialised features and modifiers when unlocking technologies, plus a custom UI for design and upgrading. You'll be able to research and build other arkship classes later.
Arkships can do a lot of stuff, but they can't research anomalies, archaeology sites, astral rifts, and certain special projects – you'll need to construct a bog-standard and, most importantly, disposable science ship for those. "This is because we don’t want your entire colony being eaten by a dimensional horror or whatever other evil our Content Designers have made for the last decade," Muray notes.
Nomad civs in Stellaris aren't entirely footloose. You can build a finite number of Waystations in systems to collect resources, monitor other civs, and build megastructures, among other applications. If you put Waystations in neighbouring systems, they'll link up into a Wayline, spreading modifiers like boosts to resource capacity and research production. This may also annoy any planet-dwelling empires in the vicinity.
Stellaris is still on our list of the best PC strategy games. Why not read Nic's (RPS in peace) tale of running a cyberpunk cult, which contains sentences like: "I aspire not to paint the map, I only wish to dip a toothbrush in my colour and flick it hither and thither, leaving my mark about the galaxy without having to deal with spreadsheets the size of sandworms."