Paradox Interactive has revealed Stellaris: First Contact, the new Story Pack for their sci-fi grand strategy game that enhances the opening to a campaign with new origin stories for your chosen civilisation.
Up until now, the start of each Stellaris campaign has seen your civilisation take its first steps into space on its own, only coming into contact with nearby alien races as you yourself are exploring. First Contact will provide a set of new origins about being met by post-FTL races. Here’s the new origins that you can choose:
- New Origins:
- Broken Shackles: You didn’t take to the stars; you were taken to the stars as an alien captive! Now, you and your fellow prisoners have overtaken the ship and found yourselves banding together to survive and thrive as a diverse new community. Can you rise to greatness from this humble origin… and will your former captors take notice?
- Payback: No one would have believed your world was being watched keenly by intelligences greater than your own – until they invaded. But you did not go quietly into the night! Your civilization has repelled a would-be conqueror from space, and with sudden access to their advanced technology, you’re about to discover just what else is out there beyond the stars!
- Fear of the Dark: As you’ve explored your home system, you’ve always suspected you weren’t alone in the galaxy… especially when one of your planets suddenly suffered an “incident” a while back. A very large faction of your own people have long advocated against tempting fate out in the dark abyss of the unknown. What path will you choose as you find yourself needing room to grow?
Not only that, but there’s new events and interactions available for pre-FTL civilisations that you could encounter as your empire expands. These will depend on their level of technology and awareness of your presence, being shaped in part by your choices.
Finally, new cloaking technology will let you equip ships with cloaking devices to survey in secret or spring surprise attacks, and you could get all Star Trek: Insurrection and set up cloaked observation posts on pre-FTL planets. You’ll naturally need to counter the potential that your neighbours are spying on you with their own cloaked ships.
All of this will come alongside the free version 3.7 ‘Canis Major’ update which will have some improvements and additions to the game for all players.
Source: press release
