Stellaris Mods - Progress, Previews and... I need another P or this aliteration kinda ends on a poopy note... oops! (Patreon)

Hai! And welcome to the monthly progress report! Usually when I do these, I like to go over all our mods. And even if there isn't much to say, I like to at least talk about future plans and stuff.

But this time I have so much to show and so much to talk about the new assets coming to Asari Civ that today's post is going to be mostly about that n_n

Mostly... But before we get to the exciting stuff, I just want to get something not-so-exciting out of the way first. Namely...

We Don't Have Time For Compatibility Patches

About a week ago we announced that our mods would no longer offer native support for third party ship classes mods (and any other mods that we do not personally use). All our existing and planned compatibility projects have been cancelled and we no longer accept user requests to create compatibility patches.

We are very sorry that it had to come to that, and so abruptly too. But it was a decision we had to make sooner or later and we chose to make it sooner, before the development time we were sinking into compatibility patches completely eclipsed the time we had for modding in the first place.

After the last announcement three weeks ago, I promised that with Cherryh compatibility out of the way, we would get back on track. And then we were bogged down by all the mod compatibility issues that had to be dealt with as well. We'd thought we'd be able to get compatibility patches updated in a matter of days but we couldn't have been more wrong. After over a week of working exclusively on cross-compatibility and nothing to show for it, we realised that we'd just wasted a colossal amount of time on stuff that didn't matter to us while having made ZERO progress on our own mods,

In the end, we had to decide whether we wanted to make mods or patches. We chose mods. Balancing the two was already having a negative impact on our productivity and enjoyment of modding and it suddenly became very apparent that the bigger we grew, the more projects we started, we'd only be dealing with more and more of that until at some point compatibility patches would completely drain our motivation to create content.

Once again, I cannot apologise enough but I do believe that we made the right choice and that turning our attention inwards and removing those distractions will ultimately lead to increased productivity on the projects that matter to us the most - our own.

Speaking of...

Mass Effect Civilisations - Asari 

In slightly over a week since revising our policy, we have managed to make up for all the time we'd wasted and made a lot of progress on both Asari and Omega! I will finally talk more on Omega in a couple of days (in a dedicated post) so today we'll just go over the upcoming Asari content: the 2.0 Starbase!

In Cherryh, Starbases are absolutely central to gameplay, even more so than planets - they produce ships, provide the bulk of your fleet capacity, serve as anchors for your empire's borders and defend them from outlaws and invaders. Player interacts with starbases on a regular basis: building outposts to claim territory, defending and attacking them during war, upgrading, downgrading and swapping modules around.
As such, our main design objective is making sure that they look and feel right. While it would have been incredibly easy to just repurpose the old spaceport model, keep it the same for all upgrade levels and totally eschew visible modules... that would have been a terrible disservice to the importance of Starbases and the FUN of unlocking new tiers and specialising different bases for different functions.

SO! Without further ado, let's have a looksie at our plans for each Starbase tier as well as the progress on the models!

The Outpost is a small station whose primary purpose is to establish foothold in a system. The owner of the outpost controls all the mining and research stations around it, but that's about it. The outpost has no modules or buildings, it has no shipyards and barely any armaments. It's supposed to be cheap and quick to construct.

In our design for the outpost, we went for a simple, utilitarian, frontier-ish look. It does still convey the elegance and monumentalism of asari structures but emphasises function over form.

The Starport is the first "real" starbase and we refer to it as Tier 1. Players start with one in their home system at the beginning of the game and are incentivised to customise its two modules and one building slot as soon as they can afford it.

The Starport is designed to look a lot cleaner and more "civilised" than the outpost. Depending on the modues it has, it can serve as a civillian trading hub, an industrial spaceyard or a military fortress. The basic shape has to be flexible enough to serve any of those functions equally well and be ready to be repurposed from one type to another as needed.
It is one of the first things you see upon starting a game so it has to leave a good first impression.

The Starhold is the second upgrade tier and the first one that requires research to unlock. It offers 4 module slots and 2 buildings, double the capabilities of a Starport.

It's a dramatic upgrade so we wanted to reflect that by dramatically expanding the size as well as the complexity of the starbase, adding on a "skirt" that houses additional facilities as well as a central habitat  which... isn't finished yet ^^ But we have very exciting plans for it!

The Fortress is Tier 3, equipped with the maximum number of module slots (six) and up to three buildings. In terms of cost-benefit, it is the optimal tier for trading hubs, shipyards and anchorages.

For this tier, we added on another horizontal expansion. This design is meant to serve as a transitory stage between tier 2 and 4 while still functioning and looking right on its own. The details aren't quite decided on yet but there is a lot of unused surface that we can't wait to use for something fun! >o<

And lastly, Tier 4 - the Citadel! (Not THE Citadel, just the) It is the final Starbase upgrade, but its utility for economic/industrial purposes is actually limited since it doesn't add any module slots beyond the six from Tier 3 and only one extra building. However, what Citadels excel at is defence! With enough weapons and defence platform capacity to rival a medium-sized fleet, Citadels can secure strategic locations and hold the line against enemy fleets for a long time.

As with Tier 3, we haven't yet decided on the details (and the screenshots are actually from earlier than the other tiers) but we are very happy with the basic shape. The "wings" build upon Tier 3 extensions to enlarge and further refine the station's shape. The wings are based on the asari Science Nexus and will look just as pretty once finished <3 I've been wanting to reuse that design and I'm so happy I finally got an opportunity!

Beyond the Starbase itself, we also have modules, defence platforms and ion cannons in the works. What you can see here is the ion cannon model and earlier in this post you can see it in action!

The idea behind it was "what if we took a Mass Relay and weaponised it?" aaaand this is the result n_n During our tests, this thing was deadly! So hopefully we managed to make it look the part!

Starbase modules and defence platforms aren't ready to be shown yet and we've decided to hold off on them until the Starbase itself is complete. But at this rate, it shouldn't be long! <3

And this is all for today! Thank you for your continued support and for following the development of our mods! And on the subject, I'm planning to post a few more updates and dev diaries this month than I usually do, talking about upcoming content, more thoughts on the Patreon reorganisation (yah I still haven't made up my mind on it ._.) and some posts about our development process and development philosophy in general. I'm feeling super talkative this month ^^

So until next time, have fun playing! <3