Stellaris Mods - We Were Doing Origins Before They Were Cool But They're REALLY Cool Now So We Want To Do MORE! (Patreon)

NOVEMBER! It's here! And even though Halloween is over, we'll be celebrating it today with a spoooooookily long Monthly Mod Report!

The October one had to be delayed due to a little embarrassing accident I had, and by the time I had recovered, PDXCon was around the corner so I decided to skip it completely at that point. BUT we're here today, with a double feature! Actually, scratch that, make it triple! We have so much to talk about I don't even know what math is anymore so let's maybe stop announcing it and just get to it already!

To start with, let's go over the features of the upcoming Federations DLC that we know of and have high hopes for in relation to our mods. The most relevant one to us is of course... Origins!

Yes! We have always loved the idea of asymmetrical starts, and tried to implement them as much as we could without breaking Stellaris in half, but implementing our custom starting conditions always involved a lot of messy workarounds as well as balance concerns. As of the live version of Stellaris, there's only so much we can do to differentiate the various starts before they fall too far from the vanilla standard that all other civs are beholden to.

However, when EVERYONE gets to have a unique start in 2.6, the spectrum of what's acceptable will become much wider and more colourful! It's not possible to perfectly balance asymmetry so we sincerely hope Stellaris devs will just let their creativity go wild. That way, we can go wild(er) too ^o^

We don't know how the final implementation of the system will look just yet but we do hope it's as moddable as possible so, assuming the best case scenario, here is what we'd like to do once we get our hands on Federations:

Mass Effect Civilisations: Asari 

Both Thessia and Illium already feature unique starts, but admittedly their selling points compared to vanilla homeworlds are more cosmetic than mechanical. Yes, Illium has a harder time with its early expansion and is compensated by a larger wealth of resources and Thessia starts with a planetary feature that rewards investing into science early on, but ultimately both of them are rather... tame compared to what we've heard is coming in 2.6 - a ruined Ringworld, Fallen Empire vassal, starting on a Relic World of all things - it's unthinkable that vanilla would have fancier origins than us so we need to up our game!

So we are reworking both of the existing origins into more true-to-narrative, mechanically distinct and asymmetrical experiences. Specifically:

• Thessia will now spawn as an Advanced Empire, even when played by a player, with all of the Athena Nebula systems already charted and claimed as well as two colonies already established within it. However, to prevent excessive snowballing, the empire will also start with a timed modifier greatly reducing its further expansion potential for the first several years of the game, until standard empires can begin to catch up.
  
  Additionally, the Planetary Feature that currently represents the Temple of Athame and provides a passive research boost will be replaced with a full-fledged Archeological Site revolving around the secrets of the Prothean Beacon.
  The "digsite" will serve as a narrative device that introduces the player to the Republics' background in an organic way, while also giving them the opportunity to actively exploit the unfair technological advantage that allowed them to rise to greatness and... rise to even further greatness! Or... not? While in the ME canon, the Republics selfishly hoarded the knowledge of the Protheans to secure themselves an edge over other galactic civilisations unbeknownst even to its own people, perhaps in MEC: Asari, players might want to choose a different path? Do you think your Asari will instead choose to share the Beacon's bounty with the Galactic Community, forfeiting the unique Artifact but strengthening the galaxy at large? Or maybe you will decide to let dead precursors lie and leave your nation free to rise or fall by its merits alone? That will be up to you to decide as part of the largest, most narratively rich and most interactive event chain we have written so far!
• Illium will also feature an expanded Origin but its narrative will take a very different form. In MEC: Asari, the story of Illium is about going where no asari has gone before to tame an inhospitable frontier on the boundary of civilised galaxy and lawless no-sentient's-land, and adapting to profit from both sides in the process.
  
  The new Illium is intended to be a challenging start initially, but with a big payoff in the end. It will start as a unique Rugged Planet that cannot be conventionally terraformed or urbanised, saddled with a number of nasty blockers that limit usable space, habitability and development potential.
  The player who owns Illium will gain access to special research options that allow them to clear those blockers and build settlements in their place, gradually overcoming the planet's natural environment until eventually nothing is left of it.
  At the end of the process, the player will be rewarded with the ability to complete Illium's transformation into a full Ecumenopolis, even if they do not have the requisite Ascension Perk! But unlike generic Ecumenopoleis, it won't just be wiped clean of all planetary features! Upon completion, the existing Illium features will be transformed into improved versions that pay homage to the history and development of all the notable districts, rewarding the player with a one-of-a-kind planet that will more than pay for all the effort it took to develop it!

As you're reading all this stuff about storytelling and narratives, you're probably wondering "That's great, but what happened to the promised regular narrative updates? Weren't you supposed to do all that stuff through them?"
And that is actually another thing I wanted to address today! When we first announced the intention to start pushing narrative updates on a regular basis while no other important content was being worked on, that... kinda fell by the wayside after the first update. We weren't happy with how the implementation of those events turned out and did not want to release another unless we could deliver something better.

Don't get me wrong, anomalies are, in and of themselves, an excellent medium for telling certain stories. Stories... typically revolving around exploration and discovery of alien and unknown things. However, um... that may not have been the best medium to carry the narrative of the Asari civilisation.
That, we have decided, should take a more introspective form. Bombarding the player with wordy anomalies during a phase that's already chock-full of them would just consign them to being skimmed and clicked through, with little information retained and ultimately little value in putting it out there in the first place.
It is an issue that Alexis Kennedy, the author of the Horizon Signal DLC, once warned prospective Stellaris writers about on his blog, here and here, and we finally had a chance to see for ourselves that he was right.

And so, we've decided to reevaluate our approach to storytelling in our mods. Even though we have pages upon pages of material ready to go, we don't want to deliver it to players in the form of dry exposition while they're busy dealing with a hundred of other unrelated things that may be going on in their game.
With the upcoming update to Asari Origins, we'll be attempting different methods of delivery, and by looking at the above, you can probably surmise what we have in mind.

The new Origins will be experimenting with two approaches:

• In Thessia's case, the narrative will be largely delivered through an excavation. Unlike anomalies, excavations leave easily accessible permanent records of the process that also acknowledge branching paths and random events that might occur as part of the story.
  That allows them to play out over a long period of time without having to worry about players losing track of the plot as they're juggling a border war, micromanaging a new colony and racing to complete their Space Pokemon collection before an unfriendly empire snipes the system Illusive Tarblac is in...
• With Illium, we wanted to try something different. Rather than tell the player what's happening, we want them to be an active participant in the story, progressing it at their own pace as they decide when to interact with the relevant techs and planet features.
  Most of the fluff will be delivered through those, rather than event messages. In this way, we're hoping to tie the narrative directly to existing gameplay systems in a "show, don't tell" kind of way.

As always, we'll continue to iterate, obsess over and overthink the littlest aspects of it and ultimately see what works best for us. Stellaris offers SO MANY tools for expressing narratives and I personally think the trick is finding the right one for each individual story we want to tell.

OH! But, of course, no talk about the Asari and a diplomacy overhaul could be complete without shipping the two in a steamy fanfic in which cute blue aliens sensually wrap the entire galactic society around their finger... but sadly we have very little official information on how the relevant systems will actually work or how much access modders will have to the infrastructure behind it n_n

In terms of what we would want to do, we do currently have our eyes firmly set on two of the announced features: the Galactic Community and Envoys. The latest Dev Diary #159 pointed out some potential areas of interest to us. The presence of the Galactic Council is veeeeery interesting and being able to leverage diplomatic weight to push favourable resolutions to the table and knock down others sounds like a game asari would love to play... and probably be better at than most ￣ヮ￣
I would very much like to rework Thessian Statecraft to interact with these new systems but we'll wait with announcing any plans until there's more information on the mechanics driving them.

Mass Effect Civilisations: Omega

In the previous Mod Report, I promised I would go into more detail on how upgrading Omega over the course of the game will change and open up more things to do in the Sahrabarik system, and that's still happening, but before we get to it today, I think we should once again go over the Omega start. Of all our projects, this is the one the introduction of Origins will affect the most!

As of the live version of Stellaris, it takes A LOT of maintenance to make a habitat start work. With the current way Omega is set up, it has to wait for the game to populate it with... planetary buildings and districts.., that don't work. And then the mod takes over, wipes it all clean and sets up a proper habitat infrastructure. It is as painful as it sounds and not very elegant in terms of code. There is currently no way to just tell the game to leave Omega alone at the start so the best we can do is clean up the mess after. It is very clear that currently the game isn't built to support non-standard empire homeworlds.

However, Origins seem to be changing it. Some of the vanilla Origins include a Ringworld section, a Relic World, and even... a Habitat! Yes! According to this RPS article as well as this ASpec video (Glory to Paluushkind!) one of the Origins starts one's empire on a habitat and makes habitats more attractive as a means of expansion! Sound familiar? ❦ ᴗ ❦

Squeee! As with many things before, we always appreciate it when our honorary Team Nessassity members on the Stellaris dev team facilitate the development of our mods on the game's side. Thank you forever for your continued support (￣∇￣*)ゞ

Jokes aside, if this is anything like what we had planned for Omega, we may have to rethink our current implementation of the start. Most importantly, we'll have to decide if we want to make Omega its own Origin, possibly duplicating some of Void Dweller's functionality, or have it piggyback off of it somehow. Either way, 2.6 can't possibly make starting on a habitat any more contrived than it is now so however the vanilla implementation works, we are at least sure it will be better than our current setup! We can't wait to take advantage of it when the time comes!

But until then, we still have other aspects of Omega to take care of. One of them is, of course, the upgrade system that is meant to keep Omega relevant throughout the game.

From the beginning, Omega is much larger than a standard habitat and features astro-mining districts, as well as multiple mining stations across the Sahrabarik system providing Omega with the much-needed minerals and energy to comfortably sustain it for the first few years of the game.
Eventually, however, even Omega will begin to run into the greatest weakness of habitats: limited housing and job slots. And as the game progresses, settling some standard planets may start to seem more and more attractive.

Or... you could upgrade Omega!

Upgrading Omega is done via special Decisions that become available as you progress through the Starbase tech branch, with the grand finisher enabled upon researching Mega-Engineering (at least as of the current implementation, we may decide to separate it into its own tech progression, similar to how we set up Illium).
With each upgrade, Omega expands and gains new habitable segments (which is reflected in its in-game appearance!) gaining space for additional districts.
But that's not all! Being able to squeeze in more pops is all fine, but that just sounds like a recipe for rampant unemployment, doesn't it? And that's where the fun part comes in! Each new tier also enables additional decisions that allow you to dedicate a portion of the new infrastructure to a specific purpose. So far, the options we have are as follows:

• Self-Sufficiency: those who want to limit their planetary expansion might wish to invest into self-sufficiency infrastructure that compensates for habitats' typically nonexistent food production by providing Farmer jobs. In addition, each tier of Self-Sufficiency will reduce all forms of upkeep for pops living on the station.
• Heavy Industry: habitats are a massive alloy investment that... takes a while to pay for itself. So those who wish to dedicate to a planetless playstyle may consider turning Omega into a massive foundry! Aside from providing extra Metallurgist jobs, each tier of Heavy Industry will increase their output.
• Exchange: this form of infrastructure, available only if the owner of Omega is a Crime Syndicate, combines legitimate trade and... other kinds of trade to the benefit of all who abide by the One Rule. This option pays homage to what Omega is most known for in the ME canon - its thriving black market - by offering a small number of Smuggler jobs that bring in consumer goods (please don't ask where from) while also generating crime. Additionally, the Exchange is the only form of infrastructure whose benefit is empire-wide; each tier reduces the empire's Market Fee modifier by a small percentage, allowing to more cheaply trade resources on the Galactic Market.

These options are mutually exclusive, so only one per each tier can be active at a time, but with a little investment of time and resources, it is possible to switch between them, and it is also possible to choose different ones at different tiers and dabble in a little bit of everything.

But this is still not all! While Omega itself is fun to expand, eventually the player might look out the airlock and notice that there's stuff like... outside of it! Incredible, I know! But please before you start casting doubt on my claims, we made that initialiser, we saw a lot of stuff out there! A lot of stuff that a player might eventually wish to exploit as well.
While Omega and the asteroid it's embedded in make for a lot of living and commercial space, its mining days are long gone, most of the station's astro-mining now involves exploiting Sahrabarik's massive asteroid belt.

At first, the owner of Omega will only have access to a couple of asteroids that can be directly mined or have additional habitats built on them. However, as your empire progresses along the Mining Station tech branch, you will find new deposits in the system ripe for exploitation.
As the game progresses, the asteroid belt will slowly reveal its potential. Please note however that it won't result in a huge influx of wealth, and will certainly be no substitute for conventional territorial expansion. It is primarily designed to allow Omega to sustain itself as it upgrades and outgrows its own capacity for raw resource acquisition. Ultimately, there's only so much a single space station, no matter how large and cool, can do.

This is all on the topic of Omega for today, but we'll have more news as it develops! There is a high chance we will once again revisit the topic after the upcoming Dev Diary detailing the Origins system. Please look forward to/dread it n_n

Elves of Stellaris 

ELVES DID IT BEFORE IT WAS COOL! that said, much like Omega, Elven origins have always been limited by the lack of infrastructure supporting non-standard starting conditions.

Many might not remember it but a long, long time ago, predating even Utopia's introduction of buildable Megastructures, the Drow Tulshar's "homeworld" was actually a ringworld destroyed by what was implied to have been a civil war between the segments, and the survivors living on the last remaining quarter were the playable empire.
The... sheer volume of workarounds, some involving deliberately bugging out the game, it took to make that start function at all was out of this world (probably literally) - the habitable segment would actually start as a standard planet determined by the species' habitability, and then have its class changed to a Ringworld segment. And that was just the beginning! The segment was not always perfectly aligned, not always the right size and there were several mods that, by making slight changes to how systems were generated, would cause the entire structure to turn into... something defying all laws of physics and probably driving mad any engineer who looked at it.
Ahem... let's just say that there were many reasons behind the decision to eventually rework that start into the current incarnation of Valshaquellar everyone knows and loves @.@

Even then, our custom homeworlds aren't exactly implemented in the cleanest of ways, soooo you can imagine how happy the idea of legitimate, officially supported and moddable Origins makes us!

Naturally, we intend to take full advantage of that system once we get our hands on it. All home systems and civics that would work better as Origins will be repurposed into them.

And... this may not make it into the initial 2.6 update, or even near it while we still have higher priorities to take care of, but the recent Stellaris news inspired us to think of bringing back the Ascari - another relic of EoS's distant past that ended up getting cut in one of our big updates so it could be redeveloped later.
There is no set-in-stone implementation plan for it just yet but one idea Nessa had was to reintroduce a playable version of the enigmatic and hostile Ascari as an Origin that starts the player imprisoned in a cluster of systems completely isolated from the galaxy's hyperlane network, connected to it only via a single locked gateway.
The empire would be left to develop within the resource-rich enclave for a few decades, before the lock on the gate would fail and expose the Ascari to the rest of the galaxy, by then largely explored and developed. That scenario would leave them to either expand beyond their cluster at the expense of whomever they find on the other side, or remain within and risk being eclipsed by younger races before long.

We think that would be a fun scenario to play! And personally I'd love to see it developed, so while we cannot promise to deliver it within any set timeframe, if we do end up with free time and development resources on our hands, it will probably come to EoS sooner or later!

Oh! And speaking of things that are being developed, Nessa Shipyards are still dedicated to the Drow Titan which, if you remember, we had to go back and redesign because we weren't happy with how it came out.
I'm happy to say there's a new version and it looks slightly less like a space-tank!

It still has that GIANT GUN we've been unreasonably obsessed with (I wouldn't blame Google for putting us on a watchlist for investigating how to design what they might assume is a doomsday weapon) but we have placed it in a more spinal-mounty location as opposed to the original... immobile turret thing we had going on. This not only streamlines the ship's silhouette in line with the rest of the shipset, but also allows us to experiment with its appearance a little more. Not being so exposed anymore, it doesn't need to be so solid and simple. Which means that at the current stage of development we're trying to decide how much GLOW 2.0 per pixel we want to stick on it! ≧▽≦

(Spoilers: it will probably be as much as visually viable)

Phew! This was a lot to get through and I don't think I've even mentioned everything I wanted to say! Maybe I should start scripting these posts ahead of time...

Pffft! Nonsense, that would make them seem sane and organised and where's the fun in that? You are clearly here to watch my mind gradually deteriorate as I jump from tangent to tangent and lose track of what I said in the intro I would be writing about and somehow end up... where are we exactly?

Um... right, SPACE! I hope everyone is as excited about Origins and all the other things coming to Stellaris soon, and you can be sure Team Nessassity won't fall behind (never again!)

Until then, thank you for your invaluable support and continued interest in our work! And of course, have fun playing Stellaris!