Team Nessassity Mods - In Which Princess Erects This Year's First Monthly Wall Of Text (Patreon)

*takes a deep breath*

HAPPY! NEW! YEAR!

Okay, so I realise it may be old news to some but we did take a little break over December so I didn't have a chance to wish happy new shopmas or whatever you Earthlings were supposed to celebrate a few weeks ago!

ANYWAYS, we're happy to be back at last! If you've been following my Twitter, you may have heard of the disaster trainwreck Nessa has been riding with her PC over the past few weeks. In short: it started acting up right before the holidays, we couldn't figure out what the cause was, she started ordering new components one by one and testing them... until today when a new memory stick, which took the longest to arrive, turned out to be The Key!

We're so happy to finally be done with that particular roadblock, but unfortunately for our project, it does mean we haven't been able to work on any of the hotly anticipated art assets we were hoping to finally wrap up over December ._.

As such, we have nothing shiny to show today so we are going to have another one of everyone's favourite Giant Walls of Text and hope it's exciting enough! >~<

MEC: Asari 

Oh! Have I mentioned the latest Stellaris Dev Diary? Espionage has finally been officially announced, and with a new interactive system called Operations! How exciting!

Huh? What do you mean I'm stalling and changing the subject? It has nothing to do with MEC and I should just get to the point?

Well, yes, but actually no! But yes! Anyways, let me explain why this is such huge news for MEC.

It's been a while since I expressed my desire to expand Illium's signature Civic, Illium à la Mode. Currently, the civic produces Influence scaling off the amount of Trade Value. It's a functional and powerful effect, but it's also very... passive compared to Thessian Statecraft, the Asari Republics' counterpart.

So in order to make it more interesting, I've been trying to come up with a way for the player to spend all that extra Influence on something, be it meaningful Decisions or maybe some special Buildings and such. Since then, I've had the chance to test both approaches. Both are certainly doable and it's not too hard to come up with gameplay effects, but neither method was perfectly accurate to what spending that Influence was supposed to represent.

The fun thing about the Asari and the governments they tend to create is their tendency towards decentralisation and individualism. Similarly to the E-Republics of Thessia, the fantasy of Illium isn't so much a single Megacorporation directing remote branch offices across the galaxy, but rather many companies independently striving for profit while maintaining Illium as their shared tax ha- I mean headquarters, support infrastructure and marketplace. Sort of the reverse of the vanilla Megacorporation template.

Keeping this in mind, what "Influence" represents for the Asari Corporate Interests is not the ability for a unified government body to legislate and execute a political action, but instead I see it more as the means by which individual corporations can punch above their weight to make a mark on the galactic economy and political landscape.

So how does espionage figure into it? Well... not directly. Rather, what I am interested in are the mechanics behind Operations.

Originally, I wanted to use Decisions enacted on planets with Branch Offices to represent "special transactions" where the player could trade pops, ships and other assets. But that's not really something Illium, in particular, is known for. I feel that's something better saved for the Vol Protectorate... when, eventually, we get there n_n
For Illium, I wanted something a bit more Branch Office-centric, and not always equitable for the other party - they're greedy corporations looking out for their own interests, after all. However, there were really no good systems in Stellaris to support such functionality - no active counterplay for the other party, no existing interface this could be tied to. Essentially, in order to make it work, I would have to implement a completely new gameplay system just for the sake of one civic... But now I don't, because Operations will provide me everything I need!

Okay, so how exactly do I envision these special "Corporate Operations" working?

The first thing I want to make clear is that the purpose of the Operations I have in mind is not to hurt the other party - who would want to host my Branch Offices if that were the case? It is not the same as traditional espionage operations.
Rather, they are going to be styled as negotiations that can have varying outcomes based on whether the Host or the Branch Office wins. For example, if the Branch Office wins, it might gain a building/modifier/whatever that produces resources for the Office owner but gives nothing to the Host. On the other hand, should the Host win, the prize will instead offer jobs for the local pops and give only a portion of the profits to the Office owner.

In that way, I'm hoping to create a system that's tied to existing (well... existing when Operations come out) features of the game while allowing Illium à la Mode to engage with it in a unique and flavourful way.

And HOPEFULLY it's the last time I change my mind on it XD

Of course, things can change and perhaps Operations won't even work the way I suspect they do so all of the above is, as always, subject to change! However, if nothing does change, this is probably the direction we'll go.

Veiled Realms: Court of Blood

And speaking of doing shady things for selfish reasons... it's time to talk about ye olde vampyres again!

Unfortunately, not a lot of features have been finalised since the last Monthly Mod Report. Between Nessa's technical issues, my own holiday rush and just wanting to relax and turn off my brain for a couple of weeks, I decided to take it easy on modding.

That said, I'm bad even at taking breaks so despite my resolution to be a useless inanimate objects for as long as I could, I somehow still ended up tinkering with Veiled Realms a little, although the results are perhaps more exciting to me than anyone else.
So normally I don't talk about the internal working of our mods in Monthly Mod Reports because I imagine it's super boring to people who come here for news on stuff they're looking forward to PLAYING.

But in reality, the player-facing features are often only half of what a mod consists of. Behind the scenes, much of the heavy lifting is done by scripts - controlling the cause-effect chains, calculating odds and variables, providing interface between the player and the various systems in play. BUT even deeper than that is the API - the toolbox and building materials that we ourselves use to put those scripts together.
And that is actually what I've been focusing on during my "break". Originally, the API of VR was a bit... chaotic, full of loosely-connected functions that I created as I went along, tailoring many things to individual features without really knowing the full picture yet.
However, when I decided to rework the mod mid-development as mentioned in previous Mod Reports, it occurred to me just how much of a mess my toolbox was, making it not only hard to repurpose old interconnected features, but also producing a lot of hard-to-trace errors whenever I attempted to untangle parts of the mess and ended up leaving references to things that no longer existed.
So... I cleaned it up! And not only that, I actually decided to expose a lot of the new API, hopefully making it easier in the future not only to expand Veiled Realms ourselves, but potentially allowing third parties to add on to it as well!
Many key functions (such as related to Feeding and Powers) have been separated into smaller fragments so various actions could be called from script outside of their intended mediums, optional variable inputs have been added to previously hardcoded functions to facilitate customisation without having to resort to reverse-engineering workarounds, and I even restructured some systems - most notably the narrative event handlers, to allow for new events to be externally inserted into the pool via on_actions (and that actually allowed me to make the feeding outcomes far more flexible as well!)

While, yes, unfortunately all that work won't contribute much to the mod coming out faster, I'm still very happy that I undertook it because not only will it pay off post-release, but it might also make the rest of the development slightly easier now that I understand how the mod works again (and believe me, I'm capable of designing some truly enigmatic infrastructures.)

And on that note, we'll see you in another Monthly Mod Report next month! And hopefully by then the Team will be fully functional and we'll have something more exciting to share n_n

Thank you as always for supporting our work and following its progress! We have a lot of exciting things planned for 2021 (as well as our plans work out >.>) so let's continue to have fun playing Paradox games together for another year! <3