Team Nessassity Mods - Vamps Are Red, Asari Are Blue, Turrets Are Hard (Patreon)

HI! I'm here (almost) on time and I'm (almost) not hopelessly distracted! Some actual progress has been made since the last Mod Report, and I'm - much to my own surprise - NOT playing Elden Ring instead! For once, I've resisted the siren song of a voracious time vampire so that I could  work on the vampires of Veiled Realms! I'm so amazing!

Mooooore~

Okay, I'm satisfied now, you may cease the praising.

Anyways! Between the just-announced Overlord expansion, the jugs we want to show you, and the progress report on Veiled Realms, there's a lot to talk about today, so...

WITHOUT! FUTHER! ADOOOOOO!

Elves of Stellaris

Elves  and giant ugly turrets. Can you think of a more iconic couple?

Well... we could, as it turns out, so as we moved on to the "what do we do with weapons?" phase of the Jugs, we ended up having to confront our Archnemesis - the thing we've been trying to avoid since we started making shipsets for Stellaris... Turrets.

As you must have noticed by now, our ships have never had visible turrets. We always felt the elevated omnidirectional turrets in Stellaris were FAR too big and would clash with the otherwise sleek and ornamental silhouettes of our hulls. While we always try to think of functionality in our designs, aesthetics always and unconditionally come first.

So... we typically opted for "gun ports" instead, whereby weapons would fire out of specific points in between hull plates, to simulate internally embedded guns.

However, given that the Juggernaut is the last and biggest ship class (at least we hope so... please, Paradox, NO MORE! >.<), we wanted to do something with it that we hadn't done before and... turrets ended up being it. The ship is SO big that it may be the only one that can support turrets without looking like it was about to get weighted down and sink... IN SPACE!

Okay, okay, okay, not the point. ANYWAYS, let's have a look at the brief history of Team Nessassity figuring out turrets! In picture form!

It all started with... slapping a vanilla turret onto the ship just to see how it would affect the silhouette. Naturally, the first thing we noticed was that despite how huge the ship was, the turret was still too big to fit into the space we designated for it.

Pictured: Avian placeholders failing Elves for the last time

But after shrinking them down to roughly half the size and switching out the style to Necroid, we started getting somewhere.

At that point, we realised that the omnidirectional XL turrets kinda looked like they could be their own ships, and that offhand joke resulted in Nessa actually sticking Elven corvettes on it.

But wait... this actually didn't look as bad as we expected! With the corvette taking up more space horizontally than vertically, it wasn't clashing with the rest of the hull as much as the tall, bulky vanilla turrets had. So we started wondering if there was any existing elven structure that we could take inspiration from to come up with a more... turret-like design...

I mean... it makes sense, right? Ion Cannons are basically just giant guns, so sticking two of them on an even bigger ship would seem like a logical evolution of technology.

So! This is the direction the Elven turrets are likely to go. Of course, we won't just literally reuse the Ion Cannon model, but unless a  better idea occurs to us in the meantime, you can expect that the XL turrets on the Jugs will be heavily inspired by same "doom tulip" design, but more discreet, better blended into the hull.

Oh! And did I mention that the Jugs itself has been mapped? That means the base model is (barring any last minute-emergencies) finished! All that remains now are the turrets, and of course, textures!

Both of those are on the way as we speak, so let's look at the final iteration of the model in its uniform grey glory one last time!

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

The next Stellaris expansion - Overlord - was announced a few days ago. Normally, we like to wait until a few dev diaries in before we start planning our mod development around new features, but this time, the trailer and feature overview were all we needed to know at least that... Elves are going to enjoy that Expansion.

The Lhùren, especially, have vested interest in more in-depth Subject mechanics, considering how important it is for them to be recognised - and feared - as the dominant power in their region of space.

The expansion also seems to be adding something resembling the planetary rings that, in ye olden times, EoS used to have as a buildable megastructure, which we ended up scrapping because it was having too many issues with variable planet sizes and we could never figure out good mechanics for it either. So we're looking forward to the vanilla implementation of a similar concept! Perhaps if Paradox managed to solve the hurdles we could not, we might end up bringing the rings back. And who knows? Maybe the Celestial Throne Origin will receive a little upgrade as the result?（＾3＾♪

Veiled Realms

Now let's cross time, space and genre and talk a bit more about our upcoming vampire mod for CK3!

A few weeks ago, while I was working on adapting the development build to the scripting changes introduced by Royal Court, I stumbled on a half-developed feature I admittedly had completely forgotten about (although I do remember briefly mentioning it in one of the previous MMRs)

The feature in question is "Banes" - a system that ties into Stress and makes the consequences of operating at high levels of Stress a bit... better suited for vampire characters.

For regular mortals, poorly manged Stress can lead to illness, fertility issues, wounds (some of them self-inflicted) and even a premature death brought on by a sudden yet inevitable heart failure.

Vampires are no less vulnerable to Stress - in fact, with all the reason-defying, monstrous things that become part of their existence after turning, their sanity is in an even more precious position.
However, being immune to diseases, able to live forever and recovering from injuries more easily, the vanilla implementation of Stress doesn't have much of a... bite.

And that's where Banes come in!

Vampires have a strange relationship with the Blood that sustains their body. The transformation it brings about grants eternal life, but it also takes away any chance to live it out amongst humans.
Vampires who cannot reconcile their humanity with the monstrous thing they have become, start to notice even stranger things happening to them. Disturbing delusion and physical transformations occur as the vampire's sense of sanity crumbles from the strain of an eternity of predation.

In game terms, the longer a vampire is functioning at high levels of Stress, the more likely they are to develop some psychosomatic disorders that take inspiration from many of those more... bizzare parts of vampire folklore and pop culture.
The character might one day find out that their body reacts with violent repulsion to the presence of certain aromatic herbs and vegetables (such as garlic). Or they might become deathly uncomfortable around their mirror reflection for reasons only they understand.
Each Bane has its own mechanical effects, often related to other aspects of vampirism, and on top of that, raises the vampire Base Menace level by a certain amount. Even the most subtle Banes can interfere with the vampire's social life or cause them to develop eccentric habits, and some are all but impossible to conceal.

As part of the Community Writing initiative on our Discord, I'm trying to collect as many fun ideas for Banes as possible, so if there is one you would like to see, please feel free to propose it in the  #📃・vr-community-writing-discussion channel!

And as for when you might play with it yourself... I don't want to set in stone any specific deadlines (it never works), but I do feel that if I can maintain this pace, I should be able to at least open a pre-release beta of Veiled Realms this summer! Please watch this space for any news/changes in that department! <3

And speaking of news, this is all for this Monthly Mod Report! Assuming the world doesn't end tomorrow, we will have even more to say and show soon! In the meantime, my Twitter and Team Nessassity's Discord are the best places to reach us and perhaps catch a few teasers here and there!

Thank you for continuing to follow and support us. Our community is objectively the best in the universe, and I will fight (gently!) anyone who says otherwise! (☞^o^) ☞

As always, let's have fun playing Paradox games and/or thinking of playing them but then realising that Overlord is coming soon and wanting to save your energy for it and... you know how that goes. ANYWAYS! Love and hugs and fun games <3