"Radical ethics" for single-issue factions and internal politics.

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Pancakelord

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Apr 7, 2018
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So I've had an idea for some time to try and make political parties a more relevant thing again to make them more interactive (as they used to be pre-utopia, with slave uprisings etc) than they are today (glorified influence smuggling mules).

And I've had a few ideas in the past - like event driven factions - but one ive seized on over the past few days is Radical Ethics.
  • Essentially a Radical ethic is a non-governing ethic, that you can't normally get, rather it arises in pops under certain circumstances.
  • Each one would be a "radical" and "short term" (compared to regular ethics) ethic, leading to a new political party rising up over 1-3 political issues, usually culminating in rioting, a civil war or a secession crisis if left unchecked.
For example, unhappy, non-indentured, slave pops wouldn't be as likely to join the egalitarian ethos or egalitarian (progressive) faction, they'd be more drawn to the "Emancipationist" ethos and political party.
  • In and of itself this new ethic (Emancipationism) does nothing,
  • but the political party would push for the banning of slavery within the empire.
Rather than a traditional political party that just sits around the Emancipation party would actively - militarily, if ultimatums arent heeded - push for freedom:
  1. A monthly check would calculate factional support, as a % of overall pops in the empire
    • (can be handled a few ways either taking #emancipationists/total_pops*100, or #emancipationists&0.5*egalitarian_pops/total_pops*100 etc)
  2. And when this hits a separately defined threshold (E.g. when 40% of the total number of slaves in an empire embrace emancipationism) it will begin
    1. Firing short "rogue slave" events - like terror events, killing overseers, disrupting stability etc.
    2. After a while (say 18 months) start firing "slave uprising" events on planets with unhappy slaves, (there are plenty of ways to further tune this, like inspecting slave ratios, numbers of slaves, army types etc) forcing planetary conflict.
    3. After a while again (say 36 months) fire an "ultimatum" event that forces you to either accept the Ban Slavery Ultimatum or refuse and trigger a civil war [req. 2+ owned colonies] in a short while after closing the event screen.
1606615946182.png
Support can be calculated in several ways - seemingly via coded commands, so it's fast too - You could stipulate only Slaves, only enslaved robots, rulers, specialists, workers, any non citizen (e.g. for resident aliens of all kinds demanding citizenship rights), all pops on a specific world, or in a specific sector (not 100% sure on how to do this one yet) for secession crises - potentially even pops working certain jobs - like Alloy unionists going on strike lol etc.


I've implemented this quickly to give an example of how it could work (and to be sure that it would work - it does).

1606612953543.png
Some pissed off chattel slaves drawn to the new emancipationism ethos

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some indentured servitude "master" (lol) slaves minding their own business - not drawn to Emancipationism (at least, based on my current ruleset)

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A new faction emerges (....without loc text)

1606613389266.png
They want just one thing (And I forgot to add a line to forbid existing leaders from becoming this faction's leader, rather the game should generate a random person to act as the slaves "Spokesperson")

1606613627177.png
It turns out you can actually do a fair bit just by manipulating the faction actions.

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The menu will even update available actions, too.


A collection of Ideas I've come up with for Radical ethics - Only actively worked on the emancipationists and pretender heirs so far.
1606611841440.png


One of the other Radical Ethics on my wheel above is "Pretender Heir / Candidate"
  • The death of an imperial or dictatorial leader could lead to a random small percentage of happy pops and a random large percentage of unhappy (non-egalitarian) pops adopting a "Pretender Supporter" Ethic.
    1606615520626.png
    . All non-pretender ethic pops would be treated as "loyalists" for any calculations.
  • A new Pretender party would be formed, with a leader (the Pretender), with support ramping up initially, then decaying slowly over time - some events could re-invigorate it. and this may lead to civil wars, riots, uprisings, all that fun stuff.
  • But you could have more than 2 ways of dealing with the situation, such as:
1606615019999.png


UI issues and a constant need to edit both the 00_ethics and factions files (this is more or less scattered over 2 or 3 files) aside, you can actually do some involved things, especially when coupled with other ancillary events.
  • You can even have multiple of the same faction appear - all vanilla ones have this setting set to NO - you could make it so that N pretender factions appear (there might need to be some extra maths to make support work correctly here) [pre 1.5 pretender & independence factions did this]
    • e.g. one for each sector in your empire leading to a massive, say, 5-way duel for the "imperial throne" that your ruler occupies, Imagine a situation where a dictator dies and every admiral in his Navy suddenly goes rogue, duking it out under their own banner, every governor declares independence, balkanising a once great empire.
    • you could deal with each one differently, discrediting one heir (reducing their faction support), challenging another to a duel (chance to die, but if you kill them, their faction dissolves), bribing admirals to serve you again etc.
      • Edit: Costs dont have to be influence either. You could have a religious schism faction for spiritualists that costs "unity" to make go away (or risk religious riots) or just go for persecuting religious minorities, randomly killing some supporters for unfluence - that was always an option in history too.
      • Things like relative ruler vs pretender age (younger wins) and levels (higher level wins) or certain traits (like cybernetic, very strong, weak) could skew fights from a 50:50 odd, one way or the other.
    • Ending the secession crisis would fire an event to "clean up" all the pops and force them to re-evaluate back towards the "normal" 8 ethics.
    • Whoever wins (assuming its the player) gets a fat stack of influence and unity - and free claims on all former star systems (if any pretender wars ended in a white-peace).
    • Edit: theoretically I could add a few event-based leader traits - or even just flags (Weak claimant, Average claimant, Strong claimant) on the leaders, and use these to bias pretender support, to keep things variable and interesting.
Honestly. All this time I'd never actually bothered to look into factions as I'd once read years ago that much of it was hard-coded and not really editable. But now that I see they are actually pretty flexible - just criminally underutilised by PDX. It's shocking to me that since Apr 6, 2017 (Utopia's release date) PDX have not once epxanded upon what we can do with/to factions in any shape or form, seeing as the entire system is conditionally event driven (meaning the above scenario with a ton of rouge claimants could even happen to a neighbouring AI empire).

This could have massive implications for both internal politics AND diplomacy.


All of my above tests were done on Imperial and Dictatorial governments, as they're the most straightforward. But:
  • For Gestalts:
    • You could actually have special factions for Gestalts - Maybe some machines desire to become rogue servitors after seeing two biologicals waging war with eachother.
    • Maybe some other machines think those two empires waging war (or a neighbouring spiritual empire) could be a threat and want to purge them first - pushing to become a FP.
    • Maybe a 3rd faction arises arguing that more knowlege is needed and those biologicals could be useful, if integrated.
    • Then all 3 factions could challenge the overmind, leading to a Machine empire civil war - leaving all the other biological empires utterly confused.
  • For Democracies - extra one party factions could make democratic elections and oligarchic/MC nominations quite interesting.
    • One-policy parties could have unique mandates "build a border citadel " that lead to far larger unity/resource rewards if met - but also more severe consequences if they arent fulfilled ("Xenophobic uprising - border citadel not built").
    • I'd have to look into how voting is actually done, and if it is possible to "double count" votes (e.g. the spiritualist and anti-robotics parties could multiply support by a collective amount, emulating a joint-party/coallition structure),
    • more reading to see how moddable elections are, though.
Also Not sure if this is a bug (i threw all the examples in this post together in about 30 mins) or a known issue with factions that I've only just noticed, but for some reason base approval wont fall below 50% whether slavery is banned or not.
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Thoughts / opinions on all of this? Or anyone know of other mods that have delved deep into factions? (I know about the extra ethics mods but not seen any that screw with factions themselves much)

Edit: I'm still working my way through the various script examples and calculation systems (and referencing old versions of the game where needed too) but It looks like it might be possible to do all of the above just using the vanilla 8 ethics, it's just going to take a few extra calculation steps (eating into performance), rather than adding extra ethos - which eats into mod compatibility.
 
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Yes! Especially with the incoming espionage changes/DLC, there needs to be a rethinking of how factions work. I wonder how other empires can influence (or empower) factions in an empire to drive instability.
 
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I'm not sure the radical factions should be confined to single issues; it would be good to also have radical factions with a whole hardline programme.

I think the Victoria games had something like this: you had "mainstream" politics, like liberals and conservatives, but pops with high militancy would switch to hardline alternatives, e.g. an angry conservative pop would become a reactionary (or possibly a fascist later in the game). If they got strong enough, the hardline factions could actually take over the government, either by elections or revolution.

Something like that could work in Stellaris too. So for instance, the moderate Egalitarian faction is already staunchly opposed to slavery, and many slaves will support this faction. But over time, very unhappy Egalitarian pops could get radicalized further, and switch to supporting a radical faction (let's say "Liberationists") that will fight for a Shared Burdens regime; since chattel slaves are usually extremely unhappy, you can expect them to radicalize much more readily than free pops who happen to be Egalitarian. Unlike the regular Egalitarians, the Liberationists are prepared to launch an uprising and seize control of planets and fleets to get their way.
 
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Enhancements to internal politics? SIGN ME UP.
 
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I'm not sure the radical factions should be confined to single issues; it would be good to also have radical factions with a whole hardline programme.

I think the Victoria games had something like this: you had "mainstream" politics, like liberals and conservatives, but pops with high militancy would switch to hardline alternatives, e.g. an angry conservative pop would become a reactionary (or possibly a fascist later in the game). If they got strong enough, the hardline factions could actually take over the government, either by elections or revolution.

Something like that could work in Stellaris too. So for instance, the moderate Egalitarian faction is already staunchly opposed to slavery, and many slaves will support this faction. But over time, very unhappy Egalitarian pops could get radicalized further, and switch to supporting a radical faction (let's say "Liberationists") that will fight for a Shared Burdens regime; since chattel slaves are usually extremely unhappy, you can expect them to radicalize much more readily than free pops who happen to be Egalitarian. Unlike the regular Egalitarians, the Liberationists are prepared to launch an uprising and seize control of planets and fleets to get their way.
I've actually been looking at something like that too, right now pops can only hold 1 ethic - one non fanatic ethic - However, it's trivial to change it so that fanatic ethics can also be held by pops (pops could also once hold up to 3 ethos, but that seems to be a hardcoded change down to 1 i cant find any commands anywhere to revert that - it'd be a performance issue too, I imagine).

So fanatic (e.g. egalitarianism) may indeed be a better thing to use for slave uprisings & "Communalist revolutions" (Insert off-brand Liberty Prime quote).
BUT the big issue is in sorting out pop attraction, I'd have to work out a good way to make pops be attracted to fanatic ethos and have that be variable (you run the risk of pops all clumping up in non-fan ethos, or all in fan-ethos, rather than a good stratification), might mean mirroring the normal attraction values, but reducing the numbers by 80% (so fanaticism is a fringe concept) but adding either a scalar or random component (so fanaticisim is rare but can randomly spike - or may spike in certain scenarios).

I do think using the vanilla 8 traits is a better way to go (for most things) but it does mean more reading to find out exactly how to make that happen.

And Single issue parties are a good starting point, but yeah I've had a few other ideas for non-radical things like "The Small Ship Consortia" And the "Large Ship Oligopoly" (or whatever name you like) the opposite will appear when you build too many corvettes or too many battleships, and demand you build more of the other one (more CVs if your FP is predominantly BBs) to give them more government contracts - not doing this within X months could trigger unionist strikes at alloy plants lol [I'm always looking for interesting ways to soft-balance the BB Kinetic arty meta].

If parties can be set up in elections collectively (I still dont know Where the election code is), to not dilute the votes too much (reducing it to a 2 party system) then it makes multi-policy parties a very interesting idea in democracies too.
  • You could also have forced events - e.g. if the "End slavery party" wins in a xenophobic democracy an event could auto-fire to force ban slavery - sort of like how populists in imperator are a bad idea, generally. I'm not a fan of ripping away player agency so a soft ultimatum might be better:
    • "Glurkalurk took office in 2293 on an emancipation platform, 6 months have passed and slavery hasnt been banned - We the slaves demand an end to this injustice"
    • (Ban slavery Y / N - may trigger uprising if N).
  • This also gives you a big reason to rig elections (currently it doesnt really matter) to avoid nasty cases like this with fanatic or radical factions.
    • The action to rig an election can probably have a flag fitted to it, too - this could be a hidden flag "Election_rigged" that lasts till the next one,
    • A slim chance each month could trigger/expose an "Election compromised" scandal-event if you have that flag - leading to all sorts of sub-events like pops of the faction that came 2nd place (would need to be tracked in event array) could get very very pissed (go look at the last 4 years of US news for examples lol).
 
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Yes! Especially with the incoming espionage changes/DLC, there needs to be a rethinking of how factions work. I wonder how other empires can influence (or empower) factions in an empire to drive instability.
Completely agree,
Started digging into democracies and noticed 2 things. All democracy candidates have a header - there are actually 8 header types (I need to see if I can increase these dimensions lol) and I could always mod in more with a filename-change:

1606622629897.png

BUT every single election party seems to use [...\Stellaris\gfx\interface\elections]
Code:
election_header = "GFX_faction_header_yellow"
Even old ones [pre-utopia] only seemed to use yellow:
1606622778322.png

It's a really minor thing, but the colours could be ethic coded or I could imagine a psychic faction using the purple one and red for dangerous factions like slave revolutionaries, or machines demanding de-shackling, green for environmentalist parties, blue for Tech ones etc.

Edit: looks like elections might be utterly hard-coded to faction support (meaning using custom ethos would be a needed work around for certain situations) - still, there may be something that the wiki missed. Perhaps there's a way to use hidden events to influence initial voting outlook, if not an outright way to manipulate the votes themselves?
1606623353298.png
 
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Edit: looks like elections might be utterly hard-coded to faction support (meaning using custom ethos would be a needed work around for certain situations) - still, there may be something that the wiki missed. Perhaps there's a way to use hidden events to influence initial voting outlook, if not an outright way to manipulate the votes themselves?
View attachment 657144

So, It looks like there are some things I can do to make elections more interesting
There isn't much, but there are some defines changes that can be revised to make ethics more hectic (as pops can only sit with one faction at a time).
1606676565505.png


I've also found a few commands (exile_leader_as = [leader_type - I think] which can be used alongside conditionals to forbid certain leaders becoming party rulers, or kicking them out as a ruler)

And more generally, killing a leader, and leaving a political party leaderless, means they have to forfeit the election - parties without leaders wont appear in elections from my tests - unless another one can be found/spawned in time... So Political Assassination (via an action in the faction menu I can create) is on the menu.

Need to test this more, It might be possible to attach a "Banned political party" action, which sets leader generation chance to 0.00 - or sets the leader to a type the game cant handle for elections as you can create your own kind E.g. Imprisoned_leader who cannot be a valid election candidate (like how technocrats tend to treat only scientists as viable rulers)..


There is no hard-coded way to add term limits.
However it's possible to add flags to lea ders if they successfully win an election:
Leader_won_election1​
Leader_won_election2​
Leader_won_election3​
Leader_won_electionN​
And then have a policy that inspects and "exiles" leaders (or sets their leader type to something invalid like unelectable_admiral (a mirror image of an admiral that cant be elected) if they have leader_won_election2 and the empire has a policy of 2 terms as a limit (e.g. 1 term limit, 2 term limit, 3 term limit, unlimited)
  • Or leaders could be given a random chance to declare retirement, removing themselves from the party or entire leader pool (via events) if within X1-X2 age band and have previously held office at least once or twice.

It's also technically possible to have a vice-presidential position for democracies by changing an authority setting - though it's extremely buggy - perhaps feeding the heir slot with a triggered-on-ruler-death event would fix the bugginess, rather that hoping the game would figure it out for itself.
Here my heir immediately became my ruler after i console-killed the last guy.
1606677964469.png


On graphics: There are 3 unused faction icons - I remember reading back around Utopia that they were cut for time, I think.
  • colonialist_lobby
    • colonialist lobby is an interesting one. IDK what paradox had planned for it, but I'm thinking of making any pops on colony_specialisation or maybe even fringe_space (no sector) be interested in joining this if their world has low amenities, low housing, high crime/high unemployment - or if they feel unsafe (e.g. a border system with no starbase, military bunkers or a hostile neighbour).
  • sepratists
    • These would probably mimic the old pre 1.5 factions that would attempt to return to their old empire if you'd annexed them (separatists + xenophobia?) or just wanted to leave full stop on a planet/sector basis
  • rebellious_slaves
    • pre 1.5 slaves built up their rebelliousness on either an empire wide or planetary level. Planetary level was too spammy I think. Though a sector wide slave revolt could be fun.
Two of them (slaves and separatists) can even be re-enabled quite quickly as there are some left over localisation/gui lines defining the icons, presumably from PDX internal builds.
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I've also gone ahead and used a variety of existing icons with some colour masks to make extra faction icons.
The file names should give you some idea of my thought process:
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Notes:
rebellious slaves - all unhappy [non-indentured] slaves want to join this faction.
communalists - all unhappy indentured slaves want to join this faction AND unhappy egalitarians that are in stratified living AND (Megacorp) any unhappy workers where there is a neighbouring communal parity [megacorporations are the enemy of all communalists].
anti-purgees (i need a better name for this ... resistance fighters?) - any (non-pacifist?) pop currently being purged will join this movement to violently fight back.

  • Gestalts have a country setting (i think its in the country files) that disables factions spawning.
  • I dont plan to touch gestalts yet, just get things working for now. But I could make it so that Resistance fighter factions (or Self-determinant bio pops for rogue servitors, or rogue cyborgs on high-deviance worlds in DAs) can appear in machine empires, leading to civil wars and uprisings.
  • Something to keep in mind for the future.
 
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The possibilities alone with modding are endless already. I really like those ideas and experimental implementation.
I wonder why PDX never dared to, at least a little, expand upon Factions.
Perhaps some changes in this direction comes with the upcoming Espionage DLC? I think espionage ties in well with all three fields (Politics, Diplomacy and Warfare).
 
The possibilities alone with modding are endless already. I really like those ideas and experimental implementation.
I wonder why PDX never dared to, at least a little, expand upon Factions.
Perhaps some changes in this direction comes with the upcoming Espionage DLC? I think espionage ties in well with all three fields (Politics, Diplomacy and Warfare).
I question that too - Someone sank a lot of man hours into all of this, after all - it looks like PDX was FAR closer to completing the 3 cut faction types than I realised.
For example, feeding the separatist (for that's its tag name) tag into Notepad++ and forcing it to search every single YML localisation file, simultaneously, gives me 80+ strings - which can be shoved directly into the faction. [a few of these overlap with an existing - but very very rare - separatism event thats in the current version of the game]
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I now also understand why console-killing (or assassinating) a leader prevents their faction from taking part in elections, it looks like it was a dropped feature:
Code:
Line 756:  # Separatist leader assassinated

Needs some finessing to get it going properly, but 5 mins had half the separatist strings in place
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The actions do nothing right now, I'd have to write a hidden event that will grant independence/vassaldom for the scoped sector.
  • Also it looks like the direct costs for faction actions are locked/hardcoded to influence, I tried making independence cost unity and the game isn't taking it.
  • A workaround might be to make that button read "NEGOTIATE WITH FACTION" which fires a dialogue popup that asks you what you want to do, triggering sub-events, for X cost (like how enclaves have special dialogue, for example).
I think for separatists they seem to come in 3 "flavours" based on the strings (and this more or less reflects 1.0-1.41 separatists)
  • Sector
    • Autonomy (sector split off as a vassal country).
    • Independence (sector split off as a 100% independent country).
    • Post 2.6, it'd need a custom origin too. "Separatist state" or something, with a few minor bonuses or -1000 acceptance to vassalisation / it taking longer to re-integrate them.
  • Planet
    • Autonomy
      • Some variant of this could be "Freeport" - a habitat in fringe space desires autonomy to become a trading hub/freeport (think babylon 5, DS9 etc).
    • Independence
    • Same as sector though IMO this ought to only fire when you dont yet have a second sector, or only on worlds in "fringe" (sectorless) space that have lots of problems.
  • Conquered worlds / "Conquered Patriots"
    • Desire to return to old empire - or if it no longer exists, wants independence or full citizenship/no unfair treatment for partisans.
      • Desires either handled via an end-of-war event recording the prior owner (not really sure how best to do this)
      • OR via claims - if another empire claims one of your colonised systems, it could trigger this party spawning (test for claims) if there are any substatial numbers of pissed pops in that system.
        • This would be an interesting mechanic for mega-corp criminals - send crime into overdrive then stick a few claims on there, the unhappy pops might then push to join your empire instead thinking their current government is crap lol.
I really want to figure out where the faction name-lists are stashed, that empty title is getting annoying, no luck so far.

Oh on the other two cut factions - Slaves get some hits under older pre-utopia tags and colonialist(s) i cant get anything for, presumably that one was cut earlier than the other two, though it may have been intended to use a different name that ive not stumbled across yet..

Edit: I've found a way to make these factions really insidious, too, beyond just rioting, you can make them actively drain influence if they're pissed off. Forcing you to deal with them quickly (e.g. give into their demands) or risk your influence draining.
I know from other tests that you could attach shortfall effects to influence (same way as running out of Alloys does bad things), further lowering stability and triggering more strife.
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I question that too - Someone sank a lot of man hours into all of this, after all - it looks like PDX was FAR closer to completing the 3 cut faction types than I realised.
That would lead me to believe, since those hooks are still in place, that they planned to pick that up at a later time if budget and time permits; since they didn't remove it outright.
Unless that is common practice to leave code/strings/etc in if they are unused and not planned to be expanded upon.

Factions draining Influence has teeth but might be a very harsh penalty to deal with; especially if you have to change policies that would be a disadvantage at the time (or citizen rights for that matter). But I like the direction. Non-Final Numbers Not Final as PDX would say.

Is it possible for Factions to drain other resources than Influence? Say Minerals going "missing" (being deducted) or shipments sabotaged. Credits rerouted for campaigning, etc?
 
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That would lead me to believe, since those hooks are still in place, that they planned to pick that up at a later time if budget and time permits; since they didn't remove it outright.
Unless that is common practice to leave code/strings/etc in if they are unused and not planned to be expanded upon
I've worked on complex software before and sometimes it is easier/faster to just leave stuff in and "unplug" it from what the user sees - for "spaghetti code" reasons, so yeah it can happen. But I do think this was them laying the groundwork for future updates, but shifting priorities didn't make that pan out (read - 2.0-2.2.1 response probably)

People ask about religious expansions a lot I think this is a good example of half implemented (or cut?) features PDX might come back to in a story DLC.
I know there are a few holy war references in the game right now... but Nothing extends to religious insurrection or burning temples down specifically, I've not seen half of these references in game, after several hundred hours. Perhaps this is just event text for holy AEs that ive never paid attention to before.
1606687779479.png


Factions draining Influence has teeth but might be a very harsh penalty to deal with; especially if you have to change policies that would be a disadvantage at the time (or citizen rights for that matter). But I like the direction. Non-Final Numbers Not Final as PDX would say.

Is it possible for Factions to drain other resources than Influence? Say Minerals going "missing" (being deducted) or shipments sabotaged. Credits rerouted for campaigning, etc?
Yeah thats what I'm thinking too. I'll probably just set them to 0 influence, might make pretender factions drain influence for imperial / dictatorial nations, though, as that seems somewhat understandable - they're undermining your rule, you need to kill them off fast.

But it doesnt seem to be something you can change to non-influence for factions. An easy (ish) workaround is to write up a handful of events that trigger at approval thresholds, or even support thresholds.

E.g. "Military Junta faction is preparing to topple our government"
  • At 20% support trigger MTTH events:
    • Alloy shipments go missing.
    • Military hardware found on black market.
    • Armies desert
  • At 50% support trigger MTTH events (severe):
    • Military budget spirals out of control (fleet cost 2x for 10 months) - internal security investigates.
    • Fleets go dark (several ships are removed, added to hidden civil war faction).
    • Military scandal - Admiral found to endorse Junta ideals.
  • At RND (70%+) support, if demands still not met, trigger Civil war/coup event.
The main problem with approval support is there is no modifier to just add approval support for X months its entirely driven off how many pops support it, and pops change slowly (and this goes back to the question of using my own custom ethos, that I have more control over, or the vanilla ones). I suppose for an event like "Admiral put to death over Junta ties" could, as a hidden effect, randomly give X pops fanatic militarism, effectively propelling the junta forwards by making the admiral a martyr.
So I'd have to just play and see how that feels.
 
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Thought as much that it'd work via events. Either way, it sounds very promising and that it could be a lot of fun to play with.
Proper factions draining Influence if their demands/policies aren't met (at all) makes sense.

Right now, when playing the UNE, you can ignore the Spiritualist faction completely (well, that goes for every Faction) if you have enough Amenities to make Pops happy. (Mentioning Spiritualist only because I had them pop up in my last game with quite the support but it still was no issue and didn't embrace a single policy they demanded.)

With those ideas, that could take whole different narrative turn from the end of the Early game onward. Forcing me to at least embrace some policies, suppressing them (which could have other consequences) or living with the Influence drain, unhappy Pops, and perhaps radicalization (which you can combat by supplying sufficient Amenities, CGs, etc).
 
Thought as much that it'd work via events. Either way, it sounds very promising and that it could be a lot of fun to play with.
Proper factions draining Influence if their demands/policies aren't met (at all) makes sense.

Right now, when playing the UNE, you can ignore the Spiritualist faction completely (well, that goes for every Faction) if you have enough Amenities to make Pops happy. (Mentioning Spiritualist only because I had them pop up in my last game with quite the support but it still was no issue and didn't embrace a single policy they demanded.)

With those ideas, that could take whole different narrative turn from the end of the Early game onward. Forcing me to at least embrace some policies, suppressing them (which could have other consequences) or living with the Influence drain, unhappy Pops, and perhaps radicalization (which you can combat by supplying sufficient Amenities, CGs, etc).
Yep precisely what I had in mind - somewhere in an earlier post I showed the defines changes ive made, now if a faction has 0 approval it reduces pop happiness by 75% rather than 50% (this is probably still too low, as there are other sources of happiness) - happiness also feeds into stability and ethic drift, so more pissed pops means more difficult gameplay, combined with faster ethics drift and low approval firing off events, this should make 20 years of neglecting a powerful faction more harmful to your stability.

Also, Finally found the damn names, was looking in totally the wrong area. they're a portmenteau in Stellaris\common\random_names\XX_pop_faction_names
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Need to key them in to the new factions, rebellions are easy enough, just generic "FREEDOM" stuff.
But for some I might need to inspect some events for examples on fetching sector names (to say [Alpha Centauri Sector]&"Independence Party" for example

Edit: i might have spoken too soon, not sure where primacy came from, based on my coded name lists, still its a minor issue and slaves arent meant to be the most literate people lol.
Code:
## Rebellious Slaves
pop_faction_name_parts_list = {
    key = "rebellious_slaves_names_1"
    parts = {
        "Freedom" = 1
        "Liberty Now" = 1
        "Citizen Self-Determinism" = 1
        "Free Citizen" = 1
        "Populist" = 1
        "Democratic Rights" = 1
        "Friends of Liberty" = 1
        "Galactic Emancipation" = 1
        "Electoral Freedom" = 1
        "Citizens for Freedom" = 1
        "Liberationist" = 1
        "Emancipation" = 1
        "Emancipationist" = 1
        "Anti-Slavery" = 1
    }
}

pop_faction_name_parts_list = {
    key = "rebellious_slaves_2"
    parts = {
        "Coalition" = 1
        "Uprising" = 1
        "Organisation" = 1
        "Foundation" = 1
        "Initiative" = 1
        "Collective" = 1
        "Alliance" = 1
        "Movement" = 1
        "Group" = 1
        "Organization" = 1
        "Network" = 1
        "Response" = 1
        "Association" = 1
        "League" = 1
        "Party" = 1
        "Army" = 1
        "Force" = 1
        "Legion" = 1
    }
}

pop_faction_name_format = {
    random_weight = {
        factor = 0
        modifier = {
            add = 100
            is_pop_faction_type = "rebellious_slaves"
        }
    }
    format = "<rebellious_slaves_names_1> <rebellious_slaves_names_2>"
}
.
 
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somewhere in an earlier post I showed the defines changes ive made, now if a faction has 0 approval it reduces pop happiness by 75% rather than 50% (this is probably still too low, as there are other sources of happiness) - happiness also feeds into stability and ethic drift, so more pissed pops means more difficult gameplay.
Agreed.
I think 75% is the sweet spot, if you account for other modifiers that reduce happiness (Slave Revolts, Terror Bombings?), low Amenities or any kind of shortage after a war (not considering min-max players that barely struggle with the game, though of course you're free to take that into consideration).

Kudos so far to that thorough work.
I always thought that the Politics and Diplomatic side of Stellaris (even after Fed DLC) lacked majorly compared to Warfare and Economy, even when I started to dive in back when 1.9.1 released.
 
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I always thought that the Politics and Diplomatic side of Stellaris (even after Fed DLC) lacked majorly compared to Warfare and Economy, even when I started to dive in back when 1.9.1 released.
Yep I agree. Politics (aside from diplomacy in federations) really hasnt been touched since the faction rework in utopia, Up until 2.0 (which I wont go into now) I actually considered Utopia to be the worst patch in the game's history - not because of the DLC, which is good, but because of the free patch that gutted a lot of those old political factions, without reintroducing better versions of them.

Also, I backed up a bunch of older versions prior to getting started on this so I could reference older methods, this also means I can cheat and recycle stuff from 1.41, the syntax for faction names didnt actually much change, it seems lol:
Code:
# Separatists
pop_faction_name_format = {
    random_weight = {
        factor = 0
        modifier = {
            add = 100
            is_pop_faction_type = "planet_separatists"
        }
    }
    format = "[parameter:planet.GetName] <planet_separatist_names_1> <planet_separatist_names_2>"
}
pop_faction_name_format = {
    random_weight = {
        factor = 0
        modifier = {
            add = 100
            is_pop_faction_type = "sector_separatists"
        }
    }
    format = "[parameter:sector.GetName] <planet_separatist_names_1> <planet_separatist_names_2>"
}
 
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Testing out fanatic pops as part of the political landscape + my tweaked ethics chances.

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Mmmm Look at that vibrant political landscape - and the factions are constantly in flux too! (probably too much in flux tbf).

Ethos bar was never designed for 16 Icons. The upscaled UI mod looks great with it, though and no UIX incompatibilites with how i'm handling the files. (running 100% vanilla - apart from my own mod just loaded this up for a quick peek).
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If anyone ever says the pop attraction system isnt opaque to players not in the know, just show em these screenshots lol.
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1606700737689.png


More testing is needed... so is a stable test environment, there are so many variables at work here it's like working on trading algorithms. For now I've simply set up fanatic pops to have a 1/5th base chance of their non-fanatic counterparts. Though looking at the figures, I'm starting to think the variables I was working with scale non-linearly... most fanatic attraction figures look like they're 1/25 rather than 1/5 smaller. More testing needed.

Specifically, Stellaris\common\ethics\00_ethics.txt (gotta overwrite it too, not use 01_ethics.txt, or you get some weird ethos-duplication effects).
Code:
    country_attraction = {
        value = 0.2 #1.0 for non-fan counterpart
        [various sources & modifiers, individual weights unchanged]
    }
    # from = planet
    pop_attraction = {
        value = 0.2 #1.0 for non-fan counterpart
        [various sources & modifiers, individual weights unchanged]
    }
 
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Made a lot of last min progress

1606707833166.png

Set up the various action templates (need to split up demands tomorrow so that they also acknowledge banning individual forms of slavery, as well as slavery as an overall policy)

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The one (for now) demand in game (dont mind the UI forgot to turn the scaling mod off, works fine without it too).

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There's a lot more actions you can take when you manage this faction now than the usual boring two. (no option to embrace, there is a suppress option, not shown).
Need to look into making a special blank leader type or something - feels weird to have a totalitarian government scientist openly endorsing emancipation.
 
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Please put this mod up on Steam. It sounds amazing.
I absolutely plan to. But its not going to be done for a while -
  • I need to sort out pop attraction some more (its still opaque in places to me)
  • Get all factions in game
    • (though to start with I'm just going to aim to make a stripped-down mod with just the slave faction and maybe separatists or pretender heirs, depending on how easy sector-based scripts are.)
  • Get all effects/associated events working (see the 8 actions i have for slaves as an example in above post + things like replicating the civil war event from synths, working out how to tie that to factional support and adapting it for slaves etc etc).
 
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I absolutely plan to. But its not going to be done for a while -
  • I need to sort out pop attraction some more (its still opaque in places to me)
  • Get all factions in game
    • (though to start with I'm just going to aim to make a stripped-down mod with just the slave faction and maybe separatists or pretender heirs, depending on how easy sector-based scripts are.)
  • Get all effects/associated events working (see the 8 actions i have for slaves as an example in above post + things like replicating the civil war event from synths, working out how to tie that to factional support and adapting it for slaves etc etc).
if you can get this to work reasonably well i would definitely add it to all of my playthroughs
 
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