"Radical ethics" for single-issue factions and internal politics.
- Thread starter Pancakelord
- Start date
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@Pancakelord @Zibbly If either of you need help with your mod i want to go into politics one day. I have knowledge of real world politics and history and could help that way. For example for zibbly's mod a new policy for indirect democracies determining representation system. If you want proportional, mmp, ranked choice voting, first past the post or whatever else. And rules regarding things like gerrymandering. Direct democracy should be a policy only without ethics and civics alternitive/classic. If that mod is enabled use the direct democracy authority from it.
Allright. Another idea. An extermist Fascist faction. That will arrise if there are too many xeno pops in your empire with a lot of xenophobic pops of your primary species. They will demand all xeno pops are immediately purged or enslaved. Purging them will make them happier and slavery not as much. They will also have some ultra conservitive demands. Stuff like setting leader enhancement to max and not being a democracy. But those will be secondary.
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That's the sort of thing I have in mind. Whether operations have to target other empires or not will make a big difference.
At the least, it looks like they won't be localized on the galaxy map, so that should help.
Starting to mod is not too complicated. I forgot if there are any setup changes to make, like .config files and such, it's been a long while since I started with Stellaris. Look that up. You'll be editing text no matter what you do, so pick a good text editor.
After that, and a little knowledge, what you're able to make is all up to how much work and creative thinking you put into it. It's somewhat like painting or sculpting in that respect. You can make a simple sketch to swap around some little thing you think could be better, or take the time to dig deep and invent new kinds of wizardry.
Those compatibilities you mentioned are a good starting project, because you'll be reading what other modders have made. You'd find out what does what, and have to understand well enough to combine folders and iron out conflicts. I've combined several mods from the workshop into 4 private mods that I personally update.
Edit: Oh yes, and trying to be an "idea guy" is generally unhelpful, because most people who spend a lot of time modding do it because they have a lot of ideas. The process of getting the ideas to work within the system is what takes so much time.
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I know the absolute basics of modding. And i wanted to make a mod that revives scrapped origins. But i kinda got overwhelemed as i wanted an origin to spawn ina fanatic purifier race somewhere else in the galaxy and i have no idea how to do that.
The most important thing to do is to read. And be thorough in your reading, methodical, even.
Most of my time modding isn't actually spent modding, its thinking of how to mod - or how to bypass engine limitations.
The actual scripting, writing and artwork is usually pretty quick, for me -
- I was able to assemble a template in photoshop that lets me bang out knockoff faction icons in about 30 mins, another 10 mins were needed to work out the best DDS file format, that's most of my art done, plus some 2D event banners either my own/stockphotos passed through a filter to more-or less look like stellaris banners or photoshops of vanilla banners e.g.**
- writing is a 2-pass process with quick placeholder text and I later rewrite everything more carefully in Word, before copying it in.
- And as it's just me working on this I have a clear idea of what I want to do so i dont need to waste much time on planning or organising things.
Cross referencing how pops used to work pre-utopia (as the last time Paradox touched factions was in 1.5, really) vs 2.8.1 on the right. And then (on a separate window) reviewing script changes and past dev diaries. I then piece all that together, make some judgements about what sorts of assumtions the PDX coders would have made, make a few tests and then from that [and 1300+hrs of playtime to know how these systems work "in game"] I understand "this is the box I have to play in".
Then I move on to "how can I build what I want to build inside of this box" and then its more testing, and once it works, I move on to the next phase, and it just goes around and around like that. Sometimes my tests pay off quickly and I make a lot of progress overnight, othertimes it takes a few days - or more - to get past a block on what I want to do.
You do not build a skyscraper in a day, you survey the soil, lay the foundations, let them settle and then build it floor by floor.
Modding - all things computer related, really - require investigative and creative skills just as much as they do a fine grasp of coding [scripting, in this case] languages.
You want to build an origin that spawns an FP in the galaxy?
- Start by making a blank origin and getting it to show up in game
- Then look at adding empire modifiers to your empire via that modifier.
- Then expand it to include a basic event,
- then expand it to make that event spawn a random system near your homeworld.
- and figure out how to customise that system or spawn hyperlanes to it.
- Then look in to things like
- spawning new empires on that star,
- chaining events and
- spawning whole clusters.
- Build on it, iteratively, methodically.
**e.g. one example of a problem caused by an engine limitation is that I can't reference pop faction leader names in the situation log because of how scopes and localisation strings (dynamic text) seem to work - there may be a solution, but I've not figured it out yet, and no one came back on the thread I posted,
So I'm looking at plan B, giving the pretenders "Callsigns" - RUBY, SAPPHIRE, JADE, AMNETHYST, ONYX - and made a bunch of recolours of the khan's robes to correspond to that in events. I've written some fluff text to explain that a claimant's "claim" on the imperial throne is ranked from strongest to weakest and named after a stone (Ruby - Sapphire - Jade - Amnethyst - Onyx -- AKA the 5 possible pretenders, in the order they'll spawn in and the colour of the robes they'll wear - they'll still have character names in regular events, just not in the situation log)
In essence I've had to find a creative workaround to an engine limitation. This isn't Ideal as I've had to deviate from what I intended, and I've inadvertently made them sound like Pokémon game titles, but it is what it is, and this sounds better than saying "Pretender One-Five, or Pretender I-V" IMO.
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I might actually try to get back into my mod. I already do have a blank origin made. The origin i am trying to remake is "purged but unbroken" A scrapped origin. I intend for it to be quite a story heavy origin aswell. But prehapse i should have chosen an easier scraped origin.
hahaI am hyped for this! Wish paradox was so in touch with what people are wanting.
Are you going to add the nemesis galactic empire to this?
I think factions are next in line for a big update with the way espionage works, but I do really like this idea.
I generally like the idea of factions being able to have different ideologies and same ethics or even multiple ethics in one faction.
So say, having two fanatic spiritualist factions that have unique wants or goals, perhaps one is xenophilic and the other is authoritarian to boot. An evangelist faction vs a church authority kind of faction.
I'm probably going to do a a big write-up for some ideas I have with internal politics since I'm pretty free on time and have been thinking about it, but I really like the idea of radical factions.
I generally like the idea of factions being able to have different ideologies and same ethics or even multiple ethics in one faction.
So say, having two fanatic spiritualist factions that have unique wants or goals, perhaps one is xenophilic and the other is authoritarian to boot. An evangelist faction vs a church authority kind of faction.
I'm probably going to do a a big write-up for some ideas I have with internal politics since I'm pretty free on time and have been thinking about it, but I really like the idea of radical factions.