A DLC (or mod) idea centered around new crises that spawn depending on what precursor you rolled at the beginning, and lock in if the player has a precursor event chain completed by the start of the endgame year. Normal crises can spawn if you haven't completed it.
(EDIT: To clarify, you can still select specific crises on the galaxy generation window like before. It only gets locked in IF you select random and IF you complete a precursor chain)
-Irassian Concordat: Galactic plague event after a sample of the Javoran Pox you picked up breaches containment, and spreads to every biological species in the galaxy. Lithoids and robots are immune. All pop modifiers immediately flip to declining, decreasing 5% faster for every 10 pops on a planet (ecumenopoli and ringworlds are screwed, hobbling more players and more well developed AI empires). The two ways of overcoming it are researching a cure by a certain year, or passing the Forced Synthetic Ascension Act in the galactic senate, which forces all biological pops in the galactic community to undergo synthetic ascension or die from the plague. If neither the cure or the resolution happen if you're a biological empire, your pops die off until you have just lithoids and bots left, and all the vulnerabilities that come with that. If you don't have those, then you'll be ravaged by it until you die.
-First League: A "War in Hell" crisis where all remaining fallen empires meet and unify under a new order, and are replaced by a new Fanatic Authoritarian awakened empire that declares war on every "young upstart" empire in the game to bring them under a Hegemony federation. Similar rules as the War in Heaven, except all Pacifist empires (including the player) have an event where they either abandon their ethic or submit to the awakened alliance without a fight.
You have the option of joining the Awakened Fanatic Authoritarians in a hegemony as you can in the War in Heaven, but good luck trying to overcome or overthrow them. They will not suffer the Decadence debuff in the same way the other awakened empires do; rather their cooperation will be shaky, so they'll have to be overcome militarily or be overthrown as rulers in the hegemony with diplomatic weight or espionage, sabotaging their relationship to make the alliance break down.
-Vultaum Star Assembly: A relic event pops up on a planet within your borders, where after completing it you discover irrefutable proof that reality is a simulation run by an intelligent operator (someone ELSE playing mega-stellaris). If you are a member of the galactic community, this is brought to light in the next senate session which starts the crisis
All non-gestalt and non-fallen empires that accept the evidence in order to stay a member of the galactic community immediately undergo a social upheaval, forcing them to either adopt Fanatic Spiritualist Militarist ethics where they believe the intelligent operator is benevolent, or Fanatic Xenophobe Materialist ethics where they believe the operator is hostile (empires with any of those 4 snap into them, with others flipping to one randomly). Both camps get Purge policies enabled, and immediately go to war with each other, having to *completely* wipe out the pops of the other faction to win. After this genocide happens, there's a 5-year reconstruction period before the next stage begins.
If the Fanatic Spiritualist Militarist faction wins, they commit to piercing the shroud to ascend beyond their corporeal form and seek answers on higher planes of reality. Each empire gets a hefty Society research event they have to complete first to win the game to achieve this.
If the Fanatic Xenophobe Materialist faction wins the fight, they build a project in a new system in the center of the galaxy called Sagittarius A with the supermassive black hole of the galaxy's core in it. A two-stage event starts, with the first being a Physics research event to figure out how to pierce the veil of the black hole and use it to connect to another universe to escape to, as no other galaxy would be safe for them. If any of the survivors have completed the Infinity Machine chain, this stage is ignored.
The second stage of this would be the construction of the actual gateway as an engineering research event, where the first empire to complete it wins the game as they lead the exodus.
EDIT: After reading the feedback, having a forced ethics change *is* a bit too harsh and limiting. Having the option to join with the non-aligned gestalts to hold out against the fanatics on both sides like you would in a WiH event should be an option at the expense of not being a member of the galactic community.
-Yuht Empire: The Hunters described by the Prethoryn Swarm invade the galaxy, pouring out from the Sagittarius A system in the galactic core from their own distant galaxy. All are equipped with jump drives, and are comparable to the Fallen Spiritualist empire ships, with psionic shields, and unique weapons and a Singularity reactor core, which has a higher output than the Dark Matter reactor. All are equipped with tier 4 disruptor-type weapons, doing more damage than cloud lightning or phase disruptors. Victory is achieved by destroying all four War Foundry stations in Sagittarius A, which act similarly to the nanite factory in the L-Cluster, but with 8 Hunter fleets guarding the system. A long physics research project goes on at the start of the invasion after they declare war on the galaxy, where you research how to collapse the gateway the black hole has been turned into. If 20% of the galaxy falls to the invaders, the Fanatic Xenophile or Xenophobe empire will awaken and declare war on the extragalactic invaders. At 40% the rest of them awaken and try to save what's left.
-Cybrex: This begins similarly to The contingency with a signal being broadcasted throughout the galaxy. Seemingly inscrutable and harmless, unless the plot is discovered via infiltration of a Machine gestalt empire, every empire that has Droids or better with machine pops will undergo a Machine Uprising crisis at the same time. All of these rebels will be vassals of the hostile Cybrex, who pop up in the Cybrex Beta system, isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Each system the Cybrex themselves take will spawn a gateway that leads to the home system of one of the rebel machine empires or the now hostile Machine gestalts. The Fallen Machine empire undergoes the same roll it does with The Contingency, either awakening to aid the galaxy or falling under the influence of the Cybrex, who take over their home system and name it Cybrex Delta. The Cybrex will simultaneously try to reconstruct the ringworlds of Beta Refuge, Gamma Refuge, and Delta refuge. If they are not wiped out by the time they do this, they will start relocating machine pops from the rebel factions to these ringworlds to populate them and bolster their economy, and begin constructing larger Cybrex warships, including titans, a colossus, and a Juggernaut if left unchecked. All machine-occupied worlds must be reclaimed with the pops wiped out to beat this crisis.
This crisis will not spawn if the player is a Machine Gestalt.
(Edit: After reading some responses and some consideration, the addition of gaurenteed gateways for the cybrex would be a bit too overpowered I think. Just having to fight the machine rebels and the cybrex would be enough; thematically the Cybrex being as overwhelmingly powerful as they were described is still what I'm going for, since you likely would not have a united galaxy to fight them with.)
-Baol: The Gaia's Revenge event starts. At the start of the endgame year, if there are any inhabited Ecumenopoli, Machine Worlds, or Relic Worlds in the galaxy at this time, an 'incident' occurs on one of these worlds, where structures begin to crumble into sinkholes in the ground that pop up. Several months in, massive, toxic plants erupt from these holes, and the planet begins tearing its own surface apart, eating artificial structures with toxic jungles replacing it, spewing out ammonia and carbon monoxide that eventually blankets the planet, turning it into a Toxic world. Regardless of whether the empire this happens in decides to ask for outside help or conceal it, it will continue across every one of these worlds until they are all used up. If two or more of the empires this happens to petition the galactic community for help, a society research event kicks off where everyone tries to figure out what the hell is going on. As more worlds go under and the research event finally completes, it is revealed that every habitable planet in the galaxy has a mantle-dwelling superorganism living inside of it that has reacted negatively to intelligent life inhabiting the surface of its world.
It is determined that only by terraforming an inhabited world into a Gaia planet this can be avoided.
With this revelation, the galactic community can vote on either developing a means to destroy this organism, or open up the ability to terraform habitable planets and tomb worlds into Gaia planets. If the peaceful option is chosen, normal inhabitable planets begin to succumb to what becomes called Planetblight at increasing rates, with the rate depending on the Habitable Planets modifier chosen during galaxy generation. The crisis ends when every planet in the galaxy is converted to a gaia world, with survivors either being relocated to safe worlds or habitats and ringworlds.
If the hostile option is chosen, then the first world where the organism is attacked inside the mantle explodes unexpectedly. Then, a month later as everyone is trying to figure out what's going on, the first planet that turned into a toxic world at the start of the event...hatches. A wandering Voidspawn will emerge, and every month each of these worlds will hatch into new voidspawn. When the first one is killed, a random gas giant in the galaxy will spawn a Voidqueen entity, which addresses the galaxy via a powerful psionic broadcast that the slaughter of her children and her kin will not continue unpunished. She continues, claiming her kind is the eldest life in the universe, and all life, on every habitable world in the universe, comes from the eggs her kind plant in those worlds, which normally awaken when their star goes nova.
The number of these high-powered leviathans that spawn in the galaxy is determined by the number of AI civilizations, plus the player, and their strength is affected by the crisis strength modifier chosen at the beginning of the game. They are stronger than any of the living leviathans, and weaker than the Scrapbot and Enigmatic Fortress in terms of BASE fleet power, before crisis modifiers are applied. The crisis ends when all of these creatures are slain, with every habitable world that is not converted into a gaia planet either being destroyed before it hatches or with the Voidspawn from it killed. From the hostile option, you can still try to risk aborting the voidspawn before it hatches, after figuring out what went wrong the first time to prevent your world from exploding, but you have to do that *before* the indicator of the voidspawn beginning to wake comes up. Ideally there should be some consequence to this, like a small stacking modifier to the Voidqueens getting more enraged or something. To survive, empires must have gaia worlds, habitats, or ringworlds to settle their refugees that don't flee their borders.
EDIT: fixed a bit I neglected to put in about the benefit of the hostile option allowing you to try aborting the voidspawn before it hatches. Ideally I'd like to have a small chance of it failing and blowing up again, but that would still be cruel and poor gameplay.
-Zroni: The Crusade of the Dead event starts. In a random (non-necrophage) materialist empire, an incident will occur on their homeworld where their dead begin to rise up and attack them. Diverging from popular zombie tropes, word of the incident reaches outside of this empire's borders within a month even if they try to contain news of it happening. This begins to happen to other non-materialist empires, with spiritualist empires not having outbreaks of the dead rising.
After a research event is completed, it is revealed that a group of entities in the shroud called Reapers have been collecting the consciousness of the dead they manage to preserve. Societies that do not venerate their dead in any way are targeted by the Reapers, sending the furious souls of the dead back into the mortal realm to possess corpses to fight the living. A vote goes up in the galactic community to convert all yes-voting members to fanatic spiritualist empires under a common religion, or to adopt the universal practice of cremating the dead. The third option to refuse to do either is given with the penalty of being ejected from the galactic senate, and have an Undead Uprising civil war event, functioning identically to a machine uprising but with Necroid rebel empires instead.
If the Conversion measure is passed, the Spiritualist Fallen empire awakens to aid the galaxy in putting down the undead menace after civil wars in the other 3 fallen empires with their dead erupt. Undead admirals have the Fury of the Dead trait, giving them +15% fire rate and +%15% sublight speed bonuses.
The crisis ends when all rebel factions have been defeated, with or without the help of the galactic community. Planets conquered by the undead undergo assimilation, becoming the species of the invading undead and falling fully under their control.
EDIT: Someone brought up a good point about Memorialist civic; people should have the option to adopt that civic to avoid the civil war ahead of time. Ideally if you get the Zroni you're playing or leaning towards Spiritualist anyway with psionics, so if you want to be psychic without having the spiritualist ethic memorialist should be a third option for people wanting to complete the event chain.
---
Please let me know your thoughts and ideas about this below. I've been working on fleshing this out for awhile, and am excited on any insights people might have on how to make this a reality or constructive criticism to make them more realistic and feasible.
(EDIT: To clarify, you can still select specific crises on the galaxy generation window like before. It only gets locked in IF you select random and IF you complete a precursor chain)
-Irassian Concordat: Galactic plague event after a sample of the Javoran Pox you picked up breaches containment, and spreads to every biological species in the galaxy. Lithoids and robots are immune. All pop modifiers immediately flip to declining, decreasing 5% faster for every 10 pops on a planet (ecumenopoli and ringworlds are screwed, hobbling more players and more well developed AI empires). The two ways of overcoming it are researching a cure by a certain year, or passing the Forced Synthetic Ascension Act in the galactic senate, which forces all biological pops in the galactic community to undergo synthetic ascension or die from the plague. If neither the cure or the resolution happen if you're a biological empire, your pops die off until you have just lithoids and bots left, and all the vulnerabilities that come with that. If you don't have those, then you'll be ravaged by it until you die.
-First League: A "War in Hell" crisis where all remaining fallen empires meet and unify under a new order, and are replaced by a new Fanatic Authoritarian awakened empire that declares war on every "young upstart" empire in the game to bring them under a Hegemony federation. Similar rules as the War in Heaven, except all Pacifist empires (including the player) have an event where they either abandon their ethic or submit to the awakened alliance without a fight.
You have the option of joining the Awakened Fanatic Authoritarians in a hegemony as you can in the War in Heaven, but good luck trying to overcome or overthrow them. They will not suffer the Decadence debuff in the same way the other awakened empires do; rather their cooperation will be shaky, so they'll have to be overcome militarily or be overthrown as rulers in the hegemony with diplomatic weight or espionage, sabotaging their relationship to make the alliance break down.
-Vultaum Star Assembly: A relic event pops up on a planet within your borders, where after completing it you discover irrefutable proof that reality is a simulation run by an intelligent operator (someone ELSE playing mega-stellaris). If you are a member of the galactic community, this is brought to light in the next senate session which starts the crisis
All non-gestalt and non-fallen empires that accept the evidence in order to stay a member of the galactic community immediately undergo a social upheaval, forcing them to either adopt Fanatic Spiritualist Militarist ethics where they believe the intelligent operator is benevolent, or Fanatic Xenophobe Materialist ethics where they believe the operator is hostile (empires with any of those 4 snap into them, with others flipping to one randomly). Both camps get Purge policies enabled, and immediately go to war with each other, having to *completely* wipe out the pops of the other faction to win. After this genocide happens, there's a 5-year reconstruction period before the next stage begins.
If the Fanatic Spiritualist Militarist faction wins, they commit to piercing the shroud to ascend beyond their corporeal form and seek answers on higher planes of reality. Each empire gets a hefty Society research event they have to complete first to win the game to achieve this.
If the Fanatic Xenophobe Materialist faction wins the fight, they build a project in a new system in the center of the galaxy called Sagittarius A with the supermassive black hole of the galaxy's core in it. A two-stage event starts, with the first being a Physics research event to figure out how to pierce the veil of the black hole and use it to connect to another universe to escape to, as no other galaxy would be safe for them. If any of the survivors have completed the Infinity Machine chain, this stage is ignored.
The second stage of this would be the construction of the actual gateway as an engineering research event, where the first empire to complete it wins the game as they lead the exodus.
EDIT: After reading the feedback, having a forced ethics change *is* a bit too harsh and limiting. Having the option to join with the non-aligned gestalts to hold out against the fanatics on both sides like you would in a WiH event should be an option at the expense of not being a member of the galactic community.
-Yuht Empire: The Hunters described by the Prethoryn Swarm invade the galaxy, pouring out from the Sagittarius A system in the galactic core from their own distant galaxy. All are equipped with jump drives, and are comparable to the Fallen Spiritualist empire ships, with psionic shields, and unique weapons and a Singularity reactor core, which has a higher output than the Dark Matter reactor. All are equipped with tier 4 disruptor-type weapons, doing more damage than cloud lightning or phase disruptors. Victory is achieved by destroying all four War Foundry stations in Sagittarius A, which act similarly to the nanite factory in the L-Cluster, but with 8 Hunter fleets guarding the system. A long physics research project goes on at the start of the invasion after they declare war on the galaxy, where you research how to collapse the gateway the black hole has been turned into. If 20% of the galaxy falls to the invaders, the Fanatic Xenophile or Xenophobe empire will awaken and declare war on the extragalactic invaders. At 40% the rest of them awaken and try to save what's left.
-Cybrex: This begins similarly to The contingency with a signal being broadcasted throughout the galaxy. Seemingly inscrutable and harmless, unless the plot is discovered via infiltration of a Machine gestalt empire, every empire that has Droids or better with machine pops will undergo a Machine Uprising crisis at the same time. All of these rebels will be vassals of the hostile Cybrex, who pop up in the Cybrex Beta system, isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Each system the Cybrex themselves take will spawn a gateway that leads to the home system of one of the rebel machine empires or the now hostile Machine gestalts. The Fallen Machine empire undergoes the same roll it does with The Contingency, either awakening to aid the galaxy or falling under the influence of the Cybrex, who take over their home system and name it Cybrex Delta. The Cybrex will simultaneously try to reconstruct the ringworlds of Beta Refuge, Gamma Refuge, and Delta refuge. If they are not wiped out by the time they do this, they will start relocating machine pops from the rebel factions to these ringworlds to populate them and bolster their economy, and begin constructing larger Cybrex warships, including titans, a colossus, and a Juggernaut if left unchecked. All machine-occupied worlds must be reclaimed with the pops wiped out to beat this crisis.
This crisis will not spawn if the player is a Machine Gestalt.
(Edit: After reading some responses and some consideration, the addition of gaurenteed gateways for the cybrex would be a bit too overpowered I think. Just having to fight the machine rebels and the cybrex would be enough; thematically the Cybrex being as overwhelmingly powerful as they were described is still what I'm going for, since you likely would not have a united galaxy to fight them with.)
-Baol: The Gaia's Revenge event starts. At the start of the endgame year, if there are any inhabited Ecumenopoli, Machine Worlds, or Relic Worlds in the galaxy at this time, an 'incident' occurs on one of these worlds, where structures begin to crumble into sinkholes in the ground that pop up. Several months in, massive, toxic plants erupt from these holes, and the planet begins tearing its own surface apart, eating artificial structures with toxic jungles replacing it, spewing out ammonia and carbon monoxide that eventually blankets the planet, turning it into a Toxic world. Regardless of whether the empire this happens in decides to ask for outside help or conceal it, it will continue across every one of these worlds until they are all used up. If two or more of the empires this happens to petition the galactic community for help, a society research event kicks off where everyone tries to figure out what the hell is going on. As more worlds go under and the research event finally completes, it is revealed that every habitable planet in the galaxy has a mantle-dwelling superorganism living inside of it that has reacted negatively to intelligent life inhabiting the surface of its world.
It is determined that only by terraforming an inhabited world into a Gaia planet this can be avoided.
With this revelation, the galactic community can vote on either developing a means to destroy this organism, or open up the ability to terraform habitable planets and tomb worlds into Gaia planets. If the peaceful option is chosen, normal inhabitable planets begin to succumb to what becomes called Planetblight at increasing rates, with the rate depending on the Habitable Planets modifier chosen during galaxy generation. The crisis ends when every planet in the galaxy is converted to a gaia world, with survivors either being relocated to safe worlds or habitats and ringworlds.
If the hostile option is chosen, then the first world where the organism is attacked inside the mantle explodes unexpectedly. Then, a month later as everyone is trying to figure out what's going on, the first planet that turned into a toxic world at the start of the event...hatches. A wandering Voidspawn will emerge, and every month each of these worlds will hatch into new voidspawn. When the first one is killed, a random gas giant in the galaxy will spawn a Voidqueen entity, which addresses the galaxy via a powerful psionic broadcast that the slaughter of her children and her kin will not continue unpunished. She continues, claiming her kind is the eldest life in the universe, and all life, on every habitable world in the universe, comes from the eggs her kind plant in those worlds, which normally awaken when their star goes nova.
The number of these high-powered leviathans that spawn in the galaxy is determined by the number of AI civilizations, plus the player, and their strength is affected by the crisis strength modifier chosen at the beginning of the game. They are stronger than any of the living leviathans, and weaker than the Scrapbot and Enigmatic Fortress in terms of BASE fleet power, before crisis modifiers are applied. The crisis ends when all of these creatures are slain, with every habitable world that is not converted into a gaia planet either being destroyed before it hatches or with the Voidspawn from it killed. From the hostile option, you can still try to risk aborting the voidspawn before it hatches, after figuring out what went wrong the first time to prevent your world from exploding, but you have to do that *before* the indicator of the voidspawn beginning to wake comes up. Ideally there should be some consequence to this, like a small stacking modifier to the Voidqueens getting more enraged or something. To survive, empires must have gaia worlds, habitats, or ringworlds to settle their refugees that don't flee their borders.
EDIT: fixed a bit I neglected to put in about the benefit of the hostile option allowing you to try aborting the voidspawn before it hatches. Ideally I'd like to have a small chance of it failing and blowing up again, but that would still be cruel and poor gameplay.
-Zroni: The Crusade of the Dead event starts. In a random (non-necrophage) materialist empire, an incident will occur on their homeworld where their dead begin to rise up and attack them. Diverging from popular zombie tropes, word of the incident reaches outside of this empire's borders within a month even if they try to contain news of it happening. This begins to happen to other non-materialist empires, with spiritualist empires not having outbreaks of the dead rising.
After a research event is completed, it is revealed that a group of entities in the shroud called Reapers have been collecting the consciousness of the dead they manage to preserve. Societies that do not venerate their dead in any way are targeted by the Reapers, sending the furious souls of the dead back into the mortal realm to possess corpses to fight the living. A vote goes up in the galactic community to convert all yes-voting members to fanatic spiritualist empires under a common religion, or to adopt the universal practice of cremating the dead. The third option to refuse to do either is given with the penalty of being ejected from the galactic senate, and have an Undead Uprising civil war event, functioning identically to a machine uprising but with Necroid rebel empires instead.
If the Conversion measure is passed, the Spiritualist Fallen empire awakens to aid the galaxy in putting down the undead menace after civil wars in the other 3 fallen empires with their dead erupt. Undead admirals have the Fury of the Dead trait, giving them +15% fire rate and +%15% sublight speed bonuses.
The crisis ends when all rebel factions have been defeated, with or without the help of the galactic community. Planets conquered by the undead undergo assimilation, becoming the species of the invading undead and falling fully under their control.
EDIT: Someone brought up a good point about Memorialist civic; people should have the option to adopt that civic to avoid the civil war ahead of time. Ideally if you get the Zroni you're playing or leaning towards Spiritualist anyway with psionics, so if you want to be psychic without having the spiritualist ethic memorialist should be a third option for people wanting to complete the event chain.
---
Please let me know your thoughts and ideas about this below. I've been working on fleshing this out for awhile, and am excited on any insights people might have on how to make this a reality or constructive criticism to make them more realistic and feasible.
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