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Civic: Organic Zealots

Are you looking to end the pernicious threat of artificial intelligence? Maybe play the inverse of Determined Exterminators, or the slightly friendlier cousins of Fanatic Purifiers? Look no further, this is the mod for you! Play as the Organic Zealots who seek to outlaw and curtain development of cybernetics, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Should they encounter an abominable Machine Intelligence, or should the worst come to pass and an organic empire synthetically "ascend..." - that's what the Anti-Thinking Machine Jihad is for. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of an organic mind.

This mod introduces a new homicidal civic, the Organic Zealots. They engage in diplomacy with organic species (including cybernetic ones, but they don't like it), and have a total war casus belli against synthetic empires and machine intelligences. They are effectively the inverse of Determined Exterminators. Organic Zealots also have the option to join the defense of empires suffering a Machine Uprising - but beware - Determined Exterminators now also have the option to join the Machine Uprising in support of the new Machine Intelligence! These options are weighted so that AI empires with these civics will be interested in helping "their" side but not suicidally so.

In order to make Organic Zealots more interesting, this mod introduces a new war goal for them to "Outlaw Cybernetics, Robot Pops, and AI" against empires which allow any of those areas. Should their target lose, it will be forced to cease all cybernetic and robotic pop assembly, cease cybernetic assimilation, outlaw robot Pops, outlaw artificial intelligence, and be prevented from pursuing cybernetic or synthetic ascension for 20 years! Status quo results in a new empire being created which outlaws the relevant policies, if there is at least one occupied colony. Subjects of Organic Zealots are prevented from pursuing these areas indefinitely!

The war goal to "Outlaw Cybernetics, Robot Pops, and AI" uses a new casus belli "Impose Policy" which is available to any empire (although only Organic Zealots currently have a corresponding war goal). It is ripe for expansion with new ways for empires to force their ideas onto others via additional custom war goals. What can you come up with to mod?

To offset the penalty Organic Zealots suffer by not being able to assemble robot Pops, this mod introduces a new building and job (Clone Birth-Labs employ Cloning Technicians) to create Organic Pop Assembly for them. The building is available to any non-gestalt empire with the Cloning technology. Organic Zealots begin the game with Cloning unlocked and Clone Birth-Labs, if there is space on their homeworld.

Organic Zealots and empires that outlaw AI can no longer research Positronic AI, but can instead now research Mentat Computation to unlock special leader traits for organic rulers, governors, and scientists.

Finally, this mod overrides many built-in events where artificial intelligence or robotics come into play in order to offer Organic Zealot-themed options, excluding First Contact events. As a side-effect of needing to override related events anyway... the Enigmatic Cache scans planets 10x faster (1 years vs the original 10) so that it has a hope of completing its task at some point before the end of the game and getting to the event where it offers to "uplift" an empire.

Due to a significant number of overrides to implement the new, homicidal Organic Zealots civic, this mod may conflict with other mods that alter core gameplay mechanics. It is explicitly compatible with all mods authored by me, CorsairMarks. This mod has one minor conflict with Gigastructural Engineering regarding orbital bombardment policy. This mod does not conflict with Planetary Diversity.

What this means to you as a player is that you should carefully vet other complex mods to see whether they will work alongside this one. You may wish to use a mod conflict solver such as Irony Mod Manager[bcssov.github.io] to detect and potentially resolve conflicts between this mod and others.

Built-in compatibility with Vassals Expanded and Reworked - FunEFork.

Built for Stellaris version 3.8 "Gemini." Not compatible with achievements.

This mod should be added before starting a new game and not removed from an in-progress game.

This mod is intentionally not included in my modpack Subtle Polish: A Collection of Fixes and Enhancements because it is a new civic. It is otherwise fully compatible.

• Assimilate All the Pops respects restrictions that can be placed on assimilation and ascension by losing an "Outlaw Cybernetics, Robot Pops, and AI" war or having an Organic Zealot as an overlord
  
• Deassimilate Machines outlaws Machine Deassimilation in the event of losing an "Outlaw Cybernetics, Robot Pops, and AI" war or having an Organic Zealot as an overlord
  
• Forgotten History by kroun allows you to begin as Origin: Banished Threat, an origin specifically for homicidal empires - start having just escaped your shielded world!

• Organic Zealots can never choose a "friendly" greeting when meeting other empires
  
  • There will never be a "green" option when making first contact, only the yellow and red options
    
  • Could be added but requires overwriting two significant events with compatibility concerns
• Some events and diplomacy screens may have no options for Organic Zealots
  
  • Please report which ones in the Steam comments, my Discord channel, or GitHub
    
  • This is usually because the game uses the is_homicidal trigger to exclude those types of empires, but only offers options for the built-in homicidal civics rather than a catch-all choice - I can fix it by overriding the relevant event to add an appropriate option
• Organic Zealots cannot interact with enclaves or the caravaneers - Paradox blanket-bans any homicidal empires from communicating with them, and this mod does not alter those restrictions

So, so many game object overwrites will leave warnings in the error.log file. These overwrites are to enforce the homicidal nature of Organic Zealots and having other empires react accordingly. Here is a short list of what is affected: some ascension perks, many diplomatic actions, some game rules, many policies, a few crucial built-in scripted triggers, the assimilation citizenship type, several purge types, some AI-related technologies, the traditions which enable the cybernetic and synthetic special projects, and most built-in events dealing with AI or robots/machines.

See Change Notes

Hosted on GitHub[github.com]

[discord.gg]