I'd love to see some equivalent of the Subterfuge tree. It's the one thing I can see that's kind of missing compared to vanilla. Great mod though!

Originally posted by Liggi:

I'd love to see some equivalent of the Subterfuge tree. It's the one thing I can see that's kind of missing compared to vanilla. Great mod though!

Hi there. While there is no true equivalent, many of the modifiers from the Subterfuge tradition are distributed to various Paths, such as Administration, Ideology and Authority.

Hey just subscribed. At first look prosperity finisher looks ungodly powerful. -50% empire size from pop is no joke. other category finisher sounds rather dull (also weak) in comparison. perhaps we can revisit them at some point?

Originally posted by glee8e:

Hey just subscribed. At first look prosperity finisher looks ungodly powerful. -50% empire size from pop is no joke. other category finisher sounds rather dull (also weak) in comparison. perhaps we can revisit them at some point?

Yes, I'm not satisfied with them either. Expect things to change soon.

I saw above that you said you intended to revisit the finisher effects. I'm not sure how feasible it is to implement, but I think it would be neat to get a bonus for each 6 or 9 traditions in a tree that you take, in addition to the finisher for taking all 18.

Thanks for your work on the mod. I'm enjoying it.

Is it possible for a patch for https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1311725711 ? Or maybe a tutorial to make said patch?

Hey can you someday make ru translate?

Hey there. So having plaied with this for quite a bit now I must say I really enjoy exploring the new options. It is a great mod and great ideas no doubt. It however has some flaws.

My biggest gripes so far:
There is no equivalent to the domination tree.
In vanilla just taking domination reduces the habitat alloy upkeep by 20%. By the midgame this saves you about 50 alloys a month that would otherwise have to be produced by pops. This trait missing makes void dwellers rather terrible as a lot of pop jobs become wasted on maintenance.

There is no equivalent for vanilla merchant builds.
In vanilla going down the merchantile path you get one merchant per commerce building / district. This makes tradeing builds playable. The Exchange III giving one merchant per x pops makes tradebuilds just not viable.

Hive Minds missing the prosperity tree.
Hive minds missing this tree completely seems not so bad at first but the tree contains 6 free space stations. That is a huge disadvantage for hiveminds.

You are locked out of federation types.
Since federation types require you to finish the full tree things like trade league, hegemony etc are not feasable. Federations take AGES to rank up and switching reduces the lvl back to 1 this and that is if the other members even agree.

Biological Hiveminds missing 2 synapse drone amenities.
This is on par with the missing merchants. Biological Hiveminds could ignore a set of jobs by taking 2 amenities from synapse drones. Not having this option makes biological hive minds really painful to play in the mid and lategame. It is not matched by the 1 maintenance drone fo 25 pops.

No real ambition to finish the discovery tree.
Half the tree is 25% to a single research type. Since you can only research 1 type at a time 2/3 of the time picking one of these is useless. This easily makes discovery the most boring and least to finish tree by a long shot.



Minor gripes:
Maybe I am blind but I cannot find "planetary prospecting" that you get for finishing the vanilla tree. It does not sound huge but for Hive Minds that was a chance to get a ton of extra resources if used right.

Subterfuge missing is painful but the worst part is no infiltration speed.
The end of the subterfuge tree in vanilla gives a whoooping +50% infiltration speed. This saves a lot of time and makes getting to 100 infiltration to steal relics even viable. Without it it takes just sooooo muuuuch time.

Supremacy Fleet Stance.
Suffering the same problem as federations. Too late obtained for certain builds.

Robots assembly denied.
Missing the early adoption effect for reduced assembly cost they suffer early fleet expansion as more ressources are required. Not as bad as void dweller but still no equivalent option.


Oddities:
Clerks
Extra Trade from Clerks and more Clerks being in different trees.



Requests for change and what I would like to see:

First of all I would like to see merchant, void dweller and hive mind builds to be brought up to par by getting a vanilla equivalent to even make them playable.

Allow biological hive minds to play mid / late game with more amentities from drones (since vanilla adds a flat value this is not matched by the % amenity bonus from the tree in this mod)

Give hive minds some love sprinkling 6 more stations in their trees.

Seeing the above 2 points maybe give them their own tree in exchange with boni to making hive / machine worlds, reduce deviancy, less bad traits and more.

Allow for planetary prospecting,

I would also very much like to see the discovery tree to see more love.
My sugggestion would be to move the "anomaly generation chance" from tier 3 to its own tier one to encourage spending 1 point early and add a bonus to anomaly and excavation down the line.
It would also be nice to see boni to getting rare technologies, maybe even one that allows psionic pursuit to allow for psychic technocracies (not sure if too op).
Maybe let discovery add more genetic / robot modification points?
Or maybe discover locations / weak points of leviathans without having to ask / pay the curators.
Pretty much anything beats a flat 25% boost with no real impact.

Add federation types as lvl 3 finisher so they can be obtained earlier. Hegemony should still require 6 picks if that can be done since no leaving it makes it a very powerful type.

Get rid of the 1x new job per x pops on a planet. Most of them are tied to 25 and what it does is cause a planet to suddenly loose a bunch of worker pops when reeaching 25 pops because they all become now magically available specialists. This is really painful on mining worlds and serves little benefit. Instead give existing pops of that kind flat boni like more unity for priests, more crime reduction for enforcers etc.
It also makes it harder to plan around housing vs jobs when suddenly you get jobs from thin air and makes it really hard to obtain any boni when playing void dweller.



Lastly I want to say I like a lot of changes in this mod. Even small things like looking at the prosperity tree. You got authority which boosts enforcers and then follows up with higher operation costs for enemies. It just matches so well and makes so much sense to be tied in such a way I would love to see more of it.

Thank you. This is exactly the kind of feedback that I'm looking for. I'll do my best to address most (if not all) of these concerns in the coming update.

My suggestion is to replace the tradition swap trigger in frr_expansion_population_c from "is_machine_empire = yes" to
OR = {
is_machine_empire = yes
has_ascension_perk = ap_synthetic_evolution
}
And the same for similar cases of expansion and domination traditions (namely, for frr_expansion_colonization_c, frr_production_agriculture_c, frr_production_agriculture_b, frr_production_agriculture_a). These existing traditions have zero sense for the empires which chose the synthetic ascention path, so I think that it makes sense to swap them in this case.

By the way, thanks for the mod, I like it a lot!

Disclaimer: I haven't played with the 18 tradition cap. But to my understanding this is how the mechanics works.

With the 9 tradition cap (3 paths per tradition), this is how you unlock Ascension Perks (AP):
1st AP cost: 7 unity levels (unlock tradition + 2 paths) [+7]
2nd AP cost: 14 unity levels (1 path remaining + 1 new tradition + 1 path) [+7]
3rd AP cost: 20 unity levels (2 paths remaining) [+6]
4th AP cost: 27 [+7] (steps 4-6, 7-9 = steps 1-3 repeating)
5th AP cost: 34 [+7]
6th AP cost: 40 [+6]
7th AP cost: 47 [+7]
8th AP cost: 54 [+7]
9th AP cost: 60 [+6]

Compared to the 18 tradition cap (uncapped - 6 paths per tradition):
1st AP cost: 7 unity levels (unlock tradition + 2 paths) [+7]
2nd AP cost: 13 unity levels (2 paths) [+6]
3rd AP cost: 19 unity levels (2 paths) [+6]
4th AP cost: 26 [+7] (steps 4-6, 7-9 = steps 1-3 repeating)
5th AP cost: 32 [+6]
6th AP cost: 38 [+6]
7th AP cost: 45 [+7]
8th AP cost: 51 [+6]
9th AP cost: 57 [+6]

When it is uncapped, you are able to dish out the Ascension Perks faster AND be able to finish the whole tradition tree.

My suggestion is to promote wide tradition builds instead of tall builds. Give the tradition finisher effect at a lower number of paths unlocked, for example 3 paths gives you the finisher effect, while the tradition remains uncapped. Now you're able to:
1) finish the remaining tradition paths for no bonus other than quicker AP
2) or go for another tradition tree and unlock another finisher faster, but sacrifice the quicker AP.

This promotes a more diverse playstyle where you possibly experiment with more variety. Seems to work better than the artificial caps and gives you more of a choice to make when you are playing.

Bureaucracy 1 should work with priests and managers

Could support for modded megacorp types be added, this would be accomplished by replacing "has_authority = auth_corporate" with "is_megacorp = yes" where relevent

Originally posted by Toby:

Disclaimer: I haven't played with the 18 tradition cap. But to my understanding this is how the mechanics works.

My suggestion is to promote wide tradition builds instead of tall builds. Give the tradition finisher effect at a lower number of paths unlocked, for example 3 paths gives you the finisher effect, while the tradition remains uncapped. Now you're able to:
1) finish the remaining tradition paths for no bonus other than quicker AP
2) or go for another tradition tree and unlock another finisher faster, but sacrifice the quicker AP.

This promotes a more diverse playstyle where you possibly experiment with more variety. Seems to work better than the artificial caps and gives you more of a choice to make when you are playing.

an idea could be to have stages of finisher, e.g when completing 6 traditions in a tree you get the vanilla finisher (being almost the same cost as vanilla to do so) then adding an effect at 6 and stronger effect at 18 reflecting the time spent in the tree and having to pick sub-optimal traditions.

having the vanilla effect at 6 would allow people to have a diverse set of traditions if they wanted to and still get stuff like joining different fed types, reduced empire sprawl from pops or new policies while still having a varity of traditions.
then having addtional bonuses that reward picking everything later

Originally posted by lyra_tcm:

Could support for modded megacorp types be added, this would be accomplished by replacing "has_authority = auth_corporate" with "is_megacorp = yes" where relevent

Good suggestion. I'll make sure to include that in the next update.