Inflection Point
Have you ever wanted your empire to start on an overcrowded Ecumenopolis? Ever wished your megacorp could be more like Buy’n’Large from Wall-E and totally mess up your homeworld with untrammeled consumerism?
Now you can!
Inflection Point starts you on a city planet with no natural resources. All of your food comes from a single planetary feature granting a handful of farming jobs. All your minerals come from the starting system mining station and a special Dwindling Stockpile feature. But not all things are wonderful in urban paradise – that stockpile will soon run out, and the planet’s economy will soon start choking up, getting worse and worse over time. Your civilization is pushed by the concept of an inflection point: if they don’t get out there and settle the stars now, they will soon face enough resource shortages that it will be hard, if not impossible, later.
(Skippable) Events
Don’t get too down on yourself. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, champ! By taking control of a second planet (usually by colonization, but sometimes the Xeno must learn to share…) you can begin the process of fixing up your home planet. First you’ll need to complete a special project; then research a key City technology (weather control systems) and finally run a planetary decision to rejuvenate your homeworld. The event text is quite suggestive of what you need to do, so don’t worry if it seems confusing. Want to skip all that? Just open the planet screen for your homeworld, type event exodus.skip into the console, and that will set things as if you’ve completed the entire event chain.
Simple Version
Still too much faff? Consider this simple, AI friendly version: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2052764610
Balance
Unlike Shattered Ring, this origin is intended to be somewhat balanced, as all things should be. Your homeworld starts with a modifier to remove the 50% bonus growth from Arcology planets. (You’ll get that back later.) You also have some special blockers that make you start with 1 point of negative housing and most district slots blocked. You get extra pops, but they all work clerk jobs. This is intended to help you pay for resources on the market to get through the challenging parts of this origin – namely making sure you have enough consumer goods, minerals, food, etc to support a fledgling empire. The negative modifiers that come in over time will cause a little pain, but it’s very survivable. In the end, you can wrap up this origin within 25-30 years or so, and then you get a nice Ecumenopolis well before you could restore a relic world! (There may be a couple minor extra goodies tossed in at the end!)
I originally intended this to be a Megacorp leaning origin to pair with my civics mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2029348400
Compatibility
Thanks to some inspiration from Guilli’s Planet Modifiers, literally everything in this mod is now 100% standalone. It should work with everything that doesn’t remove vanilla assets. Hooray for good code practices!
I test everything with all DLC active, although some limited testing has shown you shouldn’t need any of it.
Important Technical Detail
The game setup screen will always show a Mammalian city background, but in game it will correctly display whatever city set you actually chose.
The way I get the game setup screen to display an ecumenopolis background is a little bit sketchy: because the interface does not detect that pc_city has a minimum level for displaying city graphical culture, it would show the correct Sky but leave black spots on the ground. This is literally unplayable. So I made a fake planet class that is locked to show a arcology background, and then swap it out during game generation. Any modders who know how to fix this, please let me know!
Planned Work
I intend to flesh out more flavor text and possibly small flavor outcomes as well, for various empire authorities, ethics, civics, etc., to enhance replayability. I also intend to create a detailed documentation guide, which should help compatibility and troubleshooting.
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
