Primitive Galaxy

aka Faster Primitives or Advanced Player or Headstart

This mod aims to enhance primitives in Stellaris by making them much more likely to become spacefaring empires and join the galactic community over time, to supplement or even replace the normal behavior of all AI empires simply spawning on day 1. Gives any empires that do start on day 1 (such as the player) a bit of a headstart. A chance to explore a primitive galaxy before those societies start to wake up and discover FTL.

It is recommended to play with a very low setting on the "AI Empires" slider (0 – 6 ish), instead adjusting how full the galaxy is using the "Primitive Civilizations" slider

---

• Drastically increases spawn rate of primitives (15x vanilla)
• Spawns more primitives that are near the space age
• Drastically speeds up the rate at which primitives advance through ages. Advancement accelerates the more advanced a primitive civilization is.
  • Primitives near the space age are roughly 4x more likely to advance
  • Primitives in any pre-industrial age are only slightly more likely to advance
• Modifies observation posts to reflect the larger quantity of primitives (Primarily lower research/resource yields and costs)
• Modifies the starting state of a newly-infiltrated or newly-conquered primitive planet
  • No industrial districts (In case the pops can only work worker jobs)
  • More city districts and fewer production districts
  • Planetary district capacity is no longer ignored when these districts are generated

This mod is intended to allow the player to have a small "headstart" on the AI empires in the game by having the AI organically spring up from primitives rather than all spawn at the very beginning. As such, I highly recommend playing with very few AI Empires, to give the primitives empty space to pop up in.

Should be compatible with any mods that don’t modify primitives or observation posts.

This mod should be compatible with existing saves, but a lot of it will only show up on a new save (Such as the spawn rate of primitives). I wouldn’t recommend adding it to an ongoing save, but nothing should actually break if you choose to do so.

• Be warned that this mod is not in any significant way balanced and exists mostly for role-playing. Any empire type that benefits from invading primitives will be very OP and the primitives themselves will always be at a disadvantage. Some of this can potentially be alleviated by playing on a higher difficulty.
• Take care when invading all those juicy primitive worlds that you start near to, be sure that your economy can handle the stellar culture shock. Invading every primitive world you see is an easy way to destabilize your empire and cause mass rebellions.
• Be gentle with the Primitive Civilizations slider on galaxy setup. Keep in mind that the primitive spawn rate is increased 15 times vanilla. A setting of 5x is likely to put primitives in almost every single system. This will have a profound impact on game performance if set at or near maximum.
• If you want primitives to advance themselves to the Space Age within your empire borders, avoid building Observation posts. The event for advancing to the Space Age (becoming an empire) is NOT allowed to trigger as long as there is an Observation post around the primitives’ planet (This is vanilla behavior). When a primitive in your borders with no observation post reaches the Space Age, they will send a message to you asking you to cede the whole system to them. If you refuse, their "empire" will be destroyed a few days later and their planet will be peacefully ceded to you. This is the cleanest, most peaceful, and cheapest way to annex a primitive planet.
• Any empires that started as primitives will have their details (name, flag, ethics, etc.) randomly generated, it is not possible for them to be player-defined custom empires.

---

• More balance work
• Encourage players to prefer to invade industrial primitives rather than medieval ones.
  • Make the Stellar Culture Shock planet modifier’s duration be based on the age that the primitives were in before being invaded. A stone age civilization should take a very long time to recover from the culture shock, while a civilization on the cusp of FTL travel should be more able to adjust.
  • Generate districts on a newly-acquired primitive planet based on the age the primitives were in. A society in the Early Space Age should have more cities and industrial districts than one in the Medieval Age.
  • Rebalance the number of pops on primitive planets to make an Early Space Age primitive world more in line with a day 1 AI empire.
  • Add new flags for primitives that reflect the age they are in, rather than every primitive just being a stone axe.

---

Game Setup:
– Reverted change to the start year (Back to vanilla; 2200)
– Lowered the primitive chance multiplier from 20x to 15x vanilla (from 30 to 21.5. Vanilla is 1.5)
– Added text to the Primitive slider on the galaxy setup screen to indicate the dramatic increase in primitive spawn rates, along with a warning in the tooltip. (English only)
– Tweaked the spawn rates of primitives to have fewer non-space-age industrials (To shrink the second and third waves of new empires) and slightly more pre-industrials.

Events:
– Lowered the probability of random observation events like smugglers. Events caused by aggressive observation have a much higher probability of occurring (But still significantly less than vanilla)
– Muted primitive advancement events until a primitive civilization reaches the Industrial age (We don’t need to be told every time one of the dozens of primitives in our borders invented iron).

Balance:
– Lowered the rate that earlier primitives advance. There should be a wave of near-space-age primitives advancing early on, but it should thin out to a trickle after the first 50 years or so.
– Increased the number of years before primitives are allowed to advance to the Space Age from 10 years to 15 years. (Vanilla is 25 years)
– Halved the mineral cost of observation stations to reflect the higher quantity that the player will be building and the lower rewards. Upkeep is unchanged (1 energy)
– Nerfed the output of Observation posts to match the larger quantities of primitives (Most are halved).
– Lowered the AI weight for enlightening primitives so they are less likely to end up fracturing their empire for no good reason by enlightening someone just because they can. The weight is reduced more for primitives in earlier ages (Starting at half of vanilla). Note that vanilla behavior does not allow ai to enlighten any pre-industrial primitives. This behavior is unchanged.
– Modified what districts a newly-infiltrated primitive planet is given. No more industrial districts (To prevent specialist jobs), and 2 of each other production district instead of 3. Should reduce the massive administrative overhead that comes with infiltration. Also disabled a line from vanilla that caused these generated districts to ignore the planet’s district capacity.

Initial Release