Manticore Origin

This mod adds a custom origin to role-play as the Star Kingdom of Manticore from David Weber’s books. There is also a pre-scripted country at the bottom that you can use to bypass empire creation. Optimised for Medium or larger galaxy.

DLC Required: Overlord; Humanoid species pack

The origin spawns most of the recognisable star-nations from the books, all connected via a functioning wormhole junction network.

What the Mod does and how:

The custom star system of Manticore is spawned as your home system when you select the origin, with Manticore as your capital planet & 28 pops. You also start with two ideal class worlds, Gryphon and Sphinx, with small colonies. Sphinx has a pre-sapient Treecat – the closest I could get to delaying their entry as a workforce until you "uplift" them. The planets all have unique modifiers: Manticore gets +100% trade value, Gryphon gets minor boosts to food and energy, Sphinx gets bonuses to minerals, but malus to districts and habitability.

Two nearby systems are force-spawned (Yeltsin and Endicott) with primitives of your race. Yeltsin’s planet has massive habitability penalties, but produces alloys at a massive rate due to its abundance of heavy metals. Masada is a home to religious extremists, making the world useless for research, but amazing for "unity" and Xenophobe + Spiritualist ethics attraction.

The Manticore system is connected to a number of spawned systems via a special form of bypass called a Wormhole Junction (that works like the L-gate with Manticore as the Egress).

The first spawned wormhole junction system is Beowulf, which is created by linking to the Solarian League version of Sol to a number of nearby human colonies, ending with Beowulf. The Solarian League is a combination of Cybernetic and genetic modifiers – (this stops you gene-editing your pops to theirs, and makes them a powerful end-game acquisition). The Solarian League is a fallen empire modelled after the fanatic materialist fallen empire, which has pretty good events associated with it.

The second spawned system with a wormhole junction is Basilisk, which has a non-ideal planet with primitives on it. That’s it.

The third spawned system is Trevor Star, which is a (usually) one-system San Martin republic. San Martin has massive habitability penalties, but a society research bonus (for the genetic editing). Right next door to Trevor Star is the three-system advanced start empire People’s/Republic of Haven (50/50 chance). They have a 10 year massive debuff to consumer goods (that high-difficulty AI flat out ignores, lol).

The fourth spawned system/s is the Talbott cluster, including Lynx (primitive), Talbott, and Meyers. They’re a friendly megacorp that you may like to peacefull subjugate as per the books.

The fifth spawned system/s is the Mesa and Congo systems. An advanced-start criminal megacorp, Manpower Incorporated is going to form a pseudo mid-game crisis for the mod with their inflated power level.

The sixth (and currently final) *intentionally* spawned system is Gregor, which is basically the same as San Martin with less flavour, and a weaker start (they start with only an outpost). Right next door to them is a not-quite-advanced-start 3-system Anderman empire.

The commonwealth of man seems to spawn every game due to the flags I used to stop random Sols from spawning. I quite like that they exist, in my head-canon they represent the part of the Solarian League that doesn’t have it’s head firmly jammed up its own ass.

CHANGELIST
V1.4.3 Updated version to 3.7.* – no changes actually made, but I know version incompatibility can get funky.

V1.4.2 Fix for Sol Mars, Europa, etc. not being correctly assigned an owner and pops. Fixed Lynx getting Congo’s pops by accident. Reworked Matapan to be a planetless M-class, as per novels.

V1.4.1 Updated for 3.5 & added Hennesy and the Republic of Erewhon. Added Matapan and Asgard + Midgard to complete the 7 junctions of Manticore. Also balanced spawning distances.

V1.3 Lynx and the Talbott cluster now exist, connected via the Lynx wormhole terminus. Just a few jumps away from Talbott is the system of Congo, with a second, separate wormhole junction linking to Mesa.

Mesa added. Mesa is a ridiculously powerful sub-species of human, linked via a wormhole junction to Congo and Beowulf (condensed into the Mesa wormhole junction, rather than separate Visigoth and Congo junctions)

Custom start-screen added. Namelists fixed. A few other bugs fixed.

V1.2.2
Updated to add some custom empire graphics, a start screen, a pre-scripted country, and fixed the Manticore name list. Tried to create an Anderman name list, which works for custom nations but for whatever reason doesn’t for the force spawned Andermani. Fixed the Andermani being despicable neutrals.

V1.2
Updated to add the Anderman empire, linked via the Gregor wormhole controlled by an under-strength Gregor Republic, ripe for partition between Manticore and the Andermani.