New Leader Traits – New perks and tradeoffs

I always felt that Stellaris leaders were a bit blank and underpowered. They only serve as a small cog in order to keep running your game, but you never really care about them. At any point in the game – you wouldn’t be able to recall which scientists, governors and rulers are currently employed. On top of that – their bonuses aren’t that significant. Even more on top of that – there is never a tradeoff between their skillset. Yes, you can gain negative traits as you progress, but that happens too rarely to take into consideration.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any mods to fix this. And most of the mods that deal with leader traits are not maintained anymore.

So, what this mod tries to do? Well, we will try to fix it!

This mod aims to add an additional layer of spice and flavor to your leaders. We want to make leaders more unique, significant and contribute to the Role-Playing aspect of the game.

• 10 new Admiral traits
• 9 new General traits
• 11 new Governor traits
• 12 new Ruler traits
• 6 new Scientist traits
• 4 Generic leader traits

In order to support those traits, there are few balance changes that you need to be aware of:

• Default leader pool has been increased to 5 leaders per class
• Leader maximum trait points have been modified in order to enable different combinations of traits. Thus, a leader can have 2 traits (positive and/or negative) which are less powerful or 1 trait that is very powerful
• Leader default cost has been increased to 500 energy in order to combat increased perks they bring

On top of that – I took quite a bit of time to bring in graphic elements that the players will be constantly seeing, so this mod will also contain:

• New 51 icons, modified in order to fit into the game’s style
• Fully written character and trait description that should add flavor to your leaders

Spreadsheet with all new traits and their respective bonuses – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qQg9C3BQoz8eYrjTtAeXfGabsJih-2c_O01rM48HQds/edit?usp=sharing

Would really appreciate your feedback.

• Player feedback and mod maintenance
  This is a key one – I hope to receive more feedback in order to fix any critical/severe issues that I’m not aware of.
• Mod optimization and enhancement
  Fixing issues in the Known Issues section
• Being more strict about which traits are available to which form’s of Government
  I tried to make all traits to be universal for the majority of the empires, but I might disable certain traits for specific governments. At the moment new traits are disabled for Gestalt Consciousness and Machine empires.
  I will observe player feedback and perhaps optimize/merge some of the traits if they don’t bring any value to the player experience.
• Event chains for the new leaders
  This is a big one. After minor aspects of the mod will be resolved – I’ll start creating event chains involving those leaders. If you have interesting ideas about events and stories that could be implemented – I’ll gladly hear them out and will look into implementing them. I’ll leave the form to fill out in the Links section down bellow

• Some icons seem to behave differently on different displays/monitors and depending on the resolution the game is rendered. I’ve tested it on my laptop and desktop and all seems to work fine, but I’ve received feedback that some icons look a bit cheap. Nothing game-breaking, but I want players to be not able to tell which were vanilla and which were mine
  I hope to receive more feedback in order to narrow down the culprits.
• I haven’t yet crossed referenced all traits and haven’t flashed out trait opposites, so you might see some weird combinations of traits. Its not that bad, but again – I want to make it perfect
• AI handling new traits. I haven’t written this section. I don’t think it’ll affect AI much, but I’ll change that if it becomes a problem
• Balance – this is a tricky one as any balance changing mechanic needs to be tested by various playstyles, so I hope to receive feedback before I make significant changes.

Mod on Github – https://github.com/Aleksey1590/Stellaris_Leader_Traits_Overhaul
Form for reporting bugs / feedback – https://forms.gle/yWouiamA5hYNnGgMA
Ideas for leader event chains – https://forms.gle/pgWCJc4RngjBc5z99