Brave New World
This is a balance mod for patch 3.1415926 of Stellaris, oriented for multiplayer. It affects all aspects of the game while trying to keep a vanilla feel. It tries to keep the game fast-paced, speeding up the pace at which the player acquires technology and traditions, but also tries to challenge the player with many threats, including the Chosen, who are guaranteed to spawn with 100 starting pops, and the Great Khan and the War in Heaven, which are guaranteed to spawn very shortly after the midgame and endgame dates. It is intended for a whole game, from start to end of multiple crises, to last a little more than 100 years.
There are also certain changes designed to mitigate the impact of RNG, such as the fact that the player now gets access to a max of three Guaranteed Habitables, which will have a guaranteed minimum number of resource deposits. You can now also choose the traits of all your starting leaders through a series of events at the start. The worst negative leader traits in the game have also been removed or changed in their effects, to prevent the player from randomly losing the entire usefulness of a high-level leader to random bad luck.
Planets now also have 18 total building slots, which helps make playing tall in casual multiplayer feel a lot better with the help of the third Guaranteed Habitable. There are repeatable technologies which allow more building slots to be unlocked.
I’ve also completely overhauled Branch Office buildings to provide jobs related to the building’s type. So for example, a Private Research Enterprises building would provide 2 Researcher Jobs to the planet, and makes Researchers on the planet provide Trade Value. This design change was made so that the host of a Branch Office would benefit more from hosting the Branch Office, and so that the owner of said Branch Office would have to pay attention to what jobs and buildings are actually already present on the planet when making a decision on what buildings to construct.
The AI will also now make much better choices, and is now railroaded into taking more competitive Traditions and Ascension Perks, and will also go down its preferred Ascension Path as early as possible. I have the AI to only construct buildings and districts in a way such that it will specialize its planets. The AI can be quite slow about building and often ends up with a lot of unemployed pops from the midgame onward, so I’ve also scripted events to spend resources and start constructions for the AI as long as there are unemployed pops.
I’ve tried to nerf overly centralizing parts of the metagame, hitting specific traits, civics, origins that are known to be overpowered and excessively dominating in multiplayer. However, I know I haven’t done a perfect job, because I’m not fully acquainted with the multiplayer scene after many patches. I would be happy to consider any suggestions or feedback.
Some features of the game I haven’t done very much to balance, such as Virtuality Traditions and the Progenitor Hive Origin, as I couldn’t think of ways to nerf these without destroying their entire identity. If you choose to play multiplayer with this mod, I would recommend that you ban these.
Credit to sirblackaxe for writing the incorporated decision and events from his Arc Furnace Locator+ mod.
Comprehensive change log:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTycBpvVNU_iv4i_MckMHZKkPQM-c2g-MpZIl45NKQDHaq_vwSaJwFwsv9GtNwTEOptcGZhroPFsOIO/pub
Revisions:
Old revisions of this mod are available below. Click the link to download.
