Stellaris: Interstellar Incorporated – A Civilian Space Odyssey V0.3.2 Alpha

Authors description: Interstellar Incorporated – A Civilian Space Odyssey V0.3.2 Alpha

Welcome to Interstellar Incorporated – A Civilian Space Odyssey. This mod is all about bringing Stellaris more to life, mostly through the inclusion of civilian and corporate fleets, but in a way that actually drives your empire’s economy – nothing about this mod is purely visual, it is all functional.

This mod is an ALPHA VERSION. That means it’s feature incomplete, potentially buggy, and potentially broken. If you decide to play it in its current state, you are testing it. If you do decide to do so, I really do appreciate it – testing is important to improve the mod, eliminate bugs, deal with performance issues, and move forward! So be sure to report any issues you find and provide suggestions for what you would like to see or how things could be done better. If you meet something game-breaking, try using the “deactivate IICSO” edict, but be aware that as an alpha even that edict may at various points have bugs. In other words, probably don’t use this on a save you care about without creating a backup.

Current featuresCivilian freighter ships will spawn to shuttle mined resources from mining stations back to colonies – you don’t automatically get the goods until they’re delivered. Once at a colony, they enter your empire totals as normalColonies spawn autonomous miners which will mine bodies that don’t have mining stations built around them. The number of miners depends on the population of the colony, and they can spawn either gas miners, which mine gas giants for energy, or regular miners, which mine asteroids for mineralsTrade ships move between empires which share commercial pacts. Currently they will increase trade value upon arrival, but this is a very early implementation, to be expanded in the future.Minor corporations, whose spawning is determined by your “Corporate Authority” policy level. These are also in a very early stage of implementation, currently they can own mining stations, but don’t really provide any benefit or drawback for when they do so.Two other new policies: Civilian Armament Policy, which determines how well armed your civilian ships are legally allowed to be, and Civilian Hostility Policy, which will determine how you deal with civilian ships belonging to other empires.Mod removal edict. You can use this if you’re hitting a bug, want to get rid of the mod, or just want to reset the mod. Activate it and wait a few days and everything the mod adds should be cleared out. But if you let the game keep going without deactivating the mod from your mod list, it’ll reinitialize.Debug edict. Turn this on to get a huge game.log file which will hopefully help point to what events might be causing a crash, if you get one.

Planned featuresA LIVING ECONOMY:Planets have their own local resource supply stockpiles, which is added to by local production surpluses and subtracted from by local production deficits – not from an empire-wide total, with no need to transport anything. This is waiting on an upcoming vanilla patch which should make it easier (2.7)Thus, civilian ships will also autonomously transport resources between colonies, taking into account surpluses at one colony and shortages at othersMaluses when a colony runs out of a resource it needs (famine for running out of food, for example)Traders between empires may arrive to trade and supply necessary resources at colonies.Migration ships that transport migrants and refugees between planetsTourist ships that move to resort worlds, alien zoos, casino station? starbase building? and can generate incomeCivilian explorers who go out on their own to explore the new frontier, and attempts from civilians to establish their own colonies (with the empire choosing how to deal with them)Prison ships for penal colonies or deep space black sites, which transport prisoners from worlds with crimeSlaver ships, in the same vein as above – countries who participate in the slave trade will have slaver ships transporting the “merchandise.”Expanded piracy. Obviously, all of these trade supply lines make your empire’s economy and pops more vulnerable. Pirates will be more unpredictable, and will seek to attack vulnerable targets, potentially interrupting those all-important supply lines. Of course, this is a viable tactic for enemy empires to pursue as well. Some pirates may even disguise themselves as civilian ships until the time is right.Neutral criminal elements, for example smugglers and neutral slave traders, may also bolster your economy… But may increase the strength of pirates as well. More likely at planets with crime, and can increase crime as wellEnforcer ships which can deal with lower levels of piracy/crime, spawn from planets with law enforcement buildingsSalvagers who are able to derive some resources from debris/other ruinsNeutral traders spawned from trader enclavesCorporations expansion – at higher authority levels, having their own fleets and even systems, building branch offices, events related to corporations, etc.Possible change to energy credits to make them relate to purely energy, introducing another money resource which is fueled by taxes and the like
If this interests you, join me, and together we will embark… on a civilian space odyssey.

Current to-do listI’ve started the process of creating freight ships for every graphical culture, and I want to get that doneRefine civilian behavior so they know better what to do in hostiles. Right now they sometimes fly into harm’s way rather obliviously. I’m also working on some pathfinding for them to be able to avoid hostiles entirely, which is a major effortAdd more types of civilians – tourist ships, prison barges, slavers, smugglers, etc.

CompatibilityI overwrite only the following vanilla files/scripts:
game_rules: can_take_hostile_actions
[discord.gg]
Big thanks to everyone in the Stellaris Modding Den for the help they’ve provided. Feel free to join me in channel #interstellar_incorporated for bug reports, suggestions, development discussion, etc.

Click below to become a patron of IICSO. If you choose to support the mod and its further development, thank you! But please, only support it if you like the progress that’s been made so far and want to show your appreciation, not for what you hope the mod may become – it’s hard to know what will happen in the future that could affect the mod’s development, whether it be a Stellaris update that makes the mod impossible or my sudden death.
[www.patreon.com]