Interstellar Incorporated – A Civilian Space Odyssey v0.3.1 alpha Mod

Interstellar Incorporated – A Civilian Space Odyssey v0.3.1 alpha Mod

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 was out of commission for a while, but it is now REVIVED and better than ever. The new IICSO v0.3 update brings not only compatibility with the latest version of Stellaris, but also features that were planned, but never actually implemented before the mod went inactive. Now you may be wondering about that, and why, now, the mod is back. This mod is very ambitious in what it wants to do, and a lot of it doesn’t have a simple implementation on the modding side, if it’s even possible AT ALL. This led to me losing motivation for a while… but modder innovations, and Stellaris vanilla updates both recent and upcoming, are making it more possible – so we’re back!

The mod is very feature incomplete and in active development – current version is an alpha. If you decide to play with it, EXPECT BUGS. And if you find bugs, report them. If you meet something game-breaking, try using the “deactivate IICSO” edict. That’s your best chance of surviving. 🙂

Current features

• Civilian 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 normal
• Colonies 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 minerals
• Trade 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.

Planned features

• A 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 others
• Maluses 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 planets
• Tourist ships that move to resort worlds, alien zoos, casino station? starbase building? and can generate income
• Civilian 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 crime
• Slaver 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 well
• Enforcer ships which can deal with lower levels of piracy/crime, spawn from planets with law enforcement buildings
• Salvagers who are able to derive some resources from debris/other ruins
• Neutral traders spawned from trader enclaves
• Corporations 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 list

• I’ve started the process of creating freight ships for every graphical culture, and I want to get that done
• Refine 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 effort
• Add more types of civilians – tourist ships, prison barges, slavers, smugglers, etc.

Compatibility

I overwrite only the following vanilla files/scripts:

• game_rules: can_take_hostile_actions

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.