I had an initial idea that I was missing some activity outside my own colony. I wanted factions to actively change and trigger events based on some logic. At the same time, whether you play for 1 year or 10 years, the set of factions doesn't change, and the number of religions in the world doesn't really grow. Of course, mods like Dynamic Diplomacy or RimWar add some activity, but the first is too random, and the second is too straightforward and labor-intensive, without any interesting political events. So, I came up with this system.
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100 New Factions
At the moment, my mod adds 100 factions to a hidden pool: they are not available for selection at the start of the game, but they can appear during events. Let me say right away: these are fully-fledged factions. They have their own icons, faction and settlement names (besides the icon, each faction can randomly choose one of 25 colors, so that's 2500 faction variants, lol), their own leader, separate religion, relations, and so on. The only thing is that they are made on the principle of inheritance, i.e., they inherit the traits and characteristics of vanilla factions of the corresponding TechLevel.
If patched, inheritance can be made from anyone. Currently, I added a patch for medieval factions, so far only for Vanilla Factions Expanded - Medieval 2. It is not mandatory, but with it, medieval factions will appear in the image and likeness of VFE factions. Without it, you will get strange medieval factions because the vanilla game doesn't have pure medieval mechanics; there are tribals and "others." The difference there is only in the technology level, so without Vanilla Factions Expanded - Medieval 2, you will simply have a medieval era half-mixed with firearms, but everything will work fine technically.
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Brief Description (if you are too lazy to read)
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[*] New Factions: Can appear as a result of civil wars, intrigues, overthrow of power, revolutions, scientific breakthroughs (the faction will advance to a higher TechLevel), or social degradation (the new faction's TechLevel will drop). Also, in the settings, you can enable random spawning on the map.
[*] Deep Mechanics: Each faction tracks Stability, Influence, Leader Legitimacy, Attack, Defense, and Entropy. These parameters determine its actions and events in the world.
[*] Active Diplomacy & Wars: Factions negotiate, form alliances, attack each other, capture settlements, convert others to their religion, intervene in politics, assassinate leaders, and lose settlements based on complex logic, not randomly (well, almost).
[*] Global Events: Nuclear war can destroy up to 8 settlements of every faction and cause fallout on the player's map (by the way, factions below the Industrial level cannot start a nuclear war). The Black Plague pandemic will shake Neolithic and Medieval factions harder, while Industrial and higher factions will cope much better; the player can also get infected.
[*] Settings: I tried to put important things in the settings, such as point multipliers, limiting the TechLevel to Medieval (so Industrial and higher factions don't appear), disabling messages until you have a Comms Console (events will still happen), mod update frequency, chance of World Crisis, Nuclear War, Black Plague, and more. You can disable Attack and Defense systems if you play with other combat mods.
[*] Compatibility: Potential compatibility with anything, as I didn't change game files, but only built a layer on top. Conversely, many mods and DLCs can nicely complement this: for example, Ideology mods will add more diverse religions for new factions.
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FULL LIST OF EVENTS AND FORMULAS
Since the description of all mechanics, attack/defense formulas, and event lists does not fit into the Steam description limit, I moved them to a dedicated GitHub repository.:
[👉 Read the detailed breakdown of mechanics (Annexation, Revolutions, Nuclear War, and Formulas) [url=https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fhelldanpwnz%2Fdynamic_factions]https://github.com/helldanpwnz/dynamic_factions[/url]
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Performance
The mod is completely passive in the background; activity occurs only at the moment of the mod update/tick when calculations happen. But the calculations are quite simple: I compared it with the Dynamic Diplomacy mod, which many consider lightweight, and my mod works noticeably faster. Of course, if you max out the settings and spawn 100 factions in the game, it might lag, but that doesn't apply to the mod itself. Additionally, the mod regularly clears the cache, removing dead factions and other junk. The factions themselves stored in the hidden pool can increase the save size by a couple of megabytes at most, so performance is excellent.
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Save Game Compatibility
You can install it on an existing save, but note an unpleasant moment: if you have VE Framework installed, it will offer to place all hidden factions in the world, and you will have to click "deny" 100 times. But after that, everything should work fine. I might be able to fix this in the future.
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Can I remove it from a save?
No, you cannot. This will break your save, so make a backup or do not remove mods in the middle of a game.
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Compatibility with Other Mods
As I wrote above, the mod adds its own logic without interfering with vanilla mechanics, so in theory, it should be compatible with everything, even with mods like Dynamic Diplomacy, RimWar, and other political or faction war mods. However, my mod will simply act within its own system, so functions might duplicate. For this, I made it possible to disable certain aspects: if you wish, you can disable all complex mechanics and leave only, for example, random settlement spawning. Or, if playing with RimWar, remove the attack and armor multipliers in my mod settings — stability and influence events will still work.
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Current Issues
Balance is raw. I realized that polishing the balance alone will be extremely difficult and long, so I would be grateful for feedback and ideas from your side; I plan to improve this aspect in the future. Moreover, many systems had to be scrapped (initially, radius/proximity to enemies and allies influenced points), but that was tough, and I cut that system out, especially since people play on maps of different sizes.
Unpleasant moment with Xenotypes. The faction inherits xenotypes not from the parent faction, but from the one specified in the mod file or the patched faction. Therefore, illogical situations arise where, for example, 100% Baseliners separate from 100% Impids. For now, you can use Xenotype Spawn Control, as I don't quite understand how to fix this yet. But overall, it doesn't bother me much.
Faction Icons. Obviously, it's a matter of taste. Most of them were generated via neural networks. I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but without AI, this mod would never have seen the light of day, considering there are 100 of them. They were made with love but quickly, so not everything turned out beautiful. If you have the desire, you can send me your icon variants, and I could add them to the mod.
I realized that I set myself an overly ambitious task, especially for a person who is not a programmer. For almost a month, I tried to make what was intended without a break, but this mod started driving me crazy because events and mechanics grew like a snowball, and all this needs to be optimized and balanced somehow. If you like my idea, and I'm not just a madman who decided to mess up some mechanics, then I will continue to update the mod — after a break, perhaps.
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Here you can contact me or support me, or not contact and not support:
Discord: [url=https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscord.gg%2FzDhKjAz8]https://discord.gg/zDhKjAz8[/url]
Boosty: [url=https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fboosty.to%2Fhelldan]https://boosty.to/helldan[/url]
