CC’s Balance Mod Stellaris

CC’s Balance Mod Stellaris

This mod aims to completely overhaul Stellaris’ balance, as well as add a few features that I think should have been in the base game. The idea is not to change the basic idea of Stellaris, but rather to make it work better – make spaceports a more important part of the game (beyond just fleet cap numbers), make technological advantages more marked, make the game more challenging for big countries, fix bugs, etc…

This is basically a compilation of my other mods, with a bunch of smaller balance changes added in that don’t warrant their own mods. The reason why I have packaged it all together is so I can make it compatible with other mods that I want to play with it without having to create so many compatibility patches (the Zenith of Fallen Empires would, for instance, have required three), and also so that I can ensure that all the features explicitly fit together and create an overall balance. Included in this mod are my spaceport and fort, rebellion, technology and upgrades mods. You do not need to play with them if you are playing with this.

Features:
-Significantly increase the military power of spaceports, forts and frontier outposts, give extra bonuses to capital spaceports, and add a number of spaceport modules (see spaceport mod for details).
-Make ship component upgrades always worth it by increasing their bonuses and decreasing their extra costs (see upgrades mod for details)
-Make many of the non-component technologies – especially the end-game repeatable ones – more worthwhile (see technologies mod for details).
-Add 8 new Ascension Perks that suit a variety of play styles (e.g. offensive warfare, defensive walling, fanatic on spaceports, seeking general prosperity, seeking a multicultural empire, and wanting to relocate your population cheaply), reassessed the current Ascension Perk bonuses (many of them are buffed, e.g. Technological Ascendancy now gives you bonuses to research output and also makes it easier to access rare technologies), and added a complex weighting system so that the AI will pick the right one for its situation.
-Added XL missile weapon, plus ‘stealth missiles’ that are good for getting past shields and PD, and a third level of swarmer missiles.
-Many tweaks to balance – e.g. reduced the fleet cap to make large fleets more expensive (and so hopefully improve performance and make it less tedious to keep building more to keep up with a rising fleet cap).
-Various improvements to AI behaviour.
-A script to provide countries emerging from rebellions with a reasonable fleet and offensive army (and bonuses so they can sustain them), so that they can actually be a threat (see potent rebellion mod for details).
-A script to provide bonuses for small (aspiring ‘tall’) empires in the mid to late game, to make such a gameplay style more viable (and make the game more challenging even once you have plenty of planets).
-A script to make fleet costs rise over time – mainly to help with late-game lag (after 200 years, there will be 20% fewer ships), also to help new countries as this is done via a ticker that starts at 0 for each country and increases every 10 years.
-A lot of bug fixes, mainly courtesy of Risa, who allowed me to integrate much of his unofficial patch into this mod.

I’ve added a collection with the mods I play with and have made this to work with, it makes for a pretty good build!

Compatibility:

Leviathans Extended

The Zenith of Fallen Empires

Real Space

Using thesecompatiblity patches together works and indeed is desirable. Aside from that:
-The spaceports and forts bit will conflict or create bad results with other mods that change spaceports or forts. This currently includes spaceport module mods, but I hope to change that in future.
-The components bit conflicts with any other mod that changes ship component stats. Mods adding new components will technically be compatible, but will be far weaker relative to Vanilla components than they are meant to be, so I do not recommend playing with them.
-New technologies added by other mods may be underpowered compared to mine. But this probably isn’t such an issue.

This does rule out a lot of mods, especially big ones. I have made compatibility patches for LEX and the Zenith of Fallen Empires, as those are my favourite mods. I’ll consider other ones on request, but make no promises (I’ll say upfront that I am more likely to put in the effort for mods that do not add many new components).