CC’s Spaceports and Forts For Stellaris

CC’s Spaceports and Forts For Stellaris

This mod was inspired by two things: Firstly, I read Peter F. Hamilton’s ‘Night’s Dawn Trilogy’ (a great read, if a bit longer than it should have been…), in which a planet could have formidable defences, allowing an important planet to represent a formidable obstacle to attacking fleets. Secondly, and more immediately, I got annoyed that even fairly small enemy fleets could destroy my spaceports, even if I built forts (for some reason, they would hit certain ones with monotonous frequency, but I still couldn’t do anything about it). Anyway, so I set out creating a mod to fix that (and then added some extra features, just because I wanted them ???? ).

This mod’s features:
-Spaceports are boosted, including by making their weapons dependent on your tech level. In the late game, they can now reach 20k military strength without modules and almost 50k with.
-Forts are bolstered significantly, with new weapon layouts (level 3 ones can be as high as 50k). They can also now make extensive use of torpedoes and hangar slots.
-Frontier outposts now have weapons and armour that is dependent on your tech level. They can also reach about 20k military strength.
-Added eight new spaceport modules, plus edited the bonuses given by the existing ones (see thread below for details).
-Added two ascension perks – the Maginot Line (75% off building military stations, and bonuses to military stations, outposts and spaceports) and Orbital Engineering (50% off building spaceports and spaceport modules, plus you unlock or partially research all the spaceport modules).
-Totally rejigged the AI weights for when it builds which module. It will now prioritise a basic level of defence first,
especially when at war. Once it has a basic defence module, it should go for advanced modules, if it has them. Specific choices will depend on the circumstances – materialists will go for economic modules, AIs at war will build defensive ones, etc.
-Level 6 spaceports will now give you three module slots rather than one. (Note that this is done by scripting you to upgrade to level 9 spaceports once a level 6 one is built, and you then get a module for defences to bypass the game not being designed that way. Do not be alarmed if you see levels 7, 8 and 9 costing 0, this is intentional!).
-Made spaceport upgrade techs boost forts and frontier outposts (transferable skills), and certain techs that benefit “military stations” i.e. forts also apply to spaceports and frontier outposts, since they are now also serious military stations. Also merged the two fairly useless late-game repeatable military station techs into one which should now have a visible impact on your stations’ efficacity.
-Added special defence modules for your capital that are scripted to appear automatically. They will upgrade when you research spaceport defence modules. The point is to make your capitals a bit special, and also free up room for building other stuff (or let you have an uber-powerful capital spaceport, if you so please).

Credits:
Sceprax and his Novio Magnum mod for letting me use his section templates for spaceports, frontier outposts and forts as the basis for my work on that front.
Also to AlphaAsh and his Alpha Mod + for inspiration on how to script things.

Future projects:
-Respond to feedback for bugs, balancing and new modules (if anyone has any ideas for them, let me know).
-Sort out compatibility issues (see below).
-Make German and French language versions at some point.

This is a standalone part of my bigger mod, which looks to make a variety of improvements to how the game works: Increase the importance of technological advancement (so ship component upgrades will always make your ship use minerals more rather than less efficiently, solving naked corvette spam; also, repeatable techs are buffed), add some features that I felt were lacking (e.g. I have added 8 ascension perks), make the AI work better (making AI weights more complex, change the numbers on various things), and make the balance of various things more to my taste (e.g. I have made a lot of balance changes to weapon components, and also have scripts to help small empires in the mid and late game, and to give rebels a fleet). It’s currently fully compatible with LEX and the Zenith of Fallen Empires (via patches).

Also check out my rebellions mod – I make revolts a far bigger challenge (and this one is fully compatible ???? )

Known issues:
Spaceport and frontier outpost costs don’t scale with better techs. I don’t think that can be helped, though. Both have been increased.
Also, the player’s spaceport will initially spawn with the best components, and so will be excessively powerful. Luckily, this only applies to the player, and solves itself naturally once you unlock a new component. It will still be an issue for new spaceports for a while, but stops after a time, I think once it is possible to fill all the component slots (i.e. once you have researched torpedoes, point defence, an auxiliary component, and shields or armour). If you need it to be solved quicker, you can also do the console command “observe”, wait a day, and then “play 00”, and it will be fixed.

Compatibility Issues:
I overwrite 00_spaceport_modules, 00_tech_eng, section_templates/spaceport, global_ship_designs and planet_view.gui, and also make significant changes to ship_sizes, though I don’t overwrite any files in that folder. This sounds daunting, so the gist is that it is incompatible (or at least won’t work correctly) with mods that change more or less any aspect of spaceports (if you want functions of any other spaceport mods, leave a comment and I’ll think about it). It is also incompatible with anyone that changes that tech file, but let me know and I can easily do a compatibility patch if that’s all. Mods that change forts and frontier outposts could also create problems, probably not via direct incompatibility, but e.g. mods adding level 4 forts might end up having the level 4 forts weaker than my level 3s.

So basically, the two categories of mods this will likely conflict with are a) other spaceport mods and b) total overhauls.

I want this mod to be compatible with as many other mods as possible, so if you want me to make a version compatible with another mod that also changes spaceport stuff, I can probably do that on request but will probably leave out the modules if extra ones were added. Also, if anyone wants a compatiblity patch for the Zenith of Fallen Empires, I can easily give you one ????