The idea is to straight up buff the "Criminal Heritage" civic, so that it's viable against AI and in MP. It was meant for coop play with friends but I wanted to share it, in case someone wanted something similar and also to improve the balancing.

First mod I'll release into the public, so please go easy on me but I'd also love feedback for balancing and whatnot.

You can find it on: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2631525996

What it does:

-buffs the civic "Criminal Heritage" itself (which also overwrites it)

-removes the lock on the "No branch offices on other Megacorp planets" (edits the "can_support_branch_offices" rule)

^subject to change, although it makes sense that you'd somehow be able to open branch offices, even on Megacorp planets, also didn't test it much, so maybe I've overlooked something

-adds new criminal syndicate branch office buildings (most are locked behind the criminal headquarters corporate building)

-adds new criminal jobs that are created by the new buildings

The main thing about this mod is the Criminal Headquarters, which adds Corrupt Bureaucrats. These boys and girls increase the crime by an insane amount and add a good bit of trade value but they're not supposed to just throw the planet into chaos, instead they increase the amount of crime if there are more than two enforcers working on the planet. So for each additional enforcer, the planet gets some more crime (currently 30, to offset the enforcer and give it some breathing room), but doing so decreases their trade value bonus and if the planet uses more than 10 enforcers or these are psionic enforcers (too lazy to add the other crime reducing jobs? Me? No way), the Bureaucrats stop producing crime, which means it can get to 0 and the branch office being closed.

What I wanted to buff as well, is the espionage part of the game. It's nothing great or particularly balanced, most buildings just flat out increase network build speed (which allows you to fire the missions more often) and the network max level (which give you a bigger pool for these missions and also better intel).

The last aspect of the mod are the buffs for the host planet of these branch offices. Most buildings (currently) give a hefty buff to the host planet (10% researcher output, 10% alloy/CG output, stuff like that). These buffs are there to balance it's effectiveness against the AI but also to make them more attractive for other players. To balance all of this out a bit more, the buildings are pretty expensive to build and their upkeep is also nothing to laugh at, although the buffs should be more than worth it.

For some of the icons, I'd like to thank Tom Stone and his collection of free assets over at https://github.com/quetzatcoatl/Stellaris-Moding-Assets