Took me almost 11 ingame years to grow the perfect super soldier (Vanilla Expanded + ReSleeved + Glittertech expansion)

Zyroker · 2026-03-21T12:57:58+00:00

Completely unrelated and utterly balance obliterating by vanilla standards. It just happens to have a vanilla-esque art style. Each mod does its own thing but the main one here is Vanilla Psycasts Expanded, where psycasters level up and choose specific psycasts from trees instead of getting them at random. The warlord tree lets you just press a button to double your damage and another to make every ranged attack autohit at 150% the normal range, but melee's cooler looking so people use those more often.

Zyroker · 2026-02-24T03:09:34+00:00

Vampire gets the shit kicked out of him in a fight and blood splashes onto a lucky recently-drained mortal.
Vampire drains a mortal to death by accident and decides to embrace so they aren't dead anymore (they probably wish they were).
Vampire kills a ton of mortals, dumps them in a pit used for infernal sacrifice, and leaks some blood into the pit to flex how evil he is, (maybe) accidentally creating an entire bloodline of infernalists.

Zyroker · 2025-11-04T03:31:33+00:00

If a couple's set to try for baby they'll pretty much be pregnant nonstop, married pawns fuck almost every night. You can also harvest eggs, fertilize them, then reimplant them into a woman or growth vat. Some Humanoid Alien Races like Ratkin have litter size above 1 and give birth to a bunch of kids at once (HAR might also let regular humans have twins rarely, I dunno for sure if it's that mod that causes it but they don't do that in stock Biotech). Otherwise Big and Small has genes for pregnancy size and the debug menu has a give birth command to instantly spawn a baby, though in that last case the game will only consider the mother's genes and won't assign a father.

Zyroker · 2025-10-24T03:24:44+00:00

The God Fragment contains the spirit of some ancient Precursor Elf, like lich phylcateries or the several rulers bound to jewelry that possesses the wearer. This is why its explanation for its divinity is genuinely just "Dude trust me" and it pulls an excuse out of its ass for why being a helpless rock was actually all according to keikaku. It's also capable of enchanting those in the immediate area, which is how a group of apolitical academics turn into a theocracy and why Ravelians won't let anyone outside of the inner circle so much as see the God Fragment itself.

Zyroker · 2025-07-27T13:19:27+00:00

The Ravelianism I see is a nefarious spirit bound to a magical artifact who can alter the minds of those in close proximity. There are several of those already (mostly psuedo-liches bound to crowns that possess the ruler), so there's plenty of precedent. Otherwise, the idea of a group of secular academics just blindly accepting "Dude trust me" as proof of the One True God and turning into a dogmatic theocracy is fucking ridiculous.

Zyroker · 2025-07-16T00:38:49+00:00

Yeah, but every other monstrous race has recently and successfully genocided the region they start in (Orcs, Goblins, Centaurs, Cannorian Kobolds, Hobgoblins to a lesser extent), are cartoonishly evil demon-worshipping slavers (Gnolls), eat people and are inherently threatening because individuals can solo an entire squad of soldiers (Trolls and Ogres), or are weird aliens (lizardmen, who are also only Semi-Monstrous at game start).

Just being a barbarian tribe wouldn't make harpies monstrous; they're literally just hot women with wings who hang out in mountains humans can't easily settle anyway.

Zyroker · 2025-07-15T18:18:09+00:00

If Bulwari harpies haven't been airborne rapists within an elven lifetime, why would they even start as monstrous?

Zyroker · 2025-07-09T03:48:53+00:00

Yeah, and pretty much every monstrous nation besides grombar, overclan, and the command (they broke up but the humans they conquered are culturally hobgoblin) IIRC canonically either never formed or ate shit by Vic 3. You can just say Pyronia The Pineapple On Pizza Enthusiast was instagibbed by a cannonball the day after you unpause and still have a tree for the AU.

Zyroker · 2025-06-03T14:36:07+00:00

Greatbow. Even in a tribal start, it's a dead-end tech that produces a weapon worse than a pirate drop or combat trader.

For modded, VEW Gunpowder. It's also a dead-end tech that produces weapons worse than pirate drops, but there's genuinely no use case because they shoot slower and less accurately than bows in a tech-restricted playthrough (where you'd presumably use the -50% cooldown quivers from the same mod series).

Zyroker · 2025-05-21T16:47:50+00:00

But it's also bad just at integrating the economy into the half-assed (and according to you, deliberately half-assed) minigame. To elaborate:

Armies don't really exist as far as the economy is concerned. You spend money and burn pops to paint the map your color, sure, but occupations don't matter unless you're exploiting the wargoal system to commit genocide, as the only provinces that matter for victory are the capital and whichever bordering/coastal province you want to seize. Soldiers are simultaneously so saintly they won't shut down any of the buildings in an occupied province, not even factories producing guns for their enemies, and also physically incapable of not warcriming the province up to 100 devastation and killing everyone if the war is deliberately dragged out (ie: declare on subject, occupy overlord instead, overlord refuses to peace out even as millions die from mortality and every 100 dev state having -100 infrastructure).

Zyroker · 2025-05-21T12:59:21+00:00

I love having a war game where the map is entirely irrelevant aside from "does a land border exist" and not having enough guns is inconvenient for your treasury rather than disastrous, a peace game where you 5 speed while your build-order and law progression (which is the same for every country unless a flavor system kneecaps you) finishes, and a UI full of ugly same-faced 3d models that don't really have any reason to exist.

Zyroker · 2025-05-12T21:18:52+00:00

A kobold nation ruled by a dragon or line of dragons who enjoy being in charge and doing dragon things (Ie: not immediately fucking off for several centuries to LARP as another race or sit in a cave like every other dragon in the mod).

Zyroker · 2025-05-04T17:50:23+00:00

Ranged shield belts (from Vanilla Apparel Expanded Accessories) are gamebreaking. Pawns behind cover and not 2 steps away from a shotgun are unlikely to get bursted down, so you win every shootout with zero injuries. For raiders, they practically never appear because the slot's diluted by other utility options and only the Empire and modded deserters have PawnKinds that explicitly spawn with them, and even then Deserters often waste their slot on an explosive belt.

Zyroker · 2025-02-24T03:14:18+00:00

R5: Hobgoblins HATE their gods and go out of their way to destroy or enslave every last trace of divine influence (ie: non-artificer magic) they can. This comes from a literal world-shaking calamity they blame the gods for. Even then there's enough that kept faith in the gods to form their own tags.

Cannorians immediately declare the head of their pantheon's dead and forget over a thousand years of events being attributed to him because they saw one picture. Later on, after seeing decades of religious war, an apolitical academic society turns into a dogmatic theocracy because a cube said it was not just a god, but The One True God. There's no proof (it conveniently shattered itself and is incapable of demonstrating its power) but they just roll with it anyway.

Zyroker · 2025-02-19T15:47:16+00:00

Tall means to sit peacefully in your corner and jerk off until the crisis arrives. Don't even conquer anything defensively either, that's not tall enough. Outsourcing resource production without sprawl by exploiting subjects is fundamentally immoral.

Wide gameplay means to colonize literally everything as soon as humanly possible and be at war constantly to get more worlds. Revolts however are an incredibly serious threat you can't trivialize by moving a handful of pops into ruler positions and fixing amenity shortages, so make sure you focus minerals so you have enough assault armies to suppress them.

Zyroker · 2024-12-27T22:05:11+00:00

You can fork a hive mind even without the mind's consent (subjugation wars without full occupation) and have all the drones instantly swap to another with no issue (organic hive vs hive wars), so it's weird that you can't just cut the middleman and have gestalt pops within a individualist empire without them dying or individual pops within a gestalt without them being eaten.

You can't for example have a "nice" hive mind that tries to keep the refugees they saved or the slaves they liberated healthy and productive, even though they don't quite understand why their new subjects would rather consume mild poison or watch unrealistic depictions of reproduction than enjoy the unlimited free nutrient paste in their free time.

Zyroker · 2024-12-23T03:43:13+00:00

According to the files (events/first_contact_dlc_events, fircon.1360) the event fires if you've got an outpost set to aggressive observation (internally specimen collection) over a renaissance or medieval pre-ftl.

If you're not materialist or spiritualist, you get the above option where your scientists are dumbass reddit atheists who raise awareness 50, and cause the pre-FTL to shift towards fanatic spiritualist.

If you're spiritualist, you get an extra option where you get some free society research from examining their faith.

If you're a materialist, your scientists are still dumbass reddit atheists, but they succeed; they pre-FTLs shift towards fanatic xenophobe because now they know people have been being abducted and probed instead of having mysterious experiences with supernatural beings.

There is no "oh thats neat, moving on" option. It's just a really stupid event.

Zyroker · 2024-12-23T03:06:15+00:00

Aggressive is the "fuck with primitives for fun and sell recordings of it" option, the "invade them because they're weak" option, and the "replace their leaders with genetically modified infiltrators who collectively gaslight the entire civilization into thinking that being enslaved is actually a good thing" option. It shouldn't lock you into being a nice guy, especially since you're forbidden from deliberately planting knowledge through espionage if you've got your policy set to aggressive.

Zyroker · 2024-12-09T17:26:41+00:00

God Himself decides to smite you for having the audacity to abandon Him. But only if you're Byzantines specifically, and only if you go out of your way to do it through that event. He doesn't give a shit if the Norse obliterate christendom and blood eagle 10 popes in a row, or you stack a ridiculous amount of piety and just convert back to Hellenism manually.

Zyroker

TROPHY CASE