Increased the time it takes for the first wave of undead armies from 360 days to 2200 days. This gives the AI more time to handle and cleanse the plague before losing their capital to a SINGLE army unit.

Undead (zombie pops) are no longer affected by happiness.
Added "Unintelligent" trait to undead (-15% specialist output)
Necromancer apprentice job amenities increased by 20% to compensate.

Localisation updates. Re-wrote some of the story.
Forgotten bunker is no longer available until the reminder event triggers it's appearance.

Increased the time it takes for an infected planet to turn into a tomb world. Now you have more time to react and prevent this from happening.

Reintroduced the undead uprising events to planets that are infected for several years. Took awhile to fix the bugs and figure out a system that covers potential issues.

1. After one year, a single army unit will attack the planet to give a bit of a warning message for you to prepare for the second wave.
2. After 7 years, a larger force of armies will attack and attempt to take control of the planet.

This simple idea required a lot more expansion and script writing than I had anticipated.

Here's the deal:

Planets that are lost to the undead uprising will be hostile and can be attacked, armies can land on them at any time, and as far as I can tell, there are no consequences because undead uprisings are now a custom empire type that I created.

Only the empire that owns the system can gain ownership of the undead uprising planet by landing armies on it. If another empire tries to take ownership of the planet, they will only gain control of it for a short while and then the control will be given back to the undead uprising. This prevents major problems where one empire owns the system, but another empire owns the planet.

Undead uprising planets are very good on game performance. They have no government, no economy, no AI, nothing. They just sit there and do nothing, except let the plague slowly consume the planet. This might actually make this mod IMPROVE game performance on huge galaxies with many habitats and planets. Rather than use a planet cracker, just let it get taken over by undead and boom, smoother game performance :)

There's one little issue...in my testing I have yet to see the AI actually take back one of these planets. The AI might not know how to do that, and with only three days left until I am "finished" with this project, I'm not going to program that myself. For now I'll just leave it as is.

I've been running all my tests with the AI set to dumb, to see the full effects of the plague spreading. It's quite interesting to watch an entire empire get deleted from the game because it failed to stop the spread of the plague. Super cool actually. I'll begin running simulations with the AI set to "normal" in the next couple of days to see how it goes. (I have good faith that the "smart" AI will be very good at stopping the plague).

Removing undead uprisings until the bugs can be fixed.

Today's update brings performance improvements in the mid-to-late game. With the introduction of undead uprisings came the potential for terrible lag in the late game. This is because each updead uprising was considered it's own default empire, equipped with AI and the ability to grow and expand on their own. If the plague spread far and wide, this could result in dozens of little empires, which kills game performance. In order to reduce this impact, each undead uprising now has it's AI disabled. They won't expand, instead they'll just occupy the space that they live on.

I've also re-written a lot of the events. The events file went from being over 1,500 lines long, to just over 1,300 lines. The way the plague works is now no longer tied to on_monly_pulse. This is an experimental idea and if it works, it will improve performance; previously, on_monthly_pulse was checking every empire to see if it was flagged as having an infection, and then it would iterate through every planet owned by that empire. Now, instead of checking with on_monthly pulse, each planet that is infected will self-trigger it's own plague event every 30 days. If there are no "healthy" pops to convert on the planet, the pulse will leave a timed planet flag for 360 days to "pause" the infection, and this should help improve performance because then the pops will only be looked at once per year on planets that have no pops left to convert into undead.

The "cleanse planet" modifier will now be removed upon the planet being cleansed. Previously, I wanted to leave it on so that you could just set it and forget it, but leaving it on contributes to a loss in performance, so it will now automatically shut off at the appropriate time.

The reduced orbital bombardment modifier for infected planets was changed from -40% to -25%. Previously, if you stacked it with a planetary shield generator, you would have 90% orbital bombardment damage reduction, which is probably overpowered.

Reduced housing malus from rampaging hordes from -2 per pop to -1 per pop. This allows emmigration pop growth to continue by avoiding overcrowding pop growth shutdown.

Bug fix:

Fixed bug where non infected empire conquers infected planet and the monthly plague pulse stopped working.
Fixed bug where pre-sapient species broke AI decision making. Presapients are ignored by the plague until I can figure out how to fix them.

Known bug: ships pop in and out of existence in systems that contain colonies of both undead uprisings as well as default empires.

This update should fix a couple of bugs.
A) uninfected empires that gain ownership of infected planets will now be flagged as infected planets. (meaning the plague will continue to work while under the new ownership)
B) Zombie/undead uprisings will be flagged as infected immediately upon spawning.

Rampaging Hordes of undead will eventually form armies and take over planets if not purged.
AI empires playing as tomb world necrophages have been adjusted to not suck. In my testing they are powerful, but less powerful than some vanilla AI empire setups.

Upon game start, the host of the game is presented with 3 options:
Smart AI
Normal AI
Dumb AI.

Smart AI will aggressively remove the plague
Normally AI will remove the plague
Dumb AI will only quarantine 1 pop, but won't enact purge undead decision.

These options give you control over how much the plague will spread across the galaxy, and should have no impact on anything else except exactly what I just said.

If you are using a mod that changes AI weights, the worst thing that happens is that the AI will be very dumb at handling the plague.

New option upon game startup to choose if you want normal AI or smart AI

Normal AI: Will quarantine 1 pop, then enact undead purge, then does nothing else.
Smart AI: Will quarantine 1 pop, then enact undead purge, then quarantine all remaining pops.

The smarter AI is actually pretty good at preventing the spread of the plague. This makes it clear to me that against a human player, this plague is actually not particularly overpowered when it comes to spreading. It relies on countries making poor decisions in order to spread.

Increased influence cost to quarantine pop from 5 to 20
Removed the 10 EC cost from quarantine decision because it was breaking the AI
Increased influence cost to purge undead from 50 to 100
AI now properly handles making decisions when they get infected. If the AI empire has enough influence it will do the following order: Quarantine 1 pop, then enact purge undead, then quarantine remaining pops.

This drains their influence points, and the only way you'll get the plague to spread is if the empire doesn't have enough influence points to enact the purge undead option.

This will require more testing to find out what's a good balance. With a cap of 1,000 influence points, and at 20 influence per pop, the planet would need 45 pops to drain 900 influence points, plus the 100 points they spend on enacting the purge option. This would completely drain a fully maxed out pool of influence points and if another planet gets infected, the AI will really struggle to handle the situation. A player however; will be smarter.

other changes:

Undead will no longer rampage for necrophage origin. So both necrophage and tomb world necrophage can control undead.

Ai will now handle playing as a tomb world necrophage much better. Very simple fix, I changed their growth rate malus from -100% to just -25%. So far in my testing this number seems good.

Brought pop growth multiplier down from 3.0 to 1.2. Some small adjustments to help the AI do better with this origin.