Added some missing "reroll_random = yes" effects before wildlife spawning, as they were all spawning across the galaxy on the same day.

Quick update! Changed the countrytypes script for the dangerous wildlife to a better one recommended by starchitect, shouldn't have any invasion warnings or other issues now I hope! Sorry about that, guys.

I keep getting reports that the AI sucks. My intention for the mod is that the AI DOES play it. I like the idea of looking at the AI fighting off wildlife, or us coming to their rescue, or taking advantage of it to invade yourself, and just seeing/knowing interesting things are happening around the galaxy.

But I keep hearing that the Vanilla AI is truly terrible at simple invasions. Most DWE patches I've kept reigning in the strength and frequency of wildlife attacks on the AI but it's never been enough! Damn.
So something dramatic this time to hopefully solve it for good:


1. AI empires no longer have a chance for the bigger wildlife attacks to happen, they only get the normal ones. This mechanic only exists for the player really, anyway, to add a bit of unpredictability and excitement. Establishing a clean baseline of expected wildlife strength for the AI makes this next change much more reliably useful:
2. AI empires now get extra soldier jobs (and therefore defence armies) on their planets with dangerous wildlife. They should get just enough armies to usually win, with enough wiggle room where they can still lose sometimes when it makes sense (e.g "weak" traited aliens vs t-rexes). The soldiers go away as soon as any wildlife is pacified (or terraformed into extinction. or eaten by a devouring swarm. whatever.).
3. Lastly, in the event that the wildlife DO win against AI: After overrunning AI worlds, wildlife will now run out of food and their armies will gradually starve and die off over the next several years. You can use this opportunity to save them or take advantage! When all the armies are gone AI will happily colonise the empty remains, reclaiming their lost homes. Wildlife won't attack the second generation settlers.

So that's it! My hope here is that with this solution the AI will still continue to play the mod and the galaxy will continue to be a dynamic place, but they won't ever get totally rolled over.

Looking for your feedback on how this plays out!

Another bug that has been fixed is the faction type for the Dangerous Wildlife country, allowing third parties to invade and mess with wildlife - this wasn't possible before. Woops! (Thanks starchitect!!) (I think this bug must exist for the rampaging trees event in vanilla too, since I based my methodology on that one. Kind of funny to think no empires EVER lose to those trees and need saving by someone else!)

More inline work and prep for "Mysterious Worlds" release!

Big update today! Super fun coding and lots of bug smashing.

• The most reposted bug was that sometimes vanilla dangerous wildlife wasn't being affected by the mod! (It should be swapped for fancy new wildlife, and wasn't.) I think this was due to the vanilla blockers spawning late in the galaxy setup process, after my event. I've added a days delay to fix this. So cool modded wildlife should be showing up once more! Please do remember that this mod doesn't actually change the frequency of dangerous wildlife appearing, it's totally Vanilla. So if you'd like to see more then head over to the vanilla deposit file and crank the weight up.
  
• Added concepts for "Dangerous Wildlife", "Remnant Wildlife" and "Wildlife Bosses" - tooltips are much cleaner and cooler now!
  
• "Pacified" wildlife deposits are now named "Remnant" again as in earlier versions. I just prefer the name.
  
• Started using inline scripts! They're super cool and this mod super benefits from them. Cleaned up thousands of lines of script and made changes much easier to make. Very fun.
  
• Now that I'm using inlines and various numbers are centralized anyway I've removed a bunch of scripted_variables. Remaining variables were properly prefixed to help avoid incompatibilities and to make the code consistent with my other mods.
  
• I received feedback that too many wildlife bosses on fallen empire colonies "100% break the game", so I've reduced the number of bosses on colonies from 1 to 0, and on the capital from 2 to 1. Let me know if you disagree!
  
• Fixed some incorrect modifier checks relating to bosses. Thanks to Govannon for the report. So no more recruiting infinite bosses, sadly.
  
• I had a report from "kutter005" that the tech tooltip for wildlife breeding was ridiculously long, displaying all 44 possible decisions at once. I've added the missing "show_tech_unlock_if" block and added a little more logic to it.
  
• Minor balance changes: Reduced stability and bonus districts from having remnant wildlife. Reduced food and mineral cost of recruiting wildlife. (this is all still configurable by you if you want to change it in scripted_variables!)

Another quick/small update:
- Fixed a bug that caused the wrong wildlife to spawn (this was a big/silly one!)
- Wildlife can now appear on your guaranteed colonies. This means more chances at finding wildlife and more variety, but in theory would make early game a little more difficult
- And so I have also increased the game start grace period for wildlife attacks from 15 years to 25 years, so you have plenty of time to develop and prepare (this can still be customised in scripted_variables if you like)
- Removed the animated army trims that were slightly too big for the vanilla UI. I recommend you play with my planet view mod if you want the fancy animated icons that depict real monsters!
- Cleaned up the loc file a little
- Cleaned up some event switches and code for a bit of faster processing/cleaner reading

This patch is a pretty big one that massively cuts down on the footprint of the mod, aiming to make it much more simple, performent and clean. I want this mod to be something light but full of flavour so that no one has to have any qualms or worries about casually dropping it into their load order.

Mysterious Blockers:
I've removed the myriad of "Dangerous/Mysterious Continent" deposits. This is a cool concept that also appears in my planetary features expanded mod. I'm shifting these over to their own mod at some point down the line dedicated to the concept (WP's Mysterious Worlds - keep an eye out for it!). Trust me, when they come back as a part of that mod they will be much cooler anyway.

Troop Limits:
I've removed all "army/troop limit" interactions. The code back end for this system was just ludicrously bloated for what it provided, and I was never happy at all that there were occasional bugs where the counting wouldn't work correctly and people would have to save/reload. So what does this mean? There are NO MORE CAPS on armies! You can spam as many wildlife troops as you like. In exchange:
- Recruitment costs and times are longer/higher now by default (you can still customise them to whatever you like in scripted_variables, and I'm open to feedback on their prices)
- The Dangerous "Deep Wildlife Extraction Teams" technology, which used to raise your army limits, now simply creates the opportunity for you to recruit/find bosses.
- There is no longer a benefit to having a lot of the same wildlife on the same planet.

Wildlife Worlds:
I've reworked "Wildlife World" planets. The old iteration is essentially gone. I didn't like them messing with galaxy generation too much and the AI struggled with them. And since there is no more benefit to having a colony with loads of wildlife planetary features they provided no real upside. However! Wildlife worlds as a theme/flavour/story idea I still love and have preserved. So they do still exist! If you use my other mod "WP's Planet view" you'll see they get a special UI element designating them as such. I was very captivated by the idea of finding a "Mammoth world" or whatever, and I really like this iteration. It means no gameplay/performance/learning curve overhead and the AI will work brilliantly.

Breeding:
The final feature, wildlife breeding, has been reworked. It used to allow you to duplicate a wildlife feature on a planet - giving you more (and therefore raising army caps). It now works differently: It still allows you to duplicate a wildlife feature, but you'll be able to take that wildlife off-world and put it on a new planet!
- There are two steps to this process.
- The first is a decision on the planet where the wildlife currently lives, in which we breed extra specimens and corral them into our space stations and transport vessels. (Once every five years.)
- A second decision is now available on other worlds, allowing you to place them on the ground there in any alien habitat you like. (Of the same climate they came from, or gaia.)
- The entire process still costs a chunk of food and energy.

This has a similar game-play result as before: Improving your recruitment capabilities as you'll now be able to recruit your killer bees (or whatever) from multiple planets at once in parallel. I've also found the game experience of literally spreading a certain species across the galaxy to be much more fun. And it throws a bone to the value of gaia worlds to boot. You could do a playthrough now focused on gaia worlds and putting all wildlife possible on them!

Other changes:
- You can now customise the chance every year that a wildlife boss might spawn on a planet in scripted_variables. Default is a 5% chance. (Still requires you to have the dangerous "Deep Wildlife Extraction" technology)
- Cleaned up boss spawning event when played by xenophobes and other empires uninterested in wildlife manipulation. Let me know if you find any bugs, please!

Army icons have been reverted to Vanilla in this release. Yeah, I know, it's pretty lame, but I was sent a screenshot on discord of someone playing the mod and I realised a few things:
The icons were off-centre in the vanilla UI and clipping in an ugly way (but not with UIOD)
The .dds export had been set up wrong, and the blue and red channels were swapped when viewed in game (weirdly coloured icons, like mammoths)
Some icons were miss-assigned to their appropriate army (so you would have a woolly rhino that might look like a T-rex). This last bug I'm pretty sure I had fully fixed but it's knocked my confidence.

So for all these reasons I'll re-do them down the line.


Deposit icons have been shrunk from a massive 512x512 resolution to an almost tiny in comparison 98x75 resolution, which is what vanilla uses for it's planetary deposits. When I initially made this mod I liked the resolution because the deposits area of the UI automatically scales the feature size in a pleasing way, so it didn't matter. Or so I thought. I didn't realise the effect that large textures can have on stutter when clicking into the system view! On it's own this mod wasn't very costly on that stutter, but it definitely cost something and for no reason at all - which became noticeable when using it with some other big mods. So I've shrunk them down. Performance for no downsides, yay!

Tiny patch to fix a bug wherein bosses were continually respawning for some people.

The situation was this:
The event that controls the spawning of bosses was told not to fire:
1. If there already was a boss attacking
2. If the boss had been recruited from that world.

Which is all well and good but didn't account for situations where players kill a boss but DON'T recruit it! In these scenarios the bosses would keep coming back.


So to fix this I've simply made it so that the event also checks for if a boss has been defeated flatout, hopefully that works well. In crazy weird situations where one world has a a huge variety of bosses at once you'll only get the first one but I don't think that's a realistic fringe case anyway.

As an aside, I guess people were reporting this issue due to another one - where they are killing the boss but are UNABLE to recruit a new one. I have no idea what might be causing this. Let me know if this is the case in your game or have any insights please!

Icons have arrived!

One thing I ALWAYS wanted for this mod was for all the armies to have unique icons in battle. So you actually SEE your direwolves facing off against the giant crabs, or whatever. The mod just really doesn't shine when they all use the generic tiny Xeno army icon and we have to use our imaginations. Sure, there is the planetary feature art but I really wanted something for the army screen.

My hope was that by releasing the mod I might drum up a little interest and on the page I'll put a request for icon help, but nothing ever happened.

Until now!

I have an upcoming planet viewer mod, and in my work there an idea struck me: I can make the army icons bigger, and this way they will support visuals for straight up concept art instead of just UI icons! Then I can take screenshots of all the art I already have in this mod (from the planetary features), cut it into circles, add fancy trims, and voila - I can make the army icons for myself.

So that's what I did.

This entire time I was under the assumption that players would sadly need to combine this mod with my upcoming planet viewer to experience the pretty icons... but as a quick and dirty test I've downscaled them to the original size for a totally unmodded interface and they don't look half bad!

So that's it! Fancy new icons, and I'm very happy with the result. Images in the workshop slidehow at the top. The planet viewer interface mod probably won't be out for a little while but these mini icons work well in the meantime!


Other changes:

I had some great feedback in the comments about encounter rates. I'm busy with lots of stuff relating to the UI at the moment so I haven't implemented all of the suggestions, but:
1. Reduced the frequency of attack events from a chance every year to a chance every OTHER year instead
2. The chance for an attack itself is slightly lower (weight of no attack from 3 to 5)
3. The chance for an attack on AI is even lower further still (weight of no attack from 7 to 12)

Remember, you can customise all these settings on your own end in the scripted_variables balance file. Let me know what you pick and how it currently feels!

The future:
The actual combat balance of the wildlife hasn't changed, even though their icons/nameplates now have the fancy new rarity/strength tier designation trims. I'll do this in a future update.
The uncommon bosses (diamond tier) and the rarest bosses (onyx tier) don't have their unique text colouring yet (though they do have the icon trim).


(Also, had no bug reports for a while. Are they all cleaned up? Anyone have proof of using their own wildlife bosses in combat etc?)