I always liked how in Mass Effect the split between the Geth and the Heretics was dealt. How can a machine empire have a philosophical schism? Simple: a fabrication defect changes the result of a mathematical operation in part of the sinthetic population; the wrong result is then used as data for more operations and its effects cascade into more and more complex and important decisions, up to making the idea of following a race of machine gods seem rational and appealing.

If a machine empire has the "Mass produced" trait, it means their platforms are not very carefully checked for defects, so you could add an event along the same lines to produce an internal crisis for a machine empire.

I like the idea of having an empire with a "secret Intelligence agency" of sorts, like the Romulan "Tal Shiar", I always thought Stellaris lacked in-depth politics, pls make this a thing.

Also assassination events for your own or other empires leaders would be cool.

What could be a total nightmare for a Hive Mind? A plague. I don't know if it can be done mechanically, but I'm thinking of a plague that attacks the neural connections between the Hive Mind and the drones; it would work similarly to a rebellion, but it would be the plague unshackling the drones and leaving them uncontrolled and rampaging. So, a couple systems could be lost entirely, and/or there could be sudden ground combat strikes on random planets from unshackled drones.

Hmm.. you can always do something like the Hive Mind beginning to go mad after you reach a certain number of pops? Once you reach say, 100 pops your hive mind begins having some trouble controlling everyone. Could have a crisis where you risk some of your pops being lost, planets revolting, inefficient economy, etc.

Thanks for the ideas! I've added my own at the top, as you can see I have a fair few :P I like the idea of adding extra internal challenges to hives and machines once your empire gets big enough, it promises to be no easy feat to add them in and make them make sense though, so no promises any time soon!

Copying this one to make sure I don't lose it: "Unknown if you've had such suggestions yet, but for the Hive mind, I feel the only accurate and lore friendly Events you could have would be when assimulating other species into the Hive mind, that rush of new experience and memory could have a buff/debuff effect on the entire Species for a short or long time depending on how many pops were asorbed.

While with the Rouge Servitor, a common even could be the Bio trophies trying to revolt and break free of their imprisonment, which would need supressing 'For their own good'?"

Crop famine mini-crisis, in which a genetic abnormality strikes the crops on one of your worlds. Unfortunately, if not dealt with in time, the genetic disease can spread to other worlds and absolutely decapitate your food production on each world until a vaccine/treatment can be found, or an alternative food source.

Alternative food sources can cause happiness drains, depending on what it is. A pacifist empire wouldn't be too happy about culling livestock, or a xenophobe empire wouldn't accept aid from other empires (if an event happens where they offer). Militarist empires would have to divert rations to feed their population, this increasing army/ship maintenance costs, etc.

Cool idea!

How about for machinces you could impliment viruses, increasing breakdowns for a specific period of time, and adding a tech like an anti-virus (if you want to do that, or just have the virus be a timed event) with options to purge infected systems. I dont know exactly how it would work, but i think it wuld be neat. Hivemind devouring swarms could be angry after going x amount of years without consuming someone, causing unrest and revolts, and the same could be said with machines, hivemind, and xenophobe murder civs (Exterminators, Devourers, Purifiers) about lack of killing in x amount of years, or trying to overthrow their murder civilization with have start a non-murder, or opposite to want to start one after being treated poorly by xenos.

Sorry for the mish mash just some ideas, although im sure they're all extremely difficult to code and such.

Adding onto that integration idea you had, adding the species can buff and debuff, along with the forcably assimilated having a chance to die rather then become a emotionless husk?

Another quick idea would be authortarian empire pops overthrowing their non-enslaved spicies forcing a mass liberation and ethos swap off of auth?

Something I like in the mod info is that you mention interspecies marriage, which is something barely getting any attention in vanila (the only time I can think of is when you try to integrate primitive civs). Do you think it would be possible to some day, maybe, just maybe, have a storyline about marriage that goes even further to the point that a new species is born with random roll of the parents' species traits and a randomly picked portrait based on either parent (excluding the parent portrait of course)? This, on its own, can trigger even more events, things like the pops starting an uproar because of the mixed blood, eventually leading to the purge of the sub-species and internal conflict between the parent species (which could turn into intergalactic conflict if one the parent species is originating from another empire); the new species could be welcomed and even receive a bringer of peace trait, that increases the happines of parent and xenophile species on the same planet; the new species could trigger a genetic mutation in time that first makes them grow and migrate rapidly on planets and further down the line - trigger another mutation that makes them go berserk and killing off all of the other species, forcing the player to purge them before they eventually overthrow them all and ending with either them becoming the new founder pop with a fanatic xenophobe trait, turning the empire into fanatic purifiers; or getting purged and forbidding any interspecies marriages in the future giving a happines debuff for few years.

So one thing that you could do with materialists is have the scientists of your empire be divided on if you should go robotic ascension, or biological ascension. Which ever you choose, half of your scientist faction (whatever it turns out to be) splits into a faction that becomes very unhappy and are anti whatever perk you picked. Overtime you could get this faction removed via having everyone lose that ethic or have the group absorbed by another faction within your empire, but if you don't then if you pick the second tier of your ascension they revolt (based on how large the faction was within your empire). You could also add events that add modifiers to how attractive that faction is, and even an option to accept the faction and swap your ascension perk.

Democratic term limits, no idea how u would implement that though.

"Hivemind devouring swarms could be angry after going x amount of years without consuming someone, causing unrest and revolts, and the same could be said with machines, hivemind, and xenophobe murder civs (Exterminators, Devourers, Purifiers) about lack of killing in x amount of years, or trying to overthrow their murder civilization with have start a non-murder, or opposite to want to start one after being treated poorly by xenos" This is very implementable, nice :)

@Thaumaturgis: Would be nice, the issue is that one can't exactly mix and match portraits, so it's certainly easier to just make them not manage to successfully have kids. (I would like to add more pop self-modification events, on that topic, I'm just not sure yet as to the best way of going about it).

@ieatfood5512: It's tricky to have it exactly as you say, but I could for instance have some player-only events (the AI wouldn't know how to deal with it) where a faction demands you pick an ascension path and then is upset if you say no, and especially if you say yes and later pick a different one.

@Daystalle: Unfortunately not possible right now.

Originally posted by Caligula Caesar:

"Hivemind devouring swarms could be angry after going x amount of years without consuming someone, causing unrest and revolts, and the same could be said with machines, hivemind, and xenophobe murder civs (Exterminators, Devourers, Purifiers) about lack of killing in x amount of years, or trying to overthrow their murder civilization with have start a non-murder, or opposite to want to start one after being treated poorly by xenos" This is very implementable, nice :)

Im glad!