A way to counter a civil war event before it happens.
Sometimes you have angry opposite factions in your empire,.. if you supress them.. have that help with keeping a civil war. You could add in a new manage faction button which supress a possible civil war but it cost 1.5-2 influence a month

I do use the Banned! mod by Alpha Ash, which lets you ban factions. That's helpful. In the future I will add ways to avoid some Civil Wars with events, though. I do want to have political events in the future.

What I would be interested in is a way for rebels to steal systems from those they are rebelling against, provided there are no loyalist planets in the system. That would allow territory to be taken by those itty-bitty planetery rebellions that vanilla produces, so they do not always become little islands.

Amazing mod, I love watching what it does to an overgrown AI as much as when it splits my empire.

A few suggestions:
1) I think that winning a Civil War should be rewarded with influence or unity, the amount depending on the size of the Civil War. A planet rebelling could be 50 or 100 influence, whereas more for a larger rebellion. Basing it on pops could be good too, perhaps 100 unity per pop. From a gameplay perspective, this can reward an empire for winning, and help it recover a bit faster so it isn't destroyed easily by rivals that have jumped ahead (which I have observed a lot amongst the AI). From an RP perspective, nations are often more united after a civil war, as the victorious authority is legitimised on the battlefield.

2) Before the outbreak of a civil war, there should be more events, where you are given the choice to temporarily bribe the problem away. This could be energy credits (scaled with empire size and income) or another resource, such as influence or even unity. Perhaps in cow-towing to a bullish general, it costs the regime 100 influence, given how they would lose face if being intimidated by the military. This could occur repeatedly until the regime is totally out of influence, signifying losing legitimacy, and then the admiral will rebel. A third option would be the admiral demanding a larger personal fleet, perhaps 60% of your total fleet cap, which would be dangerous because if he rebelled, he'd take his entire fleet with him.

An angry planet could demand "stimulus spending", which could scale to the population. They should be high enough to hurt, perhaps 100 per pop, and would repeat until the stability improves, the player denied the request, or the player is bankrupt.

Additionally, faction leaders could demand a random grievance be rectified on a 12 month time period. This could be a policy change, as Fallen Empires do, like outlaw AI. If the player declines, they immediately rebel. If the player complies, they should lose a decent amount of influence for having backed down, in addition to the policy change. The demand could also be something like "local rivalry" or "expand borders" which may or may not be easy to satisfy in a short period of time.

This would force a player to try to placate a faction or risk a rebellion. I love your mod, but one problem with rebellions in Stellaris (and all strategy games) is that they feel sudden and arbitrary. A section of your empire is suddenly not yours and is at war with you. A series of even chains could give you a warning that the drums of war are on the horizon, and costly ways to buy time, or even avert a war. If an Admiral is challenging your authority, perhaps you placate him for a while, and lose some influence, but find a way to ensure he gets into a space battle he can't win - ridding you of a political rival and thwarting a civil war, but also losing your best commander. It would give much needed life to the game.

And if sector governors threaten to rebel, the minerals and energy you bribe them with (say 100 each per pop) should go into their sector resources, rather than just disappear from the game. This means this sector will grow more important as it demands resources. Additional options (other than war or bride) could be to grand independence as a vassal (with a hefty parting gift calculated based on pops) or full independence (no gift). That way your empire could transition into a commonwealth like the British Empire did (because they didn't go broke), or a bunch of small independent states like the Soviet Union (because they did).

Sorry for the rant, hope you take some of these suggestions into consideration!

I love some of these ideas.

1) Very good idea, I will likely do something along the lines of unity.

2) I really like these ideas, and I'm definitely going to do events. The things with chains, however, is that currently there is no way for me to prevent the player from firing their leader. I suppose this actually doesn't matter that much as the new leader will still be likely to rebel.

Events are what most people have been asking for and they're what I want to work on next for sure, but I have a lot of schoolwork until the second week of May so expect more development of those after then.

3) What do you think of Planetary rebellions, in general? I don't know if I want to keep them because there are already vanilla mechanics for planets to rebel. Idk how I feel about them, right now, basically, and I've been thinking of cutting them. I may just need to make them more dynamic.

4) The problem with the Admiral suggestion is that there isn't a way for me to force the player to keep that admiral employed. As such, it's a lot more limiting.

5) With the resources, I don't even use sector automations to that wouldn't really make sense for me and a lot of others, I don't think.

6) I love the idea of Governors sometimes giving you the option of either having them become a vassal or declaring a civil war. I can even make them a custom vassal type that can't be integrated. That is a great idea. I will almost definitely incorporate this idea when I get to events.

3) What planetery rebellions need is to be set up in a ranked order. Rebellions should be ranked, so the more powerful planets take with them weaker planets and adjacent systems with no planets or built-up starbase, since at present the vanilla rebellion mechanics while they work a bit too well at the moment, result in little islands while a often completely defunct loyalist power tends to keep all the actual territory and it's resources around the 'islands'.

You might even be able to do that without actually modifying the actual files, since they are follow-up events for 'what happens when the rebellion succeeds'.

Thanks for reading my suggestions!

1) I’m glad, looking forward to it! Every crisis should also be an opportunity, if handled well.

2) as for firing the leader, I think that should incur a hefty influence cost. Kind of like when Stalin sent Zhukov away after the war, which he could only do because of how powerful he was. The programming could be tricky, but basically if the get into a pre-rebellion state, and they don’t die but are no longer in your employ, you trigger something saying “firing X was controversial and has cost 200 influence”. If it’s a faction leader, it could anger a faction even more.

3) I like your planetary rebellions, I think that you should not only keep them, but replace the vanilla ones completely, if you can disable them. Adding in event chains will really help. In history, civil wars only happen when countries are morally or financially bankrupt, or refuse to pay. I’m Canadian, and we kept Quebec in without fighting by spending money and influence. So stimulus spending should always be an option. Saudi Arabia has shown gold is more potent than lead.

As for HOW to make planetary rebellions significant, I have an idea. I don’t think that spawning a massive fleet is a good idea, because 1) where did these space farmers get battleships and 2) having them rampage your empire seems weird. Smaller fleets are fine, but they won’t stand up against yours in most situations. I think what planetary rebellions SHOULD spawn are big defence armies, perhaps 2 per pop, so that a large planet could have defence value in the thousands. This is a popular revolt, after all. This would mean that reconquering the planet would either take huge armies of yours (minerals and time) or a big fleet to bombard and potential damage the planet. Suddenly planetary rebellions are not dealt with in 3 clicks, and it may be preferable to let them become a vassal and avoid the headache - especially if you can integrate them again in 10 years, which is the graceful was to maintain your empire.

4) as said, a unity/influence or militant faction penalty if the admiral has been fired (or isn’t employed but didn’t die) would be a good way to make that a costly, yet still viable option. Perhaps even in the even chain “Fire and public ally disgrace him - costs 200 influence”. As well as the above mentioned fleet promises.

5) one reason I suggested dumping resources into the sector manager is because I dislike when games have huge amounts of resources just disappear. If an enemy AI demands resources (which they never do) they should be richer and more active as a result. So if a sector with 88 pops demands 8800 energy and 8800 minerals or they’ll leave, adding those to their sector pool is cool because 1) you can’t take them back 2) to make use of them, you have to enable a small degree of independence by enabling sector automation 3) in the long run this will make that sector even more important, especially if they demand the same thing a few years later. Having 8800 energy/minerals disappear with no bearing on the sector seems immersion breaking.

Should you choose to let them become a vassal, their parting gift should become their initial balance. Or (cool idea) they take a share of your treasury based on population size. And of your military. That might make it more appealing just to give them independence, keep your money and ships, and maybe forcefully “reintegrate” them later.

2/4) Yeah unfortunately this just isn't possible. I simply cannot do anything to stop people from reassigning leaders. There is simply no way to code it. I might be able to make penalties for firing a leader, but there also isn't a way for me to warn people of those penalties. I'll keep looking into it.

3) I like that idea. I wanted to have defense armies spawn, I just couldn't quite figure it out, haha. I can probably figure it though.

5) Yeah, I get that for immersion but it just doesn't seem like a great mechanic. I'd rather waste the resources than turn on automation, and I know a lot of people probably feel the same. I'll think about resource immersion, but I don't think there are many good options.

5) if you didn’t ever turn on automation, it would be the same as wasting the resources. Like saying “I’ll give you the money but won’t give you the autonomy to spend it!” Just a little idea, I use automation when my empire grows beyond 50 or 100 planets.

*NEW IDEA* - Revolutions

In addition to the wars you’ve described, which I believe would be standard war types, where you have claims on their systems, there could be the most severe civil war, a *REVOLUTION*. The key idea here is that unlike the other war types, this would be a *total war*, meaning territory could trade hands as the war progressed.

I have a two different types of revolutions in mind
1) Popular revolution - 50-80% of systems join rebel empire with opposing civics to your own. You lose no fleet but they spawn small fleets relative to your own, plus lots of armies on their planets (as we discussed above), and gift them tons of alloys and a fair bit of energy. That way, unless the player puts down the revolution quickly, they will build a huge fleet and overwhelm them. An alternative to a big resource gift would be a large 40% productivity bonus for their citizens called “revolutionary spirit” that would last for a couple years, to give them enough of an economic advantage to build a brand new fleet and threaten the player, in time.

2) Military coup - kind of the opposite of a popular revolt, player loses all (or most) of his fleet, but only one system, from which the coup is based. thats system spawns large armies, which the revolters can use to invade other planets. Spawning armies at your fleets may also be a good idea, so the AI can invade.

These are deliberately opposite revolutions. In a popular uprising, you lose most of your territory and economy, but have the military advantage initially, although could lose it with time. The player must retake their empire before it’s too late. In a military coup, you retain almost your entire empire and economy but lose your military, so initially they have the advantage, and a new military will need to be built to contain the coup. Time is on your side, unless the military takes control of the capital and key economic hubs. The total war nature makes both a battle for survival.

Winning either should reward the player with tons of influence and unity - as well as whatever the revolters had in their treasury. I’m thinking 500 influence and enough unity for at least one new tradition, if not multiple. After all, you’d either lose your entire fleet, or half (or more) of your empire. Surviving that should have serious rewards.

Also, both of these revolutions should only happen if you’re at peace.

Sorry for the rant, love your mod!

I like those ideas. Keep 'em coming haha, makes my life easer if I don't have to think of everything.

I want to note I also added in defense armies to the latest patch for all wars. They should be a bit more difficult on average, and really a pain in the ass army wise if you're far over your admin cap.

That’s awesome! Out of curiosity, what is the formula for which they are spawned? Is it population based?

And what happens to your armies if you have them on the planet? Do they fight the rebels, are they ejected in to orbit, or do they just disappear?

Alternatively, you could just spawn the armies of the rebels, like the mutant horror event chain, and have them attack as “invaders” and take control of the planet if they win! I like that a lot more actually, it’s better than suddenly your planet is just not yours anymore. It also means you can try to lock a planet down with troops, but if it’s a 2x rebel army per pop spawn, a large planetary rebellion could be hard to pacify.

The same metric could be used for all rebellions, and specifically the the popular revolution I spoke about above, so instead of randomly losing 50-80% of your empire, you could just spawn 2 armies per civ on every planet, except for your capital (so you can’t insta-lose). Fortress worlds and planets with lots of troops may resist the revolution, but other planets will likely go rogue, although it gives you a little time to try to intervene in key areas.

As I said, I really like rushing troops to a planet to deal with the mutant horrors, and so a larger, or even empire wide, version of that feels so much cooler than just randomly losing planets. Plus I don’t often build military buildings or garrison troops, because I find I don’t need to. This could change that, with even small detachments giving you time to rush troops from nearby planets and quash a rebellion.

Right now they simply appear on the planet and armies on the planet beforehand are irrelevant. They are also purely admin-cap based.

I'll look into using the vanilla rebel mechanics (which is what you mention when you talk about the new armies fighting the defense armies), but it might require changing a bit of stuff. It sounds like it may be preferable, though, because I can understand how having the rebels take the planet while you have a ton of armies there would feel bad.

So I've taken some of your suggestions and completely overhauled the planetary rebellions. Now, after 5 months of unrest you'll get an event that Separatists are beginning to organize on the planet. The planet will also have a modifier, so you can easily tell if a planet may revolt.

The chances of a planet revolting are the same. If a planet revolts, armies will spawn depending on the number of pops on the planet. This gives you the opportunity to put armies on the unhappy planet to suppress the rebellion.

If they take the planet, they will also spawn some ships, based on your admin cap.

If you suppress the rebellion, the planet will be unable to rebel again for at least 2 years.

After this, I plan to introduce the possibility of making rebels vassals.

That’s amazing! Looking forward to testing it. Can’t wait to win a war and take half my neighbours planets only to have multiple threaten rebellion, forcing me to occupy them with troops.

Also, this new mechanic will make running out of consumer goods a major problem, as half your empire could start rebelling, and you could experience a Soviet-style econopolitical implosion - which will be awesome. May try that just to see what happens.

This mod is by far my favourite, as it addresses a key dynamic that Stellaris, and most strategy games, neglect. It makes running a large empire interesting and challenging, it penalizes and empire for being above their admin cap in an interesting way (not just boring debuffs), and most importantly it helps reduce the propensity for large empires unstoppable blobbing across the map. It also provides the player with crisis, as well as opportunities to seize upon neighbours’ civil wars.

Interestingly, your mod has made fanatical hive minds and machine empires competitive in my play throughs. In vanilla, they’d always get killed off early because they were at war with everyone. Now, the Zerg or Borg type empires tend to actually become a large threat because they take advantage of fractures in neighbouring empires. They are controlled eventually, though.

Thanks for all the hard work!