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Synth Collective

Lets you play as an empire of sentient, autonomous, free-willed Synth individuals, with the traits you choose. Kinda like the Gen 3 synths in Fallout. Basicaly a pre-ascended empire.

Also, optionally assimilate other species, like the Borg do. Assimilation speed scales with number of pops, unlike Paradox's fixed speed.

Let me emphasize that: These are NOT a replacement for Paradox's Gestalt Consciousness / Hive Mind robots from the DLC, but robotic individuals. They can be happy or unhappy. They have an ethos. They can and WILL join factions. They get the normal events like space piracy or cultists or whatnot.

Basically, quoth Glory from Falllout 4: "I'm as real a girl as you'll ever meet. The only difference is I bet your assembly instruction were a hell of a lot more fun."


FEATURES

- allows using the robot class and portraits for your population, in which case you get to use the machine traits

- or pick a biological portrait for your synth empire, in which case you get to pick from the biological traits. Note that you'll still be a robot, just wearing a silicone face, so you might need to switch to robot traits if you ever mod your species. Still, it lets you play voidborne robots from the start.

- you CAN change your starting traits, but keep the "Robotic Immortality" trait, as it is the trigger for the mod's scripts.

- New synths will keep your portrait, traits and species name. Including, yes, you can be a robot with a biological portrait.

- can coexist with organics, IF you want to run a multi-cultural empire (though they might still think you're a soulless machine, and the spirituals... well, they'll still dislike that you even exist.)

- if you choose to assimilate aliens (via the citizenship type Assimilation in the Species window), the assimilation speed scales with the number of pops.

- at the game start you will automatically be given the techs to make more synths, and your country is set to have full AI rights, allowed AI pops, and the AI accord. So basically your robots can't rebel when the AI crisis rolls over the galaxy.

- you start with more energy and mining districts and no farm districts (though your capital building will still produce food)

- capital buildings, as per standard Paradox code, now also provide jobs to assemble new robot people

- your people have also already built a robot factory on your starting world so you can populate the galaxy even faster, but can just replace it with something else if you want, like any normal building

- any other robots you may get from other sources, such as conquered planets or events (like the Awoken pops) or auto-build mods will be automatically scheduled for an upgrade to your species. This includes matching your name and appearance, if you changed yours from standard robot.

- included Fallout 4 style synth name list

- a fairly rich custom solar system initializer for your robots (or anyone else you wish) to start on.

- a bunch of pre-scripted synth empires, including MODIFIED (hybrid) versions of the nuked, gaia, machine world and ringworld starts. You can just play one of them as it is, or you can edit them when setting up a game. Or create your own from scratch. Note that if you edit them, you can change your portrait, traits, government, etc, but even looking funny at the origin or starting system will cause it to become the normal version of that origin. I.e., lose the special edits I did to those.

- synth leaders (even from non-synth and/or non-player empires) get regular tune-ups, so effectively they don't age


HOW TO CREATE A NEW SYNTH EMPIRE

- pick a portrait from the "Synthetic Beings" category, if you want machine traits and being able to assimilate, or from any biological category, if you want the biological traits and don't want to assimilate

- pick the "Robotic Immortality" trait for your people (mandatory; it's what triggers the setup script)

That's it. Choose the rest of the stuff as you wish, and you're good to go.


KNOWN ISSUES

1. Don't make a Gestalt Consciousness empire with synths, they don't play well together.

2. Please refrain from trying to over-ascend so to speak. You're more robotically pre-ascended right from the start than Utopia lets you get. Trying to ascend your synths to... err... synths will just cause you to lose the extra traits you picked at the start. (But you can always robomod them back.)

3. Your synth scientists will still come up with research alternatives like hydroponic farms (synths don't eat food,) colony habitats (synths have +200% habitability) or increased leader lifespan (synths are immortal,) much as they're 100% useless for synths. That's not from this mod, it's all Paradox. But they may help your organic populations, if you choose to coexist with them, so it's not all bad.

4. The game will still generate leader traits purely randomly, even if the trait makes no sense for synths. E.g., you'll still get "resilient" leaders in your pool, even though synths are immortal anyway. E.g., you'll still get agrarian governors, even though synths don't need any food.

I tried to keep your starting leaders sane, by removing useless traits and replacing them with something more useful But after enough years, you'll see agriculture specialists in your governor pool and whatnot again. I don't remove those after start, since, well, you might get biological pops later, which benefit from those. (Or not, if you choose to kill all humans or assimilate them.)

Which is more than offset by...

5. ALL synth leaders get a pretty hefty "synth" trait, which makes them significantly better at whatever their job is. So scientists research faster, admirals fight better, etc. If it makes the game too easy in the beginning (later other empires get such traits via ascension), and if that bothers you, well, I guess you can always just set the game difficulty higher to compensate. Or go annoy some fallen empire, I guess.

6. The supplied Fallout system initializer is maybe slightly too rich. I reduced it to be less over the top, but it's still on the rich side. If that's a problem, you can always hit the "Edit" button at empire selection, and pick another initializer (e.g., "Random" or "Sol") for your home system.