fire to hear @starchitec

sorry, havent checked in on my notifications for a minute. Not abandoned, just havent had time to give the latest update a real go. As far as I can tell this should still work, but theres always tweaks and balancing to do with new DLC.

gotta say; I love this mod. please don't stop maintaining it!

(there are some balance issues with some of the breakthroughs just not being worth the reduced chance of getting the best ones....although your recent re balancing definitely helped!

Works with 3.1X.X

yo is this mod working? i love it so much

Unfortunately when combining this mod with Star Trek New Civilizatons this mod disables assembly of Borg :-( any chance on a fix/compatibility mod?

Please update.

Heyo! Anyone test if it works in 3.13? Amazing mod great work starchitec!!

This mod has been in my modlist permanently, probably one of the best mods for adding flavor and variety to my games.

You cannot add or remove the psionic trait, thats vanilla behavior so you can only modify already psionic robots. You should not be able to psionically assimilate robots at all. This combined with the mod making it so you cannot assemble psionic robots (they have to gain it via chance over time) means that you will almost never have 100% psionic robots, but if you have a robot template that is the same template as what you want once they get psionic but without the psionic trait, you will be able to assemble that and in time, those new robots will eventually gain it.

The tech that adds psionics to robots/mechanical populations seems to make assimilation go wonky/break due to not being able to assimilate or modify all of them properly.

It is up to date. I may have missed version updating after the last hotfix, but it is working in the current patch.

hello. Does this mod need updating? Because it has a yellow exclamation mark next to its name in launcher :/

That would mean I need to keep track of what breakthroughs vassals had after they get integrated... which is such a rare circumstance that I dont really think worthwhile.

Would it be possible to add a empire wide spread bonus from integrating a vassal with a specific breakthrough?

yeah, same here, integrating a vassal with a breakthrough means you would lose any bonus spread you had from them.

What happens to breakthrough techs, when a vassal gets integrated? Does that mean the spread through research agreements disappears? or does the overlord gain the breakthrough itself or a bonus to it?
In vanilla stellaris integrating a subject does nothing for tech sadly

I see, yes I think this is the only part of the mod I've been ignoring for years since I was not too familiar with the systems, thank you again and thank you for your great work on this mod!

You just need any asset that has the "technology" skill, so scientists, hackers, or whatever the equivalent is in hive or machine empires. As long as you have an asset, you get a passive boost to breakthrough chances for anything that empire has. Still no guarantee youll get it quickly of course, base chances are still very low even with a boost from an asset.

thank you, lastly for espionage... as long as the asset is a scientist do I need to just "hold" them in my assets list or do I need to do Steal Technology and have them assigned as an asset for it to work?

Yes, research policies provide a minor boost to engineering/physics/society at the cost of the others. They also modify the chances of discovering breakthroughs in those fields

Are the research policies the one where you focus on one specific field?

@MaulMachine, previously, once you had the breakthrough you would get 1 or 2 psionic robots, then all future robots would be built with the psionic trait, which made it a bit to easy imo. Now, you assemble robots normally but species templates with psionic and mechanical will simply not appear in the list. These robots can gain the psionic trait eventually via a yearly pulse event. Overall, the rate of conversion should be much lower than it was previously and you will likely never be able to get a population of 100% psionic robots.

---Updated to 3.12---
-Research Policies speed boosts reduced from 20% to 10%
-Synthetic Fertility empires have a minor bonus to the chance to get the Deus Ex Machina Breakthrough (psionic robots)
-Psionic robots cannot be built, they must be assembled as a normal robot and have a yearly chance to gain psionic if you have the breakthrough. Rate at which robots that gain the psionic trait reduced. 'can_species_be_assembled' gamerule overwritten to do this

Also fixed the description link to the Chinese translation

So, once the robot species has the psionic trait, can they then be built? Or can only non-psionics ever be built, and you just have to hope?

The link to the Chinese translation MOD is missing

中文翻译MOD的链接丢失了

Its always been a balancing act with how many you can get- but right now, its a soft cap that each additional one you get dramatically reduces the chances of drawing further, and the effect stacks. (there once was a hard cap, but that also has drawbacks). 4 to 5 is what I would say is reasonable for a full campaign. However, you roll chances every time you research a technology, so if you are blazing through repeatable, eventually you will still roll them. I generally end games around that point so it hasn't been a problem. You can make the penalty increase by editing scripted_variables/TechAscendant_settings.txt- cummulative penalty is the one you would increase if you wanted to make it harder to get them in the late game

Hey just played a whole playthrough using this mod. Must say its a really nice idea. But I feel a few could be tuned down a bit. Like the empire size from pop n shield hardening fx. But most importantly - There should be a cap on how many breakthroughs you can aquire. I ended up with 6-8 of them. Which seemed a tad too much. Especially compared to the AI's performance. At least an option to set a max and how many would be really awesome. Then this would be a mainstay of a mod for me.
Thanks for your time developing this mod :)

ah ok, thanks for the clarification. maybe some mod like merger of rules does something weird then, it's just that my run of the mill research labs produce maybe a third of the engineering output of society and I can't pin down why, so this mod seemed like the most likely candidate, sorry

Which policy did you set it to specifically? They are meant to be able to shift one level at a time- so if you are at Priority Engineering you cannot immediately switch back to Balanced research (you would have to go to one of the midway engineering focuses first). As for the modifiers, they should be working- but note they wont change the amount of engineering research you produce in the top bar- it modifiers engineering research speed (the percent modifier you can see above the tech you are currently researching)

Admittedly it could be some problem with one of the countless other mods I'm running or just having a bad modifier setup but I tried to put more emphasis on engineering research policy wise and it just backfired immensely, with seemingly engineering having about half of physic and society. Are you sure the modifiers are working right? Also setting it back to normal is greyed out while I could switch to other philosophies

@Eroes did you ever find out if that crash in Expanded Events was still prevalent? Playing a multiplayer game and trying to identify what is causing our game to crash round mid game. This is the only post i seen related to crashes in our mod list.

Thanks, I found it. Apparently it was from Expanded Events.

hard sand is not a breakthrough from this mod, so that is a crash from something else. Also the response text for this mods events is generally "Marvelous" You can find what mod an event comes from by enabling debugtooltip in the console, and hovering over the event to get the event ID.

I believe it is this mod since it deals with breakthroughs, but I am getting a hard crash in my game with this running. I get an event for Breakthrough: Hard Sand, but the display shows a ? for technology gained, and when I click "Excellent" to remove the window, the game instantly crashes. I went back a few autosaves to hopefully avoid it, but it always happens on the same date.

The AI has the exact same chances as you do to roll these techs, there are just more AIs so yes, usually some AI will get them before you, especially if you on a difficulty where the AI is getting bonus tech production. The techs are simply not OP enough that getting a few is going to make an AI steamroll the galaxy.

This mod kinda makes AI empires obscenely overpowered. I have had this mod in my set for several months, and not ONCE have I rolled any breakthrough techs. I've played every kind of civic, every kind of playstyle, and plenty of tech rush. However, without fail, in every single game I play, I get notifications for AI getting breakthrough techs quite literally once or twice a year starting around 2225, oftentimes the exact same empire. The empire in question then usually proceeds to either dominate economically/scientifically in relative power for the entire rest of the game or they will use bonuses to steamroll their entire half of the galaxy.

Thats not an event from this mod.

The event "Organics Display Strange Abilities" from the Deus Ex Machina technology fires over and over for eternity and doesn't seem to do much. It will stop if you select the second option, but what it the point of this event? Does it give the psionic trait to machines that do not have it? It's kind of annoying how it works.

Was just what I was looking for, thanks.

The events to show that someone has discovered a breakthrough are TechAcendant.111, .211, .311,... up to .1311. So you could individually console all 13 of those and it will put each in the situation log. But it will fail to find an empire that has the tech if they dont show up naturally, so some of the localisation will be missing and the poi will be out of place.

Alternatively, if you just want a list of the current chance you have for each breakthrough, TechAcendant.3 adds a debug version of the chances to the situation log (it doesnt have factors, just the raw % chance you have of getting it each time you finish a tech)

Is there a way to force the breakthrough announcements to fire?

Yep- thats the entire purpose of those ship sections (they also have food upkeep instead of alloy upkeep). The section themselves cost 0 alloys, all food, weapons armor and components of course still cost alloys. The tech itself also gives you a little bit of passive hull repair and hull HP

Hey question from me,
I have researched the breakthrough: Living starships and you get those new ship designs.
From what i can tell is the only difference that thet cost food instead and less alloys is that the only benefit? or did i miss something?

@starchitec Sorry, I didn't realize it was only for breakthroughs, which are far and few between. I thought it would limit research options throughout the whole game, keeping some techs controlled through breakthroughs throughout the whole game. Its still cool, but I don't like the vanilla research roulette. By specializing in an area, i want to influence the greatness of my civilization in that area. Maybe if I add the mod that gives more options and somehow combine it with this mod so that the one specialized in gets the most rolled options.

Do you have a mapmode that shows breakthroughs? Have you seen any other countries get breakthroughs? There is an event that pops up if you do. You also get an entry in the situation log once someone has a breakthrough. I guarantee you it works, the chances are not super high so it can be a mid game event to get your first one.

Aside from the research speed changes, and research specialization policy, it doesn't look like this mod does anything. Not a single breakthrough shows up hours into a game.

I swear I fixed that, it used to accidentally remove military theory instead. The code looks correct on my end, so not sure. Other than it being in the log tho it wont interfere with anything. If you really want you can console "effect remove_point_of_interest = archeo_breakthrough_origin"

Odd. When I complete the Archaeotech breakthrough, it doesn't disappear from the Situation Log.

The mod author's Breakthroughs add something the game. The Dev's halfbaked version does nothing but slow you down each tier(breakthroughs at 5x cost, have no effect, required for next tier).