Hello everyone, for the past few weeks I have been working on new politics related content for Solar Nations 2 and am now ready for those changes to move onto the experimental branch. This announcement will go over what the changes are as well as the logic behind them.
Faction Privilege Rework
Faction Privileges are, in my opinion, really boring as they are too easy to control and don't manipulate the loyalty or strength of your factions enough. They are also not enough of a stability sink, so most of your stability ends up going into warfare and expansion which is not ideal.
In order to fix this, faction privileges have received the following changes:
You can no longer customize faction privileges
Each faction has an unlimited number of possible privileges, but the cost now scales exponentially (similar to projects) for each one you enact.
Each privilege can be leveled up to a certain maximum, but the cost scales exponentially per level. (Again, similar to projects but with stability instead of money)
Reforms which would increase the maximum number of privileges per faction now decrease the cost of granting privileges for that faction.
Privileges can now be revoked to refund 66% of the invested stability.
Each privilege will now manipulate the power and loyalty of the faction you give it to. Generally, each privilege will make every other faction 1% less loyal, but make the privileged faction 5% more loyal, resulting in an overall small decrease in total loyalty.
Situations
Situations are a new mechanic which offer variable empire-specific content and new opportunities for you to engage in over the course of the game. Each major power starts with at least one of these, and most of those are special for that specific major power, but there are also situations that can be added or removed during the game, giving you the opportunity to experiment with new gameplay options.
Situations have variables and interactions, which allow you to do special functions and gain modifiers you otherwise would not be able to. As these are situation specific, there are many new options to discover.
The American Dominate retains some aspects of the former Republic, but for how long?
Each of these actions will interact with Congress in order to give you something, so there is good reason to keep an eye on these.
The Seventeen Council's vision for humanity will not be realized overnight- it will take centuries of careful planning in order to bring utopia into reality.
Other major civilizations have their own special situations, and even some smaller situations like the Saturnian League, Tricorp, and Thule have their own.
Ascension
Some technologies present us with unique opportunities to integrate ourselves with them. In Solar Nations 2, you can now evolve humanity using the powers of Genetics, Cybernetics, or AI. Once you research the relevant technologies, you can acquire extremely powerful bonuses through the strengthening of your new species. This is done through the aforementioned Situation system, where you can add the powerful Ascension Situations once you unlock the necessary technology and for 30 stability.
2025
Some of you may be wondering what happened to the 2025 scenario. I have it mostly completed on my own computer, however I did not want to release it as a simple retexture of 2092, so I decided to wait until the Situations system was complete. I will endeavor to make special situations for the major powers of 2025 as well once the system is bug tested.
NOTE: This is not in the experimental branch yet, I am still working on the situations for the countries of the current time.
How to Play
Navigate to the Experimental Branch in Solar Nations 2. It is the only other branch than the default one. Since many of the changes are experimental, there will likely be rebalancing and bugfixes that will happen between now and the release of 0.15.