Mass Effect: A New Destiny mod for Stellaris

Mass Effect A New Destiny Dev Diary #6: FCW part 2

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth dev diary for Mass Effect A New Destiny. Today I wanted to give you a preview of what to expect with v0.1.4. First, for a bit of house cleaning, this update will drop at some point after Machine Age has released but I cannot give an exact time-frame to everyone. I don't know what will break and need to be redone after launch of the DLC. I also definitely am not touching anything crisis related at this time though depending on how the Synthetic Queen works in practice we could be looking at the future Sovereign. For those of you that need to keep playing the mod before v0.1.4 drops merely roll back your Stellaris version to 3.11.3 until the update drops. With that out of the way let's talk about the last content update for the First Contact War!

What we started with:

When 0.1 dropped the Systems Alliance had a choice regarding the fate of Jon Grissom. Here's a screen of the event for those that need a quick refresher below.

I want to talk about the event more as it highlights the design philosophy for A New Destiny. Usually, players throughout the game will be presented with two options on how they wish to proceed over any given issue. Mass Effect as a series is all about making meaningful and sometimes morally questionable decisions, when making the mod that was something I didn't want to abandon. The top choice in any given situation is usually the historical route that each nation would pick in order to have a recognizable Milky Way while the bottom is the alternative route no matter their alignment. All major choices in A New Destiny have Paragon and Renegade alignments attached for role playing purposes though don't expect anything gameplay wise referencing your morality, at least right now. AI also make choices and although the historical options have a higher weight to them, it is not guaranteed to go down that way. No two games of A New Destiny will ever be exactly the same once all story content has dropped. Let's see what I mean in practice by going over the entire First Contact War.

Tit for Tat:

The FCW was a short and relatively bloodless affair compared to some of the other major conflicts in the Mass Effect universe. When it comes to a Grand Strategy 4X title that can be boring, so A New Destiny tweaks some lore to shape fun gameplay. For instance, upon seeing Relay 314's activation the Turians shut down the Relay separating Earth and its colonies prior to game start. In this example, AI Systems Alliance has chosen to reactivate the Relay yet again and now I as the Turians have to decide how we want to respond. You can see the event below.

If the Alliance had decided to hunker down on Earth, we would have slightly different events play out, but we are where we are in this demonstration. And despite the fact that it is the Renegade option, sending a team to Shanxi to investigate is the historical option so I'm going to pick it. This launches a special research project that you can see here.

Along the way, the Alliance will be notified of aliens on Shanxi as a warning that the Turians are getting closer though they cannot do anything about that yet. Once the special project is completed the Turians must now decide how to handle the existence of Humanity as you can see here.

Since we're going historical, I'm going to declare the war, but I do want to briefly go over the other option. The Alliance will have the opportunity to either translate the Turian message or declare war themselves against the Turians. All of this could have been avoided with different decision making though it takes two to tango. Hopefully, this mini-AAR helps illustrate how choices and consequences build A New Destiny's varied upcoming future stories. Let's move on to a couple more things before we go!

The War Itself:

I want to thank communista for allowing me to use their fabulous Expanded War Goals mod that you can find on the Worshop here Steamcommunity.com . For the First Contact War I'll be using the Cleanse Borders war goal added by the mod. The fate of Shanxi and Receril rests in your hands if you get that far.

Colony Ships:

I've tweaked the colony ship tech so that empires don't always get the tech immediately. For example, the Migrant Fleet traditionally didn't colonize other planets due to the hope of taking back Rannoch. A player can certainly pivot that ideology as seen below, however, do not expect the process of settling a new world to be easy on anyone. Likewise, the Systems Alliance is much more interested in military spending at the start of the game to concern itself with colony ships until the crisis with the Turians is resolved one way or the other.

However, as a result of this change some other empires that have been theoretically untouched will need to research the tech manually until I get around to them. It is a tier one tech though you may want to avoid playing as the Drell Remnant and a few others until I give them some content. As the only main dev on the mod there's only so much I can do at once, and I prioritized the FCW for the time being.

Characters:

The FCW featured a variety of Characters who shaped the future of Mass Effect. While not all of them are present (yet), I want to go over two. Jon Grissom can be found leading the Alliance's legendary Fifth Fleet over Shanxi. You can see here he has the brave trait which can potentially give him an edge in the upcoming war.

On the other side of the conflict, we have Desolas Arterius leading the Turian Scout Fleet. You can see him parked near the Turian outpost neighboring Shanxi specifically made for A New Destiny here.

As a bareface Turian, Desolas has little respect among his men placing him at a disadvantage.

If you haven't played in a while v0.1.3 also brought over several iconic Quarian characters you can gain access to through their first event.

Overall, characters are going to be a nice addition and reward for completing certain actions and in some instances have large impacts on the empires they belong to. I am not worrying two much about age and instead tying character deaths to events. This may hinder the experience for some but, the section of Mass Effect lore I'm working with is only around fifty years, far too short a time for something like Stellaris. I'd rather have age be a little wonky and still have recognizable faces doing recognizable things when the alternative is not having them at all.

What's Next:

After a few remaining bug fixes that will inevitably arise from the v0.1.4 release we'll be moving on to v0.2 Shadow Broker. Rather than focus on a single faction, 0.2 will be more of a feature release in general. The goal is to overhaul anomalies as well as introduce everyone's favorite Yahg. The foundations for the Indoctrination mechanic will most likely be set however, Indoctrination probably won't be fully fleshed out until v0.3 Heretic War (not me1 content). My plan is to flip back and forth between empire specific content packs and general feature updates as we march towards v1.0 Arrival.

That's all for now folks! If you want to keep up with mod development, feel free to join this Discord Discord.gg and scroll down to the A New Destiny section. If you would like to join me in making the mod the help would be greatly appreciated. Please fill out this short survey so I know how to get in touch with you! Forms.gle

Krogan out.