Hello everyone, here is the full changelog for the 0.18 update.
Mission Trees have been added to some situations, and present new challenges for some nations to do during the game. The idea of mission trees is to incentivize and direct the player without forcing them to do a specific course of action, so they are still very open ended, but provide small or large bonuses based on their completion. Some mission trees also have multiple branching paths allowing for more replay value on some countries.
America's mission tree focuses on reunifying the country and building it up
Europe's mission tree allows for final Apotheosis to occur in a new and interesting way
India can now choose between liberating itself from the Castes or embracing them.
There are new situations for various countries, including Earth, Mars, and each continental formable. These situations are earned when you form the country in question. The Mechanist Coalescene can also now be obtained by Federalizing Europe in 2025.
Anyone uniting Mars will have access to this mission tree
Any continental formable on Earth will get this mission tree
With the new ledger you can measure your progress against other countries, and filter by strength.
I added a bunch of new cool asteroids to the asteroid belt. Some of them even have moons!
Also, the deposits in the asteroid belt have been moved around so the Stable Orbits are no longer the best part of the belt by far. Instead, the really good deposits are scattered between asteroids and each one usually only has one resource in abundance.
I have been slowly changing the 2025 start date to be more in line with reality. The pre existing date had many issues which primarily came from the fact that it was ported with few changes from 2092 and that I was busy working on interstellar when I was making it. I also didn't think anyone really cared about the 2025 scenario since I almost never play it myself.
NATO is more uniformly blue/purple/teal, with the US remaining unchanged (Republic/Liberal/Interventionist) and many US allies being moved more in line with their leader. The exception to the rule here is France, which I liked as a potential NATO renegade and so left them more purple-ish.
China is unchanged, but some of its neighbors have had their reforms altered to make them more erratic.
Africa, with the exception of communist countries like Eritrea and a few others, are uniformly agrarian oligarchies, autocracies, or faulty republics with neutral or restricted civil liberties. This should hopefully make the Green ideology stronger.
South America has been made more divided between socialist aligned bureaucratic republics like Brazil/Colombia (recent election hasn't happened yet) and NATO-aligned countries like Argentina. My intention here is that China will have inroads for expansion into Latin America while NATO will need to play defensively here.
Mexico's cartel countries have been replaced by a cartel situation, which also applies to other countries that have drug trafficking issues like Colombia and Venezuela. You can either embrace the drug trade for easy money or crack down on it for a big eventual reward.
Most of the middle east is unchanged, with some reforms slightly altered for the sake of creating some potential conflict between the Islamic countries there.
Europe's religion/culture traits were not supposed to be the same as their 2092 variants but I forgot to change them. They have been altered to their current values.
All countries' populations have been made to within 5% tolerance accurately represent their real life values.
Population: World Bank 2024
Religion: Pew Research
Political Alignent/Government Form
This was more complex as different sources disagreed with each other on various points. As I understand it, the "Better 2025" mod used primarily the freedomhouse.org source for "Freedom in the World" to determine political alignment, however I found some of the ratings a bit suspect, so I have included 3 sources, one with a known right-bias and one with a known left-bias in order to balance it out:
Ideally, at least 2 of these sources will agree with each other, and I implemented the results of that (with my own spin on things for the purposes of balance and fun)
I did not add any more organizations because they are annoying enough in the existing 2025 scenario. When I get around to adding organizations that don't function like military alliances (i.e, they don't call all their allies into war with them), there will be more but for now I kept it to NATO, Belt and Road, and CSTO.
I did not modify technology levels either. This is because I would like the colonization gameplay to begin immediately, however unrealistic that may appear to be. In reality, since this game is fast paced anyway, it would either happen too soon or too late, and the AI would be so far behind on colony tech due to randomized research choices that it is functionally much better to encourage AI colonization by giving the world's most advanced space powers the ability to do it from the get-go.
Ultimately, fun is more important than realism. Realism is only good insofar as it enables fun, not otherwise.
UI optimizations
Forming certain countries will give your their Situation
Federalize Organization bug fixed
New Asteroid Belt Asteroids
Graphical improvements
2025: Political changes, culture trait changes, religion changes
New notification when a crisis is happening
New pre-game technologies
AI behavior changes
Back end multiple language support (no idea how to translate properly yet)
AI behavior changes
Evil Crisis situations are now very different: they are "good" and give you bonuses but you can easily lose control of them and become Moloch/Eugenarchy.
Notification Settings: customize which notifications create popups
Subregions enabling can now be selected at game start, but cannot be changed once the game has started
New mod defines editor tool in the mod uploader section. This tool will do the formatting of the json files for you, and help build new mod content.
Research costs reduced by ~20%, but education rate reduced by 50%. This is intended to make research faster in the early game, but slower later on.
New AI Nukes option to disable AI bombing with strategic weapons
AI desire to build spaceports and spaceships increased
Polycrisis severity reduced effects
Costs of buying/selling resource capacities reduced by 75%
Trade barriers and market fee reduced overall
More tooltips
New wonders
New Crisis: The Imaginarium
Can now press Tab to switch between owned planets quickly
Bug fixes