One thing and another (including a certain story series on Furaffinity) have lead me to the conclusion that making a Stellaris mod to make the game hypnofetish-themed would be a fun idea. The only problem is that while I can work out how to code the thing, I am not a good writer and have no idea how it'd work design-wise. All I have is a civic that doesn't do anything.

Anyone have any ideas? Design help is needed more than writing help; a framework is more important (and more difficult) for the mod than writing. That said ideas on writing could help produce design ideas...

I haven't played any Stellaris at all after the 2.2 patch, the planet and pop overhaul really ruined it for me. But I reckon there's a few ways you could go. Here's some questions I'd think about:

1) How does hypnosis work in your mod? Is it like our universe, where it requires a process of induction, and then implanting suggestions that can slowly influence behavior over time? Or it is more like fictional MC, and if so how does it work? Is it psychic powers, technology, drugs? And how strong are the effects - strong enough to affect a city? A planet? And entire civilization?

2) How much influence do you want it to have over gameplay? Will you just be adding some new flavor events, maybe some new traits, a couple techs or civics - OR do you want it to be a core element, and potentially have entire empires centered around it?

3) What kind of effect would it have over gameplay? There are some obvious bonuses you could have, to unity, to influence, to productivity. I would also consider if you want to have several archetypes, like depending on the civics and the government type, you could have different paths. Like a slaver empire might use hypnosis to control their servants, while a corporate empire might brainwash their citizens to consume more.

4) What is your initial view for the mod? Like which mechanics are the priority, in your opinion?

I love the idea! Unfortunately, I got a lot of other stuff going on in my life right now, but Mind Control Fetish + Stellaris isn't something I knew I wanted until now!

Hmm. Well, let's think on what's there already.

Spiritualist and the Psionics ascension path are already heavy on reconditioning(The Corps is your Friend. Trust The Corps) and impressive stability by everyone thinking alike. That's even a Spiritualist faction requirement that their Spiritualist ethics be a majority(Pious Polity: "Pious Minds think alike"). Spiritualist is also tied to the 'Subversive Cult' government(Gospel of the Masses+Criminal Heritage, requires Megacorp). The Spiritualist Colossus also is effectively a giant hypno-ray, turning everyone on the planet Spiritualist.

Later game Hive Minds can assimilate other species, as can Driven Assimilators of machines and later stage empires on the Synthetic ascension path. There is a Colossus for assimilation, too: The Nanobot Diffuser.

Slavery exists, and is seen as a very strong option. The 'how' is vague, of course, and there's things like the Slave Processing Centre which notes making them .'more compliant'.

What are you hoping specifically to add? Some +Stability, some +Ethics change? Perhaps thinking on what you hope to do would help in terms of design.

I wouldn't necessarily get your hopes up for anything to come of this.

The idea is that most people in the civilization are under mind control, with just a small controlling elite having free will. So obviously strong and fictional, though the precise could be up to the player's choice and change flavour text and some minor stats.


Definitely the latter, though obviously that would be quite a task.


This is where I run a blank, especially since I don't have that much experience with Stellaris. I think it partly depends on how much gameplay you want in your porn.


That's the problem. I don't really have an idea for the mod gameplay-wise, just that it should implement mind control in a fetishy way.

Some ideas:

- Hefty happiness buffs to lower employment strata, but only with living standards that give those strata very little political power. This way you could reflect all your workers being tranced without giving OP stability bonuses based on it (the main mechanical effect would instead be low crime rates).

- Taking over planets or fleets in some way without fighting. Not sure how much can be done with events here, it could get fairly difficult to implement and especially balance.

- Buffs to diplomatic weight, envoy effects, or even just a direct buff to diplomatic opinion like Charismatic used to have.

I've thought about how to put fetish content in Stellaris before, and the thing I keep coming back to is transformation and assimilation. It has visual results, it makes sense as something that happens at the level of entire planetary populations, and the game already has mechanics to support it (although at least in 2.7 they were somewhat difficult to extend, so it might be better to implement your own with events that convert pops to different types). If anything, the problem is that Stellaris already has so many different assimilation mechanics that it's hard to add anything interesting on top of them! ... though the actual reason why I haven't done it is that it really needs art to go with the concept, and I've learned from experience that if you just go around indiscriminately grabbing art for a mod, the result will look awful.

People on the Stellaris Sexy Modding discord might also have ideas: discord.gg/TrkNsGU

But should it be balanced?
[/quote]

That's a hard question, especially given some things that have been released recently. Ringworld start is terrifying, for instance.

I'm not the one putting in the work so I don't have much of a say here, but...

... I feel like if you do make a mod about a weird kink society balanced, you're saying that the weird kink society actually makes sense as a part of the game universe. Makes it feel more real.

I'd make it OP. If I wanted a balanced Stellaris-playing experience, I wouldn't install the kinky mind control mod

Same here. I'm not playing LL-modded Stellaris for balance, or challenge. I'm playing to make my sexy aliens fuck other sexy aliens, and if I can add mind-control into the mix, I won't care about numbers.

Agreed. I generally dislike mind-control games that require you to play "normally", or don't at least give you the option to cheat and be OP.
Regardless of the fact that mind-control itself is a busted power (perhaps the most busted, apart from stuff like reality-rewriting), thereby begging the question of how exactly it could ever be balanced in a game setting without some artificial limitations, I don't really understand why you'd make a game made to arouse players, and then hide the juicy bits behind some grindy/tough gameplay elements. That was my (main) issue with Overwhored, mostly at the end where you couldn't actually use the Tower Mistress to cheat.
Obviously, YMMV, and I can understand feeling more fulfilled when you get your reward after difficult gameplay, but at least give us peons that don't have the patience for such things a cheat menu.

Oh I completely agree with that perspective, I just wondered what others thought. It feels good to know that I am not the only one who feels that gameplay that requires you to think and porn do not mix.

I think I know the series you're talking about, cuz I wrote it, so I've got a few ideas that might work. I don't know the first thing about coding, but if you need some writing done for like descriptions or events or whatever, I can do that if you want. You know what, I'll shill my hypno stellaris stories here, too, in case there's some hypno stellaris fan here who hasn't seen em.

www.furaffinity.net/view/35444809/
www.furaffinity.net/view/36545351/
www.furaffinity.net/view/39234128/

So that being said, here's some ideas.
-Buildings, planetary decisions, or edicts that provide an enormous happiness buff

-Possible new buildings and jobs: for instance, a temple of obedience might produce one Master ruler job and four Pleasure Slave worker jobs. The Master job would produce maybe stability, influence, and a bunch of unity, while the Pleasure Slave jobs would just produce a lot of amenities. I like this idea because the building would produce everything that isn't "real": unity, influence, stability, amenities. Really gets the flavor of "this building is extremely culturally beneficial but doesn't actually do anything productive, it's just a bunch of sex"

-Possible events or anomalies that involve officers getting hypnotized, to various effect: maybe pirates brainwash one of your admirals and then you have to fight a big fleet, or maybe one of your governors accidentally gets hypnotized with standard breeder programming, so she now has huge tits and believes that only sex matters (so, maybe -15% resources from jobs, +15% pop happiness, +80% pop growth speed)

-Lots of stuff you could do with psychics, too (maybe this whole thing could be a civic where the species starts off psychic, and that allows opportunities for more unique story stuff or modifiers)

-One possibility is a unique type of building on resort worlds, maybe a hypno-embassy, that dramatically increases immigration pull and pop growth from immigration (you could even go above 100% if you really want everyone flocking to your planets)

-If you're going for a more military conquest xenophobe style, you could even add a new purge type (anti-autonomous hypno-integration or something) that produces, I dunno, consumer goods or unity or trade value or something, where the flavor is that the pops aren't being killed, but rather integrated into the hypno-society to the point where they are considered tools, not individuals, and so they don't occupy housing or have jobs.

Really if you're trying to make this lewd fun I think the biggest thing is story events that illustrate a fun hypno-universe. If you wanna add some crazy endgame stuff, make some really overpowered buildings that can only be created on planets with 100 stability.

Here's 0.0.1. It is basically nothing - there's a civic that unlocks the mod's effects, and a building (with associated job) and decision that both increase a planet's happiness. None of these are balanced, even from a "balance does not matter, make an OP MC civ" perspective, and also probably don't work as intended. Do not expect to find it arousing. But it should prove my semi-seriousness and provide a very basic idea of what I'm going for.

mega.nz/file/Z7gmVaBR#MJP...LnnwAPqbEajmREm2df3lz330k

I have various DLC installed; I don't know if the mod requires them or not. If it does, or you don't own Stellaris, you can still look through the files using Notepad++.

And yeah, check out memes' Stellaris hypno stories, they provide a good idea of what I'm going for, though the hope is that the spiritualist-style empire seen there would just be one path players of the mod could take.