u/LittleIf

Fallen empire declares a humiliation war on my vassal, dragging me and a couple of other federation members into it.

Then some time later the rivals/enemies of some of my federation members join the war on the FE’s side (they probably proposed joining the war for free as a “gift” in a trade deal with the FE).

Then some more time later, the enemies of those enemies offer me a “gift” to join the war on my side for free.

At this point there’s like over a dozen nations involved in the war, with a bazillion claims on both sides, which means the war will probably take centuries to resolve.

It’s the best addition to Stellaris ever :)

I sent in my Zarqlan's pilgrims and they kept losing to random auto-designed AI spam! It feels like the outcome is just totally random.

Any tips on how to win it?

New civ Heian Japan gets culture bonuses from working tiles with breathtaking appeal. This kind of feels like Teddy Roosevelt's ability in civ 6. I was really hoping that Heian's unique wonder would increase tile appeal across your entire empire, but alas it only increases appeal for tiles adjacent to wonders.

Civ 6's Eiffel Tower provides +2 appeal to all tiles in your empire. It's quite powerful especially for culture victories, and especially busted with certain combos like Teddy Roosevelt or Australia.

What if we had something similar in 7? Do you think it would be overpowered?

In Steam, open your game files via Manage -> Browse local files. Then look for Base\modules\base-standard\data\victories.xml (if you are on Windows) or Contents/Resources/Base/modules/base-standard/data/victories.xml (if you are on Mac).

Look for the code block starting on line 179 with VictoryDominationPercents. The DominationPercent parameter defines how many times higher you need to score than the second-place opponent in order for the victory condition to trigger. For culture victories, look for lines with VICTORY_CULTURE_MODERN. Early victories in exploration age are also defined here via PreviousAgeCount="1" (modern age victories are defined with PreviousAgeCount="2").

For example, setting DominationPercent="1000" on the line for

VictoryType="VICTORY_CULTURE_MODERN" StartingAge="AGE_ANTIQUITY" MinAgeProgressPercent="50" PreviousAgeCount="1"

means that in a game that starts in the age of antiquity, in order to win the culture victory when the game reaches 50% age progress in the age of exploration, you need to have a culture victory score that's 1000% higher than the second-place opponent (in other words, 11x).

Setting all DominationPercent thresholds to very high values for culture victories will essentially disable the culture victory. Similarly, you can also disable the economic and military victories by modifying the corresponding lines that define their score thresholds.

Note 1: not fully sure how science victory is defined, but that's out of scope because science victories require a launchpad and therefore cannot happen early.

Note 2: after you save your edits and relaunch the game, the changes will affect existing saved games, with a caveat. From my own testing, the DominationPercent values you define will only take effect the moment the age progress hits the required threshold. For example, if you are currently 55% in the exploration age, any changes you make to the victory threshold that activates at 50% age progress will NOT be retroactively applied. However, once your age progress hits the next threshold (e.g. 80% in the exploration age for the "Crushing Victory") your edited DominationPercent will take effect.

Note 3: I'm not sure how to package this into a mod and upload it into the Steam workshop. If anyone has expertise on that front feel free to do it. My local testing was all done by editing the game files directly and relaunching the game.

For those who don't know, Han's unique improvement Great Wall in previous patches "decreased" the population count in your settlements and prevented the food cost to grow new citizens from increasing. This meant that you could spam the Great Wall while also letting your rural population grow like crazy, making Han an S tier civ.

In the new update this is apparently fixed. No more infinite culture/happiness spam. Han doesn't really have much else going for it right now, which makes me sad.

Looks like the "balance pass" they did for ToT killed a few of the strongest meta builds that used to exist (the other being Ashoka's infinite happiness spam which translated to infinite settlement cap). Probably time to move on and find some new metas :)