Star Lords

Star Lords attempts to bring the world of Starsector to life with many character-centric features. No longer will your only allies be nameless faction fleets who you'll meet once and never again. The core mechanic is the addition of dozens of Lords to the game, each with their own personality, fleet composition, backstory, and agendas.

Lords will roam the map alongside the player-- raiding, trading, feasting, expanding, and more. Lords follow their own economic system, requiring them to physically visit their fiefs to levy taxes and purchase new ships. They operate persistently and without requiring any interference from the player. When the Marshal raises the banners, the Lords will muster to war in organized interplanetary campaigns of unprecedented scale.

A Lord's behavior is heavily dependent on their personality and interpersonal relations with other Lords. Inter-lord relations are fully modeled, culminating in a brand new political system where Lords will politick, scheme, form alliances, and backstab while jockeying for wealth and influence within the realm.

Curry favor with Lords by completing their quests, fighting alongside them in battle, or supporting their political agenda. Form a core of close allies and leverage their support to seize de-facto power in your faction's political system. Or convince them to join your own faction and support your claim to unite the sector.

Star Lords is heavily inspired by campaign mechanics of Mount and Blade. The goal is to eventually add all major campaign mechanics from Warband. This mod aims to have minimal side-effects on the game. There are no changes to in-battle gameplay, and no direct effects on campaign balance aside from the actions of the Lords themselves.

Disclaimer

This mod is currently in early development. Expect plenty of bugs, crashes, questionable balancing, etc. Please report any crash logs or balance feedback to the forums. Thank you for your cooperation.

Installation

Download the latest release here and unzip in your Starsector mod folder.

This mod may be added to existing savegames, but may not be removed after being added. Make sure to back up your save game first in case of unexpected issues.

Full Feature List

• Adds 48 unique Lords spread among all the base major factions.
• Adds fief system, where each market is a fiefdom which can be owned by a Lord.
• Custom Economic system for Lords
  • Lords collect taxes from their own fiefs and participate in business ventures in friendly markets.
  • Income is used to expand their fleet, hire marines, and maintain existing ships.
• Custom fleet constructor for Lords, which allows each Lord to have their own distinctive fleet composition.
• Lords are active on the map, collecting income and waging war.
  • Lord actions are heavily dependent on Lord's personality and relations with other Lords
  • Lord's officer corps slowly level up from fighting in battles
• Player-Lord Interactions- If a Lord trusts you sufficiently, they may follow the player's military orders, offer quests, participate in scheming, and share sensitive intel about their operations.
• Feast system- Take a reprieve from braving the sector and join the lords of the realm in a night of feasting and revelry. Feasts are an excellent chance to meet all the lords and build rapport with them.
• Campaign system- Campaigns may be started by a faction's appointed marshal. All lords of the realm will gather to launch a grand invasion into enemy territory or defend against an enemy's invasion. If Nexerelin is enabled, lords may also use the Nexerelin ground combat system to capture markets.
• Defection system- Lords who are dissatisfied with their faction may defect to another. Or you can speed along the process and persuade or bribe Lords to join your own faction as your subordinates.
• Prisoner system- Lords may be captured in battle and either ransomed for credits or released for future goodwill.
• Political system- The cornerstone of all lord relations, the new political system is where all Lords of the realm gather to propose and vote on legislation. Appoint new marshals, squabble for newly conquered fiefs, conduct foreign policy, and more, as long as you can control the political situation.

Major Planned Features

Most of these are inspired by Mount & Blade.

• Continued Lord AI improvement and optimization.
• Political marriage/courtship system for forming marriage alliances.
• Expanded subterfuge system involving scheming with friendly lords to increase your status in the realm or discredit mutual rivals.
• "Freelancer" system for enlisting in a Lord's army and fighting as a common pilot.
• Flesh out feast system, with feast tournaments as friendly competition with fellow Lords
• Better integration with Nexerelin invasions and base game crises.
• Custom questlines for certain lords, e.g. allowing AI-sympathizing lords to field [REDACTED] fleets.

Dependencies/Compatibility

This mod has no dependencies, though it's recommended to play with Nexerelin for planet capture mechanics. This mod should work with faction/ship/weapon mods which don't impact base campaign mechanics. Any kind of mod that only affects in-battle gameplay is also fine. All specific compatibilities are not yet tested.

Adding your own Lords

If you're a modder or just want to put your own characters into the game, all you have to do is add another entry to the lords.json file. A few notes:

• "portrait" should be a valid image. By default, the mod will check for .PNGs in data/graphics/portraits/ of the base game or any mod folder. If your portraits are located in an unusual location, you can specify the path directly e.g. graphics/my_folder/my_portraits/my_portrait.png. This portrait must also be registered in any faction config in data/world/factions. You may register it under the starlords_nobility faction if you want a lord-exclusive portrait.
• "faction" should be a valid faction id
• "fief" should be a valid market id or null
• "ranking" is the lord's rank, which affects their political weight and base income. It should be between 0 and 2, where 2 is highest.
• "preferredItem" can be any of domestic_goods, food, luxury_goods, drugs, hand_weapons, alpha_core, or lobster.
• Flagship and ship preferences must contain valid ship variant ids. You can find these under the /data/variants folder of starsector-core or any mod directories.
• Faction and fief will be automatically converted to lower case. Ship variants are case-sensitive.

After that, your lord should be created automatically upon starting a new game.

Credits

Starsector team for developing the game
Nexerelin team's codebase for providing excellent references to many obscure parts of the Starsector API
Interestio for Lord portraits