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The Empire strikes back

Tired of watching the ultratech ‘Empire’ show up to your killbox like they’re roleplaying as medieval cosplayers with charge rifles?

The Empire is supposed to be the most evolved faction on the rim. They hail from a glitterworld. They have military expierience. They are the only faction resembling an actual country and
having something like a uniform army. And they have the best tech. At least they should have. They should not be getting wiped out by 3 naked cannibals and a tamed boomalope. Let alone any modded player faction.

With this mod, Empire raids become legitimately terrifying — filled with gene-enhanced supersoldiers, implants, and gear worthy of their tech level.


The aim of this mod is to give the empire same or at least some of the tools player factions have access too. This means genes, implants, bionic and gear. There will be no new things except for a small Hediff.
Instead the Empire will take its arsenal out of your modlist. Trying to be as plausible lorewise according to my interpretation of the Empire. The Empire is not supposed to turn into just a generic super faction. They should still keep their identiy.
The Empire should be challenging but not super op. For this reason and because it makes sense lorewise the empire only has access to Ultratech stuff and below. No archotech stuff.

This is mainly achieved by giving the empire better equipment and bionics.

The most changes are done at cataphract level pawn in order to make the early game not overly punishing considering that the empire is naturally hostile to all player factions except New Arrivals.

Customizable by Mod Settings where feasible.


Settlements are better defended. They now inlcude Stellic Guards and Wardens and roughly double to triple the amount of defenders.

For everyone:
- better equipment for all pawns
- increase access to bionics
- increased money and access to equipment (if you use mods with stronger spacer weapons they now have the money to pruchase them)
- biocoded weapons
- painstoppers
- military training hediff that gives small combat related bonus (toggable in Mod Settings)
- unwaveringly loyal (toggable in Mod Settings)
- chance for luciferium infusion (changeable in Mod Settings)

Troopers:
- basic Military appeal (no more wearing troopers Cowboy Hats)

Champion
- advanced basic Military appeal

Cataphract
- ItemQuality set excelent
- Bionic Eyes
- Bionics Legs
- Bionics Arms

Stellic Guards and Warden
- only masterwork equipment
- full set of basegame bionics
- Coagulator
- HealingEnhancer
- Immunoenhancer

And now where the real power comes from.
(all following mods/dlcs are optional)

(configurable in Mod Settings)
Be ready to fight the empires own genetic super soldiers.

The empire now also starts genemodding their pawns and creating super soliders. Combat related genes will be added to their Xenotypes. Also negative genes will be added to balance out the metabilic cost.
The higher your wealth the more genes are added. The genes are handselected to give some form of advantage during battle.

Also inlcudes the new Hussar genes for the empires gene experiments.

- Pawns can spawn with unique weapons (configurable in Mod Setting)
- If biotech is installed pawns in Space will get the Vaccuum Resiliant gene

There is support for some of the bigger bionic mods to give the empire more power. If any of the following mods are installed, better bionics are distrubited to the epmires pawn.
Starting with the Stellic Defender and Warde getting the improved set of bionics. The cataprhact get the old Stellic bionics while the old Cataphract bionics getting passed down to champions and janissaries.
- Integrated Implants
- EPOE-forked
- [FSF] Advanced Bionics Expansion
- [FSF] Vanilla Bionics Expansion
- RSBE (Hadrcore Edition should work too)
- MSE2
(For maximum implants and bionics on empire pawns use the first three, but all add something)

- The Absolver gets new bionics too

- Adds new rarer pawnkinds with eltex weaponry wearing psychic-sensitivity increasing equipment.

Also patched the Eltex Weapon Tag to replace it with "EltexGun" and "EltexMelee". Didnt find another way to only give the weapons to the new pawns. But make sense lorewise since only empire spawn with eltex gear in vanilla. Should also work as a slight buff if this weapon pack is used since these are not that great on 100% sensitivity vs 100% sensitivity fights which are probaly the norm.
Disclaimer: Not sure how good they actually are. Sound good on paper but didnt play enough to see if these are truly strong on high sensitivity pawn.

If Powerful Psycast AI (Continued) or AI Can Use Psycasts is installed a new psycaster pawn will be added to raid, with psycast specifig gear.

While not explicitly supported, for additional difficulty and anti cheese i recommend using
- Harder Gear Looting or Death Acidifiest
- Vanilla Psycasts Expanded (only this or one of the Psycasts mods mentioned above)

XML patches are used where possible. But something cant be done without C#. Especially adding the gene since i didnt want to bloat the game with dozen new Xenotypes just to make the empire stronger.
All harmony patched behaviour can bis disabled in the Mod Setting if needed in case there are problem, incompatibilies or just because you prefer it that way.

Performance impact should be neglectable small. Pawn a modified and raid creation and with my hardware i didnt notice more lag during raid generation than normal, even with raid points raid.

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Please feel free to leave feedback (balance or general), more support suggestions or problem/bugs in the comments.
Generally i would be interessted if the random gene approach is fine or if fixed progression of added xenes would be better.

Disclaimer: I wont add immediate support for big gene mods like Alpha genes, B&S or WVC. There are simply too many genes and i think the current random approach doesnt work very well there.
Im think if doing it a litte bit different with them. So no ETA on support for those.

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