Leadership now changed to "Heroism" to distinguish it somewhat from "Aptitude". Level cap bonus was removed from the tree.

One small change:
Maliciously Intolerant counselors now increase the amount of bombardment damage their ships are doing to other nations, rather than increasing the amount of bombardment their own planets receive. Sometimes a vicious dog bites its own tail, I guess.

There we are! With zilch in the way of playtesting so far, we are now theoretically updated and compatible with 3.8!

Wow! So many errors in the error log.

Well, the mod is now currently compatible with the new patch and will not pitch a fit. However, the civics still need to be updated to respect the new counselor features.

The late game techs are now no longer connected to leader levels. All the code and principles dealing with them has seen a lot of changes and there wasn't a beta to prepare for this or anything, so this is how I solve the problem quick. It's okay, though, it does mean more people will see all that content so long as they give it enough time.

Okay, there's a lot here.

For starters, this is everything I've been working on, mid-progress! I made the poor choice of working on several new things at once without splitting each thing into its own file, which meant that when I finished something and migrated it over, I'd sometimes forget a file here or there. My prototype branch would run fine, but then the live branch would break, and I wouldn't notice until playing with friends on the live branch.

So that's a problem, but also a new patch is coming that promises to overhaul one of the fundamental game mechanics, so it's better to just get everything out there, clear the work log, and get ready to start fixing a bunch of errors and incompatibilities. So what we have is:

Opulent Armadas
A partially completed ascension perk that allows you to build ship components with twice the power, but six times the cost and upkeep. Part-way through working on this, I realized that adding so many new weapons at once was a big task with very little pay-off, so I set it to the side and started working on something else (what's live now is what was completed).

Though it sounds powerful, the costs make it rather suboptimal. There is a hidden production of Unity offered by these components, however, and they are useful on star bases and federation fleets, which don't require component upkeep. Crisis ships don't get access to these components because they wouldn't have to pay for them, but unfortunately that means I have to positively affirm which vessels can equip this gear. It's not compatible with anything outside vanilla or this mod.

Various Ascension Techs
I'm in the process of adding techs related to your ascension picks. This isn't a finished process, but a few APs have them now.

Most notably, the Archaeotech perk allows you to access late game dark matter techs without having the corresponding level of scientist, meaning you don't have to complete the challenge of getting a scientist to level 10 to get the final techs. However, this is accomplished by researching step-wise techs between each tier. In practice, it seems to me that a good leader build is faster than the Archaeotech option, but more options are always good and it's not too far behind.

The inspiration for these AP techs came from a friend test-running the mod by themselves only to report they experienced almost none of the end-game techs because they couldn't get their leaders to high enough levels. So now, even if you can't do that, there will still be plenty of new end-game research options anyway, albeit tailored specifically to how you "ascended".

Big Armor
Large ships such as the mega carriers now equip armor components, but these components are uniquely large and powerful. This is so I can give those vessels upgrades to their components later and not have them lag behind the rest of the fleets. The real upside of this is that it made it a lot clearer what the armor values should cost due to math extrapolations, and all those big craft got less expensive as a result (this is also because I calculated the costs as if the armor were increasing in size tiers, which is cheaper than increasing by tech tiers).

And other stuff
And a bunch of other stuff. Mainly bug fixes and other little things, though I didn't squash all of them. For example, Fallen Empires should no longer delete their own star bases by trying to convert them into Combat Citadels. Here's to hoping that this update doesn't actually have more bugs than less!

I failed to transfer the level up messages for vassals over to the live version of the mod! That's now corrected, and vassals will no longer display a giant pink "error" square when they increase in level.

Corrected a graphical mistake with Central Mining Stations districts that caused their image not to display correctly.

Late game Machine traits are now not available during empire creation.

The "Imperial Trade" resolution now checks if you are a Sovereign Megacorp, rather than a regular Megacorp, since if you can access the resolution at all you can't be a regular Megacorp.

Corporate civics from this mod are now also properly available to the Sovereign Megacorp in the event a corporation becomes the Empire.