Planetary System Modifiers, Solar System Modifiers, Sector Modifiers (2024)

The vanilla game has a lot of Empire modifiers and Colony (i.e. planet) modifiers.

Vanilla has a handful of Solar System modifiers, like the Deep Space Black Site starbase building, but mostly this design space is unused.

There are some mods which do add bonuses in these categories -- NSC2 adds more starbase buildings which give solar-system-wide benefits, Gigastructural Engineering adds at least one megastructure which has a benefit to a planetary system -- and playing with those makes me want to explore the design space further.

What other mods work in this space?

Could a limited supply of system bonuses be used to enable a "Tall" playstyle, or perhaps make mid-game specialization more interesting?

I don't know about any mods adding these. If part of system development was on the system level you probably could cut down on micromanagement a bit. I think that obvious things like creating jobs and housing should be an automated mechanic like factories and housing buildings that are upgradable. How you develop and what direction would be up to what policies the player sets. If there would be no limits to developing planets and systems and if the process was partly automated things like decline of a planet or system could also be in the game without hurting the player or the ai too badly.

For example:

• There could be a mechanic that makes pops move back to their original empire if their planet was surrendered as part of a peace deal. The result is then that the losing side would have a far better chance at a comeback.
• The devs talked about pops automatically moving to the planets that do have jobs. If you could infinitely develop your home system or a system it would allow the capital or economic/industrial centre of your empire to move organically.
• It would allow small empires that are boxed in to compete without forcing them to go for megastructures or habitats.
• There could be events or mechanics that cause populations to move like massive unemployment because the market of a certain product has crashed.

All in all if all damage can be rebuilt and the economic potential of a single system would be near limitless the penalties and bad things that can happen can also be more severe. This all could also allow for more impactfull narrative like having to move your capital because of some threat or disaster without the need of making those kinds of things solely event based. I think the kind of modifiers you are suggesting could help in making wide and tall be less depended on artificial rules to make them work. There are clear things to go for if you want to go either wide or tall but the economy needs to support both and everything in between without the absolute need for special traditions or perks. Distance is barely a factor in Stellaris while it should influence a lot of things. Megatructures could also be a lot more interesting and offer unique bonusses instead or on top of the bonusses they already have. For example laboratories could have diminishing returns the further they are away from systems with adequate communication infrastructure but the science nexus could partially negate that penalty on top of the bonus it already provides. Finally I would like to stress again that I think that modifiers should be the end all be all and the base mechanics for the economy should allow both wide and tall. Some of those modifiers traits/perks/components/resources are simply better than other ones, making every game play out the same (or you must choose to actively hurt your own progress). In short the base economy and other base mechanics should support more different playstyles while the modifiers should provide unique bonusses that are not obtainable otherwise instead of percentage bonusses.

EDIT: I want to add one more afterthougt on the development ceiling of any system. If the development of a single system is near limitless over the course of a game if the player or ai is willing to focus all investments in the same place it would decrease the need to balance the game a bit. The game currently isn't balanced to handle low amounts of habitable worlds. The ai isn't capable to handle it and even as the human player you will have a very hard time to compete against fallen empires or the crises in the late game.