Modding Shadow Empire⌗

This post is about Shadow Empire and its multiplayer scene. If you want to skip to the technical details, wait for the next post in the series! I’ll link it here when I write it.

An Introduction to Shadow Empire⌗

Shadow Empire is my favorite video game. Shadow Empire synthesizes rigorously physics-driven procedural planet and history generation a la Dwarf Fortress, “Paradoxical” immersive roleplay-driven grand strategy games, 4X mechanics that turn research into its own minigame, an unforgiving WW2 logistics simulation, and above all else the depth of grognardia, and a bona-fide Slytherine hex-and-counters wargame with randomized unit and formation customization – for play in a sci-fi setting, detailed in novella-length chapters in the manual, providing a cynical leftist future-history defined by machiavellianism, macroeconomics, and a Kojima-esque fixation on nanomachines creating new life that then dumps you into something like Dune, Waterworld, Mad Max, Forbidden West, or something brand new, like an eighty-two meter tall Evasion Puma that stomps harder than a bunker buster.

The Evasion Puma is the product of Jadey’s death world. She’d written up a bit about the world already before she found our nightmare.

The artist Pymous’ rendition of the Evasion Puma.

I quit playing Shadow Empire once a few years ago because my heart’s delight was in taking each turn over an hour in each of my play-by-email games, writing prose from the characters’ perspectives, scheming with and lying to other players in the 4-player free-for-alls, crunching numbers for my optimized build order, gawking at randomized alien species with horrifically lethal combinations of feats – I loved the game and I love it still.

Multiplayer Shadow Empire⌗

Shadow Empire is made by a solo developer, Victor Reijkers. I get the impression it was intended primarily as an endlessly novel single-player experience with multiplayer being a happy afterthough. My fellow obsessives and I disagree that this is its highest calling!

Shadow Empire turn lengths are wildly variable on the number, gravity, and complexity of the decisions to make, the territories to govern, and the military units to command, but a better woman than me might keep all her turns from 5-45 minutes. A very short 1v1 could be over in 60 turns, with the first fifteen going very quickly for experienced players. I would describe 60 turns as the beginning of the mid-game under the most common multiplayer start, Tech Level 4.

There’s an arbitrary player cap of 4 in the UI which we can bypass but rarely do, as adding one to play-by-email turn cycles can often add a day and sometimes add a week to individual turns. A common goal is to get multiple turn cycles a day for the first fifteen, then at least one per day after that. Checking the chat, I see a game that was updated this week that’s at turn 99 – and started 2.5 years ago. The game that started chronologically after that one is at turn 149. 250 turns isn’t out of the ordinary. This game is a commitment in multiplayer, 2-6 months of 5-45 minute turns minimum likely watered down over years. Unevenly-distributed and swingy maps – “endlessly novel” by any other name – played so long exhaust a lot of human lifespan!

We work hard to generate fair and balanced multiplayer maps, but there are still issues. Nukes end the game anticlimactically, aggressive air drops incentivize bizarre road design, postures give game-warping modifiers for confusingly low costs, random events repeatedly give out-of-order technology to specific players, and the most efficient logistics strategy is logi injection where you use multiple low-level transport assets 200km outside of a city to realize a better cost to benefit ratio, among other things. We generally agree not to use ICBMs and aggressive air drops, but using suboptimal logistical solutions feels different. We want to win at math. So… some people tried to fix the game with math! One of those people? Voker57.

VAdjust⌗

Voker57 was the winner of my hardest-fought game of Shadow Empire and is the author of the forum post about generating balanced multiplayer maps I linked earlier, one I reference often. He worked with Catasteroid to create a mod which conveyed a few of his proposals for a more balanced logistics system, one which made logi injection inefficient by economy of scale. The description of VAdjust version 5:

VLPAdjust version 5 For Shadow Empire version 1.21v

A custom commissioned mod made by Catasteroid for Voker57 The purpose is to adjust the statistics of logistics buildings to modify the logistical layer of gameplay, specifically the things it adjusts are:

• The AP production of logistics assets does not increase with higher asset levels
• The construction costs and production costs of logistics assets are scaled with respect to the amount of LP production added by that level
• The number of turns construction takes for each level of logistics assets have been adjusted
• The maximum level of logistics assets is now capped by the regime’s admin level
• Disables Ancient Archive and Supreme Leader Day fate cards
• Disables Victory Pact diplomatic card
• Disables Quad MG and 10MT ICBM techs which disables their model types types
• Disables posture cards and posture creation organisation tasks
• Disables Omnious sealed door and Ancient underground complex linked zone story events
• Modifies Computing Node discovered zone story event so the bonus for scrapping the computing node provides a one-time bonus of 1000BP instead of unlocking a technology.

I won’t justify or explain these decisions, or the canonical typo “Omnious” – that’s out of scope. The important part here is on the second line: “For Shadow Empire version 1.21v.” The most recent version is 1.26k2. It doesn’t seem like that should be so incompatible, but it is, somewhat by design. Consider how Vic describes the modding tool he’s published, the Story & Stratagem Editor. Quote:

The S&S Editor is designed to allow you to add content to the vanilla game and not to change the content of the vanilla game. (that being said the ‘Modify existing table’ tables do allow you to hack into the vanilla data tables)"

So, we can hack it! That’s all I heard lol. What this has meant in practice is that mods that “modify existing table” are liable to break on each update. That said, how do we start modding Shadow Empire?

To be continued…