Just an idea for Histidine, but have you considered disabling colony growth for AI-controlled space stations? It's kind of weird that those comparatively tiny structures will eventually balloon up in population to level 6 from their pre-game sizes of mostly 3 or 4. Wouldn't change much mechanically, but it helps with immersion.
I've considered adding a market condition that greatly slows population growth to all stations before, but decided I didn't want to do something that messes that much with mod stations.
I might add an option that does it "quietly" (visible only in the growth tooltip) though, like what's already done to slow NPC colony growth in general.
Bug report: Seems like there's another 'pirate' faction that spawned with a pirate base and when I send a base strike fleet to them, my alliance declared with said faction too. weird.
That "extra" pirate faction is from the Beyond the Sector mod. I haven't looked into why it's spawning in the main sector, don't know when it'll be fixed.
Question:
Do factions currently use the items I sell to them? Including blueprints, colony items, and planet surveys?
Edit: Also ships/weapons?
Selling survey data to anyone speeds up the time before the next NPC colony expedition occurs. NPC colonies will also use colony items you sell to them on the open market, if they can.
Other than that and selling blueprints to pirates, factions don't use any such things you sell them.
I see so is it possible to have ships that have no blueprints show up without a faction knowing it? Because the ship I want on the HEM doesn't belong to any faction. And can the player's faction be whitelisted so any bp the player learns the HEM begins to sell I would like to enable this actually myself!
Would this workaround work? By adding ship hull known to Tri tach faction file and setting cu_prototypeebm hull frequency to 0 would this make the faction know the hull in knowships yet never use it at all? Therefore enabling it to be just sold at the HEM as a workaround?
That should work, although you might want to give the ship the "no_bp_drop" tag as well.
Also, what does the special item Faction setup item do? Is it like a debug item or as a current game editing tool?
It's used for the faction setup screen when starting with own faction in random sector.
EDIT: Which factions are whitelisted for the prism in the prism_factions_whitelist by default? Is the player faction already whitelisted or by listing the player in the faction whitelist does the Prism freeport sell all the blueprints I know of on the HEM?
Most of the vanilla factions are whitelisted (in the code rather than the CSV, maybe I ought to move them), but player faction isn't. Adding it to the CSV will enable the high-end seller to sell player-known ships.
However, the blueprint trader doesn't use this list at all, it doesn't check for factions.