After a couple of reloads and reboots, I got this mod working again. Not running the species diversity comp patch though only because I'm worried about breaking everything again. So hard to test mods on the patch because the mod load time is way slower than before.

Anyway! For a suggestion, I was thinking it might be worth giving hive minds some love. They have pretty underwhelming civics to choose from.

For starters, a Aliens-esque "Birthing Hosts" civic could add some flavor to a hive mind. Could work that whenever a pop is purged you either get a new pop of your species (which is a bit different from assimilating kind of like how necrophage is different too) or maybe just a boost to pop growth speed on the plant that stacks with each purge. For balance, they could have a small penalty to base growth speed to encourage purging for pops.

Lmao I feel dumb. Should have asked if you had the patch enabled. That error should be fixed now. I just had forgotten to update my patch when species diversity was updated so it was all messed up.

your suggestion does sound very interesting as well. I will have to look into the way necrophage works to see if I can emulate it to a degree. Hive minds and machine empires are what I wanted to do something for next as I have tried to get a civic for each ethic and one for the unique playstyles of megacorps and the gestalts. So thank you and even if I cant figure it out I always appreciate ideas

Oooo! It was the patch all along lol. Whoops.

I'll let you know if I think of anything else for hiveminds. I feel like machine empires have a lot of fun variety with Rogue Servitor, Driven Assimilator, and Determined Exterminator plus flavorful little perks like Introspective but Hive Minds just get bland generic buffs.

Introspective but for Hive Minds and Society research could be a nice simple idea. Also, I was thinking something with accessing the Shroud could be very fun a flavorful, but no clue where to begin balancing that in an easy way to mod in.

Also, bit of a nitpick really, but with the new stuff like Militarized Research, which is available to Megacorps as well, could we get a yellow icon for the consistency obsessive like myself? lol Aerial Automatos has always been a slightly different blue which is annoys me enough, but the blue and yellow really gets to me haha. Sorry if that sounds picky.

I am not too good at the graphic design portion of this so they are always gonna look a little off due to that. For the aerial one I had forgotten that the machines have a slightly different blue so I will fix that in the next release I do. The militarized research is meant for normal empires but I thought it would work fine with the like PMC megacorps too so I let them pick it. I could just copy a new form of the civic just for megacorps and make it yellow though so that'll be pretty easy.

It would be nice if it's not too much hassle. I can do some basic photoshop work if you ever need any help. I'll double check when I get how, but I think Serene State and National Deference are currently also available to Megacorps.