One major change is the removal of all restrictions on which pops can be assimilated. I have a few reasons for this, although none of them are sufficient in isolation:

• In general, 3.6 is a step towards making assimilation easier. Total Assimilation should move in the same direction, to keep assimilation significantly easier than it is in the base game.
  
• People install this mod because they don't want to deal with species-spam. For example, once one robot slips into your Genetic empire, suddenly your pristine Species menu is forever sullied (unless you like purging).
  
• This will probably be easier for me to implement and maintain.

Let me know if I'm missing something!

I'm also struggling to figure out what to do with Driven Assimilators (DA). The key requirement is that DA must be better at assimilation than other machine empires. We can satisfy this by moving assimilation earlier, or making it more inclusive.

If we move assimilation earlier, we can satisfy this by allowing assimilation at the start-of-game (similar to the current version of the mod). But that would break Cybernetic ascension, since TA converts pops to the primary species, which is the machine species for DA. I could disable Cybernetic ascension for DA, but that would affect compatibility with other mods.

If we make it more inclusive, we could prevent non-DA machine empires from assimilating organics. But that feels unfair to non-DA machines, since (as planned above) every other empire (including Hive-Mind) can assimilate absolutely everyone. I could make TA more exclusive for all other empires too, but that's a big change just to accommodate DA's.

I can't really think of any critiques of what you've laid out here. I think you have a very good idea of what you want your mod to be and how to take it there.

The DA issue is certainly a pickle though, given the compatibility implications. The only thing I can think of would be to change the DA-exclusive Cybernetics tree to front-load additional trait picks and project cost reductions.

Or would it be possible to maybe add a new purge/assimilation type for DAs with increased speed/resources/etc compared to other empires?

Thanks for your thoughts, Occred!

Ultimately, I'm leaning towards simply breaking DAs who want to go with Cybernetic Ascension; that's a very small percentage of all empires. If subscribers complain about this, I can split "Total Assimilation" out as an entirely new citizenship type, which would have the positive side-effect of reducing conflicts with other mods! That's similar to what you're suggesting, with the "new purge/assimilation type".

A lot of scope errors from the new update.
[13:08:35][effect.cpp:613]: Script Error, attempted to execute an effect on an unsupported scope!
Event: tass.2
Location: file: scripted effect apply_post_assimilation_effects at file: scripted effect total_assimilation_effect at file: events/tass_events.txt line: 84 line: 1 line: 1
Effect Type: set_citizenship_type
Scope:type=planet
id=16
random={ 0 1495372768 }
random_allowed=yes
root={
type=planet
id=16
random={ 0 1495372768 }
random_allowed=yes
from={
type=none
id=0
random={ 0 1101771175 }
random_allowed=yes
}
}
from={
type=none
id=0
random={ 0 1101771175 }
random_allowed=yes
}
prev={
type=pop
id=42
random={ 0 1495372767 }
random_allowed=yes
root={
type=planet
id=16
random={ 0 1495372768 }
random_allowed=yes
from={
type=none
id=0
random={ 0 1101771175 }
random_allowed=yes
}
}
from={
type=none
id=0
random={ 0 1101771175 }
random_allowed=yes
}
prev={
type=planet
id=16
random={ 0 1495372768 }
random_allowed=yes
from={
type=none
id=0
random={ 0 1101771175 }
random_allowed=yes
}
}
}

This mod seems to cause OOS errors in Multiplayer environments for random_count

So you are still in the development stage for 3.6 if i read this right? the changes look great BTW.

@Dr. Nolegs Thanks much for the bug report! I'll dig into it, but let's move this to another Discussion.

@ekvinox Nope, the 2.0 version of the mod has been released, and should support Stellaris 3.6. Bug reports are welcome.