New Shroud Patron Random Events Overview (2024)

FluffyVanguard said:

Hello fellow psionics!
With the covenant rework just revealed I decided to go through the shroud events file and compile what the new random adverse events are. There is a price to pay after all, and it's better to know that price before signing the deal.

Note that this is only about the random side effects, not taking the new covenant boni/mali or progression events into account.

The Instrument has changed in the following ways:

• can no longer reduce gov. ethics attraction
• can no longer cause +200% consumer good upkeep on a planet
• can now increase psionic pop upkeep empire wide of any resourcefor 720 days
  • 0.1 consumer goods
  • 0.75 alloys or unity
  • 0.02 gases, crystals or motes (needs at least 5 income per month to trigger)
  • 0.005 zro or dark matter (needs at least 1 income per month to trigger)
  • 0.0025 living metal or nanites (needs at least 1 income per month to trigger)

The Instrument used to be relatively harmless prior to the rework, but now it has become a bit mor serious. The 0.75 alloys/unity or 0.1 consumer goods must be wrong, because cg is labeled as common and alloy/unity as rare. Given the short timer I suspect the cg upkeep should be 1 instead of 0.1.

The Eater has changed in the following ways:

• can now eat a leader (if I read this correctly it's the highest level one)
• can still eat 1 pop and cause -20 happiness for 3600 days
• can still eat 3 pops and cause -40% happiness for 3600 days
• can no longer eat inhabited planets
• can now eat part of a planet (size > 12, only once per planet, no capital), creating a blocker (-2 districts, -5 stability, +6 phy/soc research)
• can now eat an uninhabitable planet, turning it into a shrouded world

The Eater can no longer randomly eat an entire planet, hurray! Can still eat pops though, and now leaders aswell, so ...

The Whisperers have changed in the following ways:

• can still give the substance abuser trait to a leader
• can still kill a leader
• can now kill 1 pop and cause -10 stability, +100% ethic shift chance and -200% gov. ethics attraction on a planet for 3600 days
• can now kill up to 8 pops and cause -20% unity production, +100% ethic shift chance and -200% gov. ethics attraction on a planet for 3600 days

The whisperers still mess with your leaders, but they don't tank your stability as much anymore. Instead they now try to shift your pop ethics away from your government. Considering pop ehtics don't matter that much, I consider this to be better. At least until we get an internal politics expansion. Unfortunately they retain their ability to kill 8 pops, making them the most lethal of the patrons now.

The composer has changed in the following ways:

• can still mutate your species
• can now kill a leader
• can now turn 4 pops into pre-sapients, with either the proles or intellectuals trait

Grandpapa Nurgle

The Composer can now mess with your species even better, by taking away their sapience (which is probably for the best anyway). And he can now kill a leader, because why not.

Overall the patrons are still who they always were, but at least two of the worst consequences - losing an entire colony to the eater and -100 stability from the whisperers - are gone now. The Instrument is still the best in terms of events imo, even if it's more expensive now. Plus it is now the only covenant that can't kill your leaders. Seriously what did those poor leaders ever do to you, Paradox? The Whisperers now potentially being the most bloodthirsty strikes me as odd, I'd like to see the pop killing removed here, that should be the Eaters perogative. The Composer can now turn your people into pre-sapients, which I find funny, but the leader killing is really unnecessary.

Click to expand...

Question: Can these happen multiple times or only once per game? How powerful are the positive events vs the negative events, how big is the total pool, and how often is the roll?

What I'm getting at here is if there's a set number of events, some positive and some negative, and each one is going to happen once every game, and the only question is in what order, then having some pretty darn negative events is fine and it's all about the benefit in aggregate.

If you're going to get all the events in a run but the negative events + pact downsides outweigh the positive events + pact upsides, that's bad but it's just a balancing issue rather than an attitude issue.

If it's possible, even likely, for the amount of good events vs bad events you get in a run to swing wildly based entirely on RNG then... well, that's complicated.