Lo-Fi Games

SO I love Kenshi and have already gone through a few playthroughs. The Issue I have though is that there are too few storylines and objectives. Even more so once you have a truly strong squad and adequately defended base. I found myself taking down empires only to have the world filled with roaming mobs of smaller factions. What's worse is that in vanilla you are limited on manpower and even if you want to carve out a territory with a few bases, you have to run between them to defend against all the roaming squads. This brings me to the idea of nation building for Kenshi 2.

Once you are big enough you should be able to hold down a few players created cities and assign members to act similar to nobles and lord over them. Give them the ability to govern and recruit armies with all the displaced peasants around. A new job such as administrator or trader could be set up using specific building or objects. This would then force those roaming bands and enemies to organize in order to take you on. Furthermore, depending on ruling style, you might become the new Empire that needs taking down. Also, this would allow some of those "admin" roles to develop diplomatic status and even betray you.

The AI of the game should always be looking to take you down even when you are strong. So, keep the current formula of train and survive, but for end game make it about the survival of your clan, organization or nation. Of course, this would also mean the game requirements might go higher than originally intended in order to have armies against each other. Perhaps A Kenshi game that has two modes depending on what is going on. When you are handling your squad and solo characters it operates in the current gaming mode. When establishing a nation and doing armies it takes on a more RTS approach. This idea appeals to those who max out characters and production lines to top tier. All my crafters make Masterwork gear and I'm full out fitted but non npcs can afford it. but if crafting supported the resources needed for an army or nation than it would make crafting feel necessary even at end game.

Just a few ideas.

A lot of Nation building can be achieved in the current state of Kenshi's modding kit with World States, Relations and also you can use dummy factions that don't exist in the actual gameplay as world state factors by making dialogues that effect relations with a dummy faction and world states that are tied to player relations.

IE say, you joined the Reavers, and then you speak to Solomon and say you are going to conquer the world for him or something, you could have a fake faction called "Reaver Conquest" that gets set to +100 and then when you go take out all of UC their could be worldstates that only appear when you have that relations so Reavers take over all the UC settlements when you take out the nobles.

You could create faction alliances similarly. Say you have allied with Crab Raiders and you have a mod to ally with Tech Hunters too. You could have a convo with Crab Queen where you say its time to actually settle the land properly (after you took care of South Hive, Reavers, Skeleton Bandits, Skin Bandits) and the Tech Hunters should be Allies. Convince her to say yes in dialogues. This can set a relations to a dummy faction. Then go speak to someone in Black Scratch about the same idea. That sets up another dummy faction relation. Then when both relations are met it sets a new world state where Tech Hunters and Crab Raider patrols to not spawn, but a new Faction's does instead called "South East Alliance" for example, and that faction is friendly and Co exists with both Tech Hunters and Crab Raiders and is composed of the same types of units from both factions. That way the real Tech Hunter and Crab Raider factions never cross paths and have fights because they only exist in their settlements and the patrols are friendly with both.