You probably remember that at launch Stellaris included an army "Attachment" system. This let you modify armies, upgrading them with cool things like mounting them as cavalry or deploying swarms of killer drones. With 2.2 the army attachments were removed, due to player complaints about excessive clicking. Rather than implementing a new UI for the system, Paradox removed the lot and unfortunately threw a bunch of great colour, story and lore content in the bin.

What you likely don't remember is that during a dev stream pre 2.2, the game director of the time, Wiz, speculated he would bring attachments back after 2.2. That never happened. Wiz is gone and the modern devs have talked about being uninterested in ground combat.

What you almost definitely have no idea about is that there are many more incredibly cool attachments, all professionally concept-ed and written by Paradox discover-able unused in the game files. They are amazing ideas cut right before launch, likely due to the changing ideas for ground war pre-release and then crunch. I get the feeling that these attachments were left visible in the hope a mod maker would pick up the torch. That's what this is.


This mod adds five policies to your game. Simple as that! Each is an attachment that gives you special bonuses and new armies to play with.

Inside you'll find:

• Pre 2.0 attachments, like Xenomorph Cavalry, Power Armour, Neo-Concrete Fortifications
  
• Unreleased attachments, such as Raptor Flocks, Exploding Slave Collars, Battle Worms, Class-A Psionics, Shadow Assassins
  
• New attachments, to fill balance holes in the mod, hopefully still cool like Mechs, Active Camouflage, Xeno-morph Queens and more.
  

There are more than ten paths to play through, with attachments for all kinds of empires, armies and ascension paths.


There are roughly 70 attachments to discover and they are broken into five categories:

• Equipment, like Flame-Throwers, Jet-Packs and Cybernetic Replacements
  
• Infrastructure, like Air-Defence artillery, Neo Concrete, Tremor or Storm Generators
  
• Reinforcements, like the Military police corp, Cybernetic Infiltrators, Genetic Shock Troopers, or Suicide Clone Brigade
  
• Beasts, like Mutant Hordes, Xenomorph Brood Coordinators, War Canines or Battle Worms
  
• Vehicles, like Hover-Tanks, Battle Striders, War Speeders, Dropships or Mechs
  

Unlike Vanilla, in which equipping attachments required hundreds of tedious clicks, you now apply attachments to all armies at once. Attachments are selected using Empire Policies, where they will instantly confer an empire wide bonus to all your troops.



First you'll need to research the technology for whatever attachment you like. Every attachment has it's own, each with it's own unique image, name and flavour text. In order to avoid tech-spam cluttering the tree, you do not roll for these technologies like normal - they are instead discovered from events like Archaeotechs.



You'll notice that when hiring Commanders they can now have a trait designating their personal preference or expertise with a type of attachment. Perhaps your General loves beasts, or is really knowledgeable about ground fortifications, and so on.



To discover a new attachment simply win a ground conflict with that leader! After the dust has settled they will propose to your science departments an idea for a technology and the option will be added to the list for you to research at your leisure. The attachment your leader proposes is most likely to belong to the category they are most enthusiastic about, so if you want to discover a bunch of beasts (for example) make sure you're using a leader equally keen on them.

Attachment proposals depend on a variety of other fun things: Many require you to have already unlocked previous technologies, some require your empire to be following a certain policy (like allowing slavery). They can react to civics, or origins, ascension paths and more. I won't spoil them here, but there are ten paths to find and full details are avaialble at the spreadsheet link at the bottom of the page.



Attachments come in varying strengths. As you progress through the tiers you'll be able to equp more and more of them, up to a maximum of five at once. The rarities are:
Basic (T1), Advanced (T2), Rare (T3), Exotic (T4) and Legendary (T5).

The legendary ones are especially powerful, but are extra rare and have pretty fun pre-requisites! See which ones you can find and have fun.


In addition to an empire bonus, every attachment also grants a unique bonus army to fight for you. For example, if you use the Military Police attachment, you'll gain units of Military Police Corps in your ground invasions.

These new armies are completely micro-free bonuses. They have no cost, they do not have to be manually recruited or taken in transport ships: They automatically spawn when combat begins, and leave when combat ends.

These bonus armies also interact with your Commanders trait. If the attachment you've equipped is the same category as your leader is enthusiastic about, you'll get more of them spawning. Pay attention to the wishes and whims of your leaders, adapting your policies as you go. You can upgrade the Commander traits at level-up, too. So if you want to double triple down on fighting alongside hordes of mutants, that's totally possible.

There is a unique army for every single attachment, and I really enjoyed implementing them: They can be anything from Flame-Thrower Brigades, to Clone Decoys, to Android Snipers to Xenomorph Queens. Have fun!



For full documentation I have a google sheet here.


Check out the thread below.

I would love help from anyone out there who can provide new attachment icons. I mean more variations of these icons:



My mod Dangerous Wildlife Expanded has gives you bonus attachment content (the cavalry feature) and has custom code to make these two mods work together.
UIOD is great for seeing your generals traits a bit more clearly.
As with all my mods, there is a configurable balance file for you to play with in scripted_variables if you want to mess with anything! Try it out!