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Meaningful Crime

Makes Crime more nuanced, and rebalances Criminal Syndicates. For Stellaris 2.3. Use this excellent patch by TechSY730 for now.

Despite seeming quite scary, Crime in Stellaris isn't all its made out to be. Dealing with it is actually quite simple: Enact a Crime Lord Deal, then forget about it. For a pithy 25 Influence, this blocks all negative events from Crime and gives you a whopping +10 Stability for your trouble. You'll lose a couple of pops as Criminals, sure, but since you don't need to employ Enforcers anymore it's a wash. What were you even worried about?

This is a bit of a proof-of-concept mod that tries to change that. Here's how:

• Instead of 1 Criminal for every ~30 Crime (4 Criminals at 100% Crime), you now get 1 Criminal for every 10 Crime (10 Criminals at 100% Crime). That's more than twice as many crooks turning hard-working pops into useless layabouts!
  
• Instead of stealing away an insignificant 1 Trade Value, Criminals now consume 1 Energy, 2 Amenities, and decrease planet Stability by -1. The Crime Lord Deal remains unchanged, but now it's simply giving you back the Stability the Criminals took away from you. Think of it like putting the planet on low-maintenance autopilot.
  
• Instead of Enforcers giving -25 Crime Reduction, they now only give -15. In vanilla Stellaris, Enforcers are almost too good at their jobs; now achieving a crimeless utopia requires a reasonable investment of buildings, resources, and pops.
  
• The above is all more or less true for gestalts too.

This mod also tweaks a couple of peripheral civics: Police State, and Criminal Syndicate

• If you're a Police State, Enforcers still give the full -25 Crime, but you can't make Crime Lord Deals - that would be ridiculous!
  
• To accommodate its slash-and-burn style of business, Criminal Syndicates now save on contracting costs and bureaucratic red tape! Establishing branch offices now receives a -30% energy and influence discount and Criminal Branch Office Buildings cost less minerals to construct. The branch office value penalty for a low-crime world has also been slightly reduced; bad business is still business, after all.
  
• NEW: Criminal Syndicate buildings now give jobs to their host if they didn't before, but more importantly reduce the number of criminals on the planet, too. Now they're actually giving you back something for your trouble.

I'd recommend pairing this mod with Starnet AI, because it actually knows when to throw in the towel and make a Crime Lord Deal to make things easier for itself to manage. And though I haven't tested for compatibility, I wholeheartedly encourage the use of the Underground Realms mod.
Fully compatible with Augmented Authorities. Use the compatch if you're worried about compatibility.

This mod murdered the following vanilla files in a dark alleyway:

• 03_crime_decisions and 08_static_modifiers_megacorp. Don't override the latter if you can; it's how criminals-per-crime is determined.
  
• 00_other_jobs, 02_specialist_jobs, and 04_gestalt_jobs. The latter two just for the enforcer changes, so they're not as important, but still don't override these.
  
• The Criminal Syndicate civic and branch buildings.
  
• A few lines in Defines (mostly just criminal_syndicate_low_crime_mult).