The holy slavedrivers combine two very powerful game mechanics in a clever way: Slavedrivers for double FIDSI and religion for happiness.
Introduction
The holy slavedrivers have their whole mechanics in the name already: They are religious and they are slavedrivers. Now slavedrivers is an amazing yet dangerous racial affinity that makes any population that isn't yours but lives on the same planet as one of yours produce 100% more FIDSI. It creates -10 Happiness per supressed population though.
That is where religion comes into play. The third unlocked law – Saints and Sinners bill – sets your global happiness to content or happy if you are a republic. That means you can expand as much as you like, have the most slaves as possible and people still like you.
The Faction
General
- Gameplay Affinity: Slavedrivers
- Visual Affinity: Riftborn
- Government: Republic
- Home Planet: Atoll
Population
- Political Impact: Religious, any addition you like (Anti-Pacifist and Anti-Militarist help)
- Bonuses: Loyal Citizens, Engaging Denizens, Boundless Collection
Traits
- Ace Senators
- Pilgrims minor faction population
- Smooth Talkers
- Strange But Good
- Guardians
Additional Insights
Why Riftborn?
You might ask yourself: why Riftborn visual affinity? This is a key aspect to the race because it helps manage your population much better. Remember you only need one of your own populations to make all the other factions' pops into slaves per planet. The Riftborn visual affinity forces you to construct your own pops instead of growing them with food. Like that, you can create a pop on each planet and let the rest fill up with slaves.
Isn't Republic dangerous?
In a Republic you have less control over the politics than with a dictatorship, so much is true. However the Republic allows setting the approval to happy instead of content with Saints and Sinners bill and many improvements only work on happy or even ecstatic. And republics offer the possibility to have a strong influence on the elections. If you use Strong Arm Lobbying, you will always win the election with your favourite type of government. In addition you can use more laws and get less unhappiness from parties without senate representation.
What to do until Saints and Sinners is available?
In general you have many options. You can activate happiness boosting laws, settle on small planets so the unhappiness from slaves doesn't go overboard or you cull the herd. This last option is presumably the best. It takes one turn and increases happiness and food by 25 for 10 turns at the cost of a slave. These bonuses stack up and once you've got a decent food production or culled the herd a couple of times, you will get the dead pop back within 1-2 turns. So almost nothing lost, much gained.
I colonized a new system, now what?
When you colonize a new system you will always have a pop of your own faction there. That means for getting slaves there you need the first spaceport a.k.a. the first system level improvement. You get it by researching 2 tier II techs in the economy and trade tree. Then you can select 1-3 minor faction pops from your home planet and ship them off to the colony. Not only does that give the new colony a good boost, it will also enable your empire to grow faster as a whole.
The successfully invaded system has no space for my population
After an invasion you may find that the taken over system is too full to construct own population to make the residing ones to slaves. Immediately setting the approval to happy with Saints and Sinners bill also doesn't drastically decrease food production as you might be used to from invasions, thus there won't be any people that die. Luckily, faith is the answer – yet again. The law Species Stability prevents any population apart from your own to grow. So if you need to grow your population on a full system you can either cull the herd a couple of times or send some pops to systems with some capacity left. Then in the following turns construct your population. Once you are done, make sure to deactivate the Species Stability law again because it will globally bring your empire to a halt in growth.
General
While the early game is not very easy or just takes a lot of micro management due to managing happiness, once Saints and Sinners is activated you can turn towards any goal you like to achieve. I went for expansion victory because I already started with a big territory and due to the massive Science production from my slaves I out-teched the enemy with my fleets. In wars I just started invading the AI's planets until they started begging for mercy. I signed truce treaties by demanding several systems. In 3 very short wars I doubled my system count. And the best is, they are immediately happy due to Saints and Sinners bill.
As your systems grow, they project an influence radius. Uncolonized systems within your influence can only be colonized by you, and there are techs that allow you to slowly convert systems colonized by other empires that fall within your influence.
What factors affect your influence radius? I'm pretty sure population and system level are part of it, but it seems like there must be something else because I've seen AI empires with absolutely enormous influence areas when I know they were less developed than me. Sims 4 build mode mods.
Oblivious SageOblivious Sage4,41355 gold badges3737 silver badges7474 bronze badges
2 Answers
Source: http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/392110/manuals/User's_Manual_-_Endless_Space_2.pdf
Influence: used as a currency for diplomatic negotiations and to expand the frontiers and theinfluence of your empire.
Basically try to generate more influence resource from technologies that grant influence building.
Endless Space 2 Population Control
From what you are describing sound like the AI went heavy on influence despite being less developed than you.
VyndicuVyndicu2,20733 gold badges1010 silver badges3030 bronze badges
This is a supplemental answer, as the existing one is great. Influence affects everyone's system influence radius except the Unfallen's. The planetary systems of the Unfallen do not have system influence radius at all, turning influence into a pure currency with no other effects for them. But, the Unfallen do still have a system influence mechanism: spreading vines.
In order to colonize, assimilate, occupy, or own a system, the Unfallen must spread vines from system to system in a connected web which originates from their home system. Reflecting this particular mechanic, the typical colony ship has been replaced with Vineships. Vineships include a module that allows the ship to spend turns spreading vines to the current system from a near-by system that has already been entwined with vines. There's a variety of benefits that the Unfallen, and to a degree their allies, can take advantage of in entwined systems, but the most important one for this particular question is that this spreads the Unfallen's influence into that system.
Each Vineship will take so many turns to spread vines into a system, but this can be sped up to take as little as 1 turn by combining multiple Vineships into a fleet. With enough CP available, this can allow the Unfallen to spread vines to neighboring systems extremely quickly, allowing them to spread their influence into one system per turn per Vineship fleet.
Spreading vines can also be weaponized in a sneaky, yet frightening way. Combined with the Unfallen's default ideology, Pacifism, and the tier 4 empire technology SLC (Supra-Light Content) Systems, this can make the Unfallen pretty powerful and a very real threat of taking over entire civilizations mid to late game without firing a shot.
Essentially, by being able to force peace with a nearby empire, and spreading vines/influence into those systems under relatively 'safe' conditions, the Unfallen can then spend influence to take control of those entwined systems. Some simple web searches describe Unfallen players taking over entire civilizations in just a few turns in this way. If facing enemy Unfallen empires, be mindful of this. The only real counters to this tactic are really the two diplomatic extremes: go all-in with them and form an alliance which would grant some minor benefits to your entwined systems, or declare war and force them out and destroy the vines. Also keep in mind that since the Unfallen do not have spheres of influence surrounding their systems, their systems are immune to the Pacific Conversion in return, preventing the influence radius of your systems from having any real impact.
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Posted by2 years ago
Archived
Just beat the game as Unfallen, which centers the playing strategics on allying different races (majors and minors)
A fun playthrough though, but also caused a HUGE annoyance to me cuz I like to fine-tune my empire to be as efficient as possible so every time when I got a new Pop(s) from different race joined up, then here comes the endless nightmare of adjusting ratio on various systems between different races.
And players lacks of tools and methods to do any meaningful pop controls makes this process a real troublesome one. (for instance I can't get rid of useless or less-efficient Pops, like a force-depart or just simply purge them) Not saying that this game has to reach the complexity of Stellaris but hey, at least give us some effective mechanism right?
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Posted by2 years ago
Archived
I'm currently playing a game as UE, at war with a Cravers AI, and have the issue of conquering Craver systems and having unwanted Craver pops on quickly depleting planets. Here's the 3 methods I'm currently using to remove them:
- Chain Gang: Advantages of this include the ability to research this very early on, and it only takes 1 turn to remove 1 pop, and you can do it immediately after taking control of a system. Disadvantage is that you can't really target which pop gets removed, if you have more than 1 type of pop in the system. Also it gets tedious to select this at every turn.
- Transfer Pop: Somehow all the Craver worlds I conquered are level 2, therefore they have a star port. You can transfer Cravers over to a 'penal colony' as such, for me it was a system that was totally depleted and had only 1 planet. You can also transfer pops over to a full system, and the transport will stay in orbit indefinitely. Usually I'll transfer it to the penal colony, then evacuate/raze the system.
- Starport Waiting: It seems like if you don't have a destination in your start port, pops stilling in the starport slots don't affect the system (i.e. planets don't get depleted anymore), but they don't go away either, they just sit there in waiting. It was a good stopgap measure for me when I didn't have a penal colony designated yet. I don't see this tip anywhere else, so perhaps this might help someone.
Of course, at the end you probably would want to evacuate/raze most systems, to avoid the over-colonization disapproval penalty and to throw away the systems that are too depleted for any use. The above 3 methods are to be used while you wait for the system ownership to be 100% yours so that you can evacuate it.
10 comments