And dust, in general, is far far more valuable with the economy rework. Mostly the inflation changes, but also the buyout and trade changes.

Waky forgot to mention this, but our general goal, ever since starting out, has always been to buff the S tier factions down to A, and everything else up to A. S tier is classified as "so powerful it breaks the game mechanics", such as Vodyani being uninvadable in vanilla.

The main problem with Lumeris is that.. they had no supporting mechanics. They weren't a good dust faction, they weren't a good industrialist faction, they weren't fun to play, they were just kind of.. generally sub par. When reworking them, I heavily consulted the original GDD amplitude released, and asked the Lumeris mains on our server what they would like to see them able to do, and I'm fairly proud of the end result. Rather than buffing Lumeris dust production, they are just more efficient at using dust in general.

@Butcher Pete (2/2) Fourth, the change is one (relatively minor) element of our ongoing goal to reduce the RNG sensitivity of the Vodyani, which is simply enormous in vanilla.

Finally, we agree overall with the approach you described (better to buff the trash factions than to nerf the great ones), but have needed to make some modest calibrations as we have continued to progress in the modding project. now that most of the other factions are generally clustered around the same level of power, it is much easier to ding a faction a bit than to apply targeted tweaks to everyone else--particularly given that we typically prefer to do so in ways that are thematically targeted to each faction.

@Butcher Pete (1/2, regarding the Vodyani) First, a clarification: the Vodyani malus applies only to the initial planet FIDS, so the penalty is non-trivial, but not enormous. It doesn't reduce the +8 FIDS per pop that they generate while boosted, nor does it reduce the effects of buildings, hero skills, events or other means of improving yields.

Second, we felt that this version of the change is a means of leaning into their theme of generating FIDS from means that are decoupled from planetary yields, in-line with their other faction abilities (ex: very large bonuses that come directly from the population)

Third, there is some element of a "trade" embedded in that trait, as it does also provide a -25% reduction in the approval penalties absorbed from planets, which is reasonably useful.

@Butcher Pete I wouldn't say that we are buffing Republic in order to buff the Lumeris; we gave an extra law slot to ALL government types (except for Democracy, as they were maxed out already), and then gave extra bonuses to Democracy instead. That enables the changes from our law rework to be more relevant by using more of the new higher-tier laws.

In fact, Republic is the only government type that has received no specifically targeted buffs. All others have gotten a fair bit of help, particularly Dictatorship.

@Qareen Yeah the Riftborn AI was always one of the stronger ones due to their rapid ability to colonize and grow (combined with the AI's enormous happy bonuses at higher difficulties that enable them to mostly shrug off the overcolonization penalties that would cripple a human player). I do typically find that the Cravers are comparable or better simply because they invest considerably more heavily in their military (and again, the huge amount of extra approval for them is easily "spent" on maintaining a larger number of slaves). So it's really just an extension of 2 fairly straightforward advantages of the factions that the AI can easily exploit without needing to modify how it plays, combined with a greater ability to "spend" the excess approval that other high-difficulty AI's wouldn't have as much use for.

So I noticed the modder nerfed the crap out of the Vodyani with a massive -25% FIDS production on planets. Yes, Vodyani are strong, but this has to do more with the power of their pops.

You did not need to nerf Vodyani with just a horrible malus. What needs to happen is that the other civs need some actually GOOD pops. Remove or reduce the cost on all that political party crap in the custom race editor and make it so Lumeris pops actually produce something other than +2 dust naturally. If you gave them the old "Meritocractic Cosmopolitans" that would be +2 FIDSI across the board and that's all that you would need to make the Lumeris an actually good civ. Same goes for the Unfallen. They need something other than just food production on Fertile planets for their pops.

I would rather you buff the F, D, C, and B tier factions than nerf the S tier factions like Vodyani. If everyone is OP, no one is.

@Qareen It's probably because Riftborn now have access to Cram Exam, whereas they did not before because they are a Republic, and so their pops now will produce +9 science (+5 from Riftborn, +4 from Republic Cram Exam) per turn per Rift pop. Plus Riftborn can settle outposts into colonies faster than anyone else, making that +9 also insane.

I feel a lot of unforeseen consequences coming in attempting to buff the Lumeris by buffing the Republic. Not to mention Republics now have as many laws as Democracies. Riftborn was already a great non-custom faction.

I have now tried this mod on a few games... a truly excellent job. :D

One small thing, in just about all these games I have played (all single player against AI), the Riftborn (if I am not playing them myself) tend to overpower all the other AIs. It is normal for the Riftborn to have double the points by turn 50 (on normal speed), almost every single game, then all the other AIs.

So almost every game it is me Vs the Riftborn.

The Cravers never have been able to be threat to just about anyone.

I play on huge maps with 9 AIs.

Documents/Endless Space 2/Temporary Files, send the most recent html from that folder.

How do I send the diagnostic files?

If you join the ESG server and send me your diagnostic files I can fix whatever is causing it to freese

Cool thanks! (Now I just gotta figure out if my "turns keep advancing but everything is frozen" bug is from the mod or from the game

If you go into Lobby Settings, in the same place where you find minor faction difficulty, turn down the animation settings in the second column. We turn them up by default because it conveniently fixes a lot of bugs, but I get that not everyone likes that.

If you want mod specific settings, look in the galaxy settings, we added a column for all new settings the mod adds.

An the instant exploration notifications? This mod seems to make a lot of things faster and I want them slower, like how they are default. Is this possible?

Where do I find the settings for this mod? Specifically where do I turn off having ships instantly make their movements? I personally like having them slower.

Oh, do you have a "only x population can grow" law enabled? We've fixed this issue in ESG 1.4.1.

Just installed this mod today and I have the same instant population problem. My outposts also turn into colonies after 1 only turn.

Can you join the ESG server and give a save? I've never had this issue before.

Bug report: Running the mod causes population to automatically increase by 1 on every planet every single turn. This happens with both the 1.4 and 1.41 versions of the mod. I also get a lot of weird alerts about my manpower cratering. Anyone else having this problem?

Other than that, I like the majority of the changes that I'm seeing in the mod. But this constant pop growth thing is a game breaker.

Nevermind found it, Well Founded.

What causes the Nakalim to have visibility on half the galaxy on start of a game? I could not find any info in-game.

I'm glad you're enjoy this :)
If you have any suggestions, feel free to join the discord server and tell us them

Anyways looking forward to this mod, I was using Enhanced Space before, but it seemed too much for me. I like what I read so far about this mod, more vanilla style.

So I started a game with Nakalim, and it caught me off guard that I saw half the systems in the galaxy, this is pretty interesting.

Hello! The french translator has been busy, but I've asked someone to help translate, so french translation should get finished in the near future

nice mod if i play in english, of all the tooltip will get fucked somewhere or an otherwhere, sad :/
of i cant just push the game in enflish, not so hard, put i prefer Fr for immersion, i can healp if uou need, i musn't be hard, juste a tone of work and i want this mod to be 100% french compatible.

@_m_a_ I believe it is too, though it will overwrite some of our tweaks

@Sir Connery I'll add it to the list of things to investigate in 1.5, 1.4.1 is releasing on Friday so there isn't much time to do much with that

"Which minor quests do you feel are too easy, or is the problem the cost?"

I don't really have a big problem with the quests themselves. But the minor factions in 1.4.1 get way too giant and advanced fleets if you boost their economy before assimilating them.

I assimilated and got more than 10 ships with 900atk each, when in that time everybody had ships with around 150 atk.

I think this mod is compatible with "Galaxy Generation Bigger Systems" . I havent found anything particular at created games. Systems seems to 3-5

@Sir Connery Which minor quests do you feel are too easy, or is the problem the cost?

@_m_a_ Research Curiosity Rewards is something that wouldn't be compatible, sorry

@Sir Connery Best thing I can suggest for you to do is make custom factions with aggressive personalities.

Score difference bullying is one of the most effective ways of the most effective ways to use the Nakalim mechanics, so changing that would require a lot more work than one would think.

I don't think your neutral senator thing is possible, sorry :(

Feature request:

Politics, quests and different population stuff is what really separates this from another 4X games, and is are my favorite aspects of the game.

How hard would it be to add neutral senators for all political factions to the game? So if you have a Military Hero he would still have to lobby to win the Military Party senator spot.

This is a totally new mechanic so I don't know how feasible it is to implement.

Awesome mod though. Makes everything better.

I would still like the AI to be much more aggressive early on. I've been purposefully trying to provoke aggression by leaving my systems empty of ships and only researching economic stuff. But they never attack. The very aggressive races probably would but I was near Horatio, which is quite neutral, for a good 120 turns without a single ship and trying to provoke aggression through diplomacy, end result was nothing but a few empty threats. Which is similar to all my other games.
--------
Another unrelated suggestion. Lessen the effect of influence pressure to nearby civilizations from score difference. It acts as a giant snowball. The more ahead you the more ahead you will be.

I cant get to work "Research Curiosity Rewards" , should i need to load that first or are mods completely incompatible? Thanks.

@Qareen Glad it's working!

@Sir Connery AI aggression depends on the "personality traits" they have, and how close they are to a "mechanic-less" faction. Sophons will naturally be very aggressive unless you give them the Pacifist personality trait, due to them not having any extra mechanics.

in 1.4.1, Minor Factions have a bug that makes them easier to take over (should be fixed now though), but the OP ships will be tied to a new difficulty in 1.5. Quests are meant to be the "ideal assimilation method", but they may be too easy now.

I've been playing with this mod for some time now. Rarely is a mod an improvement in all areas but this really is.

Few observations though. I'm playing on serious difficulty.

For 1.4

- AI very rarely is aggressive. Even the aggressive races are quite tame.
- AI likes to just mass colonize but is very poor at adequately defending their systems.
- Minor factions are way too easy to take over with quest.

For 1.4.1

- Minor factions still too easy to take over.
- The minor factions get ridicilously OP ships if you assimilate them early on while boosting their economy.. 10 ships with around 950atk, while the galaxy has ships mostly with 150 atk

I tried again.. and now Population Control and ESG work together... I am so confused.
Thank you for you help.
I am sorry for wasting your time.

Yup, I just used that.

Wow... thank you and I am very confused. You used in the ingame mod manager to change load order or something else?

I just tried loading Population Control on ESG 1.4 and ESG 1.4.1, where Population Control is loaded first, and ESG is loaded second, and it worked perfectly. If you're having a specific problem please let me know, but as far as I can tell nothing is wrong.

And you're welcome!

And thank you for explaining exactly what major population meant in context. :)

Captain, Cobbs : Changing loader does not help. I would guess the problem is that because ESG modifies so many minor races (and with justified reasons) that Population Control relies on to know which races in particular to get rid of is the problem. Flat out cannot start a new game with both mods enabled even with ESG last in the load order.

Thanks for the report!

Hi, the +1 Food Per Backdoor population trait doesn't seem to be working. I tested with the custom Umbral Choir, in which I had 3 backdoors but it was still giving +1 Food bonus instead of 3. I'm using no other mods except ESG, not sure what's the case here, thx

Major Population = Your faction's primary population, which in this case is Horatio, so it's +0.1% FIDS per Horatio Population.

Does Population Control work if you load ESG after it?

I just discovered, this mod and Population Control by Tygart are incompatible.. that is unfortunate. Probably not, but anyone know a fix or some other way to get rid of unwanted minor populations? I would really miss not having Population Control.

Trying out this mod for the first time, and something I do not understand (I did read change logs twice, very sry if I missed it in there) : For Horatio in particular for Pacified Collection it reads "+01% FIDS per major population in Empire". When I play Horatio once I have incorporated a species DNA I kill off this species, as I assume is normal. But to get this benefit does one need to keep at least one of a major population (ie Cravers, Riftborn, Sophrons, ect) alive or is just having gotten one and taken their DNA is it now safe to get rid of them.
(I hope my question was clear)

Hello! We've already fixed this bug in 1.4.1, thanks for the report though!

Hi, another thing to pester you with: when I enabled the law that prevents major pop to grow, the outposts are created in 1 turn, even when sieged by heavy troops, at least for Sophons (probably won't happen for non-food Rifties). I dunno if you want to do anything about it but just a heads up :)