I agree with most that is said about the Cravers in this discussion, great faction but a bit of a bumpy ride after turn ~60.

Dust, happiness and science are swinging so hard, that I don't even now why I had -400 dust last turn and +600 dust the next.

I managed to win the game by just scrapping buildings and letting my fleets kill everything they could get their hands on.

But it felt so instable, I didn't feel like I was in control of my empire at all.

What worries me tough; if this instability already occurs this early in the game, I think late game will be extremely unstable.

MajinSoul wrote:

Same experience here. The start with the Cravers is awesome. However, at some point (I think it was around turn 80) everything collapsed. You need to be at war to gain happiness and capture new systems. However, that will add penalties to overcolonilization. You also get an insane amount of happiness penalty for election results. That basically ended with most of my systems being in Rebellion and losing population, even Cravers population. This way I didn't even get to deplete Planets because there were no Cravers population to deplete a Planet, which means by playing how Cravers are supposed to be played I didn't even get to make use of their special trait. Forced truce doesn't help either. The happiness loss for not being at war will further destroy your economy. Their entire gameplay is a vicious circle right now.

I don't know how balanced my solutions are, but I will give them anyway: When conquering a system, allow to chose wether you want to implement it to your empire or abondon it. That is one thing I love about the Vodyani. It means that you don't have to deal with a bad system suddenly affecting your empire approval. Allow us to "raze" a system after a set number of turns, similar to Endless Legend. That way we could get rid of depleted systems. Cravers are dictators that feed on other factions, it would be nice if election results would have a lower effect on foreign population. After all, Cravers don't really care about the well-being of other factions. 

Don't get me wrong, I love the Cravers design but their gameplay is not in a good spot right now. In my opinion anyway.

Cravers are great fun, the quests are interesting and have me craving more.

Overpopulation is easy enough to deal with and encourages building happiness buildings for all factions. Overcolonisation however, is a different matter entirely; it destroys your empire from the inside-out, happiness everywhere plummets, elections suddenly start devouring your happiness with -30 and above penalties quickly followed by your population, absolutely everywhere migrating.

Obviously, this encourages us to not invest time in producing improvements which give increases of X for happy and ecstatic pops. So it's obviously a consequence of early alpha.

MajinSoul, I do like your suggestion of effective playing leapfrog with non-essential planets, another option yet due to how anomalies, bonuses and so on work, we may only abandon a populated planet once or twice per game. Which is fine, or something.

As of now though, the only way to bypass the out of rhythm happiness mechanic is to go Religious and enforce the law where all pops are permanently content. It's a jury-rig fix however it allows you to stop being distracted by happiness and allows you to test other things.

Same experience here. The start with the Cravers is awesome. However, at some point (I think it was around turn 80) everything collapsed. You need to be at war to gain happiness and capture new systems. However, that will add penalties to overcolonisation. You also get an insane amount of happiness penalty for election results. That basically ended with most of my systems being in Rebellion and losing population, even Cravers population. This way I didn't even get to deplete Planets because there were no Cravers population to deplete a Planet, which means by playing how Cravers are supposed to be played I didn't even get to make use of their special trait. Forced truce doesn't help either. The happiness loss for not being at war will further destroy your economy. Their entire gameplay is a vicious circle right now.

I don't know how balanced my solutions are, but I will give them anyway: When conquering a system, allow to chose wether you want to integrate it to your empire or abondon it. That is one thing I love about the Vodyani. It means that you don't have to deal with a bad system suddenly affecting your empire approval. Allow us to "raze" a system after a set number of turns, similar to Endless Legend. That way we could get rid of depleted systems. Cravers are dictators that feed on other factions, it would be nice if election results would have a lower effect on foreign population. After all, Cravers don't really care about the well-being of other factions. 

Don't get me wrong, I love the Cravers design but their gameplay is not in a good spot right now. In my opinion anyway.

BlackBird1696 wrote:

My problem is that as the Cravers no matter what political party you support your population's happiness plummets even if they are overwhelmingly in support of the winning party.

That's because they are a dictatorship. People don't get a vote so unless the people are supporting the Party YOU choose wins, you get a penalty related to the amount of people that didn't support your party. It is calculated as an average and just blanket applied to your empire. This is to countermand a Dictatorships ability to CHOOSE what party he wants in power, and in effect what Laws they can in-act. This in itself is not a problem. What is a problem... is the difficulty of manipulating the parties that gain support. As far as I can tell. The options to affect the political outcome just doesn't work, or work as strong as it needs to be.

The happiness jumps are overall very severe (both positive and negative). I think you jump down from normal to -50% or -75% food and industry on the first happiness loss