The cravers are a horrible mess thanks to the ways the game punishes you for expansion and war, completely undermining the core of the Craver's faction. I think they need to take a good look at the Necrophages and the ways that faction counteracted expansion disapproval and their endless war.

The only way in the game at the moment to counter-act that crippling disapproval is to flip your government to religious and get the forced-contentment law.

It's especially wasted on the Vodyani since they're the faction that's least likely to get overexpansion penalties.

In fact several of the Religious laws -- the approval-locking one and the Racial Purity Act -- seem like they'd be more useful for the Cravers. But there's no way to get access to religious laws while you're still a dictatorship unless you want to scrap your Militarist bonuses.

Have you experimented at all with changing your government style as the Cravers?

atejas wrote:

Right now, the only thing standing in the way of the Cravers steamrolling the other factions from their starting position is the fact that all of their systems will probably be in Rebellion by turn 40-50.

The Militarist ideology gives us a lot of laws that encourage us to go to war and produce more combat units for approval bonuses, but it's frankly nearly impossible to counteract the combined effects of overexpansion, slave driving, and election results, which often combine to approval penalties of -70 or more. This forces Cravers players to either waste valuable time and industry on happiness improvements or remain in a barely functional state with multiple systems likely losing pop units each turn and global FIDSI drastically reduced.

With that in mind, I have a suggestion to rework the Safe Skies law, instead changing it to something like the Martial Law Doctrine. What this will do is give fleets in orbit over one of your own systems access to a new action -- Suppress Dissent (or something like that). This will prevent the ship from engaging in combat for as long as it's active (have it cost 1 attack point per turn to maintain) and, when active, locks the approval of the system to a minimum of 20.

The law could be made more expensive than Safe Skies to account for the fact that it's a really powerful tool.

What a great post! Developers should really address the Cravers issues. Over-population kills them, over-colonization does the same, awful Approval penalty after the elections finishes them off. Hell. making it -10 at max will help at least a bit! Not -30... We should be able to dispose of disapproving races or at least don't allow them to vote. Ability to raze the depleted/newly-conquered system would also help!

I like your idea OP but I also like Questionableobject's input as well. Maybe they also could use some mechanisms of the Necrophages.

What if we used foreign pop in our systems similarly to the way Necrophages use the stockpiled corpses to increase their pop? 

Maybe that ca be done by adding the foreign pop in the production queue?