I've just realized I've never had high levels of Ecology (because I want a strong industry base, so I tend to get more industrialist support).  Now I'm curious to see if I can build a strong ecological society, and what it might look like.

It occurs to me the Vodyani might be very good at this.

Follow-up

So I thought I'd try it out, see what I could do to get the ecological party to show up as Vodyani.  I did nothing but build food buildings and happiness buildings, develop my essence, build arcs, colonize systems, and built a ton of scouts (I think I had 10 at last count).  My first hero was even an ecologist hero, and I got that Food-or-Pet quest, and chose for pet.  All of this should + ecologists.  By turn 60 (halfway through the game), no new party had shown up.  Nothing.

"Maybe," I thought "Federations are very hard to get new parties in?"

I had a quest: Brainwash a minor faction.  I had held off on it out of fear that the Pacifist party might appear, but I finally gave in, "What's the harm?  If the ecologist party hasn't shown up despite all of this, surely the pacifist party won't show up."  So I praise and then brainwash the race.  BOOM, Pacifist party shows up.  BOOM, they're poised to win the election, so I use the option where I use 50 manpower to suppress the other parties.  BOOM!  They win anyway.

Now, to be fair, I had done literally nothing to support the Religous party, so it's hardly surprising when a new party shows up and has some actions supporting it, it quickly dominates.  But hey!  WTF?  Where's the ecologist party? What does it take to get them to show up?  There's nothing about the Vodyani that's anti-ecologist, so why can't I make them happen?  I think I need to echo Julot: The ecologist ideology seems extraordinarily hard to gain support for.  Why is that?

An aside: The food-focused strategy is actually very good for the Vodyani.  Vodyani have excellent base stats, so by focusing on food and the ability to colonize multiple worlds, you end up with a pretty good FIDS despite not having many buildings to back it up.  It surprised me how well my faction was doing despite it's ecological bent.  Shame they couldn't actually access ecological laws.

Now, to be fair, I had done literally nothing to support the Religous party, so it's hardly surprising when a new party shows up and has some actions supporting it, it quickly dominates.  But hey!  WTF?  Where's the ecologist party? What does it take to get them to show up?  There's nothing about the Vodyani that's anti-ecologist, so why can't I make them happen?  I think I need to echo Julot: The ecologist ideology seems extraordinarily hard to gain support for.  Why is that?

To be honest I don't remember what I did during that game to unlock them. But to answer your questionning I think we are at alpha stage and I'm pretty sure the Senate isn't currently working as it should, so I guess your patience should be rewarded to experiment those kinds of gameplays.

An aside: The food-focused strategy is actually very good for the Vodyani.  Vodyani have excellent base stats, so by focusing on food and the ability to colonize multiple worlds, you end up with a pretty good FIDS despite not having many buildings to back it up.  It surprised me how well my faction was doing despite it's ecological bent.  Shame they couldn't actually access ecological laws.

I might be wrong but I'm currently playing Vodyani the exact opposite way : skipping all the food related improvements since I can benefit from Holy Proliferation for population growth. I prefer to focus on science, dust and production when playing them (especially if you get lucky enough to beeing able to build a Redsang System Dev Upgrade)

And since you often have to choose between building Arks and using Holy Proliferation at some stage of the game (before beeing able to produce essence in reasonable amounts), I use to first go at war with another Vodyani IA in order to rebuild their broken Arks and spare my essence to use it only for Holy Proliferation.

Julot wrote: To be honest I don't remember what I did during that game to unlock them. But to answer your questionning I think we are at alpha stage and I'm pretty sure the Senate isn't currently working as it should, so I guess your patience should be rewarded to experiment those kinds of gameplays.

Quite right! While I think there's nothing necessarily wrong with playing an Early Access the way you'd play a normal game, I think it's useful to push the edges, as you did with the Lumeris, to see what happens.  That inspired my playthrough, where I uncovered this weirdness, so I've reported it.  Hopefully the devs will see it (if they don't already know about it).

Julot wrote: I might be wrong but I'm currently playing Vodyani the exact opposite way : skipping all the food related improvements since I can benefit from Holy Proliferation for population growth. I prefer to focus on science, dust and production when playing them (especially if you get lucky enough to beeing able to build a Redsang System Dev Upgrade)

And since you often have to choose between building Arks and using Holy Proliferation at some stage of the game (before beeing able to produce essence in reasonable amounts), I use to first go at war with another Vodyani IA in order to rebuild their broken Arks and spare my essence to use it only for Holy Proliferation.

That's the way I played the first time too, and I don't think it's wrong.  One of the cool things about Amplitude games is that there are "many right ways to play."  Obviously creating create vampire fleets and devouring minor races or your enemy is a perfectly viable way to play the Vodyani, and being militaristic serves their natural religious tendencies because they're Fanatical, but you could play as a Pacifist, trading for Dust and building up more dust-generating engines... and then using Alms to generate more Essence to build more population.

What intrigued me about your Ecology playthrough was that it gave you access to normally inaccessible planets.  I didn't know that was an option!  But I didn't know anything about Ecology, so I wanted to try.  The Vodyani are great for "colonizing" any world they come across, so gaining access to Desert or Barren worlds, etc, would be very handy!  But to do that, you need to build a lot of food buildings (that's how you build Ecology).  But isn't Food useless to the Vodyani?  Well, it turns out it isn't exactly.  Essence is still necessary, but if you've got great Food production, then Essence becomes about building new arks, which means you can "colonize" very rapidly.  So, in principle, the Ecology build looks sound... only, I can't get ecology to unlock!  I just don't know if that's working as intended, or if there's something broken in there.

I suspect the mechanism is built in with a sort of "fade" dynamic.  Like, say building a food building is worth +5 ecology points, but each turn you're at -1 ecology point.  If I build one ecology building every 5 turns, then it's like I built none at all.  Whereas, with the pacifist action, because it happened all at once, it's ten +5s for a +50, all at once with no "fade" so it seems like a Really Big Deal to the game.  Thus, I unlock pacifism in one turn, but I cannot unlock Ecology over 50 turns.

Mailanka wrote:

I suspect the mechanism is built in with a sort of "fade" dynamic.  Like, say building a food building is worth +5 ecology points, but each turn you're at -1 ecology point.  If I build one ecology building every 5 turns, then it's like I built none at all.  Whereas, with the pacifist action, because it happened all at once, it's ten +5s for a +50, all at once with no "fade" so it seems like a Really Big Deal to the game.  Thus, I unlock pacifism in one turn, but I cannot unlock Ecology over 50 turns.

Which is kinda weird mechanic, don't you think

To be honest, I think the game should introduce you and give a choice of all parties so you can aim your strategy from the start.

Right now, sitting 80 turns and waiting for the party to show up feels... wrong and not very strategic at all.

Asuzu wrote:

Mailanka wrote:

I suspect the mechanism is built in with a sort of "fade" dynamic.  Like, say building a food building is worth +5 ecology points, but each turn you're at -1 ecology point.  If I build one ecology building every 5 turns, then it's like I built none at all.  Whereas, with the pacifist action, because it happened all at once, it's ten +5s for a +50, all at once with no "fade" so it seems like a Really Big Deal to the game.  Thus, I unlock pacifism in one turn, but I cannot unlock Ecology over 50 turns.

Which is kinda weird mechanic, don't you think

To be honest, I think the game should introduce you and give a choice of all parties so you can aim your strategy from the start.

Right now, sitting 80 turns and waiting for the party to show up feels... wrong and not very strategic at all.

I suspect that "all parties" exist right from the start, they're just invisible. If you look, each race gets "+10 points" in a particular ideology, like +10 Science for the Sophons, +10 Religion for the Vodyani, and so on.  These races have those parties unlocked, but it's not that they can't earn points for a party before that.  I think they just need to earn the minimal "10 points" before the party shows up.  And, of course, it needs more-than-minimal support of a party to pass any of their laws.

This is just guesswork on my part, but I offer as proof what happened in my playthrough.  It wasn't as though I unlocked the Pacifist party and then they started accruing points.  Instead, they showed up and dominated the election all in one turn.  There was only one turn where I did anything at all the support the Pacifist party, and that was sufficient for them to win.  That suggests that the pacifist party exists at "0 points" whether or not you see them, and I gave them, like, 50 points all at once, so they both "showed up on my political radar"  and also had more points than the Religious party, and thus won.

Mailanka wrote:

Asuzu wrote:

Mailanka wrote:

I suspect the mechanism is built in with a sort of "fade" dynamic.  Like, say building a food building is worth +5 ecology points, but each turn you're at -1 ecology point.  If I build one ecology building every 5 turns, then it's like I built none at all.  Whereas, with the pacifist action, because it happened all at once, it's ten +5s for a +50, all at once with no "fade" so it seems like a Really Big Deal to the game.  Thus, I unlock pacifism in one turn, but I cannot unlock Ecology over 50 turns.

Which is kinda weird mechanic, don't you think

To be honest, I think the game should introduce you and give a choice of all parties so you can aim your strategy from the start.

Right now, sitting 80 turns and waiting for the party to show up feels... wrong and not very strategic at all.

I suspect that "all parties" exist right from the start, they're just invisible. If you look, each race gets "+10 points" in a particular ideology, like +10 Science for the Sophons, +10 Religion for the Vodyani, and so on.  These races have those parties unlocked, but it's not that they can't earn points for a party before that.  I think they just need to earn the minimal "10 points" before the party shows up.  And, of course, it needs more-than-minimal support of a party to pass any of their laws.

This is just guesswork on my part, but I offer as proof what happened in my playthrough.  It wasn't as though I unlocked the Pacifist party and then they started accruing points.  Instead, they showed up and dominated the election all in one turn.  There was only one turn where I did anything at all the support the Pacifist party, and that was sufficient for them to win.  That suggests that the pacifist party exists at "0 points" whether or not you see them, and I gave them, like, 50 points all at once, so they both "showed up on my political radar"  and also had more points than the Religious party, and thus won.

From the GDD https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/66-game-design/thread/20676-community-gdd-5-update-politics-senate.

In regards to unlocking:

Unlocking political ideologies

At the beginning of the game, each faction starts with one or two political ideologies unlocked, depending on their population. The other political ideologies are then unlocked over the course of the game, depending on the score they accumulate. To unlock a new political ideology, one needs to reach a certain threshold ; the value of this threshold depends on the number of unlocked political ideologies: the more political ideologies are unlocked the harder it is to unlock a new one. Thus, we can spread over a long period the appearance of the different ideologies and make each empire follow a more unique path.

In regards to the fade you are taking about (emphasis added by me) :

• Game events and state modifiers: these are more diversified. They are providing a default score for a specific political ideology. Events and states are linked to the player’s actions (signing a diplomatic treaty, being under invasion, searching a technology…). In addition to their default value, they will also provide additional effect depending on the concerned population. Each population has a list of psychological traits that defines how they react to their environment (and thus which ideology they will lean towards depending on the stimulus they receive). The events and state provide temporary score, that will disappear after a certain duration or when the state is removed.

Hey, thanks for that.  It seems that some of my instincts are right, though not entirely.  It also seems that if I want to unlock the Ecologist party, I'm better off hitting several ecological keys all at once, and given how hard that is, that explains why I so rarely see the Ecological party in my games, and why Julot has such a hard time maintaining their dominance.