A few notes:

I did have Infinite Supermarkets on all my systems.

I did have Public-Private Partnerships on systems with Anomalies (but having rare anomalies makes that a bit rough).

I was under heavy attack from 5/4 Reaver fleets from the start, and building ships to fight them off put Militarists in power after the first election.

After the second election, Militarists were up to 80% from constant border skirmishes with Vodyani and Pilgrims.

I had to forgo some tech to make sure I had Influence, Happiness, and Dust techs, as well as the settlement techs and military techs.

By Era 2 the fighting was so widespread that I had to forgo building new system improvements so I could manage population with Exotic Rations, produce fleets, and produce Dust with 3D Printing.

The only Dust planets I had were 2 Steppes planets (-10 Happiness) that could only hold a few population.

The only Science planet I had was a Snow planet.

And last but not least:

I received a response from the devs in another thread and the -50% Dust on Empire Approval = Unhappy was not intentional and it will be changed for the next update.

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/66-game-design/thread/22329-please-change-empire-disapproval-penalty

Once this is resolved, hitting Unhappy in Empire Approval will not be an issue.

So yes, I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing as a Militarist Faction, but an error in coding meant empire unhappiness was causing - instead of - . Had it been a penalty to Science and not Dust, I would have ignored the Truce, pushed militarily, and eliminated the Vodyani.  By forcing me to Truce under penalty of Dust crippling, the Vodyani were given time to both Tech up and produce full fleets with advanced tech.  This never should have been the case.

I just made another run with UE with rare resources, rare curiosities, rare anomalies, hard minor factions but except many minor factions(this bugs my game a lot), and I ran pretty smoothly so far. Couple things I can guarantee are

1. You really can get Spoils of War after the first election as UE. 

2. Militarist focus wouldn't lack of science. I was the first faction to get the battleship(medium hunter) class from the second era, and also the increase numbers of ships in a fleet upgrade.

Though that setup made a lot of weird bugs I would accept. Like how minor factions suddenly spawned battleships right away after I reached the second era. Also they exceeded the fleet limit often(like had 2 battleships on a 4/4 fleet) which made minor factions way too strong. I guess hard difficulty minor faction is still pretty buggy and imbalance. 

And I'm not sure it's from that setup or not but yeah AI generates too much influence. Like one of them had 70+ influence per planet in their home system which had 3 colonized planets and it reached my home system even mine was at the direct opposite of the galaxy. And I was like in ~50 turns only. Not to include that those planets generated 70+ industrial, +100 dust and 50+ science. That's obviously a bug as in another playthrough the only time they could reached that much would be like almost late 3rd era, and I have never seen a system with that many rich planets, not to say none of them are large or huge. They're just medium. 

Like 10 turns ago they were like this

then they became like this in just 10 turns ... 

That's just impossible ... 

I can't see your point, really sorry because imo Militarist is the best party for me early on and I had utilized both with UE and Vodyani and it worked great for me. And I will use it over anything else even with that "nerf" you called, it's still so powerful for me.

Also I can't remember how I managed to get "Spoils of War" after the first election but I surely did, maybe I poured some influences on that party because I see no profit from industrialist, but as I could so surely you can. Because my dust income went on negative really quick and that saved me(but also because intentionally built too many fleets). Also Safer Skies, I mentioned before, you can build a settler ship or even an empty ship with like ~5 dust(2 dust if you make a "naked" settler ship) for 25 happiness. That should be enough to offset any happiness problem and if you can't even afford that I don't know what else you could ever afford. Also there is "Infinite Supermarkets". So I don't know why you keep complaining like you don't have enough choices while there are plenty especially as a militarist. 

Also, I don't understand why you keep complaining about lack of science. Especially there are great building and techs you can get super early to turn any large system into a science generating machine regardless of planet type. "Public-private Partnerships" and "Exoscience Stations" which I don't think AI would ever bother builds those, so I don't think you could ever falling behind in term of science with those things up. Not to say if you manage to get "Spoils of War" super early. 

About my luxury resource, as I mentioned before I would work fine without that anyway because of that I just didn't have to build the "Infinite Supermarkets" and that's all. And when I think back it would be way better if I have other type of luxury resource like science or dust boost. So I don't think it matters that much.

I am in the middle of an ES1 game as we speak.  Impossible Difficulty, 8 factions, scarce resources, huge galaxy, many constellations, many systems, many star lanes, many wormholes, spiral-4 (two factions per spiral arm).  I am the UE (who get a bonus to Dust per pop and a 10% empire dust bonus to start) and I only have 2 Arctic planets and 1 Barren planet to use for science.  So I have been invading the Sophons for the past 30 turns.  Why?  Because they have science facilities and I need them or I will lose the tech war and I will be invaded by someone with tier 3 modules while I am still on tier 2 modules.

I understand that Amplitude doesn't want Militarist expansionism to be the primary play-style, but that play-style in itself is to balance against a lack of science.  And what keeps militarism in check?  Dust upkeep.  They knew enough about the United Empire to give them a little boost to dust income empire-wide to help offset the upkeep needed to keep the Empire competitive.  Militarism already had a check and they added a second one called truce or lose happiness.  Then they added Dust during war to offset this new check they put into place.  But the problem there is that it only works during war, so when one check (cease fire or be unhappy and get -50% dust on empire) forces the other check (dust income vs fleet upkeep) into existence, you now have 2 checks against Militarism instead of the one (dust upkeep).  This is just bad games systems design.  The only + you can get requires you to have fleets over your systems (Safer Skies), but that actually requires extra dust upkeep, so that is 3 negatives to one positive.  Of course it was a downward spiral ... it was built to be a downward spiral ... whether or not it was intentional, it exists.  And what is the trigger??? Truce, or loss of Happiness.

In the current system with Militarism, these are the only 2 outcomes of the Truce mechanic and both options will be a hit to Happiness.  So accepting Truce is the only real option unless you have something to offset Dust (Dustciduous Trees) or Happiness (Bluecap Mold).  Once you accept the truce, your opponent can sit back and pass you in the tech war and you lose.  Anyone involved in games systems design for any game that involves militarism and technology knows what a window of opportunity is.  Let's take Zerg vs Terran is SC2 for an example.  Zerg can go heavy into production with additional Hatcheries.  This causes a window of opportunity to overwhelm the Terrans.  The Terrans also have a window when they upgrade to +2/+2 or a bigger one when they go +3/+3.  This is the tech window of opportunity.  Translated to ES2, you have taken the Zerg rush Window out of the game and made the Terran tech window even better.  This is not balanced at all.

p.s.  I also had to pass the law Safer Skies as the Sophons.  Yep, my scientists had to use militarist laws to keep my Happiness up.  Sounds like a problem with happiness, the root of all of the other problems I had. Looks like I am not the only one:

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/66-game-design/thread/20799-economic-penalties-for-unhappiness-are-extremely-harsh-create-an-unrecoverable-death-spiral?page=1#post-212830

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/65-general/thread/20870-politics-happiness-malus-seems-very-overtuned?page=0#post-212624

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/65-general/thread/21739-differences-between-difficulties?page=1#post-217171

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/65-general/thread/20861-unhappiness-food-penalty-too-strong?page=1#post-212603

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/65-general/thread/20653-what-s-the-deal-with-hapiness?page=1#post-211613

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/66-game-design/thread/21087-my-thoughts-so-far?page=1#post-213915

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forum/66-game-design/thread/21266-poll-does-militarist-support-increase-too-fast?page=1#post-214913

Well, I didn't try to insult you but when I played smoothly in every ways while you complain about everything, it couldn't help that the other would suspect that you had to play something wrong.

I don't know what really the problem for you, bad luck or you really did something wrong but I can guarantee it's doable. 

Even though I had resource that boost happiness, it's just one small system and if I couldn't maintain the overall happiness of my empire, things will be falling a part for me too isn't it? And by the time you're at second era, you should be able to buy any luxury resource you want from the market. And even if I didn't have that resource, I still had an option to build "Infinite Supermarkets" which gave the same thing and I didn't build them until late 3rd era.

And as I said, "Spoils of War" and "Safe Skies Bill" should give you enough boost for early-mid game easily. 

1.  Sorry.  I thought you were talking about the Militarist Law that increased Dust production during Wartime.  I didn't have Spoils of War anymore.  The constant aggression from Reavers and the Vodyani had me pumping out a constant parade of Military-Grade ships so my Industrialist Representatives were quickly replaced by Militarist Representatives.  This removed my Dust/Science per Command Point and replaced it with +15 Happiness during War.

2.  Well our Twin Elliptical was split 2 in one Elliptical and 2 in the other.  There was no second faction for me to war with.  And what I was explaining is the simple fact that an economy, while under that level of aggression from the Vodyani, was not possible in my game.  Perhaps it was all the +Food planets I had and the fact that my Governors were leveling so fast their upkeep was eating away at my bank.  Or maybe it had a little something to do with my Star Systems producing food so rapidly that I was forced to waste 1/2 to 1/3 of my turns spamming Exotic Rations so the Over-Population penalty (-30%+) wasn't throwing my entire empire into Bankruptcy.

3.  Try it with rare resources, rare curiosities, rare anomalies, hard minor factions, many minor factions.  If I had to guess, you had some anomalies that helped your dust production or happiness whereas all I had were moons and food bonuses (Rich Soils), and the last thing I needed was more food bonuses.

4.  I had no science.  I had one planet that was Snow and the rest were Food and Industry.  I didn't even hit Era 3 until after Turn 100, and by then the Vodyani had full fleets of tier 3 module ships.  Let's just say the invasion was swift and merciless.  I will try back after an update or two and hopefully they get some of these issues fixed (like my planet with two moons and single moon, the static 300 food population growth threshold, and the lack of any useful population control).

4b.  I ignored a lot of tech that didn't give me Dust or Influence.  Their Sphere of Influence was already enveloping my whole half of the constellation and they were spamming ships in my face from their asteroid-buffed industry center.  Not to mention thye spam-healed their Ark that was orbiting one of my planets, so I had to fight a fully charged Ark every handful of turns.  It was an impossible situation caused by poorly designed mechanics.  I play Endless Space and Endless Legend on Serious for fun or Impossible for a good challenge, so this idea that I am just playing poorly is actually very insulting.

Goodbye.

MadMyke2010 wrote:

1.  Spoils of War only benefits you during War.  

2.  I was playing Twin Elliptical so the other 2 factions were in another disk galaxy.  Even so, the game should be balanced so a faction isn't completely crippled in a 2 faction game.  So far as Safer Skies goes, I will reload the game and see if I can do something with that.

3.  United Empire doesn't produce a lot of Over-colonization Disapproval, so Expansionism wasn't an issue at all.  Perhaps the penalties are harsher on Hard difficulty ... do you play on normal?  I also play rare resources so that may have an impact as well.

4.  My tech problems were related to a lack of Science production as I only had 1 decent science generating planet (Snow).  Most of the planets I found were food generating and that only compounded the over-population disapproval issue.

1. It doesn't have to be during a war. Any ship you can destroy, you will get +50 dust/science which is huge for early on. And as I say, farm on a minor faction instead of take over them right away until your economy is strong enough. Or you could also harass other empire when they're out of their influence zone. My dust income was on negative early on but I'm pretty sure I was the richest empire at that moment.

2. I played on Twin Elliptical too, so there were 3 factions(include me) and ~2 minor factions on one side. And around ~30 turns, it was pretty balance for me, until I invaded everyone. Maybe because another faction is Vodyani which while they're strong, they can't expand that quickly. And after that, I think it's your responsibility to make a stable economy without totally rely on war.  

3. I played on hard. My resource is normal but I doubt that would really be the problem as by the time I'm at second era, I could easily buy every resources if I want to and the market can provide.

4. My plan for most of grand strategy game is Science > all. So I don't care how that system is, I will build anything to boost its science output. Same with tech, I will research anything that boost science first(after military for UE run) before anything else. Also, I ignore any early building that give like ~5 food/industry/science because it's totally not worth the price. You basically pay 4 dust for ~5 other resource, even with a special condition it's still rarely worth the cost. Especially at the beginning dust is so hard to earn. 

The current system for disapproval is ridiculously unforgiving.  -/+ 50% should be changed.  Any event that reduces happiness system-wide can break your entire empire in one fell swoop.  At least ES1 had a taxation system you could use to manipulate the happiness of your empire.  In ES2, you just take a massive hit to science and dust.  I just went from breaking even on dust to -322 dust per turn from one event.  Endless Legend was -15%/-30% and +15%/+30%.  That was a good place for bonuses and penalties.

ES2 currently feels like it is shoving happiness tech down my throat ... and dust tech.

MadMyke2010 wrote:

So the acquisition of Dustciduous Trees is the reason you had a strong income.  This holds true for any faction and is 100% chance.  Not a good basis for any argument.  I had Dustciduous Trees on my game with the Sophons and I had Dust coming out of every orifice. 

Secondly, 10 turns of Truce is Bankruptcy.  I have been in conflict with the Vodyani since very early game and I need to constantly replace warships as they are very aggressively pushing.  This means Militant politics went through the roof.   When I lost my "Get Dust for Building System Improvements" Law, it was replaced with the "Get Happiness for being at War" Law.  In that situation, there is no option when truce is pushed on me.  It may not be the forced truce by definition but the lack of any options makes it forced nonetheless.  If I ignore the truce, my empire dies from unhappiness penalties.  If I accept the truce, my empire dies from unhappiness penalties.

There is no option to wait 10 turns and go to War again.  At -322 Dust per turn with all but one system pushing 3D Printing (Industry > Dust), my only option is bankruptcy or scrap everything until their Influence envelopes the entire galaxy and they force all my systems to join them "diplomatically" ... with -50% influence for 10 turns due to static happiness, and the current rate of ridiculous influence bubble growth, the game is already over.  The Eden Incense I had didn't do anything to help me other than give me +50 Influence on level 2 settlements (which they had the same resource).  And -50% of +50 Influence is +25 Influence, compared to their +50 Influence.  It's a lose/lose ...

They wanted to counter Military Expansionism so they built Influence-based Expansionism.  Then, on top of that they added a penalty for pursuing Military Expansionism.  Where is the Penalty for Influence Expansionism???  There is none.  This is called over-balancing to the point of tipping scales.  They did it with Diplomacy in ES1 and EL, so trying to make trade deals went from very easy and cheesy to near-impossible.

"So +50 is too much?  Why don't we go -100 then???"  - development logic

I have never had a problem with dust as Militarist, especially I think it's too OP early on. The "Spoils of War" is so powerful early on and you can farm minor factions easily. And "Safe Skies Bill" is also super powerful. You can make a cheap "Settler" ship and that would still be counted as a fleet and provide the system with +25 happiness. Also while you're on a truce, don't you have another faction to fight with? Normally I would be bouncing between two factions and by the time I'm about to eliminate one, my tech would high enough to solve any kind of problem could happen. 

IMO it's just different from ES1. It may not has many direct way to deal with unhappiness but there are still many ways to deal with it indirectly. Heroes/Techs/Luxury Resources and may be just don't expand too much? If a system doesn't really worth it, just abandon it. My UE run with militarist ended up with most systems being happy or more without Dustcidous Trees(actually I favor Transvine).

And I don't know why you say you don't have enough room to grab a tech you want. Aside from first era, I would always grab military techs first then would grab what ever my empire need while waiting for next era and it works just fine for me. Maybe because I didn't take any less value techs from military. Like any weapon/defense module upgrades are pretty useless, especially early on. Earlier, the resources are so scarce anyway and you need a tech to harvest it, so they're definitely not worth to take. Especially when you would get normal upgrades for free from going to next era.

Mailanka wrote:

MadMyke2010 wrote:

Another big difference I would like to make is with recovery options.  In ES1, if you got into trouble with dust/happiness, you had a lot of options:

- Dismantle out-dated ships for dust + reduced fleet upkeep

- Scrap unnecessary system improvements for dust + reduced star system upkeep

- increase  taxes to gain more dust at the cost of production to industry, food, and science

In ES2, the penalties are so severe that you do not recover.  Here is why:

- if you had 6 decently developed star systems in ES1, you had about 50 -60 system improvements you can choose from, so those unnecessary Private/Public Partnerships and Cloudrippers were the first to go.  Then you could rebuild them in a turn or two later on.  In ES2, you may have a dozen system improvements empire-wide and the game was designed to make you only choose necessary tech to build.

- ES2 has no tax system and the current happiness is set in stone.  There is nothing you can do to influence this unless you research more happiness tech.  In ES1, you could win an entire game without ever needing more than 1 or 2 happiness techs if you knew how to budget dust and properly expand your empire.  Even the infamous -20 happiness for 20 turns was doable in the hardest difficulties.  ES2?  You go bankrupt overnight.

- in ES1, unhappy was -15% Dust and Science.  In ES2, unhappy is -50% Dust and Influence.  Even if you can manage to recover from the dust problem by scrapping improvements and fleets, you will lose system after system from the hit to Influence.  You can watch as your systems fall one by one to the Influence spamming AI.  If you get to unhappy empire wide in ES2, it is game over.  It may not happen right away, but you already lost the game. 

You say that all game play styles should be equally viable?  How can you force truce on my military expansionism but have absolutely no checks and balances on diplomatic influence spamming expansionism?  Amplitude has turned ES2 into a 2x game.  Explore and Exploit.  Expansion = Unhappy = Death.  Extermination = Unhappy = Death.  I want to play 4x games, not 2x games.

First, I think militarism is messed up currently (playing whackamole with the Lumeris is not a fun way to play).  The model seems to be more like, say, Europa Universalis, which I like, but the victory conditions (other than score) don't really support that.  In principle, we should be able to win militarily, but currently I find that so absurdly difficult as to be untenable.  If you're winning militarily, you must necessarily be winning with score as well, and it's usually just a matter of turns until you win with score anyway.  I've won once with a military victory and I found it exasperating, slower than necessary and a foregone conclusion.  The ideal game would be a knuckle biter until the finish, instead of sighing and hitting "Next turn" until your forced truce ends and watching the Lumeris buy up three more outposts in the meantime, so I'm with you there.

Note that the expansion disapproval was there in ES1, it's just that you didn't need to colonize every freaking thing to win the game in ES1.  However, have you tried razing systems?  It gives you a colony ship  Does it also remove that colony from your empire?  Can you conquer worlds and then promptly abandon them, to prevent over-expansion? I haven't tried it yet but it seems like it might be a solution to the Craver problem (who are really messed up by the whole forced truce thing: "Grrr, this warrior race is so tired of war!")

1.  The whole problem is a design philosophy problem.  Certain mechanics work for Civ-type games, like Endless Legend.  However, this is a space 4x, not a ground 4x.  Instead of following mechanics from Civ games, they should be looking to games like Stellaris or Master of Orion, not Europa Universalis.

2.  ES1 expansion disapproval was easily moderated using the expansive tech tree where you could bounce here and there getting as much Tech as possible.  The EL/ES2 Tech system makes you grab half the tech and go.  Now, if you don't get lucky with Dustciduous Trees (+Dust per pop and +20 Happiness ... like wow is that ever imba), then you need to buy up Dust Tech.  Then the Influence bubbles expand so fast you have to Buy up the Influence Tech too.  You also need the Colonization Tech. Happiness Tech, and Resource Extraction Tech.  That leaves you with no room to grab other Tech.  I think the whole system they are trying to push based on EL is just a mess and doesn't work in a space 4x.

3.  The thing is that I did not conquer any worlds, I was too busy trying to hold off their Coordinator ship spamming from their asteroid-supported Industry system.  And even if I did, I was the UE so my over-colonization penalty was low.  The real problem was over population, and trying to get rid of population means forgoing my dust production for 1 turn (only to be replenished the next turn by exponential food growth).  My home system alone was producing over 240 food per turn even with the unhappy penalty to food production.  The whole problem is the amount of over-population penalty present (my home system was -37 happiness from overpopulation with a population growth of 80% so that was a losing battle).  Over-population in ES1 on harder difficulties would get you maybe -15 happiness with a massive population (30+).

Things they need to fix:

• exponential food production growth vs static and incremental population growth thresholds.
• 50% penalty for Unhappy
• Influence penalty instead of science penalty for Unhappy
• rate of growth of Influence spheres
• loss of happiness for ignoring truce when playing with a majority militant senate
• the illusion of choice between useless tech and critical tech
• the rate of xp gain for governors vs fleet commanders
• the easily exploited "guard for 1 turn only" system
• the ridiculous bonus for Dustciduous Trees
• lack of population migration

In ES1, if I had too much pop, I would make a colony ship with 1 or 2 pop (or 4 pop with the Horatio) and send them to a low pop system to live.  The colony ships in ES2 don't even remove 1 pop.  Combined with over the top over-population penalties, an unforgiving unhappy penalty system, a snowballing population growth, and a complete inability to properly manage population in any sensible way, you just have an imminent death spiral.  Unless of course, you have Dustciduous Trees.

So the acquisition of Dustciduous Trees is the reason you had a strong income.  This holds true for any faction and is 100% chance.  Not a good basis for any argument.  I had Dustciduous Trees on my game with the Sophons and I had Dust coming out of every orifice. 

Secondly, 10 turns of Truce is Bankruptcy.  I have been in conflict with the Vodyani since very early game and I need to constantly replace warships as they are very aggressively pushing.  This means Militant politics went through the roof.   When I lost my "Get Dust for Building System Improvements" Law, it was replaced with the "Get Happiness for being at War" Law.  In that situation, there is no option when truce is pushed on me.  It may not be the forced truce by definition but the lack of any options makes it forced nonetheless.  If I ignore the truce, my empire dies from unhappiness penalties.  If I accept the truce, my empire dies from unhappiness penalties.

There is no option to wait 10 turns and go to War again.  At -322 Dust per turn with all but one system pushing 3D Printing (Industry > Dust), my only option is bankruptcy or scrap everything until their Influence envelopes the entire galaxy and they force all my systems to join them "diplomatically" ... with -50% influence for 10 turns due to static happiness, and the current rate of ridiculous influence bubble growth, the game is already over.  The Eden Incense I had didn't do anything to help me other than give me +50 Influence on level 2 settlements (which they had the same resource).  And -50% of +50 Influence is +25 Influence, compared to their +50 Influence.  It's a lose/lose ...

They wanted to counter Military Expansionism so they built Influence-based Expansionism.  Then, on top of that they added a penalty for pursuing Military Expansionism.  Where is the Penalty for Influence Expansionism???  There is none.  This is called over-balancing to the point of tipping scales.  They did it with Diplomacy in ES1 and EL, so trying to make trade deals went from very easy and cheesy to near-impossible.

"So +50 is too much?  Why don't we go -100 then???"  - development logic