I was thinking about this same thing myself.  

Acquiring minors is too easy, as each race has a fast way to do it (dust acquisition, warfare, bribe/praise, etc.) - and if all else fails the quests are trivial to accomplish.   

Once acquired, minors are basically irrelevant to the game play - I hardly notice their influence in the game.  Compare this to Endless Legend, where you had limited slots for integrating minors, and more importantly, minors gave you a unique unit and special empire/regional bonuses that expanded your capacities in interesting ways.  Since you were limited in how many minors you could retain, it forced you to make some sort of choice about which minors your assimilated.

In ES2, you just trivially acquire all of them - because doing so is pretty much always a good thing to do.  There is no decision because there are no tradeoffs.

mezmorki wrote:

I was thinking about this same thing myself.  

Acquiring minors is too easy, as each race has a fast way to do it (dust acquisition, warfare, bribe/praise, etc.) - and if all else fails the quests are trivial to accomplish.   

Once acquired, minors are basically irrelevant to the game play - I hardly notice their influence in the game.  Compare this to Endless Legend, where you had limited slots for integrating minors, and more importantly, minors gave you a unique unit and special empire/regional bonuses that expanded your capacities in interesting ways.  Since you were limited in how many minors you could retain, it forced you to make some sort of choice about which minors your assimilated.

In ES2, you just trivially acquire all of them - because doing so is pretty much always a good thing to do.  There is no decision because there are no tradeoffs.

Agreed. I'm not a fan of simply stealing from Endless Legend, but if they are going steal from it, at least do a good job of it. The biggest fault of minor races isn't balance; The biggest fault is irrelevance.

Agree with most of this thread. I hope they get improved in upcoming updates.

mezmorki wrote:

I was thinking about this same thing myself.  

Acquiring minors is too easy, as each race has a fast way to do it (dust acquisition, warfare, bribe/praise, etc.) - and if all else fails the quests are trivial to accomplish.   

Once acquired, minors are basically irrelevant to the game play - I hardly notice their influence in the game.  Compare this to Endless Legend, where you had limited slots for integrating minors, and more importantly, minors gave you a unique unit and special empire/regional bonuses that expanded your capacities in interesting ways.  Since you were limited in how many minors you could retain, it forced you to make some sort of choice about which minors your assimilated.

In ES2, you just trivially acquire all of them - because doing so is pretty much always a good thing to do.  There is no decision because there are no tradeoffs.

I will say that their population (and the system by extension) is interesting.  Or at least has interesting potential.  Right now its the occasional min maxing of shuffling pop between planets to get extra bonuses + some of the "X bonus per type of pop on planet" stuff, but I do like what I see already from that.  I just hope it gets deeper since right now it's rare that it matters (need the proper type of planet in the system for it to matter at all) and then it's sorta annoying and obvious micro (of course i want all my UE guys on the temperate planet kind of thing).

Eji1700 wrote:

mezmorki wrote:

I was thinking about this same thing myself.  

Acquiring minors is too easy, as each race has a fast way to do it (dust acquisition, warfare, bribe/praise, etc.) - and if all else fails the quests are trivial to accomplish.   

Once acquired, minors are basically irrelevant to the game play - I hardly notice their influence in the game.  Compare this to Endless Legend, where you had limited slots for integrating minors, and more importantly, minors gave you a unique unit and special empire/regional bonuses that expanded your capacities in interesting ways.  Since you were limited in how many minors you could retain, it forced you to make some sort of choice about which minors your assimilated.

In ES2, you just trivially acquire all of them - because doing so is pretty much always a good thing to do.  There is no decision because there are no tradeoffs.

I will say that their population (and the system by extension) is interesting.  Or at least has interesting potential.  Right now its the occasional min maxing of shuffling pop between planets to get extra bonuses + some of the "X bonus per type of pop on planet" stuff, but I do like what I see already from that.  I just hope it gets deeper since right now it's rare that it matters (need the proper type of planet in the system for it to matter at all) and then it's sorta annoying and obvious micro (of course i want all my UE guys on the temperate planet kind of thing).

How are you able to shuffle population around from planet to planet? I've been wanting to do that in order to maximize racial bonuses, but thought that it wasn't yet possible.

Minor Faction populations are definitely interesting to have, and the population mechanic as a whole is very neat (and new for Endless games). I like the diversity they bring to my empire. It would be good to be able to send them where they fit most.

I agree with this thread that it is currently too easy to assimilate minor factions, but I'd rather not staple on an additional technology to the assimilation process. Techs are limited enough as it is, you have very little room to deviate if you want to succeed and I'm guessing it's the same at higher difficulties. Until the tech system is fixed, please don't make even more of them required.

Let me add few more ideas:

• Make bonus related to population you got from this minor. More pop = better bonus.
• Only earn bonus in systems you got pop from this minor (if applicable, I know some can't only work empire-wide). gives more importance to pop and migration together with previous one.
• Minors assimilated can give you specific hulls, modules, techs, system improvements, etc...

Of course all proposed here are good ideas to consider, and as I share most of them, won't repeat here.

lo_fabre wrote:

Let me add few more ideas:

• Make bonus related to population you got from this minor. More pop = better bonus.
• Only earn bonus in systems you got pop from this minor (if applicable, I know some can't only work empire-wide). gives more importance to pop and migration together with previous one.
• Minors assimilated can give you specific hulls, modules, techs, system improvements, etc...

Of course all proposed here are good ideas to consider, and as I share most of them, won't repeat here.

I agree with points 1 and 3.  I would also like it if they were to allow players to choose which pops Ground Troops and Vehicles get recruited from. I find it ironic that playing as Cravers I have an army almost exclusively made out of Amoebas and Sophons. You would think little gray men and jellyfish were physically inferior to genetically enhanced killing machines, but nope, the game doesn't think so.

UndeadPuppy wrote:

lo_fabre wrote:

Let me add few more ideas:

• Make bonus related to population you got from this minor. More pop = better bonus.
• Only earn bonus in systems you got pop from this minor (if applicable, I know some can't only work empire-wide). gives more importance to pop and migration together with previous one.
• Minors assimilated can give you specific hulls, modules, techs, system improvements, etc...

Of course all proposed here are good ideas to consider, and as I share most of them, won't repeat here.

I agree with points 1 and 3.  I would also like it if they were to allow players to choose which pops Ground Troops and Vehicles get recruited from. I find it ironic that playing as Cravers I have an army almost exclusively made out of Amoebas and Sophons. You would think little gray men and jellyfish were physically inferior to genetically enhanced killing machines, but nope, the game doesn't think so.

I think this is actually a potentially interesting strategy choice handled right.  I don't think a ship built on a planet with no hissho for example (since cravers are weird) should have hissho pop on it, even  if I wanted it to.  This means certain planets start to matter more for military production, not just because of industry, but because they have a good invasion pop.  Shades of Dune with Arrakis and Salusa.

vahouth wrote:

It's a simple drag &drop.

Only works within a solar system ATM.

Thanks! Can't believe I missed it. Very nice to be able to do that, though being able to do it freely/without restriction is a little immersion-breaking.

Eji1700 wrote:

I think this is actually a potentially interesting strategy choice handled right.  I don't think a ship built on a planet with no hissho for example (since cravers are weird) should have hissho pop on it, even  if I wanted it to.  This means certain planets start to matter more for military production, not just because of industry, but because they have a good invasion pop.  Shades of Dune with Arrakis and Salusa.

It would certainly be nice to choose which populations get conscripted for manpower. In my games I've seen that minor faction populations have a higher chance of getting conscripted, but I'm not sure if it's intentional or not.

Do you mean that populations and their combat effectiveness should transfer over into manpower on an individual scale? So, as a faction with an invasion bonus, by recruiting Sophon troops you are foregoing that bonus or even replacing it with the Sophon's combat penalty? It would certainly make sustaining populations that produce quality troops more important. The imagery that you bring up is cool... that would be neat to see in-game, having the planet a unit of manpower is from influence its combat effectiveness.

Our purpose with Endless Space 2 is to make interaction with Minor Factions meaningful, without being overbearing or inducing too much micro. As such, our purpose is to make the initial steps of the relationship more intensive, but less demanding in the long run.

This thread has pretty good feedback so I'll pass it on to the rest of the team for review.

Once assimilated you should get a few quests that would be the path to "integration" (after all when a new population joins a country/empire it will take time for them to get used to it and for others to get used to them).

An integration quest line for each minor faction (whatever the way you got them) could be interesting (and would lead to different minor faction bonuses for each choices in the quests i guess)

In the current game the assimilated just get into rebelion from ownership and i think it's a bit silly (i mean they sometimes join my empire without me asking because of border influence, and then they get into rebellion, make your mind damit ^^) 

Frogsquadron wrote:

Our purpose with Endless Space 2 is to make interaction with Minor Factions meaningful, without being overbearing or inducing too much micro. As such, our purpose is to make the initial steps of the relationship more intensive, but less demanding in the long run.

This thread has pretty good feedback so I'll pass it on to the rest of the team for review.

For what it's worth, don't be afraid of micro. It's a turn-based game, so it doesn't matter if we have 349756 individual things to manage, we have all the time in the world to do it. You won't find many players will be upset that they have more game to play and manage, and more choices to make; That was actually one of people's favourite things about the first game from what I've been seeing on these forums.