I thought that with this update we would have gotten the long awaited "more manageable manpower on ships".

As many have noticed, building large fleets will deplete manpower on your systems, even though you don't want to build invasion fleets.

I heard a dev saying that the ships were given high base manpower so people could easily invade systems without having to do too much research to get invasion modules or more modules slots in their ships.

With Update 2, the invasion module is quite easy to get (1 research in military unlocks the 2nd quadrant giving acess to the first invasion module) so i was expecting the manpower to have been toned down so people could specialize their fleets.

But since it hasn't been done (did they forget or did they judge it wasn't time yet ?) , i did it myself for those who are interested

ModulableManpowerOnShips.rar

Drop the content in your Endless space 2 folder and overwrite when asked, to get to the "normal version" simply use the game proprieties in steam and do "verify cache integrity"

This mods reduce base manpower on every ship a lot and adds support module slots that allow the addition of an extra manpower module to make up for the loss (or another support module if you don't want an invasion ship).

You get a normal slot for small ship, a X2 slot for medium ships and a X4 slot for large ships (however X2 and X4 won't appear as such on UI, but they should work as intended). Also not that these modules are placed outside the ship (as you can see on the pictures below)

I'm posting this in general as it's also a question to the devs and how will manpower evolve for Update 3 ^^