I ll repost, and improved, this i ve posted elsewhere not because it need post count... but because, maybe, it brings my OP post into something more concrete.

IMHO i feel the negletec part of this puzzle is the population presence on each planet.

Influence, politics and religion, are as good as the populations are willing to engage.

As a simple example: (and i am sorry for the religious/politic (there is here no judgement of valour) speach but i am unable to design a clearer example)

You won t see Finland turning itself toward any religion as people generally dont give a damn to it, as much as you won t see South Arabia turning jewish or democratic as population don t feel the need to and are also driven to the status quo by coertion.

But on the other hand you ll probably see a switch in europe toward Islamic religion as the governments are housing more and more people of this religion and islamic people give much more attention to religion than european give attention to it.

All this to say that populations should have traits (translated into numeric values):

- Racial traits: (each race will feel happyer when lead, by heroes of their species governing system (and then maybe political alignement), or in an empire of their own race)

- Political traits; (Craver dictatorship, Voydany Teocracy, and so on)

- Hapiness traits:  (food for cravers, reshearch for Sophons and so on)

- and so on...Too much so on...

Probably layers and hierarchy of traits should be implemented, primary and secondary, and have a (small ?) RNG.

All this would combine into a mosaic that influence the system population and these systems combined tendencies influences the empire politic feeling, leading, why not, in systems willing to bail out to join another empire or becoming independent, heroes inclusive, especially if you don have money to pay them. (could they blackmail you?)

Maybe using the influence points could be spent in governamental propaganda so you can control a bit whats happening /mitigate damage, but make a false or several false moves and see issues rise and maybe threaten to reap your empire on the most severe degree.

All in all population would have a meaning beyond populating new colonized worlds. Managing them, and by consequence politics, would have the relevance it lacks today. 

(Now errr balancing this to make sense and be enjoyable trought math formulaes... or maybe someone will see this as an interesting challenge.)

Someone mentioned corruption to loose income and fids to give more importance to politics...., i would say add corruption influencing hapiness also. i find this very valid and interesting, as i live in a country were corruption is rampant and fuck up everybody but the politicians that make laws to protect themselves....

I have found many times that you can easily hoard influence without having anywhere to spend it on, especially if you are a Dictatorship.

So what if you can use your surplus influence diplomatically to reduce the border growth of an enemy? Why do we have to resort to violence? ;)

Or a simple hotfix where AI border growth is the same as the players.

The main complain i see now is how influence work ATM i haven t found any specific idea thread so im opening one....beg pardon if already done.

Influence is offset ATM. I too have the same kind of complaining of others. The idea is fine but need refining.

Here what happened to me:

I was in a galaxy were lay lines where in chunk (less than 10 planets per chunk at least for the discovered ones), my central world (Sophon) was siding Horacio s one. I wasn t willing to obliterate them (as it doesn t fill the sophon kind of mentality nor mine during the gameplay), so they could be used as ginea pigs...maybe. 

During the game i had reduced them to their original world, and fleeted them out, the only ship allowed were civilian ones. They world being constantly circled and besieged when needed.

Even then their influence was growing, threatening minor worlds i had to be assimilated by influence. 

This IMHO is the core problem of influence as it is. And potencially a game replayability killer in the sense it limit your gameplay style.

As per common sense:

There is no way an empire that is reduced to 1 world and fleetless, with ennemy controling its very space... space, with internal population unhapiness, should be able to generate enought amount of influence so to threaten worlds of the dominating power. It doesn t make any sense.

Its like: German Nazi after 1945 dominated by URSS and USA threatening turning countries around to become Nazi by influence.

So here a small list of feature to be think thanked around or discarded:

- Influence shouldn t turn a world around by itself, especially in no way any race original world;

- Military dominated planet, having a foreign army blockade, should not emit/receive any external influence that is not of the conqueror, or have the influence passing the blockade severely crippled, especially if no world owner military space ships are not present.

- Military conquest should not change all influence in an overnight, resistance and guerrilha tactic should/could wear down occupying troops to the point to allow an uprising if they become too low im mumber or/and power;

- to compensate this loss maybe Influence should/could speed up/Slow down any besiegment/military conquested population convertion (today the military meter is grey + color of the owner. Maybe consider making it Color of the owner + color of the conquering/new influencer(s). Or go full way: each race present should influence the world in which they reside);

- Population convertion should/could be tied to happiness. Happiness should/could be tied to the race original need (QTT of food for cravers, QTTY or reshearch for Sophon, QTTY of disponible souls for Voydani ect);  

- Influence should/could be tied to QTTY of each population present. (Simple example: Imagine i am Sophon have dominated a world but population is mainly (insert other race(s)) i start to remove this population (by force) to some of my worlds and inserting sophons into this world, my population start to influence/convert the original population...or the way around depending on the original planet happyness for example.  Also, in the reversed way, My system receiving the foreign population i am dislodging is influenced by the newcomers. This could cause troubles, inclusive political troubles as some population are/could be more tied to some kind of type of political regime. 

**Now i know this is not easy to balance or maybe even do, but would make an interesting new concept rarely seen in strategic games, and could give more relevance to the political subgame, which is an amount of work rather useless ATM. I ll explain: I never give it more attention than to see if laws slots are free (and that scarcely) and speed forwarding election day, don t give a crap if militaristic pacifist or whatever as long my system is stable politically. And never felt any kind of need to do more engaged than that - skeeping the political subgame entirely and  never feeling any consequence for doing so, which i find sad because an amount of work have already been put there, and there is true potential**

- Taking in to consideration the points above, loosing/receiving population could be a boon or a problem, managing population would have some strategic sense beyond merely populating recent colonized worlds to maximise system FIDS. (Could feeds be tied to population present by race? Example: Sophon more tied to reshearch, Cravers to food ect....but joining too much of them in a system could generate a politica/influence or even ownership change).

- As a result of all the above, maybe you could migrate your population (and AI would migrate to yours) to non ennemy worlds in time of peace, and maybe this could have some interesting result the moment a war between the 2 race is declared. 

This could be a twist in democratic/Republican system of goverment, as suddenly having a war declared some world become less effective or threatening tilting to the ennemy/you, based on population presence, effective external influence, actual happiness, politic regime, and so on. 

I know this seem huge programing work and surely is, but since its beta 0,3, and this, at least for me, marry with the: "your population doesn t have enought asset to fill your military" (or whatever is the message we are given) concept... 

Imagine your population not accepting conscription and even migrating to avoid it. 

Imagine your military with too much prison conscripting guys starting to affect effectiveness or causing mutiny and becoming pirates. (yeah i m smoking weeds on this idea LOL so much dreaming.) 

2 Other features also push toward "military win gameplay":

1) The lack of converting a civilization to protectorate (at least i haven t found one way to do something similar) to avoid destroying the civilization.

Subduing a planet/race to a protectorate would/could have the following consequences:

- Civilization would not be destroyed;

- Main world/ and maybe more than only the main one would exist and remain in control of the civilization, but under your partial control, or maybe leave it in the AI hands, but you could force the world to produce military assets and replenish troops, fix damaged ships. 

Actually the game is too much inclined to: "kill it or suffer it" which doesn t make sense for a non extreme militaristic play.

2) The tech tree itself

There is not enought slow down to achieve militaristic fast and full advancement in the others parts of the tech map.

Im not sure i m being clear so i ll try another way.

Just goes for military tech tree and surely win with minor reshearch in other trees, which is not true for other kinds of victory. Or at least its the impression i have now.

More military improvements should be blocked by needing reshearch in other tech trees.

*As off topic. Althought i had reshearched tanks and planes i was never able to field the in battle even having a carrier. I wonder what i am missing. (i have not consulted the wiki, i think this should be straighforward as possible not needing getting out of the game to see what the hell is going on. Maybe tool tips FTW.)

Well flame vest on...i think.

Cassadore wrote:

The biggest issue I have is how the only effective way to counter influence is through warfare. It happened more than once that I just simply gobbled up another empire within 15 turn through influence alone with zero resistance or that a close neighbor's borders forced me into unwanted conflict because I completely ignored influence.

Some possible solutions that could make influence more manageable are:

- A treaty that prevents the involved parties from being able to steal territory from the other through influence. (Diplomatic)

- A law that slows down the advancement of foreign borders into your own.

- Happy systems will resist against foreign influence while unhappy systems embrace it.

I also agree with this. 

This post sums up the frustrations I felt when playtesting the game.

These solutions are simple to implement and protect passive empires from aggressive hostile takeover.  Also happy pops are more likely to enter alliances or federations as a means to protect against a strong military invasion.  The premise is sound, needs testing.  The first option prevents having to stay in cold war, or war state just to keep systems that a player has taken within another empire influence zone.  If AI offers truce then he is in effect conceding system and gives up the right to simply flip it when peace is re-established.  The only exception I can see to this is where the aggressive player withdraws his forces and he has no presence in contested system.  Then it can be flipped back to original owner.  Possession is 9/10 law.

I suggest Cassadore get this post into design section of forum for review by devs.

Mailanka wrote:

For the rest of the thread, I want to note that I'm fine with influence flipping worlds, and that in my experience, if you kill the influence-generating-worlds, you kill the influence dead.  The only time it's been a problem is that you can have several influential worlds side by side, in which case to destroy the border, you need to kill all influential worlds.  It's been like that from the start.  So much so that I wonder why people are complaining about it now.  Are they new?  Or did something change that literally hasn't come up in my games by sheer chance?  Because I've not had any odd problems with Influence in any game I've played.

I think something must have changed because I have tried taking capital and influence worlds and still his influence border does not change.  After war is over he just flips systems back even if he only has one or two systems left to him.  Other players are reporting same problems.  On my maps I can still see his border influence after I have knocked out most of his systems.  Maybe playing as a different faction has different results but I can not see why this would be.  

A fallen empire, one that has been reduced, can not expect to flip systems that were once his but no longer his.