bsones wrote:

Dragar wrote:

A couple top level influence spends in an election, and the scientists were running the show. That worked for me.

How far behind were they, though? 

Significantly. Like, 10% bumped up to 30%+.

Do you have the tech that boosts the power of election effects? It could also be some government types are much more influenceable than others. 

Dragar wrote:

A couple top level influence spends in an election, and the scientists were running the show. That worked for me.

How far behind were they, though? 

I've spent influence (or Dust, since I'm on Republic now) on several elections, and the effect seems pretty minor every time. Like, it might buy a win for a faction that is a couple of percentage points behind, but not for one that is 8-10% behind. I'm pretty sure the effect only applies to that one specific election each time. Nothing in the help text indicates that election spending has any sort of persistent effect. 

My Scientists are currently on track to win representation in the next election (they won't win the election--the Industrialists are at almost 45% support, but they will at least be able to pass laws). The thing that seems to have tipped the scales is boosting my Z'Vali (science-loving) population. They are my second largest population group now, and bam! The Scientists are now second place in the polling. So it does seem like population demographics are a prerequisite to boosting faction influence. If you don't have a population boosting your targeted political faction, then it almost doesn't matter which actions you do or don't take. 

Oh, god. I know your pain. Just wrote a lot of stuff about how I circumvented this problem on the quest/events feedback thread.

My experience was that you need, at least, a large minority of your empire population to be scientists primarily. Imperials are actually unhelpful here, as their pragmatic trait means that every science boost will also boost industrial support - this is how you end up with really huge industrial support when you've only been going science. It sort of waters down the impact that science events have on your politics.

As Ozgwald is saying, the most important factor determining political strength are your populations. If you want to go scientist and become Mezari, you need your empire population to reflect that. Furthermore, you need to use spaceports and forced population resettlement in order to get to the right place politically. And for me, that has problems: I almost quit that game when I realized what I'd have to do to make scientists in charge. It's pretty unsavory.

Ship science populations to planets where they can spread - ideally, make them the only population there. Store unwanted populations in spaceports with no destination, just chilling, where they can't reproduce and have no political representation. If the unwanted population gets too large, send it to another system that has room in its "spaceport". Before elections, store in spaceports the populations who most contribute to the major political competitor of scientists in the system - that reduces their impact on the election and should grant more science representatives for the next cycle. It took more than two election cycles of strictly controlling populations and their spread across my empire, and at the time of the election more than 2/3 of my Imperials population were in transit or in spaceports - out of 11 systems, only one had Industrialists as the main political force, and that was only because there was no more spaceport room to ship them without genociding my people. But it worked.

All of this significantly hindered my growth and empire development, but was necessary to actually place scientists as the main political power (and so enact the three scientist laws necessary to progress the faction quest). I didn't change my political system, which might have led to more factionalization/weaker parties, which potentially could mean that actions to influence politics would be stronger. I'll have to check that out later.

Finally, and somewhat unrelated to your post: when you make the transition from Imperial to Mezari (or Sheredyn), if you have Imperial populations who are in-transit to another system, they don't change to the new population type! I was actually super happy about that. I called them the Imperial Remnant and imagined that they must have gotten off of their space transports and gone "why is everyone wearing labcoats now?"

Tl;dr: Scientists and Spaceports!

The science portion of your population is far too small. Compared  to beta and alpha population preferences count for a lot more. I notice this difference because every war pre release would swap me to military, now I can have wars with a largely uniform race and still remain ecologists/ industrialists (albeit militarist is just so damn easy to occur, it definitely is not balanced and should be tweaked!).

As I see the make-up of your empire, the unbalanced militarist faction will always be present as will be the industrialist you got 10 times more industrialist compared to scientists. Which means more population management. Get the z'vali to open slots on planets and breed them, by boosting with the right luxery resource. Unfortunately (spaceport) pop management can be very tedious and could use some developer love. The "easy" way I cope with it is that I have 1 breeding system (horatio player) next to a full system (close by preferred). In this system I breed my species (currently breeding remnants) it has high food production tech. All unwanted like imperialists get put on the transport to never arrive, when the population has boomed I start emptying other systems and spread them around.

Btw this management of population needs to be changed it has far too many parallels with the holocaust. Lets ship the unwanted to their death, just should be completely different.

Another addition you should have started with the population management sooner. If you want to play a certain way, that is a bit off for the faction you are playing you need to plan it long term. You want to manage how much food you generate, you want to have spaceport access timed etc. I would say it is far too tedious to switch now, you can always switch to dictatorship and try to force more change that way. Just be sure your approval can handle it. 

My current population breakdown looks like this:

Like I said, I have some anti-science population, and some pro-science population (the Z'Vali, highlighted). I don't have huge amounts of either, so I would expect those effects to roughly cancel out. My largest demographic is Imperials, who output average Scientist support in response to science actions. In light of that, you would think that the Scientists would have a much larger slice of the pie. All but one of my heroes are Science heroes (the other one is an Industrialist).

I mean, here's the political effects I have running right now:

That's twice as many science effects as military (and the list has looked like this for the last fifty or sixty turns), and yet the Militarist faction is somehow twice as powerful as the Scientist faction.  (Note that the "Military Militants" event just started, so I haven't even started to see the effects of that yet!) I actually have more science effects going than even industry, but the Imperials output a lot of support for the Industrialists, so it makes sense that they are in the lead. The relative positioning of the other political factions makes no sense, though.  Unless I'm missing something?

I found there are issues with bonus and traits. The most significant contribution to science comes from having a population that contributes to the science politics. So at least a tier 2/3 (20 pop) of science population to get this trait. Now if my bug analysis of the game is correct any new systems or further populations might not get the benefit of the trait if the trait is working at all currently. Is this the case for you? I don't know, you might simply have not done enough yet. 50/50 population ratio would help, plus recruiting science heroes.

It would help if you would show a screenshot of your population balance/ make up and what traits are unlocked, to make a more fair assessment.