Hi!

I wonder if it is by design, or by... hm.. misdesign, or just me, but it seems like it is hard to form an ecologist or religious government.

Religious: there are not enough buildings.

Ecologists: there are buildings, but they mainly produce food and you don't actually need so much food to build them and invest into techs. Food is useful on the latest stage when you can convert it into industry, but before that moment - I am not sure.

Then, I have some doubts about edicts:

Religious: the Religious edict is needed to avoid influence expences for war and rejecting cease-fire. Is it the only purpose? Because, you know, If I invade a star system during cold war, the adversary will probably deaclare a war himself. Or is there some negative diplomatic effect of war declaration I am not aware of?

Ecologists: quite an interesting feature early game, but is it possible to get by without the Science and Exploration quadrant? It seems like its usefullness is reducing during the game to potential zero. I think it should give some buffs to the planets you learnt to colonize with techs too.

Please comment and let me know if I am wrong about anything!

I can't speak for the benefits of the Ecologist party, but I think the base Religious law also allows you to bypass closed borders, or was/is supposed to do so.

SilentCynic wrote:

I can't speak for the benefits of the Ecologist party, but I think the base Religious law also allows you to bypass closed borders, or was/is supposed to do so.

You can also attack systems without a declaration of war. 

I think that it's mis-design, that it is too hard to build enough religious + ecologist improvements over the long term to solidify their support, the natural yields of Religious and Ecologist improvements aren't as worthwhile as the others, and it is too easy to support other ideologies through normal and uncontrollable gameplay - namely the Militarist and Industrialist factions.

As you point out, Food is currently the least valuable resource: you don't need much to grow, and yields higher than 300/turn are useless on a non-tributary system until you build a STAGE 5 improvement - that's late game AF. 

Meanwhile, Influence is great until you have too much of it, at which point... well, what's the point of having that much? Unless you suddenly gain the ability to spend lots of influence on stuff - and the AI is so anti-diplomacy in general that you can never get a good deal, plus you need to be at peace with them, plus you need OTHER STUFF to trade anyways - or are the UE (or are going for a peaceful system buyout victory, I suppose), there's a soft ceiling to the usefulness of influence generation.

This doesn't happen with the other resources. You always want more Dust and can always use more of it. You always want more science, and can always use more of it. You always want more Industry and can always use more of it, aside from the fringe case where you don't have any infinite conversion options, have run out of stuff to build aside from military ships, and don't want to boost the militarists - then you can have too much).

So the Food and Influence buildings have less inherent worth than those that generate Ind, Dust or Sci, and so players are less inclined to build them... shifting their politics away from those parties.

I've noticed this whenever I go for a Religious/Ecologist playthrough: that you basically always need a custom faction whose politics include Industry/Militarist -> Religous/Ecologist (whatever your favored political faction is) in order to maintain Religious/Ecologist primacy, because my natural tendency when playing, and I think I'm not alone here, favors Industrialists and Militarists even when going out of the way to avoid them. There's not enough incentive to go for Religious and Ecologist improvements, and even if you build LITERALLY ALL OF THEM, there are still more Industrialist/Militarist improvements, including ships, that you will eventually build; the hard cap on the number of Religious and Ecologist political impact triggers is less than those of the Industrialists and Militarists.

That was a longer rant than I meant to go on.

TL;DR: I agree, and think that the political imbalance that favors Industrialists and Militarists over Religious and Ecologist political parties is bad or mismanaged design.

You hit the nail right on the head OP. Right now Food is a bit too easy to produce and unlike other resources where every little bit is always useful, once you hit a certain limit (only one pop can grow per turn and it's too easy to achieve) there's zero additional use for it until you get the late game Food2Industry conversion tech, and as such there's no real reason to heavily focus on growth. 

Religious party is also pretty much impossible to keep in power as non-Vodyani even with election actions not only due to lack of buildings, but also due to lack of other gameplay actions. As complete opposite comparison Militarist party has tons of related gameplay actions that increase their popularity: war, building ships (even for defense) and fighting pirates in addition to their buildings. Even Scientists get increased popularity from exploration and surveying anomalies that you're bound to do in every game, whereas Pacifists can grow very easily if you spend a lot of Influence on diplomatic actions with minor and major factions. The only gameplay action unique to Religious party (apart from Vodyani restricted leeching) is influence conversion of systems, but it's unlocked rather late, not to mention quite limited in use so it can't keep the religious popularity up on its own.

There's been suggestions about giving religious party more gameplay actions and making them a more viable party for non-Vodyani, though I don't think we've heard any concrete plans from the devs yet.

I like the idea of having religious events tied to heroes. It could even be something like levelling up a hero, recruiting heroes (is this already the case?), assigning heroes, etc. It is possible to run a religious empire if you really want one. Republic has very strong election actions, and twinned with the pooster program, it's usually possible to get a religious party as at least the second party. Throwing in a few religious pops makes things easier. Overall I agree that it could do with some tweaking.

I find ecologist pretty easy to maintain with Horatio, unless the game has been super aggressive, although I often switch to Republic making it easier to maintain.  

Militarists could also do with some tweaking, although there is currently a mod that does this. A couple of fights with measly pirates can be enough to put them in the senate. Wars and invasions are all good, but giving them points for space battles might be a bit too much.

I'm still not fully sold on the beef with food production. Unless I'm Horatio or Unfallen (and Cravers - but for them high food production is often a bad thing to be managed), it's pretty rare that I reach the 300 food cap, except in systems where I specialise for food as I want to send out population transports. Even above the 300 cap (330 really - 10% always goes to manpower), manpower is always relevant. I gather that lots of people just siege down the manpower in systems, but this can often take much longer than just carrying out invasions, especially in the late game. I quite often run low of manpower when running long wars, and any nerf to food production will mean that your military engine will be slowed down even further. You can build the extra manpower production buildings (and I often do in some systems), but this eats your food hard - more reason to keep food production where it is. Food can get vastly over the cap once you start T2 terraforming, but by that point you should only be a few techs away from the biofuel production. 

I think the problem lies in gamespeed selection.  Food production seems to scale strangly between fast and endless game speeds.  It is very easy to reach food production cap on fast and normal to hit the magic one pop a turn number.  However on the slower game speeds its much more difficult.  Maybe making food production associate better with game speed to slow it down on fast and normal while leaving slow and endless the same would correct the issues your describing.  I do also agree that it is difficult to keep ecology throughout the game as war is almost always inevidable at some point. 

I really like the idea of your hero selection having a heavy impact on your controlling parties. Say your highest hero would offer a strong boost to whatever party they represent.  I feel this would keep the theme of religion intacted and make the chance of keeping your party of choice throughout the entire game.