I loved the idea of militia in Endless Legends that provided defence for your city even when you had no army.

It would be great if this idea would be implemented in Endless Space 2.

The best way for this would be with space stations (but other ideas could be also used).

Or we could have a number of ships without star travel capability but able to defend the star system.

For a peaceful empier it would be a way to increase star system defence without creating a strong army.

I think that this would play well with the game if creating defences would be cheaper than offence.

This would make a single race harder to dominate everyone and enforce alliances.

Really love the idear to get millitia system like endless legend does... they help a lot defend again early NPC attack and erly agression in endless legend and would likely do so good in endless space as well. 

geting way to build purely defensive force could really help making passifism/influence strategy fun to play.

Building defensive fleets quickly has the Militarist ideology quickly take over your senate. A defensive space station or defensive fleet that could not leave the system (ships without warp drives) would be a good solution. Building then could not increase your Militarists, but maybe industrialists faction? A nice social critique of the military-industrial complex and stockpiling weapons but not having the desire to get entangled in galactic politics.

Also the hero governing that system then has a way to join in the space defense with his fleet. Gives a reason to spend money on upgrading the ships of your system governors too.

Speaking of which, I feel Heroes system skills need more minors for system defense, and Fleet Heroes need to give some small bonus if they are just orbiting a friendly system, but that is a whole different thread really.

Another thing that would need fixing for this to work is how current game mechanics work.

At this point it doesn't matter how many defence ships are in orbit. You can always just send your troops to the ground and conquer.

The changes I would put in place is this:

1. You cannot "guard" a star system unless you are the only empire there (apart from allies). This means you cannot start to decrease defence of system you plan to invade.
2. If there are fleets in orbit you need to have at least one turn of combat and only then can drop your troops
   • This way ships will take damage / get destroyed and in some cases none will be left alive to do the invasion. This simply has some logic behind it.
   • Friendly fleets should be able to drop their troops to assist with system defence.

If you have multiple fleets then we could consider that some of them continue to fight the attacking fleet and some help in the ground combat (just something to consider).

Any way the same would be for space stations in a way.

Lets keep in mind they are stationary.

So the attacked always chooses the engagement range. (I expect a station would have multiple fighters / bombers which will be introduced in the game)

And we could thing about a station having ground defence weapons (or ground fighters / bombers) so not taking out a space station would mean that taking the system would be a lot harder.

But in return if you win you take over the space station also.