Half suggestion half advertising.

I believe that the voydani should be able to capture people from minor/major factions and breed them to feed on them and thus have a steady income of essence (obviously lower than consuming a whole planet population, but enough so they can still develop (really slowly) if there are no other living beings to feed on in their vicinity.

while thinking of this, i decided to test to see if i could add it myself, so here a mod that adds a small quest (brainwash 1 minor faction) that allows you to build a new building "cattle farm" that will add -30 food and +20 essence.

 for now it can be built only 1 time per system but i may add the possibility of building multiple ones (or multiple sizes). I belive such building should actually be in the main game.

Drop everything in the EndlessSpace2/Public folder and overwrite when asked (to get back to the unmodified version, simply verify the integrity of game cache on steam, should replace every file with the standard ones)

VampirilisCattleFarmsMod.rar

To be honest i wanted to make a passive for the voydanis first that would convert all their food into a smaller essence percent, but since there are a lot of things dependent on food (like manpower) i fear i would break 2 or 3 things, but if you think the passive is better i'll try to work on it and make it work

If anyone has any suggestion I'm open