It's mandatory got damn it. It makes no sense for it to increase military influence. Now, killing enemies? Yes. Definitely. But simply the act of building a ship...

I second this. Or at least there should be a treshold of CP / pop under which any new ship doesn't increase the military influence.

I half agree to this, I agree that making units should not increase military standing, but that having military units should increase standing. So increasing numerical amounts of units increases military influence. Having 12 cp(or ship numbers) I think would be the start of the influence, and increase from there. 

Yea. An actual issue, many people said that. What I think is that for lore sense it should be maintained, but the impact reduced (halved or so) for gameplay reasons.

Evil713 wrote:

I half agree to this, I agree that making units should not increase military standing, but that having military units should increase standing. So increasing numerical amounts of units increases military influence. Having 12 cp(or ship numbers) I think would be the start of the influence, and increase from there. 

Perhaps instead of a total CP number that starts adding militarist influence, it begins once you've reached a certain number of CP per colonized system? So basically you can build enough to defend yourself and your interests without becoming militarist, but once you've reached a critical mass (developing an invasion fleet basically) people will start to pick up on that and militarism will increase.

So, something like 3 CP per system isn't enough to induce militarism, but once you reach 4 then it begins; or the numbers could be based off of system development levels - 2-3 CP per level 1 system is fine, 4-6 per level 2 system - after all, a larger, more advanced and developed system will require a larger defense force - 6-8 CP per level 3, etc. This would allow scaling with galaxy size and empire development, both of which could quickly go out of alignment if there were a set number in place.