Yes or no?

Instead of Shipbound have both Shipbound and Essence/Religious, just because there are so many game play effects of the Shipbound as of now they can be split.
The Vodyani are fine, but game play effects needs better explanation; And in custom play it would be fun to choose shipbound without doing essence and/or the opposite. There can be many ways to do this but a simple one: Essene/Religious as the affinity and make shipbound into a population trait. Each would give a severe food penalty, but when using both, the total effect  as before.

Having a split of 

• Vodyani
• Ship Bound
• Essense Feeding

could certainly be interesting to see, especially for creating custom factions, like trying to mix Ship Bound and Riftborn.

And I'd love to see a tweak to how Ship Modules and Specializations work with the Ship Bound trait.

I like the idea, but balancing the industry cost of producing new arks for a shipbound faction would be really important considering how good they are early game, their potential abusability, and also that  you would be spending time building new colonies instead of infrastructure or fleets. Increasing the cost of each ark based on the number of existing arks in your empire is only part of what would need to happen.

I think both Shipbound and Essence change gameplay in ways too extreme to simply be population traits. One could be a gameplay affinity, the other a trait; I vote for Shipbound as the gameplay affinity, as it seems the more evocative of the two.

Yes, you would need to be sure not one of Essence or Shipbound would be OP if only one of them is used on custom race. But actually I think that's easy: As the option to play only one of the is available if using a custom built race, it's ok to make it more like probably too expensive at start, and then make it cheaper in future update as they get it evaluated by people playing. As long as the total effect if using both is as before, it should work out fine.

What should be affitinity or not, I suggested Essense as the Affinity in my orginal post because the religious/Essense part seem to me like more the core of the Vodyani story line. But I only played them once, so I don't really know... and I don't know how they hoose Affinity etc.

HM. Should I post this under  ideas, or not, since I already posted it here?