IceGremlin wrote:

Oh dear. I'm sorry to say, a lot of us actually complain about that exact skill in combination with engine and Fleet Speed module stacking because it lets you zoom around the galaxy without paying attention to space geography. It results in a lot of us never bothering with positioning or scouting because we know that even if we know where our opponent is, they could be just about anywhere in the galaxy next turn.

The primary point of a lot of the thread at that point was not that we need ways to ignore geography, but rather that geography is so boring and easy to ignore. Seekers contribute to just that problem.

It horribly devalues positioning and scouting to have fleets which completely eschew the concept of distance.

Agreed. Free movement also makes the various battle theater effects of special nodes (f.ex. black holes or asteroid fields) completely non-existent in gameplay, because there are no chokepoints to hold and no reason to station your fleets on special nodes since both sides of a war are only interested in attacking or defending systems that house actual planets. Free movement in its its current form is way too powerful and is in need of a big nerf to make galactic geography a thing again.

I also find it kind of weird that in ES1 the tech tiers for different travel methods was 

Cosmic Strings > Wormholes > Free Movement

Whereas in ES2 it's

Cosmic Strings > Free Movement > Wormholes

Feels like it should be the other way around like in ES1 due to free movement being outright better than wormholes in most situations, and even then free movement should be much more costly.

Generally when a new game announces a bold feature for their game and receives much attention from players to media. Few things could happen between the announcement and the release but the Amplitude picked the short stick of all possibilities and abandoned the most hyped feature in the game. The politics. Today I'll write about why I think this topic should be the most important topic, needs attention and how it can be changed into something great. 

Endless Space 2's abandoned child: Politics.

With right or wrong reasons, the political apathy has been increasing over the years throughout the world. Of course, the game market is received its fair share from this climate too. While most of the companies forcing politics to their game just to create publicity, the strategy games are on the natural side adopting politics to their games. Rather than simply pushing buttons of customers, strategy games can purely create a simulation in their games to reflect politics in their game. Without picking a side, without any backlash. A cost-effective method is to leave all the micro-politics and creating the bigger picture. Just like Endless Space 2 did with bare bones party representation. 

remember the excitement you saw this screen for the first time?

Ahead of the time, Amplitude announced this and put it inside the game and it was a well-thought simulation I must add! But few games after the players realized that it was an empty feature. It is an extremely neglectable thing happening in the game. Even though the endgame quest is a political crisis, the player never getting bothered by politics. There are many small things can be said but I simplified all into topics for now. The reasons why politics are lackluster:

• Every type of population cost the same amount of influence for law upkeeping. 
• Political traits of each population are not edgy enough.
• Happiness and politics are not interacting between them. 
• Heroes are not intertwined with the politics. 
• Heavy political lore doesn't represent the true gameplay.

It is possible that during the development limitations this amazing idea is abandoned and more simplified just to make it presentable. It is very depressing to see this great simulation happening in the background tracking every click I do and setting up to a big thing but only to realize it is only a mirage. In the comics or quests, the world of Endless presented as a deep political lore I wished the gameplay caught up with it. 

Now, besides that, the second part why I think this is the most important feature should be resurrected is purely economical one. The market is shifting towards political. Aside from the things I said in the beginning, upcoming strategy games are adding to their game too. From more in-depth faction relations to political systems. Developers have been patching their game to improve their "politics" game. Because I believe the market carves more political simulation within their 4X or grand strategy games. 

I really hope a complete dedicated DLC and patching would triple the amount of gameplay it offers now. From Kotaku to self-blogs many people were very curious about the politics before the release and in the early days. I believe it needs a second chance to create the true vision. The next topic once again will be about 4x, A perspective: One more turn.

There are so many things that affect politics - science, populations, heroes, actions, etc. - that either one effect will clearly dominate (as was the case with military faction and actions a while ago, and often is the case for certain populations), or the effects will effectively be a small random push one way or the other, without much player control.

Dragar wrote:

There are so many things that affect politics - science, populations, heroes, actions, etc. - that either one effect will clearly dominate (as was the case with military faction and actions a while ago, and often is the case for certain populations), or the effects will effectively be a small random push one way or the other, without much player control.

Politics would probably play better, and feel more complicated, if the amount of things affecting political opinion were actually reduced, and the amount of effects that result from it were increased.

Currently it's a gigantic spreadsheet of information for how it's manipulated, but only results in a marginal and easy-to-avoid chance to get the wrong party into power.

I disagree. What affects politics the most in the game is ^N bonus from your populations where N is a party they have a collective bonus for. Not things you build in your systems or ones you research, but your huge pops determine political leaning the most. If you have 100 sophons in your empire you can try your hardest to push any other party as your main, but you will usually fail miserably. So it is actually relatively easy to have any particular party as a democracy, you just need to grow corresonding pops and eventually you will get there just from their passive political influence generation. That goes for the late game. In the early game you alsohave to be smart and make decisions if you want some party to grow in influence. E.g you can decide between praising a lot of minors or conquering them just because those affect different politics. Prioritizing X or Y curiosities to push X or Y party. Making proposals and responding to them.  Building certain buildings and researching different techs. Players shouldn't be able to play every game following the same pattern and still be able to get parties they need on top of that while they invested zero effort in it and sacrificed nothing.