Basics

Well it's hard to found a point to start this guide, and as an image can tell you more tha thousand words, let's take a look at what we can see in a late game senate screen (this one from a democracy):

In these squares we found:

1. This one tells you which government you got, and summarizes most of its characteristics. There's also a button that opens the screen that allows you to change your government (indicated with an arrow). Have in mind that your government is important, becouse as I'll explain later, it marks:
   • How you can cheat in elections.
   • How many law slots you have.
   • How many political parties can be represented in your senate.
   • Miscellaneous bonus you'll receive from each government type (I'll made an specific post for each one).
   • An icon to ask for a survey has been added here in update 1.0.36.
2. Your actual senate composition. this is important, because determines what parties are represented, which in turn determines your main law and what laws you can enac. Have in mind that in dictatorships and autocracy you pick the leading party regardless senate composition, but if it doesn't corresponds well you'll get approval penalties.
3. This screen shows you:
   • Your active laws. This is important because laws affects your gameplay giving you bonus, sometimes with coupled penalties.
   • If you look at the law on the left, you can see that it has a square and a pin. this is your mandatory law. You can't chose it, instead it is determined by your main political party. you'll be able to choose the rest of your laws, as long as there's a free slot.
   • The arrow indicates the button that open the screen where you can choose your laws.
   • Also a greyed button to abolish choosen law.
   • Lastly in right bottom corner you can see the upkeep of your laws. they cost you some influence each turn. If you can't pay this, some law will be abolished. Madatory laws has no upkeep, and some other's hasn't too, but these ones always either has a downside or you have to adquire them some specific way like quests or pop bonus.
4. This square shows you how much lasts until next elections (standard 20 turns if nothing strange happens) and the actual trends of your political parties. Have a look at it, as sometimes your pop can decide to change your leading political party.
5. This one shows your leading political parties. the one on the left is the one that won last elections and determines your mandatory law. Here also you can see heroes acting as senators with three icons below them, these icons corresponds to bonus they give to you, but as I told this is an end-game screen, I'll talk later about how they're chosen and what bonus you can get.
6. Popolation census. Tells you what population you have in your empire, and opens the pop screen. Pop is very important in ES2, as people vote their favourite parties, influencing elections depending on how much of each pop you have and how they react to events. also you can get bonus from collecting pop from concrete factions. Still I won't go into this aspect, as this is not so-linked to senate and requires a guide on itself.

Well, now that you could take a general look into senate screen, I'll explain each of these parts in following posts.

Waeryvn also does some nice tutorials on youtube:

Politics:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B7TMCyfNFs

Government:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yGWXVagPvE

Final considerations

If you got enouhg patience to reall all this, now you'll may be facing a decision: "I want to make my custon faction, what government can fit it better?"

A difficult quetion, which I got no good answer for, as this is highly dependant on your playstyle, but a some guidance, take in account:

• Democracy will allow you to have more active laws and benefits from senators skills at same time. I goes at a cost of being almost unable to influence elections results. Pick this if you don't care you leading party changing in the wors moment, as for the rest is very strong.
• Republic and Federation are intermediate situations: not as many laws / senator skills bonus, but able to influence elections in effective way. Pick them if you don't want extremes. When choosing which one, consider:
  • What micellaneous bonus fits better your faction? Probably Federation if you want to go wide and Republic if you want to go tall.
  • To influence elections, I'll have excess of dust (Republic) or influence (Federation).
• Dictatorship is opposed to democracy, few laws and senator bonuses, but total control of election results. Pick this one if you're dependant on your mandatory law or you need to be able to change your leading party at will.
• Autocracy is only for Cravers, so no point here.

All this is also appliable if you want to change you government playing a base faction or custom one.

Hope it helped you someway.

Thanks for reading!

Misc: Autocracy

Autocracy misc bonus states: "Only the major population can vote, and Anarchy cannot happen. But changing government is impossible". Well there are three parts, which are related. the third one is obvious: you can't change to another government. About other two I'll go separately.

Anarchy

Well in annormal government, and if you think in a normal dictatorship with its special penalties, when one of your systems approval reaches 0%, things like this will start happening:

This is at system level. As you can see in the yeollow circle and square, a conter with a fist appears on a system, and when it reaches 0, bad things will happen, like rebel ships orbiting and trying to invade this system, or even the system leaving your empire if things go really bad.

As you see there are some options to stop this: suppress and seduce, both have costs and are temporal until you can fix what's going wrong in that system.

But it doesn0t ends here. If there are more systems in your empire, it starts affecting your hole empire, just take a look at empire screen:

Same counter, but this time when it reaches 0, your government will turn to a dictatorship (if you're not yet) and the party opposed to your actual leading party will be the leader.

As you can see very bad stuff.

But, what happens into an Autocracy? Well, let's take a look:

Notice that penalty from parties not in senate still exists, lets continue:

As you can see Nallin and Dorado has 0% approval and penalties from parties not in senate. But no trace of rebellion. This is exactly what the description says: it can never happen, so you won't have the troulbes other governments has regarding unapproval. What were you expecting from killinng machines?

Only major population vote

If you go beck to "what you people thik" section in "Senate breakdown & Elections cheating" post, you'll remember this screenshot:

At a glance it deosn't seems different, but if you look carefully, here only what Cravers think is represented, so you won't receive any effect from what other populations in you're empire wants when calculating you political representatives. This is interesting, as it can potentially low approval penalties related to representatives not in senate.

Also you can add to this:

Yes. you have propàganda like in dictatorship. This two things makes easier to try what your people think that in any other government. And if you add that your pop never goes into anarchy, you can deal easilky with unapproval, having penalties on your FIDSI, but at lower risks.

Misc: Dictatorship

Dictatorship miscellaneous bonus states: "Rebellion start developing when a system is unhappy". What?

Well this essentially comes from the fact that in this government you pick your elading party. If this leading party is not the one your citizens like you'll start receiving approval penalties, like here:

The yellow arrow marks the penalty you get. This is dependant on how many parties you have that are not represented in your senate, and how much representatives these parties whould have if they were represented in yuor senate. To have a better idea, this screenshot corresponds to same turn:

As you can see Horatio has an ecologist dictatorship, but lots of them wants the militarists in the government. These scond Horatios are the ones unhappy.

And now, probably, as you're getting a new penalty to your approval that doesn't exists in other governments, you may be asking how you can deal with it. Well guys at Amplitude had brought you a way:

Yes. This is propaganda, this is an infinite improvement that you can build in any of your systems, and will increase your leading party (the one you choose, not the one your people want) support, as you have seen in the screenshot.

Think this is pretty simple to get. It just leaves the rebellion, but It can happen also in any other gevernment type, except Autocracy, shich ironically I feel the better place to explain this, so I'll go into this in Autocracy post.

Misc: Federation

Federation misc bonus states: +1 systems occupied before triggering expansion dissaproval on empire.

Well, what is this exactly?

If you look at your empire management screen, you should find something like this:

Ovbiously this indicates your global empire approval. In the yellow box you can see a bar, that will fill everytime you colonize a system. When this bar reaches its limit, 18 systems in this case, you'll start receiving approval penalties.

This limit is dependant on galaxy size regardless your government. In federation it will be alwas higher, but how higher it is depends also on galaxy size, starting from 1 extra system on smallest, and progressively increasing.

To compare:

	Federation	Others
Small galaxy
Exceptional galaxy

As you can see, simply as that: less approval penalties from colonization.

Misc: Republic

Repuiblic bonus tells "Laws provide better effects". Mmm... easy to see, I'll just put you one law as example:

Republic	Others

As you can see this law gives +4 movement points to ships if you have a republic, but +3 in every other government. These bonus are very different in each law. I started this thread to give you an idea.

As you see this bonus is hardly dependant on how many laws can you enact and what parties are you in your senate.

Misc: Democracy

Democracy gives you +1 approval per populations. This is a very simple but good bonus. remember that it gives +1 approval at system lelvel per local population unit, rgardless which faction this population came from. Let's see this screenshot of some systems approval tooltips:

I've put an arrow showing you this specific bonus. As you can see if you sum them, in all three corresponds to system total population, so 11 pop will give +11 approval and so on.

the one exception is in the middle one, where Kalgeros are giving you +3 approval per pop unit, being +2 from specific faction bonus and +1 from democracy. have in mind that sometimes you can faound that these bonus are added and displayed as one.

Senate breakdown & Elections cheating

This is the las part that is shared for all government types, well really, they only have one miscellaneous bonus which is different, but I'll go into each one in its own post. Here I will sepak of elections actions, but first we'll need to understand how your leading parties and senators are chosen.

If you want a quick and dinamic guide, go to the Waevin vides @Tempted posted below. they're very explanatory in this part.

What your people think

First, before elections, you'll need to undersatnad what your people think. In ES2 your population vote and choose their representatives in your senate. What they vote are conditiones by each pop preferences combined with some external factors, like being at war or what you're building in you systems.

In this two following screenshots, you can see, in the same system (a Sophon democracy late-game) how events are influencing your pop, and what representatives are most likely to be voted:

Here I only put the events that influenced scientists and militarists, but as you see in the upper menu, you can chechk party by party.

If you want to know what events influence each party, here are some screenshots of explanatory pop-ups you can found in your Senate breakdow:

All that determines what your pop will vote in your next elections. you can anticipate it with a survey provided some turns before elections and in a explanatory bos in your senate screen, I told you about in the "Basics" section.

Have in mind that "Senate breakdown" shows your actual composition, but don't tells you anything about next elections.

How elections work?

It's easy. Ecah 20 turns will be an elections (except the ones from changing governemets I spoke of before). A schematic of the elections of each governments appears in this image:

I recommend you to enlarge it.

Here what we see iin the top is the fisrst step of elections, here you see all parties represented, and in the ones you have a senator her/his/its portrait. I put all governments, from lest to right: autocracy, dictatorship, federation, republic and democracy.

The image on the center is an informative screen of what your pop voted in each system, its has some interest, but is mostly uninteractive.

On the lower row you can see each elections result, with the parties that will be represented in your senate, and the one that won and will impose its mandatory law. also you can see senator pics in the parties you have a hero that can be elected as senator.

You can stop and take a look at previous section, as this is also how senators are chosen. I explained a bit, but think you can have a better idea.

Also if you look at the results you'll see that the parties represented corresponds to the political parties representation mentioned in governments summary.

I know how elections run, but my wnated party didn't win. What can I do?

Here is when your gevernment election actions cames in. If you enlarge the previous image in the first step you can found one of the following lines with one or more options:

Essentially this options allows you to cheat in elections. What is available depends on your government:

• Autocracy/Dictatorship: Official support. In both cases you choose what party you want to win the elections, regardless what your people think. Of course if you choose an undesired party, you'll get some approval penalties.
• Federation: you'll get official support, and a options that require to pay influence. Official suport enhaces a bit the selcted party, but its barely ineffective. the other options give a strong boost to the selected party or a penalty to unselected parties. If the difference is not excessive they're very effective, and can get even more by unlocking techs in empire developement quadrant.
• Republic: same as federation, but here you pay with dust.
• Democracy: you only have official support, but like in republic and federation you only get a very small bonus to the chosen party. Essentially almost impossible to cheat, as you'll only benefit if the selected party is set to win or with a very small difference with the favourite one.

Leaving this actions a part, the only other way to manipulate it is by performing actions that goes in favour of one specific party, but this way is complicated.

Think with this I can end the explanation of the common government parts. So I finish it here and in following post I will explain specific bonus.

Leading political parties

This starts with the sentence: "Set political party representation to X on senate" mentined in government types. Esentially it determines how many political parties are represented in you senate.

But why this is important?

Well your political parties determines soem things:

• What laws you can enact. this is described in previous sections. As you can easily see, if you have more parties represented in your senate, you'll have more laws available.
• How many senators you can have. This is also important, because each senator is the hero with higher level representing a party, and once s/he is in the government will give you bonus.

I'll try to go as clear as possible, but this part will be for sure better explained in a video (@Tempted posted links to Waervyn videos below, I recommend taking a look at them), hav ein mind that here can be a bit messy.

To start, just try to remember (or look at "Basics" section) the full senate screen, and fro it I'll cut for you squares 2 and 5, the ones corresponding to "Senate Breakdown" and "Leading Political Parties", then compare the most opposite governments, as I've been doing in previous posts: an autocracy and a Democracy. Here we go:

Autocracy	Democracy

You may ask: hell, lo_fabre, what are you trying to show us here?

Just remeber, or look again at this image and I'll go from top to bottom.

Breakdown, left hero & mandatory law

This three are very related. Here have in mind it pick in Autocracy the goverment most liked to my cravers, to simulate a consistent result in elections if they gone like a democracy.

If you look at this breakdown, the hero on the left corresponds to the party with most representatives. This party is also the one that determines your mandatory law.

In the case of Autocracy there are no more heroes as you only have one political party represented in your senate, but in the case of Democracy there are three heroes corresponding to the three parties with most representatives.

In Dicataroship there will be also only one here, and in Federation or Republic there will be two heroes here.

If you have more than one hero from one political party, one will be chosen as senator. Not time to test, but until patch 1.0.25 it was the hero with higher lvl, but at patch 1.0.37 seems to have been changed to the hero you recrurit first from this party, regardless having another with higher lvl.

What happens if I haven't any hero of parties in my senate?

Well, then you'll see a benner in the place of a hero, and will be able to enact laws of this party, but don't receive any of the bonus that a senator gives to you. It looks like this:

Party political experience

This is the bar under the hero or banner. It indicates you the political experience of each party.

If you remember laws swction, this is the same that is required to unlock and hence enact more advanced laws.

Short and simple.

Senator skills

In the the late game examples, you can see three icons blow each hero. they correspond to senator skills, and once a hero is senator from one of your parties, and you unlock this skill (via XP gain from hero), you'll get empire-wide bonus.

Let's have a look at two heroes skills:

Both are showing you skills tooltips, and in both there's a line that tells: "On Senate (if political leader)". Well this is the bonus you'll get if this heroes are political leaders, and also you have unlocked this skill.

All heroes have three of these skills: one gneral, one corresponding to its faction, and one corresponding to its class.

If you put this together with all explained till now, you realize of the total of this bonus you can have for each government:

• Dicatorship / Autocracy: up to 3.
• Federation / Republic: up to 6.
• Democracy: up to 9.

Here a list of these skills:

This table is updated as said in v1.0.25, but devs have said that some skills will be nerfed in next update, so if you found some of them, please leave a post with actual changes.

And till this all I can tell about leading political parties. sorry about this part being a bit messy, but I didn't found a better way to put all this together and clear.

Laws

In this post I'll try to explin how laws work by answering some questions:

• What are laws and how they work?
• How many laws can you have?
• What laws can you enact?
• Have they any cost?

What are laws and how they work?

Essentially laws are something you can enact into your senate and once enacted will have empire-wide effects, but at some cost.

To see more about this, lets take a look at anatomy of laws:

Going top to bottom, you can see:

• Law name, and icon.
• Political party that law belongs to. In both cases to scientists.
• Some flavour text. Has no game impact, but I recommend reading it at least once, there's good narrative here.
• Effects: well its self explanatory, essentially what you will receive once a law is enacted. There are always bonus, but some laws can also a negative effect (normally only the independent laws).
• Required political experience: its a requirement to enact laws. To make it easy, all parties get political experience for being more time in your senate, so laws that requieres high political experience will only be available after its party has been for long into senate.
• Upkeep: most of laws has upkeep in influence. If the law has is specified here.

Now that we've seen what a law is, lets go to following point.

How many laws can you have?

Well here we have to distinguis about total number of laws and how many laws you can choose, which is closely related to the political parties mandatory law.

Total number of laws

The total number of laws is dependant on two factors:

1. Your government
2. Stages unlocked in empire development tech tree quadrant.

Your government determines your initial laws, but this is increased as yopu progress into empire development quadrant as follows:

Here you can see respectively the law slots unlocked in stage 3 and 5. Look tahta dictatorship and Autocracy never unlock new slots, and on the other side Democracy is the one that unlocks more slots. If you sum this with what I explained inn governments section, the total slots available to each government are:

• Dicatatorship: 2
• Autocracy: 3
• Federation: 2 up to 4.
• Republic: 2 up to 4.
• Democracy: 3 up to 6.

This refers to total number of law slots, but...

How many laws can you chose?

The total number of laws you can choose is your available slots minus one. This is due to the mandatory law. Each political party has one mandatory law, which once this party is leading your senate will occupy the first available slot, leaving the rest open allowing you to choose a law. To see some examples:

Here in left colum you see an initial Dictatorship above and a late-game Dictatorship below. As you see you have two law slots, but you can only pick the law into the scond one (the one with + sign), while the first slot is always occupied by "Hardship Ready" which is the mandatory law for ecologists, and is pinned to remember you that you can't remove escept changing your political leading party.

In right columb you see and early game Democracy above and late game below. Following same pattern there's the mandatory law, in this case "Oracle Of Science", beacause scientists are the leading political party, and 2 initial free slots, that goes to 5 in late game.

Also take note that in right lower corner there's the total upkeep you have to pay in influence.

What laws can you enact?

Well essentially you can enact laws that:

• Are from one of the parties represented in your senate.
• Independent laws which doesn't belong to any party.
• The political party (if law is linked to one) has enough political experience. Remember that it increases as your party is represented into senate. don't worry if a party goes out in an election, if it is represented again you don't loose the accumulated experience.

Let's look at two examples:

The upper example correspong to Ecologist Dictatorhip in late game, so you can enact independent laws, and  all laws from ecologists party, because they have lots of political experience.

The lower corresponds to a Democracy which has sicentists, militarists and pacifists represented in its senate, and is in mid-game. As you can see, you can enact laws from scientists, pacifists and militarists, plus the independent laws, but not all laws, because some parties hasn't enough political experience.

If you're asking how many parties are represented in senate and how they're chosen, I'll go into this in next section. no spoilers here.

Have they any cost?

Well, of course most of them has. To summarize:

• Laws from parties has an influence upkeep cost, which you have to pay every turn. If you don't the law is abolished. As a rule of thumb this cost is related to the political experience needed to enact the laws, it's like tier 1, 2, 3 and 4 laws which has more requirements and higher upkeeps.
• Independent laws has no cost in influence, but most of them has negative effects. If you look into last two screenshots, you can see that the law "Super Tax Act" applies a penalty to your happines while it is enacted. Of course it dissapears if you abolish this law.
• There are some other laws that comes from quests, pop collection bonues or other rewards that has no influence upkeep, nor negative effects. They're hard to get, and won't tell all of them here.

Hope now you have an idea about how laws work. I'll be glad you continue reading next section.

Governments

Governments differences:

Following the order in post avobe, let's go to see what make each government different from others. to have a general picture:

Probably the first thing you can notice here is that Autocracy has a very different image taken from the game than other governments. It has a simple explanation: this gevernment is EXCLUSIVE for Cravers, you can pick this to any other faction, nor when creating a custom faction of your own (still not sure if you can if you pick Cravers affinities, didn't tested to be honest). This is at the point that all other screenshots are taken from gevernment change screen, but the autocracy one is taken from a Cravers game senate screen. Have in mind that it works both ways: when you play cravers you can't change to any other government, you're advised now!

The second thing you notice is that in all other governments appears a required Approval rating and a Cost in influence listened in first place. this is what you have to pay if you want to change to this government. Well really you don't pay Approval, what happens here is that you can't change to a government if your empirea approval is below the required threshold.

And now lets go below the cost to change government, into "Government Effects" section.

Here you always foud a sentence telling you "Set political party representation to X on senate", the unmber in the X place indicates you how many parties are represented on senate. This is important, because:

• You only can enact independent laws, or laws from political parties represented in senate. Of course there's the exception of laws from other sources: pop bonus, quests, etc...
• You can only have senators from political parties represented in your senate, and only one senator from each party. As example in case of federation, you can have a 2 senators. Why they're important? Well I'll go later into this, but to summarize, senators are heros that provides empire-wide bonues, and sometimes these bonues can easily stack.

Next you can notice is that some governments has its own characteristics regarding law slots:

• Dictatorship has two law slots. Have in mind that one of them will be your mandatory law, leaving you only capable of picking one law. Well, honestly you can pick your mandatory law by picking your leading political party.
• Autocracy is the same case, but you have three slots.
• Democracy will always have an extra slot.

This number of laws is not constant in Demacracy, Republic and Federation, and grows as you unlock stage in your empire quadrant in tech screen, but as you can see is influenced by the gornment you have.

Last thing in this section you can see is a summary of the miscellaneous effects you'll get from each government, as each one has its own, there's no a definited formula. I won't explain more here, because below you can found a section for each one.

In lower section, called "Election Actions" what you're seeing is the way each government has to cheat in elections. to make it easier and summarize, it goes like this:

• Democaracy is described as "None". Really you can't do anything to chat elections. People will choose your leading political parties.
• In republic you can use Dust to change your people's mind. Expending it can change the weight of some parties, but have in mind that this is not a definitive result, so you can expect someone with 30% votes win an election after "convincing" your people, but don't expect winning with a 1% votes before cheating 8of course you can increase its representation and have a senator, but not expect being your leading party).
• In Federatioun you do essentially the same than in Republic, but using Influence instead of Dust.
• In Dictatorship and Autocracy you pick your leading party regardless what your people vote. Well this is a dictatorship, isn't it?

Actually you may be bored an thinking that this is all a mess. To have an idea of the differences, just look at this image comparing the most opposed systems, Democracy and Dicatorship in late game:

Here you can see most of what I explained:

• Democracy has 6 law slots vs 2 of Dictatorship after unlocking all possible slots.
• Democracy has 3 senator heroes vs the single one of Dicatorship.
• If you look at senate breakdown and political parties trends, in Democracy they correspond with enacted laws ans senator heroes, while in dictatorship I simply decided to pick ecologists, even >50% of my people wanted militarists.

There's of course the miscellaneous efeects that aren't shown here, but as you can see they're both very different.

Changing governments:

This is easy to change a geverment, as long as you don't play cravers, as I told, they can't. I won't explain large here.

Just go to senate screen, press the "Change Government" button and you'll open a screen showing you all 4 available governments for non-craver factions. If you fulfill the conditions and can afford the influence cost, you'll be able to choose your new government.

After doing this you'll have an Anarchy period, wich basically comprises a period while all your laws has no effect and you get no bonus from senator skills. this period may vary depending on some factors like game speed.

Following anarchy you'll have an "extra" elections, just in the middle of your habitual 20-turn elections. Have in mind that the 20 turn count won't be altered, so if you change government in middle of this 20 turn counter, you can have something  like: Elections (turn 1) --> Change government (turn 6) --> anarchy for 8 turns --> "extra" elections (turn 14) --> "normal" elections (turn 20).

Probably make it a bit short, but if you try you'll see there's no secret here.

Hi,

I will try to write here all what I know about senate. Have in mind that this guide is made with the intention to help new players, so if you're and advanced player probably won't found it interesting. Also if you're new to ES2 and found this can be simplified or made clear someway don't heshitate on telling this into comments.

Before starting some clarifications:

• Actually this is WIP. I have little time, so try avoid blaming me for being slow.
• Will split the explanations into various posts, being each one actually WIP.
• Settings about galaxy size, resources, pirates or whatever you may ask are set to average/normal/as close as preset as posible in purpose of making this guide. think only exception is galaxy size in federation bonus.
• Difficulty set to Normal, except one Democracy screenshot in Sandbox.
• All info is taken from game launch to v1.0.25, if you found something obsolete in later versions, post it. I'll update if I can.
• I'm not natural english speaker. If you found some grammar, ortography mistake or typo, feel free to tell me.

Let's start.