It would be nice to have a toggleable option that allows only Heroes of owned populations to be hired from the Academy and the Marketplace. This would essentially help with a number of issues:

  1. Increased Hero Availability in the Marketplace now has the side effect of making Dust-rich factions (or Influence for UE) to spam purchase a large number of Heroes, which creates some issues with Federations and Overcolonization Disapproval
  2. Non-faction populations need more reasons to collect. A lot of assimilation bonuses are lackluster and some populations can feel underwhelming (Bhagaba)
  3. Accumulating random Heroes of various races seems very strange especially when dealing with certain factions or religious xenophobes

I will now elaborate a bit on each point:


1. The Marketplace


Allowing an option to only show Heroes to a buyer when they own at least 10 (or 20) of a specific population type limits the pool of Heroes available to one faction but doesn't limit the pool of available Heroes. It also deters the tendency for multiple players to compete for the "best" Hero on the market. While I very much prefer the market with a lot of heroes to choose over the old market with only a few, I would prefer even more Heroes in the marketplace but with limited availability for each faction.


This could be done by only showing specific Heroes to the players who possess that Hero faction's 1st or 2nd level Population Collection bonus. This way there are a lot of Heroes in the marketplace, but one or two players can't buy them all. This was an issue in EL and it seems to have crept back into ES2.


One thing that seems very unbalanced is the ability for Federations to collect a vast amount of Heroes that allows for a lot of extra colonization capacity. This solution would require Federations to collect a wide array of population types in order to have access to many Heroes in the market. Then the issue arises where the extra populations end up carrying much heavier weight on election outcomes, making Hero collection a political gamble as well.


2. Population Collection


Right now population collection seems to be a bit underwhelming. Outside of FIDSI or other bonuses for collecting 20+ (or even 50+) of any given population, there doesn't seem to be much reason to collect an assortment of populations. While there exists unique improvements that rely on "per population type" they do not seem like a reason to collect many population types, especially with the amount of system population micromanagement needed to maximize their effects.


Perhaps a change such as this would give further incentive for collecting populations of various types, even going so far as provoking occupation or forced migration of a specific faction to gain specific populations.


On the other hand, some populations are either unwanted by some players (a lot of players don't want Cravers) or just seem underwhelming compared to other similar populations (Bhagaba vs Imperials or Pilgrims vs Pulsos). Implementing a change such as this would give reasons for those populations to be present or collected simply for access to certain Heroes.


3. Thematic Hero Availability


There are many times where I wonder why a Hero is available, like Niris Heroes or Bhagaba Heroes when none of those population types even exist in the galaxy. It should also be easier for someone roleplaying a xenophobic faction to limit their available Hero selections to their specific faction or race.


I feel this proposed system allows for a more thematic approach to Heroes instead of everyone just having a weird hodge-podge of Heroes in their rosters. Having a religious faction that only has a single population gets a bit nonsensical when they have Heroes from a wide variety of races.


Summary:


For these reasons, I believe having a toggleable option to restrict available Heroes would improve the game for those of us who care about consistency and some sci-fi realism. It would also allow players to choose how much Hero purchasing power certain factions have in multiplayer instead of some factions having access to all the advantages that come with Heroes.