As a Vodyani faithful, mostly spending time in Arks - save the occasional tumble with my old favourites the Hissho - I do not often deal with the lesse-, uhm, minor faction pops in the game. But when I play as any of the other factions I feel as though micromanaging useful populations take far, far too many clicks. On top of that, try as I might I seem unable to keep tabs on what kind of population is growing where, this especially when playing as the perfect Horatio or the Riftborn.

A solution is a way to designite either entire systems, although preferably also singular planets, to only grow, or be inhabited by, a certain kind of pop. Say you have a System with a nice strategic resource and just a starlane hop away some Harmony are stuck on a planet with none, yet it would take you ages to reverse this position by using the lowest level of the Shipyard. Well, unlocked in the Empire Development tree you would be able to research a Planetary Specialization that would allow you to designate a planet to automatically use available Spaceports to draw in Harmony population unto its surface while relocating the previous residents.


Does this handy tool make Minor Faction utilization too quick? Too powerful, perhaps? If the balance team deem it so then reserving planets this way could come at the cost of System Approval, or perhaps the chance of events that would cause pops of the kind that was moved to cause negative yields or Approval in your entire empire.
Using the feature would be automatic, by your gloriously efficent bureaucracy, and so would of course pose the same threats as when done manually, aka potentially sending pops into a System where they are vulnerable to be destroyed.

There are of course many ways to implement such a system, for instance it could also be done through laws or perhaps a new mechanic in what I'd call "Edicts" where you'd spend influence, or any FIDSI, to apply certain effects somewhere.

tl;dr I'd like to see a system to automate or slightly un-encumber us when trying to collect minor faction pops.


If you bothered to read all that, the Church thanks you.


Past this point is more elaboration, "slap on" ideas if you will.

In the case of Horatio they could utilize their cloning abilities to do these things without the need of Spaceports, but would still require a Planetery Exploitation and/or an Improvement. If he most perfect can clone himself, and wishes to accquire the rest of the galaxy's better genes, what is stopping him from cloning pops already in his empire on any planets he deems it wise?

In the case of the Riftborn, a faction I personally choose to only produce Riftborn pops yet I recognize it would be more efficent to utilize whatever tools available (in this case your starting Epistis), they would naturally come to the conclusion that it is simply more efficent to send their Epistis allies to Sterile plantets and would perhaps do this shuffling of pops more efficently or with less negative impact, if such cons to the feature were implemented. As a side note, I'd much like unique improvements for the Riftborn that designate a set percentage of Production every turn to the production of new vessels for Coroz refugees.