Greetings and salutations, great leader of a space empire! By now, your nation must number countless stars - and quite the number of non-native aliens as well! Why, just look at those Gnashast fellows over there with their massive teeth, or that tiny Mavros squad with their gigantic mechs and enough explosives to level a city block! How your rivals must cower in their boots when you come for them with the strength of a thousand brutish alien subjects!


But alas, this is not the case - for when you come to seal your enemies' fates and plant your flag on their corpses, it is your average and unimpressive Lumeris attacking instead of their much more warlike associates. What happened to your mighty secondary citizens and their blood-thirst? Why won't they accompany you into battle?


Just recently, I went back and looked at a PCGamer article on Endless Space 2 all the way back from September 8th. In excerpts taken from interviews with Amplitude, you guys said that "'In Legends, the planet is the hero of the game … she has a soul,' says de Genlis. 'We created a whole storyline around a living planet... The way we do it in Endless Space 2, we still want that strong focus and unique thing, and that's population,' says de Genlis. 'The population is the hero of the game. We always try to take population into account. Population should always be at the heart of your decisions.'" Thinking on my experience with Endless Space 2, I'd personally say that that is definitely the case a lot of the time. However, there is one key aspect that it doesn't make much of a difference in: warfare - specifically, planetside! Sure, there are the impact of parties and minor faction traits, but what about all the talk of Sophons about getting cheap muscle from aliens, and the United Empire making new patriots to join them in their conquest of the stars?


There is already a way to change the ratios of manpower types and improving them. What I suggest is this: have an additional tab, accessible from the existing manpower menu much like you swap from trade companies to the system list and the marketplace, that would let you compose the actual races involved in your armies to make them more effective. Of course, there would have to be a substantial amount of that minor faction within your empire, and no one or two factions would ever be able to out-represent your major population in your armies, but even with strict limitations on how many of each minor faction you could field in your manpower you would still get a great amount of variance and diversity from the inherent multiculturalism of massive empires!


Maybe it's the Cultist inside me that's driving me to want my colonial thugs to wage war while I sit back and lounge, but such a mechanic would add an immense amount of depth to the already nuanced population of Endless Space 2, further developing that key idea: that you, at the end of the day, are only an empire because you have a devoted population to rule over!


The PCGamer article, source of my quotes:

http://www.pcgamer.com/endless-space-2-takes-endless-legends-quests-and-varied-factions-to-the-stars/