At current game version 1.0.52 a big part of the Cravers's mechanics revolt around population management, where the basic premise is the smooth happiness-wise transition from depletion by cravers to enslave populations in depleted planets.

In general Cravers are perceived as a faction that could use a buff.. IMHO it can be said:


1 Cravers are considered a faction too micromanagement intensive
2 Cravers are militaristic not expansionists, which is fine, but in the current expansion penalties evacuation mechanics they struggle.
3 ES2 is a game strong in lore/faction differentiation. This is a strong point of the game and should be improved and profited as much as possible. For the Cravers this is the scotched earth strategy, they are robotic insectoids.

Any design action that may alleviate this points could be of interest.

Proposition: Craver's new tech of evacuation. It permits a faster and better evacuation of systems and it opens the possibility to improved gameplay in a very organic way with the current game's mechanics.

What are the possibilities? Let's see the previous points:

1 A special Cravers evacuation system could permit to avoid manually emptying the system. As a minimum, the reminding population of a planet could be automatically send to the last used destination. This would ease population managements and clicks/turn when evacuating a system. A more ambitious approach could be to automatically re-send all population to available spots throughout the empire prioritizing the nearest available places first. An even more ambitious possibility is to do this in a very few turns, ignoring the spaceports but loosing some % (half?) of the conquered population

2 Reduce time to be able to evacuate a system. Due to Craver's fleet superiority this could act as a very strong buff, permitting to destroy enemy systems (and thus profiting from being at war without expand), capturing populations (raiding riftborn worlds just for taking the population) and improving the capacity to wage proper war without de-stabilizing the empire. This is lore-compatible since tech-insectoid depleters do not need consent for moving people around or destroying systems. Another possibility, if its considered they desperately need a buff (not my appreciation), could be to even get some manpower (based on % of improvements) for destroying a system like this (anything else like dust would not be very lore compatible)

3 An improved evacuation system should facilitate expanding, by leaving depleted worlds for conquering new. An additional feature could be to completely deplete a world when evacuating, thus making it un-available for other player (and maybe even getting something in return such as manpower). This would be as well lore-friendly. For avoiding exploits vs invading AI worlds this option could be available only after certain % of depletion has already being achieved or directly after the system has been under the player's control for X turns.

Recapitulating:
*Automatize pop distribution when evacuating+faster pop transport with losses
*Reducing time for evacuation to be available
*Direct profit from evacuating
*Full depletion of worlds when evacuating (with or without profit)

This are various elements and could be organized in two techs. in the south part of the tech tree.  As an example the first one for improve time to evacuate and pop raiding with looses, and the other one to deplete when evacuation with conversion of improvments to manpower.

All these elements go well with the lore and the Cravers mechanics. If I had to choose, I would directly eliminate advance terraforming for the Cravers and add this instead which suits them better.

Since these improvements are an addition that builds on already exiting game mechanics, it is not mandatory for the AI to master it out of the bat, i.e. they do not break the game if not well managed by the AI.

Such change would improve faction differentiation which is the cornerstone of the game.