Hello.

After playing quite a few hours of ES2 I found that one of the most engaging aspects of  it is politics and, by extension, population management. I think that it is a system brilliant in it's simplicity, tho it can use some automation and UI improvements to avoid it becoming tedious.

In short, this idea is centred around creating a more enjoyable experience managing populations of your systems by altering how the second part of the collection bonus works. This would be achieved by replacing  a flat 5-15% bonus for having 1 population of a particular species present in the system to a scaling one providing small incremental boosts of 1-5% to a maximum of 5-25%  at 5 population in order to discourage boring, tedious and micro heavy process of spreading every species to every system to get that bonus everywhere. Numbers are of course up to debate and aren't applicable to all bonuses, but I hope they show the general idea. I'll now attempt to explain why I think this is a good, and in my honest opinion, necessary change. I ask that you pardon me the wall of text below, it serves to explain, in detail, my logic to those of you who would like to hear it.


When I started playing around with collection bonuses I was disappointed to find that the game encourages you to spread each species to every single system in your empire instead of specialising planets/systems by matching members of the species to a system best suited for them.


Why is this so?

1. Spreading species around increases chances of that species increasing population. If you have 5 Imperials and 1 Amoeba on a system, they will grow at more or less the same pace, regardless of the initial population size. This in my opinion is fine fair and interesting way to encourage managements of your minorities, so this is not the part that causes issue for me.

2. Once you acquire 20 members of any given species in your empire second collection bonus unlocks. For most of them it's a significant percentage buff to every system with at least one member. Pictured below is Kalgeros, one of the most notable "offenders" with a buff that is even bigger than an Imperial influence buff of 15%. This means that if you want to optimise your influence output, you will want one of them in every single system you have.



Why is this bad?

1. It encourages player to engage in an extremely micro heavy process of spreading species, one member at a time, to every new system player acquires. Just how bad this is? Let's assume that you have perfect memory and do not waste any actions. Each time you want to do it, you have to: find a system with that population, open it, drag the population to the star port, open sub menu, find the target system, select it, click confirm, exit star system. That's 8 actions, sometimes it will be less because you manage to move more than one species at once, but that's no saving grace, just an easing of an ever growing head ache. If you are like me, and do not have perfect memory and waste some actions, you will be spending minutes rechecking and correcting your misclicks and mistakes, forgetting which systems already have a particular population en route to them, etc, etc. Rinse and repeat for every species in your empire every time you acquire a new system. And if you acquire a new species not only you have to spread your existing species to their system, but to export that species to every system you have often leaving a lone member of a species, outnumbered by outsiders ten to one, on his home world.

2 It requires no strategic thinking, just a blind repetition of a pattern, that could be performed by any basic automaton. This means that if you are trying to play optimally you should do this in every single one of your games, no matter who you are playing so long as it's not Vodyani. No interesting options, no thinking, just boring repetition of a pre-determined pattern. The only argument against this point is the flat bonuses provided by pops, such as "+4 approval on fertile" provided by Kalgeros. However this bonuses pale in comparison to both percentage boosts from collection and system improvements, and as such do not provide any meaningful argument against the issue.

3. It turns populations into cogs, that can be switched out and replaced left right and centre. This one is mostly immersion issue, but honestly I think it deserved a mention. It is obvious that with this being a video game that's exactly what they are, but should you be reminding player of it so often and in such blunt manner?


What should be done about it?

This is where the idea of replacing the flat percentage bonus with a scaling one comes in. By doing so you now encourage players to form small mini collections within star systems, but since the bonus is capped at 5 members you are still encouraged to spread the population around.  Let's see how it addresses the issues I raised above.

1. Tedious micro. Instead of having to move populations to every system in the empire you now can focus on a few systems for any given population, every now and then adding a new system as your population grows. Because you
know where your population of a particular species already is, and because you only have to select one target system, the process is greatly streamlined and far less likely to result in mismanagement and wasted efforts.

2. Strategy. Now you have an opportunity to chose which systems you want to prioritise for a particular species, thus offering player more options pertaining to specialisation of systems and utilisation of population bonuses.

3. Immersion. Instead of dragging out members of a species like cogs to various systems-machines, you are now in effect creating communities of a species which in turn provide you with bonuses.

Addendum.

I hope I was able to convince you that this is a good idea. At any rate thank you for reading, and have a nice day. Picture of the kalgeros was taken from the wonderful guide on minor factions by Vardogyr on steam. It is very handy, check it out if you ever wondered about what you get for collecting 50 members of a particular species.