How do the Vodyani work?

[Nanako]

I'm playing a little with the vodyani and their strange ships. Its interesting, and a few questions have come to mind that i'm afraid/unable to test out on my own for fear of losing stuff:

1. How do system improvements work? Are they tied to the system, or to the ark ship? Do they go with you when the ark moves to a new system?

2. How does population work? I can't quite figure out how much population i have. During an election - when i had one moored and one roaming ark ship, the roaming ark was shown as a voter, and it said 4 total population, though the moored system only had 2. But now that i've moored that second one as well, it only put 1 population into its new system. Whats happening there?

Do the arks carry population, or are people left behind or destroyed or something?

I've also got a system right now which can't seem to tell how much population it has. Some screens report 3, some report 6. The two planets in the system both have 3 pop slots each and all are filled, but with the rate its been growing its not possible to have 6 pop here yet.

this is wierd, please explain

Also why only 3 pop slots, how can i unlock more? I can't seem to find any improvements to increase these values

3. Is there any way to get more equipment slots on the arks? Their sheer power is awesome and i'd like to have one as a dedicated military ship,

[Rynas]

1. They're tied to the Ark, unless the improvement itself says it doesn't move with the Ark (some wonders have this).

2. The population is tied to the Ark. If your Ark has a population of 2 and it's anchored to a system with 3 habitable planets, each of those planets will have 2 population working on them, so you'll have 6 total workers. The population that shows up during voting should be the Ark population.

The population moves with the Ark. If you move the Ark, the system will have no people left behind on it. If you move the Ark from a system with 2 habitable planets to one with 5, the one you left behind will go from 4 to 0 workers and the new one will have 10 workers after you anchor.

You unlock greater than 3 population slots by unlocking Level 2 on the right side of the tech tree, then going into the trade screen and selecting a luxury resource for leveling up systems. Once you have 40 of the resource, you can build a Level 2 improvement on an Ark (it consumes 40 of the luxury) and it will then have 5 population slots.

3. There's a later tech that upgrades Ark slots, on the left side of the tech tree. There are some other Ark techs in the bottom part of the tech tree, too.

[Apheirox]

Waervyn has some excellent ES2 guides on YouTube. The questions you're asking are rather basic and have been answered many times already.

Vodyani is fantastically designed, a really interesting faction - not forgetting their amazing soundtrack, either. Unfortunately, they're also... kind of broken overpowered. I haven't tried multiplayer but I honestly don't see how you can possibly be expected to defend against a self-repairing 8 CP ship with 15000 hitpoints and ~3000 firepower before turn 20-30-40. Moreover, Vodyani heroes, including the starting one, of course, have access to a skill that is so powerful whoever unlocks it first is more or less guaranteed to win the game. It's a fun faction to be sure, but... game-breaking. And of course the AI just follows its algorithms and goes about business as usual every time and gets equally surprised every game you assault it with your invulnerable combat ark ship. Until you figure this out for yourself, though, enjoy!

[mg]

Let me show you my basic l2p channel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D04t9PH3fyw
Check out his steam channel as well!

Vodyani is similar op like riftborn, simply avoid playing game breaker metha & set the game resource's opacity to low.

[Nanako]

Originally posted by Apheirox:

Moreover, Vodyani heroes, including the starting one, of course, have access to a skill that is so powerful whoever unlocks it first is more or less guaranteed to win the game.

Do you mean the skill that gives +8 movement? or some other

[Apheirox]

No, it's the 'infallible authority' one. I posted about this elsewhere.

A level 30 hero (which is easy to get as Vodyani - especially since after unlocking this skill it will increase production so much you can power-level the hero with the skill) will provide 150 FIDSI for every pop on every single planet in the empire. It's so much larger a bonus than anything else available it's completely absurd (for comparison, Riftborn ultimate skill - which requires higher level - provides +10 production per anomaly, so that's something like 30-40 FIDSI if you're lucky, probably more like 20 FIDSI per system on average).

Once you unlock Infallible Authority it basically breaks the game if you're a competent player.

[PhailRaptor]

Originally posted by Nanako =^.^=:

Originally posted by Apheirox:

Moreover, Vodyani heroes, including the starting one, of course, have access to a skill that is so powerful whoever unlocks it first is more or less guaranteed to win the game.

Do you mean the skill that gives +8 movement? or some other

Vodyanni Heroes have a racial skill that provides 1 FISDI per pop, per level the Hero has, applied to every Ark in the Empire if the Hero is on the Senate.

[Zankor]

That skill is probably supposed to be percentage instead of flat or something. It would still be stupidly powerful but to be fair The "Endless" series of games seem to have a lot of obviously too powerful abilities.