The Tikanan

### Assimilation Trait

**Swarming Infantry (50/70 Chance):** 17.5% more Infantry Troops on Ground Battle
**Infinite Soldiers (20/70 Chance:** 100  per turn on Empire

*Only recently civilized, the Tikanan still retain much of their wild, aggressive nature, and are constantly preparing for war.*

## Lore

A sharp lesson in the dangers of importing exotic wildlife, sometime in the last century a small contingent of Tikanan were brought to the human splinter colony world of Abelard for purported "zoological reasons". In fact, this marked the zenith of an increasingly dangerous game of one-upmanship by two factions on the colony world, who liked to capture and bring unusual species to their peoples. When a breeding colony of Tikanan escaped the lab block and disappeared into the wilderness, the human leadership played down the event, declaring that the unintelligent creatures would naturally die out. Ten years later, a hundred thousand Tikanan swarmed the human settlements, forcing the original inhabitants to flee. How they went on to evolve their own twisted civilization is uncertain, but what is clear is that they became much more adept than the mindless insectoids who'd arrived a dozen years earlier.

## Population Traits

 Increases  Political Output.
 Political Traits
  political opinion more impacted by  events.
 Tikanan Ground Battle Offense Strategy
 Effect:
* Attacker Troops Max Health: -20%
* Improvement Destruction Probability: +25%
* Population Destruction Probability: +25%
* Bombardment Damage to Defender: 10%
 **Editor's Notes:** This only boosts a few values compared to the vanilla "Blitz Assault" - namely, the "attacking troops max health" is only reduced by 20% rather than 25%, and the extra number of troops you can deploy is boosted from 30%, to 40%. Other than that, it's functionally identical.
Strategy
All that the Tikanan give at 50 pop is this ground battle tactic, however, by being a ground battle tactic, it doesn't take up any law slots, and doesn't conflict with any laws from other minor factions. It's also the only way to boost manpower deployment limits before some quite late-game technologies, which gives a significant edge in ground combat. Normally, you wouldn't want to waste troops by constantly using the blitz strategy, but the Tikanan also solve the one major downside of self-inflicted troop attrition, because their population traits and bonuses provide massive troop refills for free.
The Tikanan's cryptic "+5  per turn" specifically means that it will, for free, automatically **refill** 5  every turn (or 10 on a fertile planet), in addition to any  given by -> conversions like Patriot Pills or Exotic Rations. This  refills the troops on a system, and it also restocks your global  pool. With 20 Tikanan across your empire, this slaps an extra 50 on the system, even if only one Tikanan pop unit is resident on a given system. (Note: you may briefly see the number push past 100% on a system when you end the turn, but that's just a temporary visual effect, which seems to be a depiction of those troops being recruited and then dismissed for lack of housing. It doesn't actually boost the maximum troop capacity on a system.)
The real significance of this trait is that it's **independent of  production**. If you have any significant number of Tikanan, not only can you freely use ground troops as cannon-fodder, but you also may be able to skip building Patriot Pills or Exotic Rations, essentially boosting your growth rate by 30%.