Custom Faction

A custom faction in Endless Space 2 allows you to play a match as a race/faction/empire of (partly) your own design. They can be created and managed at the same start-game screen where you'd normally select a built-in faction. Because they take a while to set up, designs for them can be saved for future matches.

A custom faction is not, *strictly-speaking*, freeform; much like Amplitude has done in their earlier title, Endless Legend, you will still be locked into one of the pre-existing faction's appearance and more importantly, their active story-quest that you progress through in the game. This is called the **Visual Affinity.** It includes their population's portrait, their ship designs (both the visual look of their ships, but also the module loadout of those ships), as well. You are able to pick your own icon to represent the empire and pop units. The visual affinity will also replace a limited set of technologies with "faction-specific" ones, but almost all of these are just the technologies that give you your ship designs.

However, you're given a surprisingly large amount of leeway to customize how they play the game. The most important bit of customization is known as the **Gameplay Affinity**. For each faction, quite a few parts of their gameplay that could reasonably be considered "central" to their story and playstyle, are actually uncoupled from the faction. You're only allowed to pick one gameplay affinity, but this allows you to do wild mixups, like having Vodyani who completely skip the Ark-ship mechanic, and just settle planets like normal. Or for another example - you can give anyone Horatio's gene-splicing mechanic. Amplitude has gone out of their way to make sure that if a particular part of a faction's questline "requires" a feature that's actually supplied by their gameplay affinity, that part of the quest will morph slightly to be something that does not require it. For example, a "shipbound" faction will get an appropriate replacement if they're asked to settle additional planets. You are limited to only one of these main mechanics, since some of these would interfere with each other in a pretty incoherent way (for example, there would be a real design conundrum with a faction that was both "ship bound" and "in the shadows"); some affinities could conceivably play nice with each other ("slave drivers" and "gene hunter", for example), but Amplitude's decided everything's going to work inside this "one gameplay affinity" design, so that's simply the law of the land, so to speak.

There are also other surprisingly customizable aspects. There are even some traits possessed by the main factions that are bound to neither the visual affinity nor the gameplay affinity - for example, the way that Cravers 'deplete' planets is simply a trait that's part of their population design, so if you design a custom main-population unit for them that removes this, they won't have that in the game, and as a result, the game will play quite differently. There's a similar thing with the Riftborn's "biophobic" trait, although their planetary terraforming-towards-sterile stuff is bound to the "Continuum Sculptors" affinity, so having one without the other could get a bit awkward. Also some traits and affinites are mutully exclusive, most of these make sense as they would naturally nulify each other("Constructionist" and "Unskilled builders" or "Ship bound" and "Involuntary nomads"). Others however are allowed even though they cause problems("Ship bound" and "Riftborn") both in balance and gameplay.

### Points:

Customization of the faction is done with a "point" system. The designers felt that because not every available option is worth the same thing as another option, that these should be "weighted" so that if you customize something to have better stats, it comes at the expense of something else in your loadout. Even the gameplay affinities get this treatment, since some of them are considered to be a bit stronger than others.

There are 2 pools of points:

* Population includes : Visual affinity, the three politics traits and the three bonuses traits,
* Traits includes: Home planet, Government and the other faction traits (lower left)

The maximum size of the Traits pool is determined by the Gameplay affinity.

## Gameplay Affinity

* Gameplay Affinities do not cost points but they set the pool size of points available for Traits.
* They change some of the available technologies and provide unique laws, thus each tend to favor a certain play-style.
* Go to the source faction's page for more information on each affinity.

## Visual Affinity

Choose the faction's appearance, based off of one of the vanilla factions. Your choice costs 5-10 population points and provides the following:

* Unique ships (the description of the ships can be found on each faction page)[transportation ships not included]

* Unique technologies. All of the bonus listed here needs to be unlocked via a specific technology.

* Unique quests.
* Unique modules.

## Home Planet

* This will set the starting home planet.
* The cost in faction trait points is listed on the right side
* Not all planets are available without mods

## Government

* Detailed information on governments can be in Senate.
* The cost for all governments is 10 faction points.

## Political Traits

### Politics

* First, The main ideology of your population, cannot be unset
* The Second and Third are secondary and tertiary ways your population is affected by politics, can be unset

### Main ideology

The cost is 10 population points and you must pick one:

* Religious
* Militarist
* Scientist
* Ecologist
* Industrialist
* Pacifist

### Secondary and tertiary ideologies

* Here you can up to 2
* If you pick Aggressive for example,  events will also increase support to the  ideology an equal amount, in addition to the normal  increase.
* If you chose Anti-Ecologists,  events affecting this population will provide less support for the  ideology.

## Population Bonuses

The bonuses comes in three parts, and can be left unset.

* First are bonuses per population on planet.
* Second are other generally bonuses per pop but with conditions. For example, +3  on cold planets.
* Third is a collection bonus.

### Collection Bonuses

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

 20 Population
 50 Population

### Faction Traits

Limited to a number of 8 without mods, though some vanilla factions start with more

#### Starting Minor Population

Additionally, You can also have your pick at your starting minor faction population. They come with different bonuses. They each have a unique law, tactic, or combat bonus. You may click on their name for additional information.

#### Starting Technology

You may also have your choice of traits that determine which technologies your faction starts with.

#### Start Modifiers

Finally, you can choose traits that affect the starting condition of your game or home planet.

Set  to 0 on Planets
 Hyperium Source
 Involuntary Nomads
Planets are settled as a Colony instead of an Outpost, with these temporary effects:
+25  on System
+5  on System
+15  on colonized System
+10  on all Systems
+25  on Empire
 Strange But Bad
 Strange But Good
 Titanium Mine