Species Modification and elections

[powerofvoid]

Species modification appears to still sometimes cause all of your leaders to (despite having full citizenship and being faction leaders) be excluded from elections, resulting in the selection of some level 1 nobody for rulership with nothing you can do about it. (Only one candidate, and they aren't in the leader pool)

Most recently, I got it by modding my species into a derivative of a tomb-world-preferenced self-modified variant on a different-homeworld same-name-same-portrait subspecies.

Does anyone know what exactly causes this, how to prevent it, and how to fix it?

 

[KingAlamar]

I was seeing that in my earlier games. Haven't seen anything similar with the 2.2.4 test branch. I also started running the Glavius AI mod for reference.

I may be wrong but I think a patch readme made an off-hand mention that this should be fixed with either 2.2.3 or the beta path [2.2.4].

 

[powerofvoid]

I do not see that in 2.2.3's or 2.2.4's notes.

It was allegedly fixed back in 1.8, though.

 

[KingAlamar]

I do not see that in 2.2.3's or 2.2.4's notes.

It was allegedly fixed back in 1.8, though.

In that case maybe I hallucinated it ... <insert Chappell Show reference here>

Edit: I may have confused your issue with one that is fixed in 2.2.4 change log
* Fixed democratic election lacking candidates due to leaders having no mandates

I know I had elections in 2.2.x with as few as one candidate [not sure about zero candidates] but haven't seen that again in 2.2.4 beta test patch.

 

[Senstrae]

I've also noticed this.

There's two tags assigned to templates of your starting species, which you can identify by hovering your mouse over a given template. One is "X is our Founder Species" and the other is "X is a Species in our Empire". Incidentally, from what I've observed, only one template at a time has "founder species", while leaders from the other templates will be excluded from elections.

I've played a few Life Seeded starts with genetic ascension. After Glandular Acclimation, I typically run four templates, one for remaining Gaia World Preference, then one for hot, one for wet, and one for cold worlds. Depending on the very first template you make, those inherit the "founder species" tag and later modifications to that template also inherit "founder species". I learned this the hard way, because one game I modified Continental Preference pops first, and they inherited "founder species" tag to the exclusion of the Gaia World branch. Admittedly I haven't done much testing, these are just things I've observed during normal playthroughs.

After that, just make sure that your templates have different names so you can identify which template a given leader belongs to when you hover over the leader portrait.

This is probably something the team should look into, but there's a good chance there's other systems tied into the "founder species" tag, such as events and dialogue. I assume resolving it may not be as simple as giving every template of your starting species the same "founder species" tag. But I do think that templates of your starting species should be categorically distinct from templates of other species in your empire.

 

[RabbaDooDabba]

Events like Mind over Matter and Enigmatic Ascention can break your founder species identity. Usually it is a bug where the game does net set the new sub-species as the founder species.
What happens is that you end up with 0 pops of your founder species so there is just one candidate created for your elections, I guess as a failsafe.

I tried to tackle it in this thread. That was version 2.1 but it should still work ( I can't check it at the moment, though )

If you picked Mind over Matter, picking Transcendence later will reinstante your founder species without gene-modding back and forth.

 

[powerofvoid]

I think I fixed it by genemodding all the pops of my "founding species" to match the template I was using as my main species, but I'm not sure it's actually fixed.

I just did a temporary workaround by editing my savestate to put my next election after the end-date.