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[Endless Space] It is a Space 4X! Similar to MoO2! IT IS OUT! It is Worth It.
durandal4532
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Crossposting from my definitely useful and not dumb blog but here is the rundown:
So a new thing popped up on Steam today, Endless Space.
Now, with all the starts being kicked recently I am getting slightly mildly suspicious when someone promises me a cool game in exchange for investment/preorder whatever. And seriously, I preordered SotS2 and it was so bad. But Endless Space intrigues me. It’s reasonably cheap, $27 for the most expensive version. It also has a neat sort of alpha/beta participation system, where when you buy the game you get Games2Gether Points. Which sound really silly! But it’s not a bad idea, it’s a distinct developer-mediated methodology for getting fan input. Sometimes you want a wild font of ideas on a forum, it can be great. But sometimes a half-dozen people saying you should “allow people to enter the game like the matrix so that we can play like if it was the matrix” and you just want to take a reading on something more concrete. The examples up at the moment are competing logos for a faction design, and competing designs for a certain type of pirate ship. And I mean, why not? You’re guaranteed to nail down a few little features that don’t actually matter, and it creates an atmosphere of participation for fans who let’s face it are not always the most brilliant design mavens.
And that’s not all! It actually looks kind of really neat. I wish they had a real demo out, because it looks like it hits an amazing note of simplicity married to complexity that these sorts of games really need. It has a beautiful, clean interface (from the screens and videos I’ve seen) that just looks like a joy to observe while pretending it is a display on the deck of your command carrier. It’s unfortunately vague on a lot of gameplay specifics, because you know it’s a 4X so you… 4X things. It’s really hard to pin these sorts of games down without actually spend an hour or twenty with them, so that does make me pause. But fucking look at this:
And it’s all like that, just this slick as hell UI letting you do what you actually want to do: colonize, build, diplomacize, and murder. Also interesting is that the battle system seems a bit unique. Basically you make important decisions, but leave the actual to-do to mostly automated processes. On the one hand, I like telling everything what to do. On the other hand, part of the allure of being a Space Ruler is that you get to order people to do shit and make them figure it out. If the system allows for actually interesting tactical decision-making in the battles, it’ll definitely be fun. Particularly if new techs open up the field a bit more.
And I mean what a goddamn tech tree, right? Again: Clean, beautiful, functional. I love it when games like this realize that accessible UI is what you need to feel like an in-control ruler. If I’m governing by Excel I am not going to feel cool.
Anyway! There’s a very neat look at the Alpha build with some nice things to say at Space Sector, and in the meantime here’s a movie! I really think I might drop money on this. I mean, SPACE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wr19Ln9sO4&feature=plcp
Also, extra special content here's a forumer talking about the alpha:
So a new thing popped up on Steam today, Endless Space.
Now, with all the starts being kicked recently I am getting slightly mildly suspicious when someone promises me a cool game in exchange for investment/preorder whatever. And seriously, I preordered SotS2 and it was so bad. But Endless Space intrigues me. It’s reasonably cheap, $27 for the most expensive version. It also has a neat sort of alpha/beta participation system, where when you buy the game you get Games2Gether Points. Which sound really silly! But it’s not a bad idea, it’s a distinct developer-mediated methodology for getting fan input. Sometimes you want a wild font of ideas on a forum, it can be great. But sometimes a half-dozen people saying you should “allow people to enter the game like the matrix so that we can play like if it was the matrix” and you just want to take a reading on something more concrete. The examples up at the moment are competing logos for a faction design, and competing designs for a certain type of pirate ship. And I mean, why not? You’re guaranteed to nail down a few little features that don’t actually matter, and it creates an atmosphere of participation for fans who let’s face it are not always the most brilliant design mavens.
And that’s not all! It actually looks kind of really neat. I wish they had a real demo out, because it looks like it hits an amazing note of simplicity married to complexity that these sorts of games really need. It has a beautiful, clean interface (from the screens and videos I’ve seen) that just looks like a joy to observe while pretending it is a display on the deck of your command carrier. It’s unfortunately vague on a lot of gameplay specifics, because you know it’s a 4X so you… 4X things. It’s really hard to pin these sorts of games down without actually spend an hour or twenty with them, so that does make me pause. But fucking look at this:
And it’s all like that, just this slick as hell UI letting you do what you actually want to do: colonize, build, diplomacize, and murder. Also interesting is that the battle system seems a bit unique. Basically you make important decisions, but leave the actual to-do to mostly automated processes. On the one hand, I like telling everything what to do. On the other hand, part of the allure of being a Space Ruler is that you get to order people to do shit and make them figure it out. If the system allows for actually interesting tactical decision-making in the battles, it’ll definitely be fun. Particularly if new techs open up the field a bit more.
And I mean what a goddamn tech tree, right? Again: Clean, beautiful, functional. I love it when games like this realize that accessible UI is what you need to feel like an in-control ruler. If I’m governing by Excel I am not going to feel cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wr19Ln9sO4&feature=plcpAlso, extra special content here's a forumer talking about the alpha:
So the combat doesn't control like an RTS? My interest level jusr shot up.
How do you get the cards? Research? Race specific? Exploration?
I played Endless Space for a couple of hours last night (or to be honest, I “just one more turn”-ed it to 4 in the morning).
Yeah combat is more like watching a movie of the fleets nuking it out as they close in on each other really, you get to play strategic cards during the preparation phase that are activated during the 3 different combat phases, then you sit back and watch the show basically.
1 card plays during the long range phase (where torpedos / missiles are king), 1 during mid range (oh god so many beam weapons) and 1 during melee (kinetic weapons hurt like hell).
Each card has some bonus (like 40% more kinetic damage, or repairs x% hp or reduces enemy fleet accuracy by x% etc), a family of cards it counters and a bonus effect you get if you picked a card that counters the card the enemy played during that phase.
The new card types I unlocked where from research, in the applied sciences tech tree I think, and some technologies are race specific so there could be race specific cards, I haven't looked to see if that is the case though. I played the locust/bug-dudes and they didn't appear to have any cards as racial traits at lest.
I agree with nessin about the UI, it looks pretty fantastic, and I can't wait to play the game some more tonight.
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durandal4532 on
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I too wish they had a demo out. I'd hate to drop $27 on a game I might not like.
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I hope we hear from more Alpha players. This looks really promising.
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
Yeah I think I'm going to grab this next week though. I have a little bit of money coming up and I can just pretend this is the SotS2 purchase that I got refunded.
Edit: The one worry I have is that watching your fleets battle will get boring. If there's a quick-fire version of it in addition to auto-combat I'll be mollified, but right now I worry that I'll want to auto-complete during the longer games and lose out on a lot of tactical decision-making.
This looks like it is what I want.
I am interested!
-Oh sweet mother mary's dangling balls this is the most glorious thing I have seen in my life holy shit holy shit this is everything I have ever wanted okay let me at it let me at it
What I would kill for is a way to easily edit in new minor events. Things like "Star went supernova! Pop: - Resource: + whatever whatever" that require no actual art assets would be a great way to make different forays into galactic rule differ. That was part of what I loved about fooling around with Escape Velocity, all you needed was a decent idea for a little story along with a +/- on whatever you liked. And if you just loaded absolutely all the mods, it was a completely smooth experience of just having more different content pops more often.
Alright, alpha get. I'll report back later with impressions.
It's actually pretty cool! You don't actually control the ships directly, nor the camera, but choose from various cards for long, mid and short engagement distances. And then the battle plays out before you.
See, this sounds kind of ideal to me. You still to get to load out ships and stuff, but not having to bother with fiddly little combats all the time.
Edit: Honestly the cards system sounds a little like Star Chamber, which was a great game.
It's nice because it can be expanded infinitely, too.
EDIT: Oh, crap... from the screenshots I thought this was a neat little 2D game playable on my laptop... but then I saw the trailer and it's 3D apparently
The actual combat system is pretty awesome. Whoever wrote the camera scripting watched far too much BSG. It's amazing.
The look, the feel, the technology descriptions, the neat ships, the planets, it all comes together really nicely. It has some of the best parts of Gal Civ mixed in with SotS-The-First-After-Patching-And-Expansions-Not-That-Piece-Of-Shit-The-Never-To-Be-Sufficiently-Damned-Mecron-Threw-At-Us and a little something that reminds me fondly of Alpha Centauri. I think it is the way research and development is presented, it brings to mind happy thoughts of putting nerve gas pods on my rovers, though the setting is totally different. Bonus points for automagically upgraded engines. I think. I may be mistaken, but I think that was the case.
Also they implimented system resources of all sorts that provide tangible strategic bonuses like faster flight speed and this and the other when you have enough under your control. Great stuff. Research things to learn about them, then you can see them on your map. Luxuries, building materials, artifacts, whatever.
Currently combat is not terribly deep at the early game, but we're looking at one hell of a rabbit hole waiting to be excavated. One encounter that tickled me was seeing my torpedo fleet fight a kinetic fleet. My first salvo hit hard, because they had zip for flak. But at close range they tore half my fleet to bits while my second salvo was still toddling over to finish them off. The cards are a neat way to put a little interactivity into classic statistics wars, and you can actually see your fleet do things that correspond with them. Magnetic shields caused big force shields to deploy and kinetic ordinance bounced off them, while the engineering card caused little repair drones to zap their motherships.
These devs know presentation, and they are presenting the hell out of the information every 4x typically provides.
'Course it ain't done, some stuff don't work, some stuff ain't there, and I really hope they'll make it easier to select a fleet on the galaxy screen, but I am so happy this exists. Absolutely excited to see the full version.
-And I can't forget to mention that it runs really smoothly. None of that stuttering galaxy map bullshit.
If you want them to make the universe more alive, ask them! As an alpha player you get the chance! Uuuussseee iiiiittt
I'm desperately enamored of the UI in this game. I almost don't care what's going on. It's basically everything I ever wanted the UI in SotS I to be. The card-affected combat also intrigues me. I do agree that the game could maybe use a bit more life, but obviously we're at the alpha stage. Hopefully we'll get some more diverse planet art and some random events or the like to spice things up.
Battle.net
I don't even care about the size of GalCiv's tech tree - it's just that the whole thing was a big time sink, and nothing more. Lasers levels 1 through 1 billion. Shipyards levels 1 through 1 billion. Research labs levels 1 through 1 billion. Etc.
There were no interesting techs or tech choices; you started the game with basically everything unlocked, and just spent time adding modifiers to bullshit.
I've never encountered a tech tree as clean & interesting as MoO II's.
This game looks fucking rad, though. One of you guys needs to post a Let's Play or something on YouTube.
There's nothing amazingly interesting about the weapon tree, it's just what weapons and armors you want. Essentially every weapon has a defense just for it, and that defense is useless against the other weapons.
Oh well. I'll probably pick this up anyway when I get back from Paris. The UI looks absolutely fantastic, and that alone is worth the price of admission for most 4X games these days.
The combat cards seem like a very slick way of keeping combat time down for multiplayer, and would probably work for scratching the player-directed combat itch as well.
How differentiated are the races? Do they seem like they have significant strategic differences? That's something I really liked about SotS.
I find SotS1's tech tree more compelling (there are a wide variety of ways to go with it, and I like the random element), but *alpha*
I find that I really don't mind the loss of ship control during combat, it's fun to watch it play out, and spec out my fleets for specific card combos.
PSN: Dyvion -- Eternal: Dyvion+9393 -- Genshin Impact: Dyvion
Endless Space is silky smooth so far and the turns are super fast.
Some random stuff about the game:
Ship modules come in 3 forms, offense, defense and support, it reminds me of Galactic Civilization 2 in that there are 3 weapon types: missile, beam, kinetic, and 3 types of defense: deflect (kinetic), shield (beam), flak (missiles).
Support modules there are quite a few of, like high energy couplings (+40% min and max damage on weapons but -20% health), or repair modules (+15% ship repair per battle phase, +2% fleet repair per turn (in friendly sectors)).
Basically when you design ships you pick a ship class / hull which gives you a tonnage which in turn decides how many modules you can stuff into the ship. The ship class also has an effect like the raider hull which cause engine, repair and scout support modules to take up 25% less tonnage, or the marauder which case weapon modules to take up 20% less.
For my first game I picked the Cravers empire. Their gameplay is “Consume Worlds” and main victory type is Military. They're some kind of bug-people that only care about feeding and are expanding into space because aliens are tasty.
Their traits include Eternal War which makes it so they can't be at peace with all other factions, and another one that causes their colonies to build up locust points which means fresh colonies get +resource generation while older colonies generate less than normal, to signify the swarm consuming everything I suppose.
In addition to those traits they get cheaper, larger ships (more tonnage) and larger fleets (+2 command points, so I could have 7 basic ships in my fleets while my neighbor was limited to 5), a trait that gives them research points for blowing up enemy ships (knowledge gathering) and another one that gives them one more population unit on tiny, small and medium worlds (crowded planets).
I'm still only partway through my first game, which so kindly isolated me together with the war-loving Hissho, with a single wormhole connecting our region with the rest of the galaxy (and you need tech to travel through these). The Hissho get a bunch of temporary (15 turn) buffs (that stack and the duration resets whenever a new stack is applied) when stuff happens: +weapon damage after winning space battles, +planetary resource generation after successful invasions. I don't know how many of these buffs they can accumulate at once.
Their revenge trait makes their fleets 50% more powerful when invading worlds after losing one of their own colonies (for 20 turns I think) and increases their invasion defense. They also have a pretty massive buff to all weapon damage, 40% or something ridiculous like that.
They are currently pouring all their research into kinetic weapons as far as I can tell which makes for *lovely* battles if they manage to reach melee range (lovely as in I die horribly).
Star systems are connected by lanes (“cosmic strings”) you have to travel through, engine speed determine how far you can move along a lane in a single turn. Later technologies supposedly unlock new modes of travel. I've researched warp drive which says it provides a way to move independently between stars, but I've no idea how. I'm basically the worst bug emperor ever.
You don't seem to be able to attack enemy fleets in star lanes which is a bit annoying, since they can zip past you on their turn if their destination is a star system further away. I had 2 nice choke-points against the Hissho but their fleets could just run past those deeper into my empire and I had to divert fleets to hunt them down. So an option to send ships after fleets in star lanes or some kind of “attack any enemy fleets that attempts to pass through this system” order would be nice.
Planetary invasion takes a few rounds though (at least with my awful invasion tech) so it's not like in MoO2 where if they slip past you with a fleet and some transports (or have telepathy) you instantly lose the colony. All systems have an invasion defense and invasion recover stat. If an enemy invades the defense stat starts ticking down like a hp bar each turn depending on the enemy fleets invasion stat, and if you repel the enemy with a fleet that stat starts recovers (fairly slowly though, so you can whittle down a system), if the defense reaches 0 they take the system. I've only invaded a few systems so far so I'm not 100% sure that it works exactly like this.
When you encounter an alien race you're in a sort of cold war state where you can blow up their ships if they're not in their own space, without declaring war, and newly established colonies (called outposts until they become fully fledged colonies and start controlling territory I think) can be invaded. I hadn't researched any invasion tech while me and the Hissho where still on speaking terms so I couldn't try it out. Our scouts nuked it out fairly enthusiastically with crude kinetic weaponry while we weren’t officially at war though.
I can't comment on diplomacy since I'm a pro-gamer and assumed that the Eternal War trait = the Repulsive trait in MoO2 so I didn't even bother opening the diplomacy screen. Things soured pretty quickly between me and the Hissho. I got a few diplomacy notifications that their attitude towards me was deteriorating (and why: my rapid expansion and expanding military, which is nice).
I don't think there is any kind of spying, after playing a lot of MoO2 I'm pretty thankful for that honestly. Though it'd be interesting to be able to find out what kind of technologies my enemies are investing into so I could try to counter it etc.
Research consists of 4 different trees: Exploration and Expansion, Diplomacy and Trading, Galactic Warfare, Applied sciences. Each tree consists of about 30 technologies (a few race specific) and looks sort of like a talent tree, you can only research this tech if you've researched this one or that one etc. Most of the technologies give you 2 of the following when you research them:
Starsystem improvements: Like buildings in MoO2 except they affect all colonies in the star system they're constructed in, for example: Geo-industrial plants: +2 construction per population on lava planets, +2 on planets, +1 on tundra.
Empire improvement: A permanent buff to your empire, like +2 fleet cap or +20% tonnage on all ships.
Planetary exploitation: Sort of a planetary specialization trait, you pick one for each world you own, and they make the colony produce more research or food etc. Certain specializations work better on certain types of planets.
Luxury resource exploitation: Some (a lot) of worlds have luxury resources, but they only provide their buffs if you have the appropriate tech. For example: Transvine +40 approval on planet, +16% ship xp on empire, monopoly effect: +40% ship xp on empire. They're still visible on planets even if you don't have the technology to use them though.
Strategic resource discover: Similar to luxury resources, but these are required to build certain kinds of weapons and ships, they also offer some bonuses: Hyperium +1 research per population on planet, monopoly effect: +10% income on empire. They only show up once you have the appropriate technology, like certain resources in Civ5.
Diplomatic options: Unlocks stuff like cease fire, offer peace and cooperation agreement.
Colonization: Lets you colonize different types of worlds, like lava, desert, barren etc.
Ship class: Unlocks different kinds of ship types
Anomaly reduction: A lot of world have anomalies, some offer bonuses like Hollow planet: +1 population on planet, +1 cash and research per population on planet. Some provide buffs and debuffs: hostile fauna (-10 approval on planet, +1 food per population on planet), and some are just debuffs like Toxic (-10 approval, -2 food per population on planet). These techs lets you remove certain negative ones for a construction cost.
Planet improvement: Terraforming, let's you change a planets type, usually comes at the cost of approval on the selected world.
Ship modules (weapons, defense, support)
Tactic: New battle / strategic cards that you play during combat, like Camouflage (defense type): 40% efficiency on missile defense (block: 10%), -20% kinetic damage (block: 20%), counters sabotage. I think the (block: 10%) and (block: 20%) are bonuses you receive if you play that card and the enemy plays one of the sabotage type, just like he might have gotten extra bonuses if he had played one that counteres defensive strategies instead.
The game focuses more on star systems than individual planets. The star system page shows you the various planets it contains, how many population units they can hold, the resources every population unit will produce on each world, and the various traits the worlds have, like anomalies, resources etc.
You don't construct buildings on individual planets, instead you build system improvements that offer their bonus to all planets in that system (with different types of worlds getting larger or smaller bonuses from certain buildings).
The systems food surplus, industry, science and dust (intergalatic currency, some kind of remnant from an ancient civilization I think) is just the resources from all the worlds in the star system added together. Once you have colonized one world in a system it's very simple to colonize the rest, you just click on a world and select colonize and it is added to the systems construction queue. The only things you build on individual planets are exploitations (you select one out of all the ones you've discovered), you can survey moons, suppress negative anomalies if you have the tech, and terraform. Any of those options are then added to the system construction queue together with your ship production and system improvements. It cuts down a bit on micromanagement which is nice after playing say Ascendancy.
tl;dr – great looking game so far.
Edit: Bug people are the best people.
Much appreciated. I shall begin the ingestion of the humanoids hives and larva tonight!
I explored and kept on building colonizers since I had a lot of empty star systems and a wormhole to block it all of.
Then suddenly another dude came through the wormhole, and he despised me because I was so puny. I played on a bit, but it did not go well for me, I quit the game and I was 4th or 5th in all the rankings....
I'm still thinking on what I did wrong, possibly overextending myself with too few pop. at good planets.
Playing as the Science-y guys (Sophon? Something like that) in a Large galaxy against 5 AI. I lucked out and got a constellation all to myself, so I had plenty of time to build up and cut my teeth against pirates. Took the wormhole out and met the Empire and the other Sophon on the other side, though all three of us seem to get along. The other Sophon are in a very tight little knot of stars north of the wormhole, now dealing with the Cravers who are invading from another wormhole (who blew up three scouting fleets of mine, so will eventually be dealt with) while the Empire is south of my wormhole, protected by long travel lanes down to their home area. The Empire has now taken the two stars closest to the wormhole and pushed into my constellation, taking over two stars on my side I didn't get to in time and gone from Warm to Suspicious due to our expansions smacking into one another, unhappy that I snapped up the entirety of the rest of my constellation, war looks inevitable but I just made a research dive towards Alliances, hoping to start talks with my Sophon brethren to protect against the Empire and Craver threats. I am worried that I have very little research done into weapon tech, hopefully my command, tactical and Cruiser advantages balance it out.
I also have production advantages with some very highly developed systems deep in my constellation (one of them, Atlus, can put out a frontline Cruiser every other turn). Pretty sure if the Empire bites I can secure the wormhole within a turn (possible other cause of the worsening relations is the 4 full fleets I have stationed ready to jump into Empire systems, with Ground Attack Dreadnoughts being built behind them).
So very good but sooooo very dangerous (an hour and a half of "one last turn" proves that).