It's based on the hero's professions. The heroes with a focus on food and industry will get civil engineering. The ones that don't have that class won't. I'd like to see a hero progression info-graphic some time. It would make leveling easier.
I'm still working on the Empire. Their base racial perk is that as their taxes go from 50% to 100% they get a bonus 0% to 100% industry. As I'm reading this, that says to me that the higher my taxes go, the more industry I'll have empire wide, with a linear progression of about 10% industry for every 5% extra taxes. Does anyone know if this is correct? I'm trying to develop my economic policy, and I'm kinda confused.
Finally got a chance to play this today. It's so awesome. The UI is great in almost every way (the research screen can use some serious disambiguity). The combat is fast and fun, and doesn't detract from the rest of the game. The hero system is fantastic; governors and admirals are great additional choices for the player.
Took me about 50 turns to get a handle on things. Was bleeding dust for a while, till I remembered I was supposed to be building improvements in my systems (which I had been wasting time researching till that point). I'm still learning, but this game is pretty amazing. Definately glad I pre-ordered.
Do people still want impressions? I'll lay it down anyway because I've been ensconced in Endless Space for a few days now.
The game is more Civ-like than a lot of people are acknowledging, I think. It's certainly got MoO blood running through its veins, and no doubt one of its ancestors mated with GalCiv and contaminated the genepool, but if you wanted to simply lay out what Endless Space is to the complete layman, it leans far more toward Civilization in Space than the others. It has certainly taken some very specific design cues from Civ4 and stripped away a lot of things from MoO2 instead, which is interesting because as far as 4X games go, not only are most in space, but most take their lineage from the other side of the road than Sid Meier. Civ has for a long time almost been an island in the genre. It works here, though.
What I enjoy most is that, like most great games that come to define a genre, it has stripped out the superfluous bullshit that has bogged down a lot of past masters. For example; ship design in ES looks basic and rudimentary when compared to, say, Twilight of the Arnor. But I played ES for essentially a whole day yesterday and then dipped back into GalCiv2 last night and it actually highlights the fact that a lot of the latter's mechanics are boring and annoying. I guess you just think it's cool to design your own ship, but that puts so many limitations on the rest of the mechanics that you lose out in other areas, like the battle cinematics (which are great, but more on that later).
This streamlining extends most noticeably to the UI, which is seriously - pending some tweaks and a better tooltip system - one of the best around, in any genre. How it manages to make almost every mechanic 'at-a-glance' is amazing. You end up not needing to even analyze half the things because of that little color swatch in the corner summarizing an entire blurb of flavor text into 'this is the resource this upgrade improves'. That's super useful lategame when you have a huge amount of redundant upgrades that you need to churn through.
It also puts the four eckses to the fore. The biggest amount of screen real estate is given over to exploration, unlike GalCiv which has all the other things hanging off the sides. This creates a nice flow to the way you play the game, tunnelling down through mechanics rather than dipping into each one separately. The structure and shape of the constellations is as important to ES as the continents are to Civ. Unlike GalCiv, the landscape of Endless Space is given much more strategic importance. It also reinforces how subtle and invisible their design is. The way that different stars correlate to different planet configurations, the way that at the most zoomed out level you still have a firm grasp on the long-term strategic elements of the game is brilliant.
There's a visual language to Endless Space that dispenses with an awful lot of text and on-screen indicators. Game mechanics are displayed with art, not design. Each time you zoom in on your empire, its as though you're focussing in on more refined and more intricate gameplay systems. You start out looking at the general shape of your empire, important to expansion and exploration. Then you go further in to look at system clusters, and the visuals change to represent what you want to do, things pop in telling you what's happening on that level of gameplay. Unlike Civ5, where everything is on all the time, even when you're high in the atmosphere or zoomed right in on a single worker, here each level of interest has an appropriate level of detail for what you need to do at that specific hierarchy of gameplay. That's why improvements are system wide and only show up when you're looking at systems - allowing you control over your exploitation - which gives you the final piece of the puzzle, the extermination of your enemies, which is one of my favorite parts.
In almost all of these 4x games, combat its a number cruncher. It's essentially that here, too. But its coated in a gleaming cinematic each time you fight, and reinforced with an almost CCG type augmentation mechanic, that allows you to very subtly shift the course of battle without making everything a twitch game. It's a middle ground between Civ's 'unit A attacks unit B' system and the Total War 'each battle is a realtime event' way of doing things. It's certainly more fun than MoO2 (and don't get me started on Sword of the Stars, urgh), even if it is more basic and not as in depth. Because really, like in Civilization, the actual fighting is secondary to the wider scope of war as a whole. It makes the individual skirmishes fun to watch, simple to contest, and most importantly, links them to the broader mechanics of the game. The CCG system is directly impacted by research and hero bonuses, and allows you to actively spend resources to shift the balance of a fight. It makes the whole thing comprehensive and seamless. Too many 4X games have the first three Xs over there, and the final one over here. A SimCity game with combat tacked on as an afterthought. Endless Space manages to make them all blend together. Certainly to a much better degree than any GalCiv2.
It is this blending which I think makes Endless Space a hot prospect. Nothing is done in isolation. There are no 'industry only' technologies to research. Every tiny facet of the game has ramifications for the other aspects. Colonizing new types of planet, like Arid or Tundra, in other games would have only affected a small circumference of game mechanics around it, like industry and production and perhaps science. But here, every decision has an impact on the smallest and largest aspects of your decision making. Colonizing a Tundra planet indeed gives you a science and industry boost, but it also directly impacts your military battle plans (because technology is given more importance in combat than in a lot of other games - there are no archers killing panzer tanks in this game). Unlocking the colonization techs also feeds into the military wing of the tech tree. Ship designs are linked directly to exploration, rather than being in a separate tree altogether. And the exploration techs also improve empire-wide infrastructure, each one having additional bonuses to fleet movement, speed or size, and planet exploitation options. It also affects diplomacy in a tangible way, especially with a Locust-type race that has to constantly expand and exploit to survive, because like Civ, diplomacy is more about what you have, rather than what you want. It is not only the size of your empire that governs your strength, it is also its specific type and composition.
The flexibility of your colonized planets is hugely important. You cannot afford to be too diverse in your choice of worlds, but you need breadth and adaptability more than in most other 4X games. This is why, to an extent, many people have been complaining that the game can very rapidly snowball. That you can be in contention one minute and then steamrolled the next. This will improve with balancing but I also think it is a crucial aspect of the game. Mediocre civilizations in Endless Space can be forged rather easily, and compete with others on a level playing field with no problems. But the exceptional race that moves ahead in technology and industry can completely dominate to a disgusting degree, while also having their own weaknesses be made more apparent. I like this. It makes the highs and lows of the game more fierce, and avoids a lot of the staleness of particularly Sword of the Stars. Things can blow up in your face if you lose focus for even a moment.
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For example; in my last game, I was the Sophons and going for technological supremacy. In Endless Space, a small quantity of highly advanced ships can wipe the floor with vast armadas of primitive designs. Cravers started invading my systems and what started as a war of attrition quickly became a complete slaughter. But a slaughter of me. My error was the way that I both stretched my forces too thinly and also concentrated them too much. I built many ships and spread them out, but also moved my populations to as many huge terrans and oceans as I could, to improve science bonuses. I was racking up an insane kill count, taking down five, six ships at a time in every system, for no losses. But the tipping point came when I had exhausted my industrial capacity to build ships, because the Cravers are a swarm race, sending wave after wave of their own vessels to die at my technologically superior hands, and then had to dip into the Dust pool (gold reserves). Which ran out incredibly quickly because I was too focussed on science and production and it took too long to repopulate my arid planets for a Dust recuperation. I was too inflexible and not well prepared.
That's what makes the game really fun and interesting to me. Every route is viable, and every type of gameplay is rewarded. In GalCiv, which is my bread and butter, as long as you do your thing well, and don't fuck up, you'll have options. You can min/max if you want, and it will be totally fine in the long run. Here, it's not that you can't do that, but that you absolutely cannot treat yourself as being in isolation. The structure of the galaxy, the enemy empires and the composition of your own worlds is given much more importance than before, so unlike GalCiv, a myopic player will sooner crumble. I was destroying hundreds of Craver ships with my incredibly advanced Battleships and Dreadnoughts. But their fleets of poorly equipped Corvettes, with their puny guns and weak shields, were so cheap, and their expansion was so relentless, that when my capacity was filled I they just kept coming. Using my own captured systems against me with huge production bonuses. The Cravers are a plague, and I was overwhelmed, dying a horrible, quiet death on my last remaining system with a small barren and a medium gas helium.
But conversely, in another game, I went all out industry and production, running at 100% taxes on my United Empire civilization, and managed to defeat the same Craver offence with adaptability. Systems that were invaded were quickly cleansed, preventing them from getting a foothold, eventually choking their expansion before it even began. My technology was not so much about weapon power and shield strength, but about fleet movement speed, fleet size and planet defences. I learned from my Sophon failure, which was my inability to react promptly, and I had built an empire that was not particularly advanced, but was constructed in a way which allowed for rapid repulsion of threats, and a quick mop-up of invaders. The Craver expansion was stalled, and their empire collapsed in upon itself as I rushed around, repelling their invasion fleets. Of course, I still ended up losing because over in another constellation, the Hissho were finishing up with their expansion and shifting entirely to extermination. Their fleets were not endless, but they were perfectly constructed.
When they invaded, I was able to react. But they had brought with them a counter for everything. My torps were bouncing off their dreads, and their lasers cut right through my ships as though they had been watching my screen the whole time. I had fast moving fleets designed to attack large numbers of weak vessels. Plenty of kinetics, plenty of mid-tonnage vessels in small fleets. But they had brought dreadnought armadas and laughed in my face. I had the capacity to spread my research to counter their counters, but their strength was in the breadth of their military. They're the Swiss-army army. So my diverse empire that was designed to beat the Craver swarms, well it was like a smorgasbord for them, because when they attacked a system, no matter how fast I reacted, I couldn't get it back. Their invasion was like a spear, being more focussed than the Cravers (who attacked everywhere at the same time). Their encroachment was unstoppable and swift.
This is where I think it takes its ideas from the Civ side of things rather than the GalCiv/MoO stable. Maybe it's just because I've been playing GalCiv constantly since it came out but in that game, things are gradual. You can see Armageddon long before it arrives. Your defeat is one of slow degradation. Those Drengin will get here, eventually, but I have time to change over to mass drivers on all my shit long before the shit hits the fan. But in Civ4, shit can get real in one turn. You can lose a chokepoint city, maybe someone else gets that vital wonder before you that your entire happiness/culture grand strategy was hung upon. You can reach points in games of GalCiv where the systems you have set up, the colonized worlds, the improvements and planet tiles and ships you've designed could almost play themselves. You could walk away from the computer and set it to automatically pass turns and nothing much would happen. Endless Space is not like that, at least not in its current incarnation. You are always on a knife edge, always. And what's amazing is that the game makes this fun and not an anxiety filled nightmare.
It was fun to lose, to see even a patchwork AI (that has been confirmed as being placeholder) utilize the mechanics in such in interesting and surprising way. That's a mark of a good game, I believe.
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It seems Endless Space has stripped out all the bullshit that has been slowly added to the genre for a decade. It has taken a lot of design cues from an unconventional source and has enough fresh ideas that I'm actually unsure of where it will end up. For the price, it's a no brainer. And the best thing is that this is an Alpha build. This is as bad as the game will ever be, with a huge amount of room for improvement, not to mention three more core races and a sack full of balance changes and new mechanics, with a few months of new art assets and lore improvements to come.
Endless Space is, from my initial impression so far, really superb. Especially for a new developer. And the flaws (there are significant flaws) are delightfully so obvious that the devs have already said they've been fixed immediately in preparation for the upcoming beta in a few weeks. The fact that it has come out of absolutely nowhere and in a few days killed all enthusiasm I had for Sins Rebellion is a miracle unto itself. Given another couple of months in the oven, and assuming they get the balancing just right, this could be monumental and completely shift the genre. But get it wrong and it could be a Civ5, well received but ultimately not a path forward. Here's hoping they get it right because it's really, really fun. And for £20, if you like 4X games you are insane it you don't at least pick it up to try.
Are there star color types like in MoO2? I liked the idea that green stars and yellow stars(etc.) would have more of a tendency to carry certain planet types than others.
I do think there could be slightly more shit to do, early on... but like Civ this game kind of depends on getting past turn 50-60 before it really picks up. I'm dubious about there being much interesting to do on a Small or Tiny map, really.
I also wouldn't mind like, large-scale system-defining actions above and beyond the normal building methods, something that required say building parts on all the planets in a system, or that could only be built should you have enough of a certain type of planet or a certain selection of planets. I like the idea of redefining areas of my empire, and space-related games can't really do the "improvements" thing from Civ very easily.
Oh, actually... I'd love if there was some sort of abilty to alter/create space lanes, or wormholes, or something. That could be neat.
Also, there needs to be actual official methods of interdicting fleets as right now they can take a quick dash through any fleet arrangement, so long as they never stop at a planet.
Oh, and I wouldn't mind some sort of official "catapault". Maybe that would only make it more annoying, though. I guess the siege idea as it is kind of works, I'm just impatient.
I do think there could be slightly more shit to do, early on... but like Civ this game kind of depends on getting past turn 50-60 before it really picks up. I'm dubious about there being much interesting to do on a Small or Tiny map, really.
I also wouldn't mind like, large-scale system-defining actions above and beyond the normal building methods, something that required say building parts on all the planets in a system, or that could only be built should you have enough of a certain type of planet or a certain selection of planets. I like the idea of redefining areas of my empire, and space-related games can't really do the "improvements" thing from Civ very easily.
Oh, actually... I'd love if there was some sort of abilty to alter/create space lanes, or wormholes, or something. That could be neat.
Also, there needs to be actual official methods of interdicting fleets as right now they can take a quick dash through any fleet arrangement, so long as they never stop at a planet.
Oh, and I wouldn't mind some sort of official "catapault". Maybe that would only make it more annoying, though. I guess the siege idea as it is kind of works, I'm just impatient.
Scorched Earth, literally - terraform planets in border systems to barren/arid to slow down the advance of opposing empires along your outskirts. Now that would be a concept I'd like to see.
There's definitely some blockade mechanics ready to be patched. The devs said that enemy ships should not be able to fly straight through your systems without penalty. At the least moving into your territory should end their movement phase. I think they mentioned that eventually enemy ships will not be able to leave colonies without taking damage/penalties. As far as outposts go, I guess it's working as intended. I like that settling a system is not the same as owning it. You have to protect your fringes that way, it's a nice layer of strategy.
I think there should be an equivalent to Sins' jump space inhibitor. You can fly into an enemy system for no penalty, but leaving it costs you something, time/movement/damage whatever. It allows scouting, but imposes a penalty for doing so.
What do you guys build/research early game to get a strong economy/industrial base for expansion?
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SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
The comparison to Civ is apt. I'm able to apply basic strategies I learned from Civ to Endless Space. Stuff like improvements and balancing your budget are things that are immediately clear to me.
I also do like how the galaxies feel like they have a geography. They feel like real, solid places.
This game is going to be crazy when multiplayer is added.
If we're talking about things we'd like to see that are missing: Visual representations of planet exploitations. I can't imagine it would be a vast amount of effort to add a layer mask to
well let's see.
There's three sizes of each planet type, each with their own surface texture. How many planet types? I think there's nine, not including asteroids. So that's only twenty seven separate textures that match up with surface details, for each of the four exploit types.
It would be sorta awesome if you upgraded an arid with the trade exploit if little cities appeared on the surface. It would add a layer of fidelity and dynamism that is missing from the game. It does feel a little static, as it is.
If you check their forums, a huge amount of content was actually ripped out of the alpha because their placeholder AI wasn't able to use them. Like retreat cards for battles, and a wider diversity of hero abilities.
Also, because a lot of the heroes are G2G designed, when more are put in, you'll only be hiring heroes from your own faction, instead of from others. They'll have the same abilities, but the lore will line up better.
Outpost would be great. Maybe a special ship that you can build in the space lanes to intercept enemies. That would be awesome as well.
Scarab those were awesome stories. I will agree you need to be flexible. My current game I am finishing up a war with the cravers and the empire at the same time. When the Cravers first attacked me my fleets were still focused from my war with the Horatio. I had to shift my designs pretty dramatically and was just holding the line. Now thanks to my speed, tech and production ability of the largest empire I have taken Craver planets and even the Empire's homeworld.
I must say though, a tech victory takes forever when you have to divert resources to survival.
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Librarian's ghostLibrarian, Ghostbuster, and TimSporkRegistered Userregular
They are trying to push out a major update, beta maybe, next week.
I just started a new game and have this huge cluster of systems to my own with only two systems that had a way in. I planned to create choke points at those two systems with huge fleets and just build up behind. Stupid other race came from no where and colonized one of the systems before I could get a ship there. That race was no where NEAR me. He just wanted to come by and screw my plan.
SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
By the way do pirates just kind of pop up in places? My home systems are in a cluster behind a choke point that I have my main fleet in orbit around but I still get pirates flying around.
Although a craver ship did the same thing. No idea where these things are coming from!
By the way do pirates just kind of pop up in places? My home systems are in a cluster behind a choke point that I have my main fleet in orbit around but I still get pirates flying around.
Although a craver ship did the same thing. No idea where these things are coming from!
It's definitely the whole being able to slide right through systems thing. They can start beyond your visual range, then slip through a system to past your visual range.
Actually that's the only UI thing I'd like: make visual range as obvious as Influence, right now I forget that having a Scout along with a fleet actually helps a shitload in terms of tracking enemy movement.
By the way do pirates just kind of pop up in places? My home systems are in a cluster behind a choke point that I have my main fleet in orbit around but I still get pirates flying around.
Although a craver ship did the same thing. No idea where these things are coming from!
By the way do pirates just kind of pop up in places? My home systems are in a cluster behind a choke point that I have my main fleet in orbit around but I still get pirates flying around.
Although a craver ship did the same thing. No idea where these things are coming from!
They apparently spawn on uncolonized systems.
Oh! I'd love to see uncolonized systems become other things if you leave them alone for a while. Like the friendly/unfriendly natives get spaceflight, or they become pirate strongholds or something. You know, with some updates on what's happening so you don't just suddenly have 20 pirates in your area.
Oooh, interesting. I did not notice that when I played, they just had 1-2 ships pop up every so often.
If you let pirate sit on a planet a little to long they will conquer it. My first game I played on newbie level ai to mess around with the game and they actually wiped out the research guys before my Cravers got the chance.
Oooh, interesting. I did not notice that when I played, they just had 1-2 ships pop up every so often.
If you let pirate sit on a planet a little to long they will conquer it. My first game I played on newbie level ai to mess around with the game and they actually wiped out the research guys before my Cravers got the chance.
Yeah, during the few games I've played so far the pirates have been a far bigger threat than any of other AI empires, since like the barbarians in Civ games they just show up over and over, and seem to do so quite rapidly and quite aggressively, even on the lowest difficulty.
Hence, it'd be nice if one of the other gameplay aspects the developers had the smart idea to swipe from the Civ games would be the ability to tweak the frequency and aggression of the pirate quasi-faction.
i am quite clearly dominating 2 opponents while the third is at war with me, but since i am busy fighting 2 other wars he just sits in his corner gaining dust.
i am quite clearly dominating 2 opponents while the third is at war with me, but since i am busy fighting 2 other wars he just sits in his corner gaining dust.
It would be nice if there was a tangible effect of someone having a Dust monopoly. Like, some sort of indicator that oh shit this guy is able to... I don't know, control heroes or slow everyone else down or just some sort of "better get on that one guy in the corner".
I'm mostly pissed off because i had so much tech researched and I just eliminated one race, and was working on the last planet of the other, and then this horatio mother fucker had like 7 systems, I have like 30, but i lost
I'm OK with a Dust accumulation victory, but the limit needs to be way higher. Like, an order of magnitude higher at minimum.
You should never accidentally win a game without knowing it. And you should not be unaware of when an enemy is encroaching on victory. It should be highly visible and not too easily attainable.
You can see how close people are to an economic victory by holding your mouse over the money area on your screen. I think my problem with the economic victory, outside of magically conquering them you can't really stop or delay the victory when they are close. This is where the espionage stuff would be great. A way to slow down/stall an enemy from winning by science or economies.
Right like that's the thing. If Dust is a shortcut victory then it isn't working, and if you or an opponent can get it without anyone noticing that's totally not working.
Some sort of global messages when a player is say ~50 turns from any victory should popup. and should also make all the other AI turn on them, there's not much use if I notice someone is close to a dust victory but can't go and try to stop it because I'm still under attack, or can't move my fleets through neighbors space.
for now I just turn off the dust victory condition.
I hope the developers clean up and re-write those fan biographies, because my inner Grammar Nazi has been stirred from its slumber and is angry at what it read. Most of them are rather boring stories, as well.
Why is Xavitor winning the second group of bios? It reads like it was written by an adolescent.
Dashui on
Xbox Live, PSN & Origin: Vacorsis 3DS: 2638-0037-166
I hope the developers clean up and re-write those fan bios, because my inner Grammar Nazi has been stirred from its slumber and is angry at what it read. Most of them are rather boring stories, as well.
One can only hope that
A: They will be cleaned up for release
B: They intend for there to be so many (at least a dozen for each race) that in the long run, patchy quality will even out
C: They intend for a system to create your own, similar to creating your own race, making it all moot.
Or hopefully all three.
I'd imagine that a lot of the fan-made content is going to be of the superfluous, bonus content style. Like, the core game will be highly polished, then there will this extra stuff on top, put into the 'create your own' basket as a primer for introducing players to the mechanics of creating your own custom content. Like when some RTS games come with community maps included on the disc, even though they're all shit.
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I think it depends on the combination of professions or whatever they're called for that particular hero, but I'm not even close to 100% sure here.
I'm still working on the Empire. Their base racial perk is that as their taxes go from 50% to 100% they get a bonus 0% to 100% industry. As I'm reading this, that says to me that the higher my taxes go, the more industry I'll have empire wide, with a linear progression of about 10% industry for every 5% extra taxes. Does anyone know if this is correct? I'm trying to develop my economic policy, and I'm kinda confused.
Took me about 50 turns to get a handle on things. Was bleeding dust for a while, till I remembered I was supposed to be building improvements in my systems (which I had been wasting time researching till that point). I'm still learning, but this game is pretty amazing. Definately glad I pre-ordered.
The game is more Civ-like than a lot of people are acknowledging, I think. It's certainly got MoO blood running through its veins, and no doubt one of its ancestors mated with GalCiv and contaminated the genepool, but if you wanted to simply lay out what Endless Space is to the complete layman, it leans far more toward Civilization in Space than the others. It has certainly taken some very specific design cues from Civ4 and stripped away a lot of things from MoO2 instead, which is interesting because as far as 4X games go, not only are most in space, but most take their lineage from the other side of the road than Sid Meier. Civ has for a long time almost been an island in the genre. It works here, though.
What I enjoy most is that, like most great games that come to define a genre, it has stripped out the superfluous bullshit that has bogged down a lot of past masters. For example; ship design in ES looks basic and rudimentary when compared to, say, Twilight of the Arnor. But I played ES for essentially a whole day yesterday and then dipped back into GalCiv2 last night and it actually highlights the fact that a lot of the latter's mechanics are boring and annoying. I guess you just think it's cool to design your own ship, but that puts so many limitations on the rest of the mechanics that you lose out in other areas, like the battle cinematics (which are great, but more on that later).
This streamlining extends most noticeably to the UI, which is seriously - pending some tweaks and a better tooltip system - one of the best around, in any genre. How it manages to make almost every mechanic 'at-a-glance' is amazing. You end up not needing to even analyze half the things because of that little color swatch in the corner summarizing an entire blurb of flavor text into 'this is the resource this upgrade improves'. That's super useful lategame when you have a huge amount of redundant upgrades that you need to churn through.
It also puts the four eckses to the fore. The biggest amount of screen real estate is given over to exploration, unlike GalCiv which has all the other things hanging off the sides. This creates a nice flow to the way you play the game, tunnelling down through mechanics rather than dipping into each one separately. The structure and shape of the constellations is as important to ES as the continents are to Civ. Unlike GalCiv, the landscape of Endless Space is given much more strategic importance. It also reinforces how subtle and invisible their design is. The way that different stars correlate to different planet configurations, the way that at the most zoomed out level you still have a firm grasp on the long-term strategic elements of the game is brilliant.
There's a visual language to Endless Space that dispenses with an awful lot of text and on-screen indicators. Game mechanics are displayed with art, not design. Each time you zoom in on your empire, its as though you're focussing in on more refined and more intricate gameplay systems. You start out looking at the general shape of your empire, important to expansion and exploration. Then you go further in to look at system clusters, and the visuals change to represent what you want to do, things pop in telling you what's happening on that level of gameplay. Unlike Civ5, where everything is on all the time, even when you're high in the atmosphere or zoomed right in on a single worker, here each level of interest has an appropriate level of detail for what you need to do at that specific hierarchy of gameplay. That's why improvements are system wide and only show up when you're looking at systems - allowing you control over your exploitation - which gives you the final piece of the puzzle, the extermination of your enemies, which is one of my favorite parts.
In almost all of these 4x games, combat its a number cruncher. It's essentially that here, too. But its coated in a gleaming cinematic each time you fight, and reinforced with an almost CCG type augmentation mechanic, that allows you to very subtly shift the course of battle without making everything a twitch game. It's a middle ground between Civ's 'unit A attacks unit B' system and the Total War 'each battle is a realtime event' way of doing things. It's certainly more fun than MoO2 (and don't get me started on Sword of the Stars, urgh), even if it is more basic and not as in depth. Because really, like in Civilization, the actual fighting is secondary to the wider scope of war as a whole. It makes the individual skirmishes fun to watch, simple to contest, and most importantly, links them to the broader mechanics of the game. The CCG system is directly impacted by research and hero bonuses, and allows you to actively spend resources to shift the balance of a fight. It makes the whole thing comprehensive and seamless. Too many 4X games have the first three Xs over there, and the final one over here. A SimCity game with combat tacked on as an afterthought. Endless Space manages to make them all blend together. Certainly to a much better degree than any GalCiv2.
It is this blending which I think makes Endless Space a hot prospect. Nothing is done in isolation. There are no 'industry only' technologies to research. Every tiny facet of the game has ramifications for the other aspects. Colonizing new types of planet, like Arid or Tundra, in other games would have only affected a small circumference of game mechanics around it, like industry and production and perhaps science. But here, every decision has an impact on the smallest and largest aspects of your decision making. Colonizing a Tundra planet indeed gives you a science and industry boost, but it also directly impacts your military battle plans (because technology is given more importance in combat than in a lot of other games - there are no archers killing panzer tanks in this game). Unlocking the colonization techs also feeds into the military wing of the tech tree. Ship designs are linked directly to exploration, rather than being in a separate tree altogether. And the exploration techs also improve empire-wide infrastructure, each one having additional bonuses to fleet movement, speed or size, and planet exploitation options. It also affects diplomacy in a tangible way, especially with a Locust-type race that has to constantly expand and exploit to survive, because like Civ, diplomacy is more about what you have, rather than what you want. It is not only the size of your empire that governs your strength, it is also its specific type and composition.
The flexibility of your colonized planets is hugely important. You cannot afford to be too diverse in your choice of worlds, but you need breadth and adaptability more than in most other 4X games. This is why, to an extent, many people have been complaining that the game can very rapidly snowball. That you can be in contention one minute and then steamrolled the next. This will improve with balancing but I also think it is a crucial aspect of the game. Mediocre civilizations in Endless Space can be forged rather easily, and compete with others on a level playing field with no problems. But the exceptional race that moves ahead in technology and industry can completely dominate to a disgusting degree, while also having their own weaknesses be made more apparent. I like this. It makes the highs and lows of the game more fierce, and avoids a lot of the staleness of particularly Sword of the Stars. Things can blow up in your face if you lose focus for even a moment.
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For example; in my last game, I was the Sophons and going for technological supremacy. In Endless Space, a small quantity of highly advanced ships can wipe the floor with vast armadas of primitive designs. Cravers started invading my systems and what started as a war of attrition quickly became a complete slaughter. But a slaughter of me. My error was the way that I both stretched my forces too thinly and also concentrated them too much. I built many ships and spread them out, but also moved my populations to as many huge terrans and oceans as I could, to improve science bonuses. I was racking up an insane kill count, taking down five, six ships at a time in every system, for no losses. But the tipping point came when I had exhausted my industrial capacity to build ships, because the Cravers are a swarm race, sending wave after wave of their own vessels to die at my technologically superior hands, and then had to dip into the Dust pool (gold reserves). Which ran out incredibly quickly because I was too focussed on science and production and it took too long to repopulate my arid planets for a Dust recuperation. I was too inflexible and not well prepared.
That's what makes the game really fun and interesting to me. Every route is viable, and every type of gameplay is rewarded. In GalCiv, which is my bread and butter, as long as you do your thing well, and don't fuck up, you'll have options. You can min/max if you want, and it will be totally fine in the long run. Here, it's not that you can't do that, but that you absolutely cannot treat yourself as being in isolation. The structure of the galaxy, the enemy empires and the composition of your own worlds is given much more importance than before, so unlike GalCiv, a myopic player will sooner crumble. I was destroying hundreds of Craver ships with my incredibly advanced Battleships and Dreadnoughts. But their fleets of poorly equipped Corvettes, with their puny guns and weak shields, were so cheap, and their expansion was so relentless, that when my capacity was filled I they just kept coming. Using my own captured systems against me with huge production bonuses. The Cravers are a plague, and I was overwhelmed, dying a horrible, quiet death on my last remaining system with a small barren and a medium gas helium.
But conversely, in another game, I went all out industry and production, running at 100% taxes on my United Empire civilization, and managed to defeat the same Craver offence with adaptability. Systems that were invaded were quickly cleansed, preventing them from getting a foothold, eventually choking their expansion before it even began. My technology was not so much about weapon power and shield strength, but about fleet movement speed, fleet size and planet defences. I learned from my Sophon failure, which was my inability to react promptly, and I had built an empire that was not particularly advanced, but was constructed in a way which allowed for rapid repulsion of threats, and a quick mop-up of invaders. The Craver expansion was stalled, and their empire collapsed in upon itself as I rushed around, repelling their invasion fleets. Of course, I still ended up losing because over in another constellation, the Hissho were finishing up with their expansion and shifting entirely to extermination. Their fleets were not endless, but they were perfectly constructed.
When they invaded, I was able to react. But they had brought with them a counter for everything. My torps were bouncing off their dreads, and their lasers cut right through my ships as though they had been watching my screen the whole time. I had fast moving fleets designed to attack large numbers of weak vessels. Plenty of kinetics, plenty of mid-tonnage vessels in small fleets. But they had brought dreadnought armadas and laughed in my face. I had the capacity to spread my research to counter their counters, but their strength was in the breadth of their military. They're the Swiss-army army. So my diverse empire that was designed to beat the Craver swarms, well it was like a smorgasbord for them, because when they attacked a system, no matter how fast I reacted, I couldn't get it back. Their invasion was like a spear, being more focussed than the Cravers (who attacked everywhere at the same time). Their encroachment was unstoppable and swift.
This is where I think it takes its ideas from the Civ side of things rather than the GalCiv/MoO stable. Maybe it's just because I've been playing GalCiv constantly since it came out but in that game, things are gradual. You can see Armageddon long before it arrives. Your defeat is one of slow degradation. Those Drengin will get here, eventually, but I have time to change over to mass drivers on all my shit long before the shit hits the fan. But in Civ4, shit can get real in one turn. You can lose a chokepoint city, maybe someone else gets that vital wonder before you that your entire happiness/culture grand strategy was hung upon. You can reach points in games of GalCiv where the systems you have set up, the colonized worlds, the improvements and planet tiles and ships you've designed could almost play themselves. You could walk away from the computer and set it to automatically pass turns and nothing much would happen. Endless Space is not like that, at least not in its current incarnation. You are always on a knife edge, always. And what's amazing is that the game makes this fun and not an anxiety filled nightmare.
It was fun to lose, to see even a patchwork AI (that has been confirmed as being placeholder) utilize the mechanics in such in interesting and surprising way. That's a mark of a good game, I believe.
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It seems Endless Space has stripped out all the bullshit that has been slowly added to the genre for a decade. It has taken a lot of design cues from an unconventional source and has enough fresh ideas that I'm actually unsure of where it will end up. For the price, it's a no brainer. And the best thing is that this is an Alpha build. This is as bad as the game will ever be, with a huge amount of room for improvement, not to mention three more core races and a sack full of balance changes and new mechanics, with a few months of new art assets and lore improvements to come.
Endless Space is, from my initial impression so far, really superb. Especially for a new developer. And the flaws (there are significant flaws) are delightfully so obvious that the devs have already said they've been fixed immediately in preparation for the upcoming beta in a few weeks. The fact that it has come out of absolutely nowhere and in a few days killed all enthusiasm I had for Sins Rebellion is a miracle unto itself. Given another couple of months in the oven, and assuming they get the balancing just right, this could be monumental and completely shift the genre. But get it wrong and it could be a Civ5, well received but ultimately not a path forward. Here's hoping they get it right because it's really, really fun. And for £20, if you like 4X games you are insane it you don't at least pick it up to try.
Purchased.
I do think there could be slightly more shit to do, early on... but like Civ this game kind of depends on getting past turn 50-60 before it really picks up. I'm dubious about there being much interesting to do on a Small or Tiny map, really.
I also wouldn't mind like, large-scale system-defining actions above and beyond the normal building methods, something that required say building parts on all the planets in a system, or that could only be built should you have enough of a certain type of planet or a certain selection of planets. I like the idea of redefining areas of my empire, and space-related games can't really do the "improvements" thing from Civ very easily.
Oh, actually... I'd love if there was some sort of abilty to alter/create space lanes, or wormholes, or something. That could be neat.
Also, there needs to be actual official methods of interdicting fleets as right now they can take a quick dash through any fleet arrangement, so long as they never stop at a planet.
Oh, and I wouldn't mind some sort of official "catapault". Maybe that would only make it more annoying, though. I guess the siege idea as it is kind of works, I'm just impatient.
And now I've bought a game that I wasn't going to buy and have no time to play. Stupid forum.
Scorched Earth, literally - terraform planets in border systems to barren/arid to slow down the advance of opposing empires along your outskirts. Now that would be a concept I'd like to see.
I think there should be an equivalent to Sins' jump space inhibitor. You can fly into an enemy system for no penalty, but leaving it costs you something, time/movement/damage whatever. It allows scouting, but imposes a penalty for doing so.
I also do like how the galaxies feel like they have a geography. They feel like real, solid places.
This game is going to be crazy when multiplayer is added.
well let's see.
There's three sizes of each planet type, each with their own surface texture. How many planet types? I think there's nine, not including asteroids. So that's only twenty seven separate textures that match up with surface details, for each of the four exploit types.
It would be sorta awesome if you upgraded an arid with the trade exploit if little cities appeared on the surface. It would add a layer of fidelity and dynamism that is missing from the game. It does feel a little static, as it is.
I can only expect this is in the pipeline.
I like the idea that you can have sort of proto-warfare, border conflicts.
I never liked the fact that in most of these games you go from 0 - MINE in like 1 settler.
Also, because a lot of the heroes are G2G designed, when more are put in, you'll only be hiring heroes from your own faction, instead of from others. They'll have the same abilities, but the lore will line up better.
Scarab those were awesome stories. I will agree you need to be flexible. My current game I am finishing up a war with the cravers and the empire at the same time. When the Cravers first attacked me my fleets were still focused from my war with the Horatio. I had to shift my designs pretty dramatically and was just holding the line. Now thanks to my speed, tech and production ability of the largest empire I have taken Craver planets and even the Empire's homeworld.
I must say though, a tech victory takes forever when you have to divert resources to survival.
I just started a new game and have this huge cluster of systems to my own with only two systems that had a way in. I planned to create choke points at those two systems with huge fleets and just build up behind. Stupid other race came from no where and colonized one of the systems before I could get a ship there. That race was no where NEAR me. He just wanted to come by and screw my plan.
Although a craver ship did the same thing. No idea where these things are coming from!
It's definitely the whole being able to slide right through systems thing. They can start beyond your visual range, then slip through a system to past your visual range.
Actually that's the only UI thing I'd like: make visual range as obvious as Influence, right now I forget that having a Scout along with a fleet actually helps a shitload in terms of tracking enemy movement.
They apparently spawn on uncolonized systems.
Oh! I'd love to see uncolonized systems become other things if you leave them alone for a while. Like the friendly/unfriendly natives get spaceflight, or they become pirate strongholds or something. You know, with some updates on what's happening so you don't just suddenly have 20 pirates in your area.
If you let pirate sit on a planet a little to long they will conquer it. My first game I played on newbie level ai to mess around with the game and they actually wiped out the research guys before my Cravers got the chance.
Yeah, during the few games I've played so far the pirates have been a far bigger threat than any of other AI empires, since like the barbarians in Civ games they just show up over and over, and seem to do so quite rapidly and quite aggressively, even on the lowest difficulty.
Hence, it'd be nice if one of the other gameplay aspects the developers had the smart idea to swipe from the Civ games would be the ability to tweak the frequency and aggression of the pirate quasi-faction.
i am quite clearly dominating 2 opponents while the third is at war with me, but since i am busy fighting 2 other wars he just sits in his corner gaining dust.
It would be nice if there was a tangible effect of someone having a Dust monopoly. Like, some sort of indicator that oh shit this guy is able to... I don't know, control heroes or slow everyone else down or just some sort of "better get on that one guy in the corner".
You should never accidentally win a game without knowing it. And you should not be unaware of when an enemy is encroaching on victory. It should be highly visible and not too easily attainable.
for now I just turn off the dust victory condition.
Enjoy it a lot.
Vote for Afsheen! She's a space lawyer.
Afsheen is a pretty cool hero though.
Why is Xavitor winning the second group of bios? It reads like it was written by an adolescent.
One can only hope that
A: They will be cleaned up for release
B: They intend for there to be so many (at least a dozen for each race) that in the long run, patchy quality will even out
C: They intend for a system to create your own, similar to creating your own race, making it all moot.
Or hopefully all three.
I'd imagine that a lot of the fan-made content is going to be of the superfluous, bonus content style. Like, the core game will be highly polished, then there will this extra stuff on top, put into the 'create your own' basket as a primer for introducing players to the mechanics of creating your own custom content. Like when some RTS games come with community maps included on the disc, even though they're all shit.