I don't know what to make of rivers/coasts. On the one hand, you can stack up big bonuses on them. On the other hand, doing so costs research and production that you wouldn't otherwise need. Is the overhead worthwhile? Even if you're passing up free anomalies in favor of rivers? Even if only a fraction of your cities are near water? I have to make tough choices about research as it is.
Ocean tiles are, with the proper research, ridiculous.
My most productive and richest city was one I started pretty late, all because it's on an island with an isthmus, so it's got a huge number of workable ocean tiles.
They're all ... lemme see ...
+4 Food (+1 water, +3 Fish Farms)
+6 Industry (+5 from the cargo port, +1 from the Apprentice thing)
+5 Science (+3 Hydro whatever, +2 from the science thing)
+5 Dust (+1 water, +3 Sifters, +1 ... something else?)
... and I'm about to add another +5 dust to that from the Dust Reclamation thing. That looks right-ish.
It's a fully featured 4X game. They skipped stuff like fancy intro movies and animated characters in diplomacy menus. Leonard Nimoy doesn't narrate the game. The art is really good. The interface is inspired, similar to how Endless Space's interface put other games of its type to shame. You'll have lots of weighty decisions to make and there is a wide variety of victory conditions. Each faction feels very unique and you get a lot of options for customizing them by focusing their research and choosing which minor factions to integrate. There's tons of natural wonders and resources to exploit. The territory system is great. One city per province works really well, you get great options with meaningful choices in expanding your cities. Amplitude is great at after market support too, all of their games continue to receive polish and refinement after release, with big features and overhauls coming in reasonably priced expansions. If you enjoy fantasy 4X games and you think you'd like to try one that has a refreshing approach mechanically and aesthetically then you could do far worse than Endless Legend. They didn't cut any corners where it matters.
Well that sounds good. I might think about picking it up this weekend.
@Wyvern The price thing is just a rule of thumb that I find works well. However I know it doesn't cover everything which was why I was asking.
Ocean tiles are, with the proper research, ridiculous.
My most productive and richest city was one I started pretty late, all because it's on an island with an isthmus, so it's got a huge number of workable ocean tiles.
They're all ... lemme see ...
+4 Food (+1 water, +3 Fish Farms)
+6 Industry (+5 from the cargo port, +1 from the Apprentice thing)
+5 Science (+3 Hydro whatever, +2 from the science thing)
+5 Dust (+1 water, +3 Sifters, +1 ... something else?)
... and I'm about to add another +5 dust to that from the Dust Reclamation thing. That looks right-ish.
Ocean squares are insane.
Those bonuses don't come from nowhere, though. They all require a specialized research, and with the way research cost scaling works in this game, everything you research is one other thing you aren't researching. You can't just blow through old research in two turns like in Civilization. Are you giving up Seed Storage or Public Granary for those fish farms? Then you need to spend industry to make the buildings. Often twice, since there are separate ones for rivers and lakes. And then some of them only work in summer, when the alternative techs you passed up probably worked year-round. Plus you're settling in locations that will be suboptimal until those techs come online, which might not be until the third tech tier. And some provinces won't have a usable water-heavy location at all.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but I just don't know if it works as well in practice as it looks on paper.
It's a fully featured 4X game. They skipped stuff like fancy intro movies and animated characters in diplomacy menus. Leonard Nimoy doesn't narrate the game. The art is really good. The interface is inspired, similar to how Endless Space's interface put other games of its type to shame. You'll have lots of weighty decisions to make and there is a wide variety of victory conditions. Each faction feels very unique and you get a lot of options for customizing them by focusing their research and choosing which minor factions to integrate. There's tons of natural wonders and resources to exploit. The territory system is great. One city per province works really well, you get great options with meaningful choices in expanding your cities. Amplitude is great at after market support too, all of their games continue to receive polish and refinement after release, with big features and overhauls coming in reasonably priced expansions. If you enjoy fantasy 4X games and you think you'd like to try one that has a refreshing approach mechanically and aesthetically then you could do far worse than Endless Legend. They didn't cut any corners where it matters.
Well that sounds good. I might think about picking it up this weekend.
@Wyvern The price thing is just a rule of thumb that I find works well. However I know it doesn't cover everything which was why I was asking.
I've read today that if you sub to IGN Prime for a few bucks, Endless Legend is their free game this month. Wish I knew this a few days ago, but I'm happy with the deal I got
My go as the Broken Lords is proceeding much more smoothly than my space bug venture. I have ALL the dust. Which I promptly spend. But hey. I'll take dust flow over bankruptcy.
Ocean tiles are, with the proper research, ridiculous.
My most productive and richest city was one I started pretty late, all because it's on an island with an isthmus, so it's got a huge number of workable ocean tiles.
They're all ... lemme see ...
+4 Food (+1 water, +3 Fish Farms)
+6 Industry (+5 from the cargo port, +1 from the Apprentice thing)
+5 Science (+3 Hydro whatever, +2 from the science thing)
+5 Dust (+1 water, +3 Sifters, +1 ... something else?)
... and I'm about to add another +5 dust to that from the Dust Reclamation thing. That looks right-ish.
Ocean squares are insane.
Those bonuses don't come from nowhere, though. They all require a specialized research, and with the way research cost scaling works in this game, everything you research is one other thing you aren't researching. You can't just blow through old research in two turns like in Civilization. Are you giving up Seed Storage or Public Granary for those fish farms? Then you need to spend industry to make the buildings. Often twice, since there are separate ones for rivers and lakes. And then some of them only work in summer, when the alternative techs you passed up probably worked year-round. Plus you're settling in locations that will be suboptimal until those techs come online, which might not be until the third tech tier. And some provinces won't have a usable water-heavy location at all.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but I just don't know if it works as well in practice as it looks on paper.
Eh, personally I usually find myself skipping most of the military techs until the later era's/a need to cherry pick them comes up so it's not a huge deal. Plus most of my cities produce fast enough that it's not much of an opportunity cost unless I'm at war.
It's not quite as cut and dry as I said (would be dull if it was) as things like Anomalies are good immediately on city founding but once you're settling your second or third region you probably have the tech rolling enough that rivers and oceans can take a priority. If the anomalies really good you can always stretch a borough out there.
I really enjoyed Endless Space, though I consider it a flawed gem. I have questions before leaping into this one.
One of my issues with ES was that the length of time before a new colony would apply it's own territory circle was artificially slow, and made the pace of the early and mid game glacial, with horrific penalties if you settled outside your sphere. Is that feature in effect here?
Another issue was that even with the expansion there were exactly zero female rulers, which was glaringly unpossible to not notice once I noticed it. Has the sausage-fest ended?
I really enjoyed Endless Space, though I consider it a flawed gem. I have questions before leaping into this one.
One of my issues with ES was that the length of time before a new colony would apply it's own territory circle was artificially slow, and made the pace of the early and mid game glacial, with horrific penalties if you settled outside your sphere. Is that feature in effect here?
Another issue was that even with the expansion there were exactly zero female rulers, which was glaringly unpossible to not notice once I noticed it. Has the sausage-fest ended?
1) There is no area of influence. Once you plop a city down in a region you own all that region and no one can fuck around with you in it without declaring war. The expansion as a result isn't too slow. Most people put down their second city after their first policy pass on turn twentyish.
2) Right now of the four humanish races two of the avatar's are female. Among the monster's one of them is technically female (the Cultists head robot is their queen) and the Drakken are technically a matriarchal society ruled by two ancient sisters (also hilarious and well written) even if their avatar is a dude Drakken.
So depending on how you wanna count it it's either 25% or 50% of the current factions.
Just the fact that the sausage-fest has obviously ended is enough for me. Admittedly, most of the factions in ES were completely non-human, but of the humanish ones they didn't make one of the avatars a woman, and they should have. Once I noticed there wasn't even one I couldn't not notice and the annoyance level built rapidly from there.
It would have been alright if they had made making a custom faction (complete with custom portrait) a simple thing to do but they didn't.
Although to their credit Horatio was a transgressive post-human and his clones fell onto both sides of the gender divide. But still.
So, made it a lot deeper into my first "mess around" game, and I'm coming to the following conclusions:
Tech (and which ones you research) is the most important part of the game. You are forced into making decisions.
As a corollary to this, science is the most important resource. Obviously, food and industry matter when first putting down your city, but being able to crank out additional research compared to others gives you an enormous edge.
Dust seems weirdly over-valued in diplomacy compared to other resources. Like, tossing in a couple hundred dust can flip the AI "balance" on an otherwise imbalanced deal.
Command is also quite important. I like the concept of needing to have certain "pull" in order to make certain offers on the global stage.
I'm not sure that the extra effort to do quests for minor factions is worth the extra reward in all cases compared to attacking (which isn't hard) or just buying out (they're rather cheap). They should make the minor factions grow in strength for their home cities (if not the roaming bands) and have the costs increase to buy them as the game goes on.
If not in strength, the longer you wait with the minor factions, the more of them will be there in the villages. And some of them eventually just start sending army after army out to attack nearby cities (at least, that happened in my last game)
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Just the fact that the sausage-fest has obviously ended is enough for me. Admittedly, most of the factions in ES were completely non-human, but of the humanish ones they didn't make one of the avatars a woman, and they should have. Once I noticed there wasn't even one I couldn't not notice and the annoyance level built rapidly from there.
It would have been alright if they had made making a custom faction (complete with custom portrait) a simple thing to do but they didn't.
Although to their credit Horatio was a transgressive post-human and his clones fell onto both sides of the gender divide. But still.
The Vaulter portrait in Endless Space is a woman. That makes it 2:1 men:women, if Horatio doesn't count (being androgynous clone species). The rest? Who the fuck knows which gender they are, they're aliens/robots/crystals.
Started a game. my hero and his two units get chased across the map by a horde of roaming armies from various villages before being killed. A bunch of Haunts appeared and barricaded my second city. Leaving my empire basically crippled and defenceless as my capital had to support two cities of infrastructure whilst also trying to get an army together to defend the realm. This took forever to do as I had no Dust to speed construction, and building a unit took 8 turns.
More haunts kept spawning and joining the siege. It took untill research age 3 for my troops to have good enough equipment to break the siege. I'm now back to where I should have been about 60=70 turns ago. Hopefully I haven't fallen too far behind the other civilizations.
Enjoying this game
I've only played around a little, but from what I can see so far I'm already desperately hoping that Civ VI steals from this mercilessly. Armies with multiple units that split up for combat? Hexes, but within regions? City expansion? Yes please.
I mean don't get me wrong I'm enjoying the setting so far but history speaks to me more than fiction and I could see most of the basic mechanics of this game working splendidly in civ (or a non-fantasy mod, hint hint)
Also, I'll probably be putting in some stuff for Endless Space, too, since the last thread for that fell off the face of the earth a good year ago, and it's part of the same series so here's as good as spot as any.
Thread of the Endless is clearly the correct title. Both Legend and Dungeon are pretty decent games!
Put some Endless Space stuff up there on the first page and changing the thread title. I don't know much about Dungeon, so won't go there (and I think there's still an active thread for it), though.
I've only played around a little, but from what I can see so far I'm already desperately hoping that Civ VI steals from this mercilessly. Armies with multiple units that split up for combat? Hexes, but within regions? City expansion? Yes please.
I mean don't get me wrong I'm enjoying the setting so far but history speaks to me more than fiction and I could see most of the basic mechanics of this game working splendidly in civ (or a non-fantasy mod, hint hint)
Well yeah, outside of the Ardent Mages there's nothing that's super fantasy about the mechanics.
About the only issue you'd run into is that historical 4x's have much larger unit diversity and I'm not sure how well the combat system would hold as you brought more guns on board.
Just the fact that the sausage-fest has obviously ended is enough for me. Admittedly, most of the factions in ES were completely non-human, but of the humanish ones they didn't make one of the avatars a woman, and they should have. Once I noticed there wasn't even one I couldn't not notice and the annoyance level built rapidly from there.
It would have been alright if they had made making a custom faction (complete with custom portrait) a simple thing to do but they didn't.
Although to their credit Horatio was a transgressive post-human and his clones fell onto both sides of the gender divide. But still.
The Vaulter portrait in Endless Space is a woman. That makes it 2:1 men:women, if Horatio doesn't count (being androgynous clone species). The rest? Who the fuck knows which gender they are, they're aliens/robots/crystals.
This is an absurd hang-up that you have here.
I was struggling to remember who the Vaulters were, and googling didn't help. The wiki was talking about this faction like it was tooootally in the game and I was like "Is it really possible that I perfectly remember every Endless Space faction, except for this one mysterious faction which is a total blank and I have no memory of it whatsoever?"
Nope, I have an excellent memory.
Turns out these Vaulters are only in the game for people who bought the expansion and a different video game (cross title promotion).
I didn't play that other game, so the Vaulters didn't exist in my game and there was no mention of them. Hell, I never even saw anything telling me to buy this other game to get a new ES faction.
So sure, I guess technically it wasn't a sausagefest.
Endless legend sure has changed since the last I played. Unit balance seems much better. You can now actually build boroughs without gimping your cities. District leveling seems off still but at least approval can be managed. Over all it is much more playable.
I lost my first game because i wasn't paying attention to the AI and one of them just steamrolled the others while leaving me alone. In the end it became too big for me to stop its research machine from getting a tech victory and its almost 1k HP units were really a PITA... I will never again let an AI tech up like that ..
Tried the Broken Lords. It's cool having one less resource to care about. I like that I can just super-duper focus on amassing Dust and buy all the things. It's made winter a real butt-kicker though, what with my low industrial capacity because I'm stupid.
So, I purchased Endless Space a long while back, but I've only recently gotten to installing and playing it. I'm running into fairly tight happiness/income issues when starting out and I'm wondering if there is an approach that can be taken to help with this. Also, how much do you need to specialize systems? Do I want to build all the system improvements, similar to MoO2 or do I only want to build a very limited selection?
Also, combat. I don't have Disharmony, but is there a certain build path I want to follow or area I need to pay attention to when designing my ships?
Well, let's be honest here: you can mostly break combat in vanilla Endless Space by going for "largest ship possible, absolutely nothing but missiles." You kill everyone before they get close enough to use lasers or guns.
Early game in Endless Space, I'd say start on an easier difficulty than you might think, and then basically do the following: don't buy things with dust, and just flex your taxes to keep happiness at a reasonable (or good) level. Industry is the most important thing for early game so you can build things, followed by food, followed by science. Specialization of systems is not something I really did unless the planets in that system itself dictate it (asteroids, certain types of gas giants, etc). I mean, if you end up with all dry planets in a system, sure, change build PRIORITY, but you'll eventually want to build anything that gives a benefit which outweighs the upkeep, which is usually "everything that actually produces something in this season."
Go for Terran, Jungle, and Ocean first off (unless there's a planet which is in the next tier which has hydromel or something), Arid and Tundra are fine, Desert and Arctic can be a bit tough, Lava and Barren are annoying, Gas Giants and Asteroids should be ignored until you're at a point where you need the massive boost from gas or you've got nothing else left.
Wet planets make food, dry planets make dust, rock/hot planets make industry, cold/wet planets make science.
Also, it's not apparent immediately, but within a system, you can drag population between colonized planets. Exploit this at will.
How important is it to do the early land-grab in Endless Space that tends to be important in other 4x space games? Are you forced wide in order to compete, or is it possible to go tall? The gameplay mechanics I can see, seems to favour going wide but I might be missing things.
Man, the Vaulters' basic unit is kind of crappy. Roaming beasts keep shattering my exploration armies. I guess I should invest in pacifying something with decent melee presence and making units from it ASAP next time or actually spend techs in some early unit upgrading or something.
Combat on vanilla endless space follows a few basic rules
Missiles for long range
Laser for medium
Guns for short
Each has its corresponding countermeasures.
Most of the tie it boils down to countering what the enemy is build
Lasers work just fine for long range as well, and they're more accurate than missiles are. Missiles as a whole seem to have the worst damage dealing ability due to being easy to counter and having a lower accuracy to begin with. I'd probably go Laser->Gun->Missile in ranking them by damage dealing capability.
I might also be terrible at actually building missile ships, so that might be the actual reason behind this opinion.
Man, the Vaulters' basic unit is kind of crappy. Roaming beasts keep shattering my exploration armies. I guess I should invest in pacifying something with decent melee presence and making units from it ASAP next time or actually spend techs in some early unit upgrading or something.
Go into the army screen and upgrade their designs. Better weapons and armor make a HUGE freaking difference in this game. You can then upgrade existing units that are in your territory, if you have the resources free.
There's no plan, there's no race to be run
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Combat on vanilla endless space follows a few basic rules
Missiles for long range
Laser for medium
Guns for short
Each has its corresponding countermeasures.
Most of the tie it boils down to countering what the enemy is build
Lasers work just fine for long range as well, and they're more accurate than missiles are. Missiles as a whole seem to have the worst damage dealing ability due to being easy to counter and having a lower accuracy to begin with. I'd probably go Laser->Gun->Missile in ranking them by damage dealing capability.
I might also be terrible at actually building missile ships, so that might be the actual reason behind this opinion.
Do you have Disharmony? Missile effectiveness is vastly different before and after that release.
Or in retrospect, it might have been just a normal patch which came out around the same time.
But like, seriously - my most effective build until that got fixed was "literally nothing but missiles on everything, use offensive cards. No extra storage, no shields, no nothing. Just more missles."
Nothing lived long enough to shoot back. And I legit won on Endless Difficulty (in duel mode, via expansion victory so yes, it was a quick one moreso than a huge battle) before Disharmony came out, so.....yeah.
How important is it to do the early land-grab in Endless Space that tends to be important in other 4x space games? Are you forced wide in order to compete, or is it possible to go tall? The gameplay mechanics I can see, seems to favour going wide but I might be missing things.
So EARLY land grab isn't necessarily an important thing - most people start off separated by wormholes (think "continents" in typical 4X games). The ones which the wormholes go into themselves can be useful, since they're the early-to-midgame choke points, but for the most part you'll have a good long while to spread out in "your" continent. That being said, staying with like...3 or 4 systems is not a good game style for Endless Space. While there IS a happiness modifier to help slow expansion, the resource boost that you get from spreading vastly outweighs it. So while you don't have to spread EARLY, spreading is still necessary, and there is a pretty significant edge to be the first person with wormhole technology and get into the regions which have no players (as well as the bonuses for being the first person to explore planets if you have that turned on).
How important is it to do the early land-grab in Endless Space that tends to be important in other 4x space games? Are you forced wide in order to compete, or is it possible to go tall? The gameplay mechanics I can see, seems to favour going wide but I might be missing things.
So EARLY land grab isn't necessarily an important thing - most people start off separated by wormholes (think "continents" in typical 4X games). The ones which the wormholes go into themselves can be useful, since they're the early-to-midgame choke points, but for the most part you'll have a good long while to spread out in "your" continent. That being said, staying with like...3 or 4 systems is not a good game style for Endless Space. While there IS a happiness modifier to help slow expansion, the resource boost that you get from spreading vastly outweighs it. So while you don't have to spread EARLY, spreading is still necessary, and there is a pretty significant edge to be the first person with wormhole technology and get into the regions which have no players (as well as the bonuses for being the first person to explore planets if you have that turned on).
Okay, that seems to match my observations. I kept on getting stuck in my little island of 4-5 systems behind the wormhole that generally had Arid/Tundra type planets as the best options, so racing for wormhole technology really helps.
As for my issues with building system improvements, I'm guessing that I'll need to get the happiness to high enough levels that it will allow me to raise the tax rate in order to be able to afford the improvements.
Man, the Vaulters' basic unit is kind of crappy. Roaming beasts keep shattering my exploration armies. I guess I should invest in pacifying something with decent melee presence and making units from it ASAP next time or actually spend techs in some early unit upgrading or something.
... wait, what?
You aren't just completely annihilating all the things before they even do any real damage to you?
I mean, you've got shields (which give you bonuses on defense when you get attacked) followed by crossbows which do bonus damage against something right next to you, and your units are fairly beefy to start with, so most combats against fast enemy groups should consist of:
1) The first enemy charges your closest marine (if they can reach it), and your marine takes one on the chin but does a respectable amount of counterattack damage.
2) The next enemy charges hopefully a different marine. If they charge the same marine, you only get 1 counterattack and 3 attacks might be enough to kill your unit.
3) Later, rinse, repeat until out of enemies.
4) Your marines MURDER THE FUCK out of the remaining enemies with close-range crossbow fire.
This works even better if you can swing the combat such that you start off with a cliffside between you and the enemies, because then they generally can't reach you for a whole round or two.
Man, the Vaulters' basic unit is kind of crappy. Roaming beasts keep shattering my exploration armies. I guess I should invest in pacifying something with decent melee presence and making units from it ASAP next time or actually spend techs in some early unit upgrading or something.
... wait, what?
You aren't just completely annihilating all the things before they even do any real damage to you?
Not even close. Rumblers and ice wargs give no fucks and simply waltz through my arrows and crush some of my units because it takes two rounds of everyone (generally the exploration armies are two-three marines plus hero or so) shooting at one to kill each it, which means my exploration army, now probably left with one marine and one hero, has to head back home for reinforcements or die to the next encounter. Daemons and other ranged-slayers straight up murderize the shit out of me.
And of course the moment I send out my units at home base to reinforce the exploration army I get sieged by the ardent mages and everyone has to do the five turns back trek though all the foresty area. Friggin opportunists. I think I'm too used to Civ V, where each individual unit is relatively strong and the AI rarely bothers with attacking your cities with a serious attack unless they have a rather larger military presence. I need to get used to building more people in this game. It always feels like a waste of gears and Dust to build units when there's so many upgrades that need building, and it feels bleh to spend my valuable science points in getting somewhat better weapons and armor, until suddenly I need them desperately and it's too late.
Still, the fact that I spent most of the time I went to my friend's house playing this probably means it's a worthy purchase. The only question is do I care enough for having the Ice Wargs and that one hero to take a 25% price increase to the chin on the Founder version like he has?
Man, the Vaulters' basic unit is kind of crappy. Roaming beasts keep shattering my exploration armies. I guess I should invest in pacifying something with decent melee presence and making units from it ASAP next time or actually spend techs in some early unit upgrading or something.
Go into the army screen and upgrade their designs. Better weapons and armor make a HUGE freaking difference in this game. You can then upgrade existing units that are in your territory, if you have the resources free.
I was not aware you could upgrade non-hero units.
Guess this explains why I was floating a metric ass load of resources.
Posts
My most productive and richest city was one I started pretty late, all because it's on an island with an isthmus, so it's got a huge number of workable ocean tiles.
They're all ... lemme see ...
+4 Food (+1 water, +3 Fish Farms)
+6 Industry (+5 from the cargo port, +1 from the Apprentice thing)
+5 Science (+3 Hydro whatever, +2 from the science thing)
+5 Dust (+1 water, +3 Sifters, +1 ... something else?)
... and I'm about to add another +5 dust to that from the Dust Reclamation thing. That looks right-ish.
Ocean squares are insane.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
@Wyvern The price thing is just a rule of thumb that I find works well. However I know it doesn't cover everything which was why I was asking.
I haven't tried it myself yet, but I just don't know if it works as well in practice as it looks on paper.
I've read today that if you sub to IGN Prime for a few bucks, Endless Legend is their free game this month. Wish I knew this a few days ago, but I'm happy with the deal I got
Eh, personally I usually find myself skipping most of the military techs until the later era's/a need to cherry pick them comes up so it's not a huge deal. Plus most of my cities produce fast enough that it's not much of an opportunity cost unless I'm at war.
It's not quite as cut and dry as I said (would be dull if it was) as things like Anomalies are good immediately on city founding but once you're settling your second or third region you probably have the tech rolling enough that rivers and oceans can take a priority. If the anomalies really good you can always stretch a borough out there.
I really enjoyed Endless Space, though I consider it a flawed gem. I have questions before leaping into this one.
One of my issues with ES was that the length of time before a new colony would apply it's own territory circle was artificially slow, and made the pace of the early and mid game glacial, with horrific penalties if you settled outside your sphere. Is that feature in effect here?
Another issue was that even with the expansion there were exactly zero female rulers, which was glaringly unpossible to not notice once I noticed it. Has the sausage-fest ended?
1) There is no area of influence. Once you plop a city down in a region you own all that region and no one can fuck around with you in it without declaring war. The expansion as a result isn't too slow. Most people put down their second city after their first policy pass on turn twentyish.
2) Right now of the four humanish races two of the avatar's are female. Among the monster's one of them is technically female (the Cultists head robot is their queen) and the Drakken are technically a matriarchal society ruled by two ancient sisters (also hilarious and well written) even if their avatar is a dude Drakken.
So depending on how you wanna count it it's either 25% or 50% of the current factions.
It would have been alright if they had made making a custom faction (complete with custom portrait) a simple thing to do but they didn't.
Although to their credit Horatio was a transgressive post-human and his clones fell onto both sides of the gender divide. But still.
Tech (and which ones you research) is the most important part of the game. You are forced into making decisions.
As a corollary to this, science is the most important resource. Obviously, food and industry matter when first putting down your city, but being able to crank out additional research compared to others gives you an enormous edge.
Dust seems weirdly over-valued in diplomacy compared to other resources. Like, tossing in a couple hundred dust can flip the AI "balance" on an otherwise imbalanced deal.
Command is also quite important. I like the concept of needing to have certain "pull" in order to make certain offers on the global stage.
I'm not sure that the extra effort to do quests for minor factions is worth the extra reward in all cases compared to attacking (which isn't hard) or just buying out (they're rather cheap). They should make the minor factions grow in strength for their home cities (if not the roaming bands) and have the costs increase to buy them as the game goes on.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
The Vaulter portrait in Endless Space is a woman. That makes it 2:1 men:women, if Horatio doesn't count (being androgynous clone species). The rest? Who the fuck knows which gender they are, they're aliens/robots/crystals.
This is an absurd hang-up that you have here.
I think I'll have to give Legend and Dungeon a try!
Edit: Well, I'll have Endless Legend as soon as Steam stops being a baby and giving me errors when I try to check out.
Dungeon is a very different (but entertaining) animal, fwiw.
The AI being dumb as a bag of hammers and utterly predictable in a way thats only compensated by having them cheat
I'll own that too as soon as it works on my Mac
More haunts kept spawning and joining the siege. It took untill research age 3 for my troops to have good enough equipment to break the siege. I'm now back to where I should have been about 60=70 turns ago. Hopefully I haven't fallen too far behind the other civilizations.
Enjoying this game
I mean don't get me wrong I'm enjoying the setting so far but history speaks to me more than fiction and I could see most of the basic mechanics of this game working splendidly in civ (or a non-fantasy mod, hint hint)
Put some Endless Space stuff up there on the first page and changing the thread title. I don't know much about Dungeon, so won't go there (and I think there's still an active thread for it), though.
Well yeah, outside of the Ardent Mages there's nothing that's super fantasy about the mechanics.
About the only issue you'd run into is that historical 4x's have much larger unit diversity and I'm not sure how well the combat system would hold as you brought more guns on board.
I was struggling to remember who the Vaulters were, and googling didn't help. The wiki was talking about this faction like it was tooootally in the game and I was like "Is it really possible that I perfectly remember every Endless Space faction, except for this one mysterious faction which is a total blank and I have no memory of it whatsoever?"
Nope, I have an excellent memory.
Turns out these Vaulters are only in the game for people who bought the expansion and a different video game (cross title promotion).
http://steamcommunity.com/app/208140/discussions/0/630799815345058435/
I didn't play that other game, so the Vaulters didn't exist in my game and there was no mention of them. Hell, I never even saw anything telling me to buy this other game to get a new ES faction.
So sure, I guess technically it wasn't a sausagefest.
Very technically. For you.
But it was for me.
I lost my first game because i wasn't paying attention to the AI and one of them just steamrolled the others while leaving me alone. In the end it became too big for me to stop its research machine from getting a tech victory and its almost 1k HP units were really a PITA... I will never again let an AI tech up like that ..
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Also, combat. I don't have Disharmony, but is there a certain build path I want to follow or area I need to pay attention to when designing my ships?
Missiles for long range
Laser for medium
Guns for short
Each has its corresponding countermeasures.
Most of the tie it boils down to countering what the enemy is build
Early game in Endless Space, I'd say start on an easier difficulty than you might think, and then basically do the following: don't buy things with dust, and just flex your taxes to keep happiness at a reasonable (or good) level. Industry is the most important thing for early game so you can build things, followed by food, followed by science. Specialization of systems is not something I really did unless the planets in that system itself dictate it (asteroids, certain types of gas giants, etc). I mean, if you end up with all dry planets in a system, sure, change build PRIORITY, but you'll eventually want to build anything that gives a benefit which outweighs the upkeep, which is usually "everything that actually produces something in this season."
Go for Terran, Jungle, and Ocean first off (unless there's a planet which is in the next tier which has hydromel or something), Arid and Tundra are fine, Desert and Arctic can be a bit tough, Lava and Barren are annoying, Gas Giants and Asteroids should be ignored until you're at a point where you need the massive boost from gas or you've got nothing else left.
Wet planets make food, dry planets make dust, rock/hot planets make industry, cold/wet planets make science.
Also, it's not apparent immediately, but within a system, you can drag population between colonized planets. Exploit this at will.
Lasers work just fine for long range as well, and they're more accurate than missiles are. Missiles as a whole seem to have the worst damage dealing ability due to being easy to counter and having a lower accuracy to begin with. I'd probably go Laser->Gun->Missile in ranking them by damage dealing capability.
I might also be terrible at actually building missile ships, so that might be the actual reason behind this opinion.
Go into the army screen and upgrade their designs. Better weapons and armor make a HUGE freaking difference in this game. You can then upgrade existing units that are in your territory, if you have the resources free.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
Do you have Disharmony? Missile effectiveness is vastly different before and after that release.
Or in retrospect, it might have been just a normal patch which came out around the same time.
But like, seriously - my most effective build until that got fixed was "literally nothing but missiles on everything, use offensive cards. No extra storage, no shields, no nothing. Just more missles."
Nothing lived long enough to shoot back. And I legit won on Endless Difficulty (in duel mode, via expansion victory so yes, it was a quick one moreso than a huge battle) before Disharmony came out, so.....yeah.
So EARLY land grab isn't necessarily an important thing - most people start off separated by wormholes (think "continents" in typical 4X games). The ones which the wormholes go into themselves can be useful, since they're the early-to-midgame choke points, but for the most part you'll have a good long while to spread out in "your" continent. That being said, staying with like...3 or 4 systems is not a good game style for Endless Space. While there IS a happiness modifier to help slow expansion, the resource boost that you get from spreading vastly outweighs it. So while you don't have to spread EARLY, spreading is still necessary, and there is a pretty significant edge to be the first person with wormhole technology and get into the regions which have no players (as well as the bonuses for being the first person to explore planets if you have that turned on).
Okay, that seems to match my observations. I kept on getting stuck in my little island of 4-5 systems behind the wormhole that generally had Arid/Tundra type planets as the best options, so racing for wormhole technology really helps.
As for my issues with building system improvements, I'm guessing that I'll need to get the happiness to high enough levels that it will allow me to raise the tax rate in order to be able to afford the improvements.
... wait, what?
You aren't just completely annihilating all the things before they even do any real damage to you?
I mean, you've got shields (which give you bonuses on defense when you get attacked) followed by crossbows which do bonus damage against something right next to you, and your units are fairly beefy to start with, so most combats against fast enemy groups should consist of:
1) The first enemy charges your closest marine (if they can reach it), and your marine takes one on the chin but does a respectable amount of counterattack damage.
2) The next enemy charges hopefully a different marine. If they charge the same marine, you only get 1 counterattack and 3 attacks might be enough to kill your unit.
3) Later, rinse, repeat until out of enemies.
4) Your marines MURDER THE FUCK out of the remaining enemies with close-range crossbow fire.
This works even better if you can swing the combat such that you start off with a cliffside between you and the enemies, because then they generally can't reach you for a whole round or two.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Not even close. Rumblers and ice wargs give no fucks and simply waltz through my arrows and crush some of my units because it takes two rounds of everyone (generally the exploration armies are two-three marines plus hero or so) shooting at one to kill each it, which means my exploration army, now probably left with one marine and one hero, has to head back home for reinforcements or die to the next encounter. Daemons and other ranged-slayers straight up murderize the shit out of me.
And of course the moment I send out my units at home base to reinforce the exploration army I get sieged by the ardent mages and everyone has to do the five turns back trek though all the foresty area. Friggin opportunists. I think I'm too used to Civ V, where each individual unit is relatively strong and the AI rarely bothers with attacking your cities with a serious attack unless they have a rather larger military presence. I need to get used to building more people in this game. It always feels like a waste of gears and Dust to build units when there's so many upgrades that need building, and it feels bleh to spend my valuable science points in getting somewhat better weapons and armor, until suddenly I need them desperately and it's too late.
Still, the fact that I spent most of the time I went to my friend's house playing this probably means it's a worthy purchase. The only question is do I care enough for having the Ice Wargs and that one hero to take a 25% price increase to the chin on the Founder version like he has?
...probably not, no. Classic it is.
I was not aware you could upgrade non-hero units.
Guess this explains why I was floating a metric ass load of resources.