The UI is, and you should buy it just so you can complain to other devs about how a UI should be done. Because ES fucking nailed the UI. There are still issues with the strat map being a low information content wasteland, but the rest of the UI is just phenomenal. As far as the game itself, eh, it's pretty rote space 4x. They do a few unconventional things but nothing worth remembering at the end of the day beyond the UI.
Eh, I would take issue with that, somewhat. I think the races are the sort of wild, creative science fiction that I always want to see in a game like this but almost never do. They dodged the bullet of giving us the Lizard guys, and the Insect guys, and the Klingons. I don't think I've seen such a cool lineup of weird races in a sci-fi strategy game since Ascendancy. The racial abilities play to the fiction well, and I really like the idea of each race having unique techs in their tech tree. I don't think I've seen that before.
GalCiv 2 did unique techs in trees, and SotS did races with odd powers and travel differentiation more extreme than what we're getting here.
SotS races were pretty uninspired, if I remember correctly. The standard assortment of insect guys, lizard guys, etc. I guess it also doesn't help that I hated that game. I wasn't a fan of GalCiv II either, to be honest.
I'm in the middle of my first game of Endless Space. I made the awesome mistake of removing the seed module from my colony ships, building a ton of them, and being left with useless crap because I couldn't retrofit them to the new design for some reason. I'm also now at the point where I have two out of five star systems on strike, and none of them have big "circles" compared to the other race I can see in the game. The game has a ton of promise though. The UI is great, though it has some glaring issues with not telling you why you can't perform actions at times. I'm not sure how I feel about the card game combat, but that's mostly because I've been getting my ass space-whipped something fierce.
A, that's exactly what Endless Space is doing. I have no idea why this fucking turd of a +1 mechanic lives on, but it does. B, the second or third or fucking whatever expansion for GalCiv2 had racial tech trees. The _races_ were uninspired, but the _unique capabilities_ of the races were similarly creative. As far as GC2 and SotS being terrible games, I'm there with bells on.
What is the best 4x space game yet made? I played a bunch of Gal Civ 2 a few years back, but it always annoyed me in one way or another (I really hated that I couldn't use my economy's full production capacity without no research and vice versa). I also played Ascendancy to death back in the day, which had fantastic colour on all the alien species and really fun ship modules in theory, but its AI was derp. I never played MOO2. Is that still the genre ne plus ultra? If so, what does it do that none of its successors have managed? I have Sword of the Stars sitting here, picked up from a bargain bin on a whim, but have never started it up. Worth a look? ( I don't count Alpha Centauri as being 4x in space in the same sense, btw. played a bunch of that too, however).
The game is supposed to come out in two months so I don't think anyone should expect a significant change to how the combat works. It's a hybrid, and better that then another system where you either just look at results or watch the AI fight with your ships. At least the card system provided some player impact on how things turn out. That's where they can and presumably will continue to tinker, but they are not suddenly going to allow greater control of fleets in that part of the game. I wouldn't call it "terrible combat" at this point either. If you want SOTS or Sins of a Solar Empire combat control, you won't be happy with ES.
Had fun with this yesterday. A word of warning: in huge maps with 8 civs the game simply crashes once you get to a certain point of map complexity, like Sins did. ARGGGGH. My biggest gameplay problem is the terrain. In a typical Spiral Galaxy game only one or two other civs will be accessible, if you want to play with 6-8 players you need to pick the "big circle" maps or else the victor is basically determined by who starts in the center. I also wish about half the techs were scrapped/aggregated into one, and the same for all the strategic resources. TOO MANY! I like complexity, but this is just silly. Maybe it's just me, but winning anything but a militaristic victory is very difficult. It's not like Civ where you can mostly avoid war if you pay enough, instead certain civilisations just flip from close friends -> war in one turn. I guess it's nice as a "surprise attack" mechanic but makes the attitude data basically useless.
I'd say Endless Space is the least bad option if you simply must have a space 4x. Although the tech tree is a vast wasteland of +1 lasers and buildings, the actual moment to moment gameplay isn't so bad. SotS is a fiddly idiot nightmare with loads of meaningless slider based decisions and absolutely disgusting numbers of ships you have to build until you're nauseous. You might enjoy playing Ship Shuffler Extreme, I did not. SotS 2 I only bring up so that we can all point and laugh. A year after release and it's sort of functional, what an achievement! Too bad about the whole "we still have to program the actual _game_" thing! GalCiv2 is the dullest experience available. Imagine you've gone to a party full of geriatric tee-totaling actuaries. Yes. That bad. You could possibly include X3 in here, but the grind is just unconscionable and the UI was inspired by goatse. AI War is more of a puzzle game than a 4X, but I suppose it could qualify. Star Wars Rebellion ought to be included in any list of this sort. Board game through and through, most people hated the ever loving shit out of it. SMAC, Imperium Galactica 2 and Haegemonia were all pretty good for their time. Of the three Haegemonia is the "newest" and therefore least painful. On the other hand it's also got a brain shatteringly stupid combat system, so there's that. Does manage to look cool as hell while you're playing, so that's a plus, but I'd say it's more the forerunner to Sins of a Solar Empire than GalCiv et al. Different lineage. Speaking of SoaSE, if you crank the speed down real low and play on a giant map it becomes a passable imitation of a 4X. It's much better as a fast 4X than as a slow RTS. Ur Quan Masters (Star Control 2 freeware redux) ends up being a sort-of-kind-of-4X-if-you-squint-just-right. Distant Worlds deserves a mention despite the fuckoff huge price tag. If you're willing to slap down something like eighty bucks for the complete package you'll supposedly get a decent game. I wouldn't know, but I'm skeptical in the extreme. If I racked my brain for a while I could think up some others, but the bottom line is if it's not on here it's probably niche as hell or incredibly forgettable. Or really new! Who knows! Endless Space is almost certainly the best you can do while still following most genre conventions slavishly. I wish they'd innovate or, god, at least move just slightly out of the 90s. But odds are that that won't happen until some competition lights a fire under everyone's ass. Maybe Paradox will give it a go? The card system is atrocious. It's a hyper complicated rock paper scissors. Why would anyone ever in their right mind want to inflict that sort of thing on humanity I have no idea, but this is what we've been given.
What difficulty are you playing on? I've only been on normal and haven't seen any "flip" behavior, which I actually do find annoying in most versions of Civ. And I've yet to see a military victory at all - I've won on the science route and seen the AI win on the money and science paths.
So its just like every other card system, right? Look, I'm no fan of card systems in general but this isn't the worst way of adding some player involvement to the space battles in a game that isn't trying to be SOSE or SOTS. And its not like you can't just skip that and auto-resolve if thats what you want, which is what a lot of the games in this genre do anyway. So I don't see how anyone has lost anything with this particular solution. Your post above indicates you don't have much tolerance for 4x space games in general. I guess I figure they each have their strengths and weaknesses and I play the one that suits my mood at the time. Like any other strategy game, really.
It isn't like in every other card system ever. In Poker or Blackjack you're trying to build an interesting structure based on revealed (Texas Holdem, Blackjack, Bridge?) or hand only (five card stud) cards with options to change your mind with discards over the course of a round. Because participants share a single deck and probabilities are known interesting metagaming possibilities emerge. This game has none of that. In Magic or the more computer oriented Spectromancer you build a deck and use some sort of counting system for resources and such, then trade resources for whatever you need to beat the opponent. Although your options are functionally random wrt card entry into hand, your decisions most certainly are not. And in Six Gun Saga, well, I don't know what the hell is going on in that but it's just pretty fucking cool. At no time is opponent action independent from player action. At no point are they random. In this game your decisions are limited to removing cards that would be self evidently stupid to play (a +laser skill when you're using missiles, for example) and then making a random decision. Depending on the random decision of your opponent the outcome could be bad, good or irrelevant. In other words, rock, paper scissors. As far as space games in general, most of them are objectively bad. I'm not going to lower my standards for what I consider a good game just because they happen to be in space.
Normal and Easy. About half and half. The surprise attack was in a normal game, quite lategame, where I was losing badly but was between the winner and everyone else. Despite giving everyone else open border agreements so they could go savage the winner they didn't, and I was too outclassed militarily by the winner to try anything (at this point I was hoping for the Wonder victory). They liked me (the step above Warm) and we had active trade agreements, next thing I know I get the "obviously they don't like us now we're at war" message and lose half my planets to a protracted siege. Aeon221, GalCiv2 is the most fun you can have playing space 4x with your pants on. THE SCALE OF THE THING!
I bought this late last night and have been trying it out. I rarely play Civ type games because I am atrocious at them, but I generally have slightly better luck with the space 4x variant. The UI is really nice. I wish the tutorials were more complete. I found some star lanes or whatever that are wispy looking and I gather I can't traverse them without more tech? What do I need to be able to do that? I thought it might be a better engine, but I researched the thing that apparently gives the next engine upgrade yet I don't seem to be able to put it in any ships -- it doesn't show up in the modules list. Also, derpy as this makes me, it took me a bit to figure out how to order a ship to move (right-click the destination, as it turns out). This isn't totally unintuitive but it seems like something that could have been mentioned.
Scroll down on the support modules list when designing a ship. Engines and all sorts of other stuff are in there. The wispy lanes are wormholes. You're looking for one of the southern exploration techs to use them.
Found the wormhole tech, thanks. I knew about scrolling down in the Support module section, but apparently what I unlocked was just an improvement to the basic engine.
I finally got back into this today. Sheesh, this game is hard. I'm getting waxed on normal difficulty. I've lost 4 games today - once to pirates, once to an invasion that I couldn't stop, once to an enemy who I fought to a draw but would never make peace (Horatio) and put me so far behind that I couldn't catch up and once to an enemy who got so big that he won by monetary victory. I still think I like it, but I may never play it again because while I understand the buttons on screen, the conceptual details of actually winning are avoiding me.
Big content patch (276 MB) has landed on Steam: I pre-ordered the game but never played more than an hour or two of the beta. Maybe I'll jump in following this patch (I have a week to kill until XCOM!), or maybe I'll wait for a couple more content patches...
Endless Space is free to play on Steam this weekend, so I downloaded it. I'm still getting the hang of it, but one thing already bugs me. Enemy ships can blockade a system even if all they have there is a scout and you've got multiple ships. It can maintain the blockade until you kill it, which in the early game can take multiple turns. That's pretty annoying.
Also, it should be mentioned that Endless Space has an interesting community support campaign where the more people play the game this weekend, the more features will be added. http://endless-space.amplitude-studios.com/Games2gether/G2G-Community-Rewards
I dropped into a brief game being played by Kat, Riz and Mcknight on saturday. It was a decent beer and pretzels board game experience with a mostly flawless multiplayer interface* (I literally just hit join on McKnight in steam and was in the game moments later). I also discovered you could name systems fun things like PENISLAND and AEONSUCKS (later changed to MCKOWNED). The map layout kinda sucked (all of McKnight's planets were adjacent to PENISLAND and he was sandwiched between me and an AI while I had a huge sector to exploit basically unopposed) and the war system is wonky (made peace with an AI I was invading so that I could turn my fleet around and defend myself, but my fleet was stuck because no idea so I ended up fucked) but overall it was a pleasant, properly paced experience. In single player it's still a tedious waste of time. *we had a couple bugs, some issues with loading and sometimes the joy of having all your shit changed when you dropped. Compared to the irritation inherent in something like CK2 multi even over hamachi it's brilliant.
Does it play differently in multiplayer or something? The single-player seemed a bit tedious to me - I spent hours and hours with MOO and MOO2 but with this I was getting bored after maybe just 2-3 hours.
Even from the first screen starting a new game I saw that each race has a laundry list of traits of the +/- percent type. That's not usually a good sign, at least for me. The turns regularly became a matter of researching a new tech, then building the upgrade from that tech into all my star systems... then waiting until I got a new tech that I could install a new upgrade with. The ship designer manages to be simultaneously fiddly and abstract, because you aren't going to actually be controlling the ships in combat. Combat just seems like a slog in general - the Paper/Rock/Scissors battle card system is not really that interesting. My favorite piece of design was that there's no way to retreat from an no-win fight without Manually controlling the battle so you can play the Retreat card, which makes it have to load the combat graphics and have you sit through a minute of animation waiting for your chance to run away from a battle that you give no shits about anyways. I thought that surely the Auto-AI would know when to run, but the one time I hit Auto with my Scout ship with no chance of winning the AI proceeded to get my ship killed while dealing no damage to the enemy fleet. Everything just seems like +10% to this or that stat or +1 of some resource when you're regularly dealing in quantities of dozens or hundreds. This might be perfect for the spreadsheet warriors among us, but it's dull as dishwater in practice.
Small size map + humans make a tedious game far more entertaining. It still sucks and there are still WAY TOO MANY +1 techs and upgrades, but it's less awful than single player.
It occurs to me that the game most reminded me of being like playing a game of Civilization on a super tiny map where there were only 30 total land tiles in the world, but where your guys could only move like 1/4 a tile per turn.
You can only move your ships through another empire's territory (the areas surrounded by a thick line and shaded in their colour) if you're either at war or have an open borders agreement with them (which requires you to go about 3 layers deep on the diplomacy tech tree). They really don't do a good job of explaining that, though.
Yeah I get that, but it was sitting on their planet when peace was signed with an adjacent friendly planet.
Wow, tough crowd in here... After playing for several hours and reaching the mid/late game on a normal-sized map, my early impressions are a bit more positive. In particular, I think Endless deserves credit for its faction design, at least at a fluff text/aesthetics/concept art level. There's the typical "humans as good guys" faction, but I love the other human faction -- jackbooted imperialists with an aesthetic straight out of Emperor of the Fading Suns: I love that the robot race is actually benevolent for once. I love that one of the factions is made up of '000000s of clones of a deranged human narcissist. Etc. The reason why people criticise the game as "soulless", I think, is that relatively little of this creativity seems to have made it into the actual gameplay. Endless Space doesn't have the bonkers space operatic mega-projects of Space Empires IV (Ringworlds! Dyson spheres! Rearranging the wormhole map!). And it doesn't give me the sense of wonder that I felt exploring Distant Worlds' huge galaxy. Mechanically, this is a competent-but-uninspired or uninspired-but-competent (take your pick) MOO2 clone. Settling large Terran worlds, gritting my teeth over small irradiated worlds, building structures and plonking down governor heroes to boost food/industry/science... this could all have come straight out of that classic. The main difference in gameplay is that, instead of MOO2's intricate (and excellent) ship design and tactical combat, Endless "borrows" Galciv 2's much simpler combat system. I don't mind combat in Endless - I can see how a system that boils down to 'build moar/higher-tech ships' might grow tedious, but so far, watching the pretty spaceships trade shots has been a quick, entertaining diversion. So no, the turn-to-turn experience won't win awards for originality. Still, what we have is a pretty -- and pretty decent -- foundation that's already given me a few hours of fun in SP. I'd quite like to see where the developers go from here...
The main problem ME is that the AI is absolutely dire and doesn't follow the same rules as the human players. Hence a lot of us saying that it's actually quite fun MP but becomes a bland and boring SP experience quite quickly.
I really enjoy this game, but the AI cheating it's ass off is a bit of an ugly bandaid on the AI being pretty shit in general.
ES is a game I'd really like to like. It seems to everything fairly competently for the most part. I wouldn't consider the AI dire though it could use some work. The research trees are more interesting and varied than many games of this type and certainly far better than the "Laser 1, Laser 2, Laser 3" of the Galactic Civ series. Graphics are more than fine and there are a bunch of options in the game. Where I think it could use some major improvements are (in no particular order): 1. AI, which has been discussed to death. 2. Better synergy among its various subsystems, especially in dealing with research. The concepts are too grand and it's very difficult to tell what some research brings. Yeah, I understand "colonize barren", but some of these other things...I have no idea. 3. Starting positions. The random map generator could use some work as I'm often stuck with few or no colonizable planets nearby. 4. Pirates. At least when I played the game a bunch they were absurdly overpowered. 5. I'll use Brian's term - the game could use a bit more soul. Random events, more interesting AI negotiation, wonders (which I think were put in) and so forth all lend flavor to the game. I think it's better now than it was, but the paint-by-numbers aspect of the original game was pretty off-putting. 6. Fleet control. Yeah, the graphics are pretty, but I really have zero control over my fleet. If I'm not going to be able to control them, then why did they waste the time coding the pretty graphics? I'm just not overly fond of the combat mechanics or lack thereof. However, don't get me wrong. I don't hate ES and don't regret my purchase. I've gotten quite a few games out of it and the developers continue to improve the game for free rather than releasing stuff as DLC. As such, I can't knock a competent game that's being updated for free, even if it wasn't the lightening in a bottle I was hoping for when I preordered.
Fluff is irrelevant. In terms of actual play, the factions have few differences. Yes. Those things aren't gameplay, they're weird tertiary systems. If you're happy you're happy. I still consider it a major disappointment compared to Paradox's strategy offerings. The moment by moment gameplay of Endless Space involves fiddling with build queues before hitting end turn. There's way too much IMPLEMENTATION OF STRATEGERY and way too little PLANNING OF STRATEGERY. This is also true of games like Civilization, but to a lesser extent due to the larger degree of player agency in the combat model. If you really MUST have a Paradox style parity between economic nodes and movement nodes you could at least adopt their system of providing node wide benefits and penalties depending on the system type (eg: lower supply limit, higher defense bonus). Instead every system -- from a combat perspective -- is exactly the same. It's about as interesting as cutting your toenails. So your choices are all irrelevant, allowing players to focus on the incredibly dull meatgrinder style combat beloved of idiots everywhere. Which brings me to the next issue: the ship design system and the specifics of ship combat. Specifically, that both of these things suck donkey balls. Because of the way the RPS model in this game works, you derive massive advantage from scouting out your enemy and designing your ships based on their ships. The countered player will lose every fight (which sucks) and die all the fucking time unless they counter this move. The whole thing is stupid. And the ship design system? It's also stupid and boring because the choices you make are entirely determined by your current and potential enemies. It's a solved game theory problem created by the inclusion of dominant strategies, and it's quite a lot like playing a game of rock paper scissors where players announce what they're going to throw before they throw it and can change their mind up until they actually throw down. Stupid stupid stupid.. What they _should_ have done was the same thing Civ does: offer the player a curated list of interesting units that mildly counter one another. Or, if they're really wedded to the idiotic "DESIGN UR SHITTY SHIP WITH +1 TO HERPING DERP EVERY THREE TURNS" feature, offer the player a list of upgrades that don't counter one another so absolutely, eg: defensive modules that provide x% efficiency against all damage and an additional y% against a specific damage type such that y <= x/5. IOW it's a nice bonus if you've got a countering strategy, but you won't completely devastate your opponent because of it. And then there's trade. How should you do trade? You should do it the way EU4 is going to do it: by having players use naval power and 'diplomatic' actions to redirect trade flows toward their country . Note how there's a nice combination of interesting low maintenance active gameplay, player action and strategery in that idea? Way better than the passive gameplay of the Endless Space/Civ style open borders == trade paradigm. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...s-world...&s=f75968e4f0b47751abbb124cf79d0b99 And structures! Building structures to constantly +1 my planets into usefulness sucks giant donkey balls. I only want to build things that give me new functionality or that indicate a particular direction a planet should evolve into, not shit that just multiplies existing income from the system. This stuff isn't rocket science, the problem is shitty design that ignores the massive evolution strategy games have seen since the days of the old shit people nostalgiagasm about. Steal some fucking ideas from CK2 or other innovative entries in the genre for fucks sake you fucking fucks.
I'd add that there's more differences in gameplay from MOO2. I found myself generally having no clue in ES why specifically I'd want to be doing any of the options available, so I just built whatever was available that said it gave bonuses to shit. This isn't exactly conducive to strategic gameplay. My favorite event (aside from the one Aeon mentioned that makes your slow ships move even slower, which I had happen as well) was one that occurred extremely early in my game where apparently one option was to just get 100 dust a turn for 20 turns. This at a point where my entire empire was generating a dust surplus in the single-digits. I'm not really sure what the lesson from this was - that dust isn't really very valuable if the game will just randomly give you 2,000 of it? Somehow with MOO2 you generally had a sense of why you were doing things and what active benefits those things were providing for having done them.
