Yea, maybe it’s because I really suck at the game, but I find Hard/Serious to be pretty challenging. I play the game lightly, though, not hardcore.
Thanks guys! I put in a good 90 minutes or so last night off and on while watching the OSU-Oregon game, and I am feeling much more confident about my progress now. Thanks to the advice, I did find the tech to research for the extractors, and once I got my economy built a little more there did seem to be more to do every turn. I’ve now explored a bunch of ruins, assimilated two minor factions, settled a second city and built it up fairly well and defeated a couple of roaming armies. I’ve also moved into the second research era, and I’ve completed a couple of my faction quests. It was a lot of fun once I got over the initial 20 turns or so of “move army, click end turn”.
Thank you for this link! I watched today during lunch, and while I had already figured out much of what was in the video while tinkering around last night, it was great to see that I am “doing it right” in terms of how I am progressing. I also got a couple of good ideas/strategies from the videos (I watched the next one as well) and I may restart to try to employ those strategies form the beginning, or at least jump out to a faster start. Then again, I am really enjoying the little empire I’ve built as the Vaulters so far, so maybe I’ll save the quick start strategies for when I want to play another faction.
Can you only assimilate one faction to start with? I see in the tier two research items there is an item that adds a space for another assimilated faction. Is there one at each of the levels 2-4 to put a hard limit on assimilated factions? I’ve pacified a few already, but it only seems to allow me to assimilate one.
Yea, you can only assimilate one to begin with, unless you’re playing the Drakken. I can’t remember offhand if they start with an extra slot or if they have a race-specific tech in the first tier that they can research.
Thanks Kevin.
So I had to start over. I realized that, being new to everything, I had made some poor choices early on in terms of starting city placement, native assimilation and second city placement as well as too many long delays and poor decisions in research and production that were going to make life much more difficult for my Vaulters. Starting over (still using Vaulters) gives me the chance to use what I have learned to my advantage. The first map I popped up on was terrible. I was stuck in the extreme northern edge of the map in mostly frozen landscape with a lot of narrow areas hemmed in by sea and too-high terrain. I walked around for several turns and failed to find a decent starting spot at all, not even a hint of a resource node or special tile. I quit and started over yet again, and this time did much better with a starting location on the southern edge of the map and a home city placement on a peninsula with multiple special tiles and titanium, glassteel and gold all within sight. Should be a defendable and resource rich way to start off.
I am fairly well set with a nice mix of science, industrial, dust and food, with good tiles of each I can reach out to later with my suburbs. My home province has only one native faction village, but the pacification quest was easy (had to fight some vipervine things in the ruins), and the next province over has three native villages (pacification quest is reach Tier II research, simple for my Vaulters) and some very attractive tiles for my next settlement, so once I am able to settle/pacify/assimilate over there I will be in very good shape. I am taking tomorrow off work, and am looking forward to putting in a couple of quality hours of game time.
One more question : If I create a new unit, say Armored Marine, using an existing Marine template and simply adding more pieces of armor, then how do I upgrade my existing Marine units to become Armored Marines? I tried putting then in the city garrison, but the “retrofit” button (or whatever it’s called) stays inactive.
You don’t have to garrison them to upgrade… Are you sure you had all the needed materials and/or gold?
They just need to be in your territory, they don’t need to be a city. It sounds like you’re doing things right but here’s the workflow, if anything jumps out at you:
- Go to the designer, select the marine, click Edit.
- Make whatever changes you want. It should show you on this screen what it will cost per unit. Not just production, but also any special resources you need (glass steel, titanium, etc).
- Save design.
- Select the unit(s) you want to upgrade, either an Army or in a city Garrison. There’ll be a retrofit button. If it’s greyed out it’s because you’re lacking something like one of the resources or money. The tooltip should inform you what you’re lacking if you hover over it.
Weird, I could swear I did exactly that, but the retrofit option was inactive. Could it be my production points were tied up in a current construction project? Does my build queue need to be empty when I attempt to retrofit?
Nope, it shouldn’t be tied to production queues in any way.
Production points are converted to money when retrofitting, so the cost can be more than you have in the bank.
I’ve long looked forward to a game that allows retrofitting via the production queue, rather than always having to upgrade using cash. Space Empires 4 allowed it.
MOO 2 ;)
So, I’m definitely enjoying this game although I have a bad case of starting-over-itis. I don’t think the tactical combat is very good, but my biggest complaint is inaccessibility of information. I wish EL had the equivalent of a Civopedia. There doesn’t seem to be a way of accessing information about minor factions you’ve encountered but haven’t pacified. And while there are tooltips for the units, there needs to be a way to see what the different icons do. Fun game though. I need to finish one.
Personally, I wish they’d throw out the tactical combat implementation altogether. Like you said it’s not very good. I’d be more interested in a rough simulation of how the battle went (think Civ: Call to Power, EU4 combat, something like that). I want force composition to matter and have an impact on how the battle turns out, especially given terrain, but I don’t want to deal with full-on tactical combat unless it gets significantly more fleshed out (a la Age of Wonders 3). There needs to be a significant number of tactical abilities on the various units to make the combat interesting in it’s current form, IMO. As of now, I just auto-resolve everything.
I agree, the tactical combat is probably the weakest feature of the game. While there are many units with unique or strategic abilities, the field of combat is so small that you never really get a sense that you’re utilizing any strategy involving the units. You just place them in as advantageous array as possibly and let them pound on each other. If the combat area was even half again the size it currently is I think there would be more opportunity to use ranged units effectively (especially if elevation changes seemed to matter) and more strategy behind units that had sweep attacks, heals and other special abilities. There is enough unit variety due to being able to recruit units from pacified minor factions and hire mercenary units that you could create a mixed force with some pretty effective combinations of special abilities, but the game wastes all that potential on combat that boils down to “bigger stack wins”.
I’m nearly 100 turns into my restarted game as Vaulters and I’m enjoying it immensely. My closest neighbor is the dragon people, whom I have already moved into “peace” status, and I just uncovered a few tiles of another faction further out. Expansion has gone well, I am up to 6 cities now and have room for 2 or 3 more before my borders may get hemmed in by other factions. I’m researching ships though, which should allow me to effectively “hop” borders and take unclaimed lands beyond my neighbor factions. That begs the question, if you are at “peace” status with a faction, can you move your armies through their territories without issue or do you need to be allies for that?
Heads up: through tomorrow, Amplitude are celebrating something they call “Endless Day” (i.e. the anniversary of their founding), and there is a new hero and achievement to be unlocked in Endless Space, Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless all three. In Endless Space, the hero just requires starting a new (unmodded) game by tomorrow, but the achievement requires winning a game on Endless difficulty that was started by tomorrow. In Endless Legend, start a new (unmodded) game by tomorrow and found your first city, a new quest will start shortly thereafter that will reward the new hero and the achievement. In Dungeon of the Endless, the new hero will be part of the starting pool through tomorrow, but you have to survive at least three floors with them (in one game) to unlock them permanently, and win a game started by tomorrow with them to unlock the achievement.
These can pretty much be earned any time it seems…
OMG, IT’S JANUARY 26th
Solution
Don’t hurt us.
What’s fun about technology is that you can mess with it. It’s easy: just go back in time.
So I tried last night to earn the achievement. I started a new game as Dust Lords. Founded a city, and next turn got the quest to “go explore many ruins” that seems like it’s the new quest for the achievement. The first ruin I explored sent me on a quest to explore 4 more ruins in 15 turns or less, and I explored at least 4 more ruins in the process of travelling to those highlighted ones. While I completed the second “explore these specific ruins” quest, there wasn’t any movement on the original achievement quest at all. So I searched 9 or 10 ruins and nothing. I’m not sure how many is “many”, but it seems like this achievement quest might have been a bit too time consuming to do in the limited time available. If I want to try to continue for the achievement I’ll have to turn back my system clock I guess…
The fifth or sixth ruins I searched happened to be the “correct” one for me. Bummer that your attempt was more frustrating.