Endless Space 2

You guys might have already known this, but I just stumbled across the fact the Amplitude has been releasing incremental updates onto a beta branch, available from Steam. Check out all the fixes in today’s 1.04 patch.

-Tom

As someone who owns ES1 but has only played for a couple of hours years ago and doesn’t plan on buying ES2 in the near future, is it worth downloading and figuring out how to play again? I’ve got the add-ons.

Personally I thought ES1 was horrible, but ES2 isn’t bad so far. Some odd quirks, and probably the AI should be more focused on tech. I won another game easily as the uh, what are they, Lumeris. Guess it’s time to increase the difficulty level. It seems adjacent empires are afraid to invade for some reason when my tech level is double theirs, because my only war was at the end when I was getting bored and I declared it myself. It’s funny that the base politics of the mafia species whose storyline include murder and mayhem is pacifism, isn’t it?

No345

-Tom

I’ve been playing a UE game, but focusing on science rather than war - this has proven good for learning some lessons about the political system.

I’m not sure if it’s Federation or UE specific, but spending influence seems to have a pretty strong effect on electoral outcomes. This is pretty good, as I’ve found effective ways of spending influence (outside of law maintenance) pretty lacking - it doesn’t help other races never seem to want to make peace without huge bribes, so diplomacy is rarely a good place to spend it. The UE has a lot of ways of spending accrued influence, which I like.

The other lesson I’ve been slowly learning is that avoiding critical buildings or tech because it’s the ‘wrong’ political ideology - particularly military - is a bad idea. What you really want to do is trickle it out a little bit at a time between elections, so that you’re not all of a sudden building warships, researching military techs and fighting battles all at once.

Still interesting so far.

I wondered about this as well. Maybe the idea is there’s really not much need to be actually producing it unless you’ve got some reason to want to expand borders quickly? But unless you’re trying to absorb a collapsing star or black hole, I’m not sure why you’d care so much. I guess it extends line of sight, but even then, that doesn’t seem very useful.

So unless you’re the UE, maybe you’re not supposed to really care about influence? I wish I understood the damn diplomacy better, because I suspect we’re supposed to be gaming whatever the hell is going on with that influence pressure bar and the demand thresholds.

-Tom

Curses! I already reinstalled it.

You can absorb enemy systems ‘peacefully’ with influence in the late-game, so it can be good to produce a truck load of it! Blocking off systems you don’t want to colonize (solitary gas giants, etc.) to stop enemy colonization could be good too.

I think you need enough for your laws. That can often be more than you’d produce without help (even 1 per population is rare without specific anomalies, buildings or heroes). The stockpile is for diplomacy, but that’s not much of a factor right now, to be honest…

In peacetime, the pressure bar seems fairly pointless - if basically lets a big empire with a lot of influence make ‘demands’ of an empire with less influence once the bar fills up. If they refuse the demand, you get to go to war for ‘free’ (without the influence cost). That’s not all that great.

Don’t listen to him: ES Disharmony is a great little game. I’m just aching because my rig can’t play ES2 :(

It seems like you should be able to spend just influence to get other races to agree to stuff in diplomacy. If they don’t think it is a good deal, then they should be able to counter with influence of their own to negate yours.

I actually quite like that idea, but I can see it going down badly with a lot of players.

Almost never not a good idea!

And, yeah, I probably shouldn’t be so quick to wave someone off Endless Space when I haven’t played it in so long. I don’t think I’ve touched it since, well, Endless Legend came out? But my basic thinking is that the glut of really good 4Xs available right now obsoletes Endless Space. I can’t imagine it’s not a step down from GalCiv III, Star Ruler 2, Stars in Shadow, Stellar Monarch, or Distant Worlds.

But do let us know what you think @Canuck. I’ll be curious to hear your opinion this many year’s down the road from its release.

-Tom

Ugh, don’t despoil a list of decent games with Star Ruler 2, a planetary logistics simulator with an extremely boring diplomacy card game built in. If I try to picture in my minds eye the devs getting excited about linking up a bunch of planets in a web of resources that people are just going to love micro-managing… the only way I can do it is if I imagine a heap of cocaine just off camera.

Re influence, every time you stack “praise” on a minor civilization (or find a curiosity in their system) you increase their friendship accrual rate, so if you have nothing better to do with purple stars you can at least make them like you faster.

You! Get the fuck out!

Seconded.

I’ll partially side with you @MisterMourning. I tried to get into Star Ruler 2 multiple times and didn’t really find it very interesting - mostly do to the planet linking and the combat. I did think the diplomacy card game was a great idea though - probably the best part of the game.

I just picked up this game, but I feel like I won’t figure out enough shit to decide whether or not I like it within the 2 hour Steam refund window. There’s just so much stuff.

I say give Endless Space Disharmony a try. This forum is notorious for disliking that game but there are some of us that really clicked with the game and enjoyed our time with it–I still have it installed on my machine to this day!

Ultimately Endless Space 2 will benefit from the experience of years of developing other games and a more mature game studio. Despite that I still find Endless Space 1 really special. The races/factions are just as interesting and I appreciated the lonely melancholy vision of space that is weaved throughout the game. Of particular note I found the broad empire management model in ES1 very enjoyable.