Endless Space 2

Yeah, 100% pressure and a demand for something minor results so far as I can see in a guaranteed war. It’s pretty funny when some pissant little empire that’s one tenth your power declares war on you because you asked them for some minor tech you skipped past.

Well, to my embarrassment, I went and tried out GalCiv 3 Crusades, while waiting for the ES2 patch… and after playing a couple hours, it too refused to finish processing a turn. So yeah, if this is going to be the trend, I’m going to find it pretty infuriating. :)

But I see the patch is now out for ES2, so back to it.

With today’s hotfix, I suppose the game is stable enough that it’s a good time to buy? This seems like it might be the best turn based 4x in the last few years; perhaps.

As a soon to be beginner, what would you say are things you wish you knew before playing the game?

@Howler: the hotfix appears to have fixed most but not all instances of the pending-turn bug. That bug has never affected me, I’m happy to say, in 40 hours of gameplay.

I’m really enjoying this game, and I recommend it to 4X fans. As for your question: I wish I’d paid more attention to the importance of food in growing and maintaining manpower. In my first game, I was making enough food to grow my population, and it didn’t dawn on me until too late that I wasn’t growing enough food to maintain an army and navy during wartime.

The other thing I wish I’d known was how cool the more exotic factions are! I’m not sure which faction to recommend for your first game! Some say start with more straightforward races, like Humans or maybe Sophons (science experts). But I think the game really took off for me when I tried a couple of the more unusual races: Riftborn and the Unfallen. Also, if you’re a turtler, you’ll love the Unfallen – they thrive on peaceful gameplay. If you’re a warmonger, humans might be a good fit. If you like building stuff, Riftborn; if you like making money, Humeris; tech, Sophons. I have no clue how the Church faction plays yet. Horatio sounds really cool; that’ll be my next game.

The Sophons are the easiest. When you maintain a substantial tech advantage the game isn’t much of a challenge. Improved Fusion Torpedoes are your friends :)

Should we Unfallen worry about rival empires taking control of our systems with influence? Or are we immune from that? I’m contemplating whether to establish a colony that’s within a stone’s throw of a UE colony with a big influence radius. I’ve extended my vine network to the system, but I’m wondering if I’d be better off just letting the UE take it?

It would be nice to know what entangling a system does. As far as I know it lets you colonize a planet for free and ship travel between systems is a bit faster although I am not sure how much faster.

I also suspect that you are immune to influence because your worlds do not generate any. I am also guessing that you can’t skip systems, IE: If you own A and have the following hyperlane configuration: A - B - C that you can’'t own System C without owning B first.

I had to give up on my Vodyani game. I was doing well I had 8 arks built was at war with the riftborn and at peace with the unfallen. One aspect that is different with the Vodyani is that since you are limited by your arks you tend to have systems in your zone of influence that you don’t occupy, why waste an ark on a single planet system for instance. So since I was at peace with the unfallen they started extending their vine network into my influence zone, to pick up those 1 planet systems, I assume. My problem came when they extended their network to my home system and then got mad that I had warships in their territory, my home system, this made our relations degenerate to cold war very quickly which made the vines slow down my ship speed and pretty much got me enmeshed in a second war. So moral to the story is only allow the unfallen to extend their vine network to your systems if you are in an alliance.

@Hery: interesting story. So how would you keep the Unfallen from extending their vines into your systems? Kill their vineships?

@DeepT: You’re right, I can’t skip systems. Interestingly, though, I can extend my vines to nebulae, asteroid belts, and black holes, and in most (all?) situations, I gain their benefits. In fact, they make great system border/buffers: I vine up to and including a black hole, and I let the UE take the system on the other side of the black hole.

Hmm, I’m still not sure whether to colonize a vined system that’s about to be swallowed by a human influence ring. It could be an interesting experiment, so maybe I will.

If I were playing that part of the game again I would either remain at cold war to be able to kill their ships in my territory or I would go all the way to Alliance, it is just peace that won’t work. I suppose it’s really a defect in the AI since it is pretty unreasonable to get upset that we had war ships at our home system just because they managed to entwine it.

Actually, I had something similar with the Horatios. Three measly early game ships in my home system, and they are having a fit that I am threatening them, because they settled in the next system over. In fact, they continued complaining even after I sent those ships several systems away to deal with some pirates.

I think this is working as designed, but I am not sure.

Does anyone else have trouble moving ships? I am very frustrated with the interface. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Lots of times, a ship will not respond to my orders until I cycle through to it. And I just got warp drives, but I can’t get a ship to head across to another constellation. No idea why this is.

I believe you need Baryonic Shielding to move outside the warp lanes. And even once you have it, you have to move to a specific system - can’t just head for open space, even if you know there’s a warp lane or influence bubble there.

I found a bug where I wanted to visit some cool unlinked node that was quite close by my constellation. I had baryonic whatever for dozens of turns, but the game errored me with “unable to link to system” or similar verbiage, and no one visited the star for the entire game.

That’s weird. I’ve never seen that; you should report it.

Actually, I did have Baryonic Shielding and I was trying to go to a specific system that an event had revealed… But what I found in the end is that, similar to moving along lanes, it is just wonky. Doesn’t work but then cycle through other stuff and come back and it might work then.

Is anyone else getting spammed by endless diplomatic messages?

Quite a few, but it’s more that they are puzzling than that there are so many of them. The supposed content of the message does not match up with the mood, so it’s just meaningless babble.

Before this bug, this content / attitude mis-match seemed to be a regular feature.
IE: You are less trustworthy then an eel, but hey, want an alliance?

The mafia translator is sleeping with the fishes. And the eels.