Endless Space 2

I’ve played this a bit the last couple of nights, and it’s pretty fun. I’m not sure how much of the fun comes from not knowing what the heck I am doing. Trying to avoid restarting to do things “the right way”.

Just save and reload battles to learn how different battle cards work and how it effects outcomes. It can be very drastic.

Yeah I was pleased with how some of that interaction worked. My ships were set up with lasers, beams and all shields, but I was facing an opponent with missiles and shields. I swapped out one of the lasers for lower-tech kinetics and charging in worked fairly well. Then I was fighting one of their fleets with a mix of missile ships and kinetic ships, so I hung back and maximized defenses. Most of their missiles couldn’t get through, and their kinetic ships didn’t survive to close the distance.

I just bought it on sale as well and am doing the same thing. I’ve started about 20 games, but never gone past 40-50 turns.

Have not gotten to the AI battle phase yet, only clearing pirates and trying to grasp the game concepts (like manpower and how it relates to my ground forces on attack).

I have learned the most about this game by watching Let’s Play videos on YouTube.

I highly recommend the following two series to watch…

ENDLESS SPACE 2 Let’s Play - VAULTERS (New Expansion) - #1 (Macsen Lets Plays)

Vaulters - Let’s Play - Endless difficulty - Endless Space 2 - #1 (FMRPlays)

Even if you’re not interested in playing the Vaulter faction you will learn a great deal about the game basics watching these.

As mention earlier in this thread by AquaMafia, FMRPlays has a great series of tutorials for the game that I found very helpful as well… Endless Space 2

I find that looking at fights from a top down perspective also helps for figuring out which cards you want to use. Just because you picked hang back for your missile boats doesn’t mean you will actually fight at long range since the enemy gets to pick a card too.

I was thrilled and surprised to see 2 new inexpensive pieces of DLC when I got home:

I have a kind of poll type question (not sure how to do that):

  • What size and galaxy type do you all like best?
  • Your favorite race?
  • Your favorite race music?
  • Your favorite intros?
  • Do you change victory conditions (what game speed and game difficulty do you use)?
  • :)

I’m down with little DLC packs like this. Snagged both. Thanks for letting me know!

To answer your question:

  1. Basic Spiral, Smallish. 4-5 races.

  2. Probably the Lumeris.

  3. Love the Riftborn’s theme.

  4. Likewise love the Riftborn’s intro.

  5. Nope, and standard. Edit- Hard Difficulty.

  6. :P

Here are my own so far:

  1. Spiral 8 - with 8 opponent races

  2. Vodyani or Unfallen

  3. United Empire

  4. Vodyani or United Empire

  5. Nope (Hard difficulty and Normal speed)

  6. I wish I knew how to do unicode so I could post silly emoticons :)

I am in my first game.

Easiest difficulty, “I have played 4x before” tutorial mode. Human baron dude race. Default galaxy.

I like it a lot. I hate the hand crafted quests (I hate em in Stellaris as well) I always prefer procedural content in 4x games.

Love the races though, each one feels well acted , drawn and stylised from the people to the ships. Excellent stuff. Music off as with all games so I cant say if its any good.

I’m not the boss of you or anything, but I implore you to give the music a try. Amplitude’s music is my favorite among all of my games, and ES2 has my favorite music from among their games. Just load up a game with the Riftborn and give it a shot. Do it for the children.

OMG you’ve got to play with the music on. Seriously some of the best ever made for a game.

Nice thing about Amplitude’s quests is that they typically aren’t too draconian. You can usually get around to them when you get around to them.

Then again, I’m biased as I really like the quests. I think it adds a lot of flavor to the races, but I do get annoyed by the way some other 4X games utilize quests.

I love the quests too. Always look forward to them when they pop up and get bummed when I’ve exhausted them all in my game hehe.

@jpinard

Sure both! I will try it. It was not a judgement or anything, I just tend to listen to playthroughs of boardgames while playing my PC games so music just gets in the way. For Endless Space I am listening to the lonesome gamer play Genesis. It oddly fits :)

I used to watch The Lonesome Gamer all the time. He has a trance-like almost ASMR quality to his speech cadence. It’s very calming and insightful.

Also Amplitude’s music is great.

Yeah I love it when he says “we shall see about that” in his videos. Also if you haven’t watched his Genesis replay I dare you to not giggle each time he says “peasants” :) It gets me every time! Great guy.

I just picked up this and the expansion, and I’m stuck on the invasion screen: I don’t seem to know how to start it and I also can’t call it off. The “ready” button says that my opponent (the pirates) is still choosing its strategy, and I can’t seem to get a response anywhere else on the screen. Anyone have a guess what I’m doing wrong?

I haven’t played in a while, but last time I did there was a bug that caused something much like what you’re seeing. Unfortunately there was no fix at the time. Are you sure you’ve got the latest version? Or maybe a similar bug has cropped up since.

oh shoot, that’s too bad. I ought to have the most recent version as I just bought and installed the game today.