You buy Distant Worlds is what.
Now that’s just mean. Why would you do that to someone?
If you have issues with ongoing development, then yes, I would steer clear of Stellaris for sure. GalCiv3 with the Crusade update feels less “Civ in Space”, but it’s still got that DNA at its core. Distant Worlds is arguably a little more entertaining than staring at your desktop wallpaper.
ES2 still has food, production, and science, but to me it feels a lot more divergent from a “Civ in Space”. Granted, I’ve (intentionally) played it very sparingly in Early Access, so I don’t know if issues with the AI or endless fleet spam that I heard plagued the first one are still present, but I’ve liked a lot that I’ve seen.
Stellaris is $12 if you sign up for one month of Humble Monthly right now. You’ll get another six or nine games along with it, too.
I picked this up last week. This really tickles my fancy right now for i am weary of the traditional Paradox or Firaxis game model which requires tens or even hundreds of hours of investment. ES2 is not that, and i feel like the game “respects” my time a lot more but it also means you fly though the game more rapidly. It seems much more EL than ES1 though, so if you bounced off Endless Legend you may bounce of this one as well, but if you liked how efficient and snappy EL was you’ll probably like this one even more so. Although i hope there is a bit more random content in the release version, there isn’t quite the diversity of “tiles” as there was in EL so far. Right now i’d actually put ES2 above Stellaris, though i think Stellaris does a lot of cool things and is worth a look, ES2 just seems like a faster, more refined, smarter version of Stellaris with better production values. Stellaris does do the “giant space battle” thing much better though, space battles in ES2 are pretty much spacey equivalents of Endless Legend battles between 4-12 units a side.
I am mostly interested in how good or bad the AI is. ES just had a brain-dead AI. I am not sure if it was worse than the Civ 6 AI. I do not expect Sun Tzu, but something that is at least decent would be fine.
One tell-tale factor is to look at the AI planets you capture. Are they decently built or are there a lot of stupid decisions. In ES 1, the AI would just build everything. Like there was one building that would stop all pop growth and put it to production instead. The AI would build this thing fairly quickly and you would have planets that had room for like 10 pops, but stuck at 3 or 4. A planet might have no real science resources on it, yet the AI would build all the science upgrades which would cost a tun of dust to maintain, yet get almost nothing out of it. That kind of thing.
Nevermind the fleet battles…
I like the graphics, but the combat stuff is basically the same, but with nicer pictures, it offers little new, infact the old card playing is gone replaced with even more automation.
I’m not sold on this, as it isn’t enough to warrant calling it a sequel and turn times are longer and game is more sluggish for no reason I can tell.
A few things added that comes from Endless Legend, fighting heroes , etc…but also ship design is cluttered and not very good atm.
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How did the old card system work in comparison to ES2?
If you played the battle, you could choose each card before each phase, now its all decided before the battle, so its more like Galciv 3 in ways.
however its VERY pretty.
I’m surprised no one mentioned Star Ruler 2, probably the best of the bunch.
I can now agree with the above statement.
Can someone tell me what are unique features of Endless Space 2, compared to other 4X space games?
For example, Star Ruler 2 has budget cycles, unique diplomacy card system, and full ship customization, among (many) other things. Is there something similarly distinctive in ES2?
I think the developers, Amplitude, are best-in-class regarding faction/race design. I love all the peer 4X games but the Endless series has some truly interesting alien race ideas.
Another thing that is unique (to me at least) is the way they handle politics and factions/pops. It’s closer to Stellaris than most other games, but it’s a bit more distinct with the factions being hard set as Science, Military, Ecologists, etc. pops that have different benefits and influence what sorts of laws you can pass. It’s pretty slick.
Endless Space 2 is also shaping up to have fairly asymmetrical gameplay. There’s a lot I haven’t seen yet, but the major factions are well defined and differentiated in their playstyle - one faction ‘builds’ population rather than using food; another doesn’t populate planets but rather large Ark vessels that exploit the entire system they are in.
RPS just gave a glowing review and slapped the “Recommended” seal on this.
Instead I get to happily recommend it. From the interface to economics, it sports some of the best systems I’ve seen in a 4X game, and like Endless Legend, it’s simultaneously confident and experimental, finding new ways to spice up a genre that can too often be bland.
Nice to see reviews trickling in, I’m excited to jump into this tomorrow. Any word on if the AI is halfway decent?
I don’t know if it will be good or bad, but I will say that it is clearly something the developers have paid a great deal of attention to, and many of the game systems (while complicated) seem solvable by an AI. There is no one-unit-per-tile nonsense clogging up the decision space.
So if the AI sucks, and it probably will when measured against a human, it should suck any more than any 4X sucks, and hopefully it will suck somewhat less. If it sucks, it will be because they tried and failed, possibly because 4X games just aren’t playable by an AI without investment beyond the scope of game developers. It certainly won’t be because they ignored it as an issue.
Glowing except for the discussion of the combat, which, after all, is one of the Xs in a 4X game. People have been complaining about it since early EA but it seems they have still left it totally hands off, which is a shame. I was hoping they’d treat it more like Legends where you had enough interaction during the battle to at least feel you were a part of it, making decisions that affected the outcome. This seems even worse than the card system in the 1st game.
Looking at the Steam forums, sounds like the 1.0 dropped just a bit ago actually, during a dev stream, as an early gift. I’ll be checking it out for myself here in a bit at lunch.