Add more Cravers? Smaller map? If you overtook the AI that’s one thing, if they never threatened you despite it being in their interests, that’s another.
Just won my first game on Normal. The AI was competitive for the first half of the game. I guess that was during my learning curve, because I then completely took off from the pack and was almost double the next highest when my Alliance won a Conquest victory. I’m on Hard now, and I made things more chaotic for my home system and starting position.
Playing with the pirates on would be a good way to keep yourself diligent militarily, but I think I will wait for another game or two, to turn them on.
I may have hit a bug with the Unfallen’s main quest line. It suddenly just stopped. I completed chapter 4 I believe, and the next never started. I can’t find any other reports of it, so I don’t know what happened. Kind of bummed, because the Main Quest lines are one of my favorite things in Amplitude games… Maybe the next time I play them I will get to see it out.
Actually, I’m surprised and disappointed that manual is online with the release build. It’s obviously based on a way earlier version of the game and Amplitude couldn’t be arsed to update it. For instance, check out the bit about the tech tree on page 22. What the heck? And look at the faction descriptions on page 52. See anything missing? Like half of the factions? Seriously, that thing should be pulled or updated.
-Tom
You can do this??? I was in an alliance, but the conquest victory condition implied that I still needed to conquer my allies’ homeworlds. It kept listing the required homeworlds as 1 even though I was allied with two other factions. :(
Oh well, that’s a game I lost to a Lumeris economic victory anyway.
Could it be that the next chapter has yet to reach its trigger condition? Keep us posted.
When I was asking about the state of the review build we were given, I was told as recently as a few days before release that they were still working on the Unfallen. I held off playing with them because of that, but if the main quest is screwed up, I’ll keep holding off.
-Tom
What are the requirements to win the science victory? It is the victory I want to go for, but unless it is research everything, then I have no idea what it is.
Also for ground assaults, how do you make tanks and an air force? I thought it might be some kind of military tech I was missing, but I didn’t see anything about it.
[quote=“DeepT, post:365, topic:77211, full:true”]
What are the requirements to win the science victory? It is the victory I want to go for, but unless it is research everything, then I have no idea what it is.[/quote]
So a) you didn’t think to check the tooltips, and b) you post in this thread but don’t read it?
I wonder why one of the military techs has an airplane icon and another one of the military techs has a tank icon. Might be worth investigating.
Sorry to be a dick, DeepT, but for a guy who plays as many games as you do, I’m consistently surprised at the question you have to ask. But to answer your questions, science victories are either screwed up or mislabeled, you need Autonomous Construction in military tech tier 2 for tanks, and Universal Aerodynaics in military tech tier 4 for aircraft.
-Tom
Yeah, I found that and have been upgrading it. Got the infantry all the way up and halfway through the armor tree. Doesn’t seem to be helping but then I have no idea how far upgraded the opponent is. I was hoping for a sort of combined-arms approach, like in Civ where you’d sit an artillery on a hill and pound a city down until your ground forces can move in. Haven’t yet figured out any way to do something similar here with my space forces.
I know, right? That is pretty annoying. You can see their basic stats for health and damage by mousing over them during battle, but it’s conspicuously lacking in the detail you get with space battles.
-Tom
So, it turns out that you can indeed beat down ground enemies with your space forces, it just wasn’t obvious to me. (Which describes much about this game, to be honest.) You just have to do it before starting the ground battle, not after you’ve already invaded. When you put a space fleet in orbit and tell it to blockade the system, it starts slowly reducing defense. Leave it up there for a bunch of turns and it’ll drop the defenses, and then you send in the ground troops. Makes perfect sense, once you realize what’s going on. I had been trying to find some way to actively bombard, but apparently all you have to do is float around and stop their supplies from getting through.
It seems my first game is coming to an end. I’ve been warned that the Lumeris are getting close to an economic victory. I don’t know where they are, so I can’t try to stop them - other than cancel my trade agreement with them. My score has been bouncing around in the 2 and 3 spots for a while after I got off to a slow start and was trailing the pack. I was first going to go for the quest line victory and had been pursuing that pretty aggressively, but it seems like there isn’t a quest line victory like in Endless Legend! I’m now going for the science victory, but I’ve only discovered 1 or the 4 Endless techs and they are taking around 10 turns each. But, others have said there may be more needed so even if I get those 4 it seems like it may not be enough.
So far this game seems like it has some cool ideas, but it hasn’t grabbed me the way Endless Legend had. I didn’t really examine the numbers to see if the actual data backs me up, but it feels like there just isn’t enough variety in the planets to give me that feeling that Civ did when you find that great spot to found a city. Grabbing resources in ES2 is important, but I’ve never been like, “wow this system has great FIDSI output!”.
This is true in 4X games in general, but for some reason it bothers me more in ES2 - I’m selecting a tech to research and I can pick this one that improves industrial output for hot planets, and another tech improves something else. What should I pick? Once i get above a handful of planets I can’t remember how many hot planets I have, so I end up picking techs just based on hunches.
I also got into a war with a long time friendly faction because I had ships in one of my systems, but their influence was encroaching on it so they were getting mad at me for having a fleet there. I even moved it out, but the next turn they still thought I had a ship in their space so they declared war.
Maybe I’ll enjoy it more once I fully understand all the different pieces. I did like the first ES, even with an AI that wasn’t great. I tend to like strategy games where the rules are straight forward and results are obvious, but figuring out a good strategy isn’t necessarily obvious. For some reason the mechanics of ES2 aren’t always obvious to me.
Tom,
I did say I looked at the techs and did not find anything and did ask if I missed it. So its not like I am too lazy to even check for myself. I also googled this stuff before asking here.
As for the science victory, is this the thing you are talking about looking at tool-tips? Once again, when i started the game and saw the victory condition in the setup I did look at the tool-tip which did NOT list what sciences you needed. If there is some other place to look? I mean if you then tell me, go to the science victory screen and just look there, well I do not even know that such a screen exists. It is not all intuitive to go through a bunch of screens / menus to find hidden underneath someplace is the screen with whatever it is I want to know is presented.
As for my next dumb question:
What affects system border push? I thought it might be influence point generation, yet I have systems with zero influence point generation with big borders. Maybe its population? I am not sure about that though. The reason I asking is that I do have some decently populated system that are losing the border push war against another culture.
A tutorial message just popped up for me that said the more influence the system has generated form the beginning of the game the bigger the zone of influence for that system. Also form the manual, “Influence is of enormous importance in galactic politics, and every system you colonize will have a
slowly-growing zone of influence. Influence is increased by the population of the system as well.”.
I just started a game and fiddling around to try and learn to click to do simple things.
Does the one colony ship have at least one type of planet that we can colonize? I went exploring and found only one hospitable planet. When I tried to colonize it I learned that I needed the Rare Earth Foams tech before being able to do so. It was a Mediterranean planet type. So I am scratching my head wondering why it stated it was hospitable when I still need to research a tech to colonize it.
So the one thing I haven’t taken away from this thread is: is this game any good? I see a lot of people confused about mechanics, and Tom attempting to explain poor documentation but I haven’t actually seen anyone be like… “wow, this is an amazing game, buy it”.
Given the studio’s penchant for going crazy with sales, both often and large, there’s no way I’ll pay more than 20 bucks for it just because I know I have the patience. But I would like to know if I should keep it on my wishlist or if it’s just a pass in general.
I’m in wait-and-see mode on account of the bugs and questions about the AI. People seem to be saying a lot of opposite things about the latter, so I will wait and see how it pans out.
I’m confident that Amplitude will fix the bugs, but I don’t personally feel like investing a lot of time and energy into a game only to hit a show-stopper, since I have less time for gaming right now.
I was very surprised when the Conquest Victory came up and it list the three of us in the Alliance. At first, I thought it was one of the smaller quest announcements.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how many turns elapsed between the last chapter and the end of the game, but it was dozens of turns. I too was thinking that it might have just been a trigger not happening, but it must have been a rather elusive trigger. It could have something to do with me playing on the Endless time setting and being so passive.
I just checked and I have the Achievement for completing the Unfallen Lore Quest, but the last chapter I finished was just talking about how the Heart and I swear it mentioned anticipation about where it would lead them. Also, didn’t you win the game by finishing the Faction Lore Quest in EL? I can’t remember if it is a Victory Condition in the game setup.
Pirates seem very annoying to me. They are trivial to defeat, but waste a lot of my game time in moving patrols around chasing them. The only way I can justify their existence as a design feature is if there was an efficient “auto-patrol” mode that would automatically move a flotilla towards the nearest pirate and kill it without wasting my time with the combat resolution. Alternatively their frequency could be reduced by 95% or even more if they became noticeable threats with gameplay options for dealing with them like negotiating with some pirate chieftain or conquering some pirate stronghold or whatever…
Good news! Under ‘gameplay settings’ when starting a new game, you can disable pirates.
My understanding was that pirates spawn from the Minor Races, just like the roaming troops did in EL. So, pacifying the pirates relied on getting on friendly terms with the MRs. Unfortunately, I think pirates may have the ability to move between systems before you do and don’t have any trouble finding your system whilst you send out probes willy-nilly looking for their source.
That happened to me in one of the EA games I played of this, and I haven’t turned on pirates since then.
Does @tomchick have any input on Pirates? Do you play with them on or off?
I’m still working through my first game, but the game has been working fairly well for me. It takes some doing to uncover what’s actually going on a lot of the time, but so far I haven’t run into any real roadblocks. Having said that, I don’t think you’re losing anything by waiting to play the game. Give it another few months for improvements to be made (and sales to happen). Had I not gotten lucky with Tom’s giveaway, that’s where I’d be.[quote=“Miramon, post:377, topic:77211”]
Pirates seem very annoying to me. They are trivial to defeat, but waste a lot of my game time in moving patrols around chasing them.
[/quote]
I dealt with pirates in the early game by just putting a couple of ships in each of my systems on blockade mode. When they came through…bam, stopped by the blockade, and then the blockading fleet crushed them on my next turn.