I’d rather a dodacahedron map. Space has three dimensions, dammit!
What’s with the lack of trapezoid love? Hexes and squares are all the rage but none of them have the exotic sex appeal of a trapezoidal space quadrant.
Trapezoids are dull too. Any single tile tesselating the plane is dull. We need some kind of irregular tesselation of unique non-self-similar forms. And the plane shouldn’t be Euclidean, either. In fact just powering up the galactic map display should have a non-zero chance of summoning an elder god.
I had a very different reaction in that I found a ton of planetary developments/buildings, exploitations, and a very comprehensive terraforming and improvement system. There were also planetary bombardments and such that could be used offensively to destroy a lot of a planet’s infrastructure. They didn’t have GalCiv style building placement on a hex map, but ES definitely had planetary development and specialization.
-Todd
Kanly!
Wow, I had to look that one up! My hopped-up mentat shoots a lasgun at your shield.
More instead that disheartening sense i get around certain unexpectedly successful game developers that can’t quite seem to squeeze the success they deserve out of their product with timely DLC.
The Giants DLC or whatever it’s called is completely superfluous. Most of the achievements cannot possibly be attempted without a huge smattering of dumb luck as to resource placement. You can play forever without it and never feel left out.
The ‘exotic’ planet finds were cool, but that was a later version after most of the updates and my early games were the default game, i guess i just was used to GalCiv’s actual physical footprint on a planet system and was hoping for that. I understand that stuff bogs down late games, but with a reasonable automate option you can just focus on key planets.
The “reveal trailer” reminded me how much I enjoyed the music in Endless Space. That simple theme song fits the subject perfectly.
I liked the game itself too. I actually put more time in it than Endless Legend, which I also enjoyed. It’s a studio with a lot of interesting ideas.
i’m wondering, if this is something that draws on EL as well as ES, whether it might be a solar system environment, one that positions ES2 between EL and ES. This would be cool: space and a living, active environment
I’ve always wanted a 4x set at the star system level! I don’t expect they’d make such a drastic shift for a sequel though. Granted, this is Amplitude so I suspect they’ll be doing something interesting with it.
There’s at least one or two space strategy games coming out set at solely the system level. I’ll try and dig up their names for you as my brain is melty right now.
Solar War comes to mind, and if you flex your definition of “space strategy” a bit then you can include The Last Federation. Neither one is a 4X, to be fair, but they’re contained in a single system.
I’m looking forward to this. When the news came out they were releasing a sequel I finally booted up the copy of Endless Space I bought on some Steam sale at some point in the last couple of years. I’m having a lot of fun with it, although it has a ton of room for improvement as far as getting rid of unnecessary micromanagement and adding more unique play styles for factions is concerned. As has been said, I really hope they apply the lessons learned from Endless Legend to this.
cool!
The new battle system looks pretty cool!
Nice video. I also like the look of the new combat system, though I wonder if it’s really that different from the original version. As in the first game, you decide on combat strategy first, and then the game animates the result. The difference here is that the pre-combat decisions look more interesting.
That combat system DOES look more interesting. Even if it essentially boils down to the same thing as the first game, I just like the idea of maneuvering fleets around more than picking special powers to use.
I dunno. I do think the whole “planning battles and watching them unfold” mechanic can work pretty well – both Combat Mission and Dominions held my attention for a LONG time with such mechanics.
But I don’t think it worked too well in the first Endless Space because the engagements didn’t feature enough scope and/or variation to create “emergent” situations: the ships flew close to one another and then the combat ended. At best you were watching the pretty lights and congratulating yourself on choosing the proper choice from maybe twelve variations, and at worst you were looking at your ships and wondering why the captains of the vessels were so stupid as to blindly follow your instructions even though it would be obvious to drunken chihuahua that it was all going south.
Maybe if the new system allows some mid-battle course corrections…
Looks like it will hit Steam Early Access in September, just got an email.