If you go to the empire summary screen (first icon) you’ll see a tab at the top that says “Victory”, or something like that. Click on that and you’ll get a screen that shows all your stats to date, and also has the victory conditions. Mousing over each one tells you how close or far from it you are, as well as where you stand in relation to the other factions.
I think I may have a bug or something with trading. There is a trading company, but it says it cant find a route to its subsidiary and to research wormholes (which I have).
Explorminate has a nice review just out which is very detailed and (I think) helpful. It covers each of the 4 "X"s and provides an assessment of the AI and the game’s strengths/weaknesses. For those looking for more info on the game, this is pretty nice:
There has to be some trick to border push. I have a system that is old and has a pop of 18. The AI established a colony maybe 20 turns ago nearby. Its pop is 2 and its border is pushing into my colony’s area.
I’ve noticed similar things, where a tooltip will tell you to research a tech you already have. I suspect there’s probably multiple requirements, but the tooltip isn’t showing the correct “missing ingredient”.
In the case of trade routes, make sure there’s actually lines on the map between the systems. Your ships might be able to (slowly) travel between systems that don’t have a line, but trade routes don’t seem to allow it (at least at low-to-medium tech levels).
It depends on your influence, I believe (the purple stars). I’ve been playing the United Empire, which gets a bonus to influence, so I’m doing to the AI what you’re seeing - my smaller systems are still managing to spread wider borders than their large ones. But it does seem to reset when you conquer a system - it can take a while to rebuild!
I just finished my first game, losing to an economic victory after trying for a science victory. I think the science victory is too hard or perhaps the economic victory is too easy. I was not even trying for an economic victory myself and yet was like 80% of the way there by the end of the game. I wonder if I can disable the pure cash aspect of it. I am ok with the wonder one because it requires a lot of every kind of resource types although maybe that isn’t all that hard considering the market.
I am not sure how I feel about the game. The diplomatic AI is just as crazy as it is in every other game. I figure a conquest victory would be a terrible slog since it takes so long to capture a system AND the happiness penalty would be insane if you did try and capture half the galaxy, never mind most all of it.
So far my feeling on the game is “Meh+”. Ill keep playing the other factions. The rift born seem really interesting.
I think alot of Endless Legend’s praise comes from this… :O.
I’d say that’s a very fair review. If past games are anything to go by, Amplitude will continue to work on Endless Space 2, and I look forward to seeing what DLC they have in store. The expansions that they developed for Endless Legend were pretty great.
I see nothing wrong with that. The price of admission is worth the great faction design and then Amplitude’s games just keep improving from there.
And there we disagree. I felt the factions were skin deep and once you played through a faction once, that was that. I did play through each faction once, had almost fun with the Broken Lords and the Necrophage, bounced off the Roving Clans guys, and thought the one city race (cultists?) was a fantastic concept. It made a fantastic, front loaded first impression but not much actual game. Anyway, ymmv. Enough people liked it and I am glad of that as ultimately it brings more people into the tbs hobby.
I also appreciate the attempt to curate the experience by providing a storyline by way of quests, but again, once played through once, that was that. Also, the quests often didn’t make much sense (go half way across the map to get x reward which you don’t exactly need etc…)
How that relates to this thread is that I keep hearing how great the factions are, and how wildly different, but my worry is that this is another front loaded, great first impressions game, that will get boring fast.
Now that’s ofcourse very subjective and not something I imagine you can really answer but I am just trying to glean some info.
So far am glad to read that the ai isn’t terrible, because it was rubbish in EL.
I have a story question about the Sophons:
So I was following the story quest and I got to the part where the AI revolts and you have to invade a world to put it down. You recover some disks and it say that they will be examined and maybe something will come of it a little later. For me that’s where the story ended. 100 turns later nothing else happened. Is that it for the story or is there supposed to be more?
I’m pretty sure that’s it.
Won my first normal-difficulty game easily, using my custom sophon++ race. Never lost a single warship to combat apart from my first couple of scouts, though I did lose a planet briefly when someone declared a surprise war. The game does get a little dull after a while toward the end, but it’s still way more fun than say Civ VI.
Re the story: there’s this weird thing with ENFER, after some quest event, a world called Illuminati or something like that appeared populated by ENFERNALs. When I approached it with a ship, it became my possession without a fight, though it still had the yellow band indicating ENFERNAL control. I was totally in possession of the one planet in the system, and yet I had to ground attack my own planet to stop all these weird yellow fleets from appearing everywhere. I don’t recall any popup screen guidance about this at all, it just sort of happened.
Did you get an achievement for completing the Sophon story? The Unfallen story felt like it ended abruptly for me as well, but looking through the log and then seeing I got an achievement later, that must just be it. Not bad, just not as long as I expected.
I just checked, and yes I got an achievement for the story arc. That was lame. Its like something you would come up with while your eat lunch with co-workers. They might as well not even have it in the game it was so feeble.
The story is like this:
Sophons build an AI.
The Ai has 2 tasks to do.
After the 2nd task the AI goes bezerk and needs to be put down. (totally original, RIGHT?!)
The AI is put down
THE END
( do not forget to submit the script to the pulitzer prize committee)
The first military tech that increases your command points – you know you’re gonna research that one – also gives you a support module called Titanium Slugs. These are used to either boost your bombardment a bit by using some spare support slots, or to boost your bombardment a lot by making a dedicated planet bomber.
I could not disagree more strongly. This is one of the best strategy games I have ever played in that regard. There’s a reason the default view the first time click on a system is a fullscreen one-by-one close-up of each planet.
Yeah, they could really use some kind of colonizer management screen, couldn’t they? However, because of the way hot/cold/temperate and fertile/sterile work, once you have enough planets, any tech or hero skill that advantages one of those traits is going to come in handy. The trick is figuring out where to build the resulting improvement, but that’s something you decide only when you’re staring at the screen that gives you the specifics for each planet.
For this game, I can explain the resource, combat, and technology systems till the cows come home! But diplomacy? Sheesh. These black-box diplomacy systems drive me batty…
-Tom
Yeah, the parts of this thread where we’ve been discussing it.
Influence and only influence. Every system has a colony base that provides a trickle of influence, so even if you don’t build anything, assign a hero, or implement a law to improve influence, a system’s border will grow.
I don’t think that’s correct. A happy population will give you a bonus to production, and that includes influence, but I don’t see any connection between between the population of a system and its influence production (influence generated pops excepted, of course).
I think you might be confused about the terminology the game is using. A planet is either labeled inhospitable because you haven’t researched the appropriate tech for that environment yet, or colonizable because you have. I’m not aware of any other label. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but did you maybe confuse “hospitable” with “inhospitable”?
I love this game. Take that however you will, as I’m not in the habit of telling people what game to buy or declaring whether something is simply good or not. But I will go on record as saying I’m loving it.
Argh, must be another screwy tooltip on the victory conditions screen. The game right now implies you’re ineligible for conquest victory unless you conquer your alliance partners. I specifically opted out of a conquest victory because of that. Dagnabbit. I mean, I lost anyway, but still.
There are no quest-line victories in Endless Space 2. (That I’m aware of…) So it sounds like you just saw the Unfallen through to their conclusion and got the achievement. Gratz!
Playing with pirates off is Baby Mode. And as @ineffablebob mentions, the key is putting ships in orbit on defense. As the tooltip tells you, that forces any ships to stop for a turn when they enter the system. You can effectively shut pirates – or anyone else – out of your empire this way.
-Tom
You do know there’s a tutorial mode in this game, right? One that answers many of these questions for you as you play? I mean, you’re lobbing softballs here, so ask away, but if you’re really interested in learning how to play, there are more convenient ways than waiting for someone to reply to a Qt3 post.
-Tom
Actually, I’d argue to flotilla positions might be more (?) important than the effects. Once you’re building ships, you’ll have some that you definitely want at long or short range. Since each flotilla’s range is determined in part by the other guy’s card, a card with a short range on the left flank is different than a card with short range on the right flank.
I really liked the combat in Endless Space 1, and I like this combat system even more. Very very simple, quick, and clean, without taking away important decisions.
-Tom
I don’t know about obvious, but, yes, you’re missing something. If you can’t be bothered to read the tooltips, just build trade HQs and subsidiaries. They’ll become a major part of your income.
-Tom