There’s a real woeful documentation problem with this game, because that penalty just isn’t listed anywhere. But I checked, and you’re right.
I guess you just want to move all but one of your Cravers off a planet before it’s depleted then, and move slaves onto the planet for the +50% slave driver bonus. Even if the planet ends up depleted, that seems to counter the depletion (probably why I wasn’t noticing it).
Well the +50% still works, so you end up with a planet that’s 75% of what it could be.
So, long term, you lose out quite a bit. As long as you can keep the conquest/expansion ball rolling though you’ll be really strong.
I just played part of a game with a modified Riftborn, and one of my solar systems started to deplete. Just one. Not a conquered system, and one of the planets fully depleted while the others partially did. Not sure why or even whether it affected my production levels. Nothing unique in the system, so I wonder now if some attribute of the hero governor caused depletion. At the time I wasn’t paying much attention so I don’t even recall if it was a Craver hero.
The patch from a few days ago made big improvement to performance in my game.
ENDLESS SPACE 2 - AI MODDING CLOSED BETA
“The current version requires a good knowledge in C# programming”
So it’s a reasonably serious thing.
We complain a lot about 4X AI here. The most successful story about fixing such problems I’ve read was the fan-made Pandora: First Contact AI. This seems a push to move along similar lines.
Vox Populi for Civ5 did wonders with mod tools as well.
That is awesome that Amplitude is opening up the AI to modding.
It my not amount to anything, but it’s certainly laudable.
I haven’t played this game yet, but I do know Tom really enjoyed it. Could someone point out to me the disconnect with Tom’s relative exuberance for it vs the general gaming populations seeming ambivalence? The reddit community is only a fraction of even some fairly niche games like Hearts of Iron IV, for example, and it hasn’t been discussed here in weeks despite being relatively new-ish.
Even when a game’s marketing fails it, when people really love a game they tend to discuss it to death, and I really haven’t seen that for this title.
I only ask because I thought the first one was pretty decent and Endless Legends was even “good-ish” (having bought them both on large discount), so I thought I’d look into this.
I can take a stab at it, but you’re probably better off if someone else weighs in. But I’d attribute any commercial or critical failings to the following, roughly in order of importance.
People are dumb.
It doesn’t do a good job with the “new user experience”. That’s such a biz-term and I hate it, but it’s accurate. Endless Space is no Civ V or VI. Say what you will about those games – I certainly will! –
but they’re very welcoming, very easy to sink into, very “come in, sit down, can I get you anything?” They know how to court new players. Endless Space 2 has a Euro snobbiness upfront. The documentation is in the interface and you have to look for it. It will not meet you halfway. There are scads of numbers and tooltips, and if you’re curious, the game is more than happy to reveal itself to you. If you’re not, well, it’s got stuff to do and it can’t be bothered babysitting a bunch of brats who haven’t played it already.
The archetypes aren’t familiar. The playable factions are weird. Space humans, of course. But otherwise Space Ents, some slavers who might be lizards, extradimensional space beings, some space religious people. Some of them aren’t even familiar gameplay archetypes. Growing roots around solar systems? Orbiting instead of colonizing? What do you mean my planets degrade after I’ve used them.
It even avoids expected gameplay archetypes. The politics stuff, for instance. What kind of game that isn’t a Paradox spreadsheet does that??? There’s a reason Firaxis can just glom new tech trees onto their games and call it design. People understand tech trees. But Endless Space 2 has a tech platter, political leveling up, colonies that aren’t just like cities where you stick buildings on a planet, etc. “What the heck is going on here?” someone might ask if he was just wanting some comfort food 4X. “This isn’t like the other games I’ve played!”
The production values are arty. Lots of big splashy but static drawings. “Hey, what’s with all these paintings in my videogame? Where are the cutscenes?” I adore the space porn in this, but it’s largely in the combat, which is its own non-archetype.
The combat isn’t easy to figure out and there’s no familiar paradigm for it. It’s very hands-on for the set-up, which can relate to the ship building, which relates to the tech tree, but in ways that aren’t very well documented. If you don’t know what you’re doing – the game won’t help you too much – it’s going to feel like you might as well roll a big fat space die.
I’m sure there are other reasons people might not like Endless Space 2, but those are a few guesses off the top of my head.
-Tom
Cyborg insects, I think.
I think the big two of Tom’s list are certainly the “new user experience” and the unfamiliar archetypes.
The documentation is mostly there in the form of tooltips, and having played Endless Legend I didn’t have trouble with most of it. But some of it is just missing. (On the plus, 99% of the bugs appear to be resolved now, which massively helps figure out the rules.)
Amplitude loves weird and wonderful. Endless Legend had an enslaving cult of sentient robots and “elves” undergoing a magic fueled industrial revolution. Endless Space 2 is maybe a bit less out there, but one of the most normal factions is a weird looking race of semi-aquatic creatures organised like the mafia.
I love the arty production values, but I can see why they aren’t to everyone’s tastes.
Bizarrely enough I see all of these as points in the games favour.
But then again I thought EL was glossed over emptiness…
I’d add to Tom’s list the game-breaking “endless end-of-turn” bug that took them several weeks to fix (there was at least one “fix” that didn’t actually fix the problem along the way). I got hit by that once, in a game I’d poured hours into, and that pretty much killed my enjoyment. I moved on to other games and Endless Space 2 got dumped onto the backlog. As far as I know the bug’s been fixed, but once I’ve moved on to other stuff I tend to stay there. I’ll try again someday, but it’ll probably be a while. I doubt I’m the only one in that boat, and some of those folks were making a lot of noise against the game.
Other than the first point - I think some better documentation/tutorial would be very helpful - I agree. But then, I doubt we represent the majority of the market. Certainly not the portion of it that writes most of the ES2 reviews and comments, apparently!
How similar is this game to the first one? If it’s very similar then I think some of the points discussed above can be ruled out. The first game did extremely well until some serious flaws became apparent and even then it sold very well.
I suspect that if ES2 isn’t doing as well it may be because a lot of people were ultimately disappointed in ES1 and didn’t even bother with ES2, assuming it was just more of the same. Those that were enthusiastic about it may have been turned off by the serious bugs after launch. Others may have been turned off by the learning curve and lack of easy to find documentation. More than anything though, I suspect the bugs at launch hurt them a lot because it killed most of the usual launch enthusiasm. It’s hard to get that back.
Looks to be around 150k owners give or take. Thats not bad imho.
There are some good opportunities ahead for more sales. Fighter/bomber strike-craft were planned but did not make it out with release - despite the Carriers making it in! That update is planned for free, and will be major enough to get some gaming-news headlines.
Not bad but the original sold 1.3 million so it has a long way to go to match that. Granted that includes lots of sales so I suspect once the price comes down a lot more people will try it.
Reading Tom’s comment, it occurs to me that it may have hit a market dead spot. Too artsy/snobby for a large part of the general market, too vaguely documented for the nerdy market (not an insult, that’s me), too much Endless Legends in space (FIDS and its heroes goes interstellar) for the edgy crowd. And not moddable enough for that crowd.
No doubt about it, though, I got a lot more enjoyment out of Endless Legends.
Mostly agree, but:
My experience of space combat seems much simpler than Tom’s. Torpedoes win. I push to the level 3 advanced fusion torpedoes quickly, my first level-3 tech, and then I don’t need any more offensive weapon technologies for the whole game, though I will eventually pick some up just to get higher level for a tech victory. Then in actual combat I push the power-to-shield button or the barrage button over and over and over again :)
But wow, they really hide the one most important UI feature for ground combat quite well, don’t they? That teeny little spaceship icon for investing in ground combat troop strength. Tanks and planes seem kinda pointless, but you’d better have 200 titanium and hyperium (or whatever the total works out to be) to max your infantry strength.
150K in sales is not great either. Hopefully, that’s profitable enough that Amplitude and SEGA don’t give up on this.
I think the single biggest contributor to Endless Space 2’s mediocre reception is Endless Space. As @Coldsteel pointed out, they sold millions of units largely via Humble Bundle and other sales. That game, even in its final updated and finished form, had a lot of issues that didn’t get solved until the sequel. Take everything others have said already - the obtuseness, the artsy presentation, lack of mods, unfamiliar concepts - and add to that a frankly half-baked initial outing and it pretty easy to see why this game has struggled.