Sounds great!
Looks like fighters, bombers, a new mission, and a new hero are coming out this Tuesday! I love, love, love space strategy games with fighters and the new BSG game came out at a bad time for my discriminating wallet, so I’m happy that Tuesday is just a couple of days away.
-Tom
You can opt-in via betas in steam, if you can’t wait for the update, and get it already.
Right click on the game in your Steam Library
Select Properties
Select the Betas tab
Enter the following password: TargetLocked
Select the target-locked build in the drop down list
Click OK
Give us your feedback after playing!
… Razgon, let’s be best friends.
That does look neat – like the war in the Pacific. But since when is feedback a verb? ;-)
According to Steam, this is their midweek madness sale, at… the regular price. It’s like when Amazon sends me one of those reminder emails that show me something I was looking at two days ago at the same price. “Hey, you didn’t want this then, do you want it now? Same deal?” “…No.”
edit- whoops, there it goes. 25% off. Meh, I dunno.
Yeah, but fighters… and bombers…
If space 4X is your thing, $30 is a great price for this one. It just got a significant update today that I’m looking forward to trying out (hence the fighters and bombers statement above).
A nice update about to drop (tomorrow) for ES2 - it adds some nice diplomatic interactions with AI, and some overhaul of some of the ‘pressure’ mechanics that were really unfinished on release. There’s also a very good combat balance pass (which changes things considerably, but plays much nicer with fighters/bombers).
I was part of the closed beta, and while NDA has lifted for text, I don’t really have much to say except it’s worth checking out. There’s clearly DLC in the works. along with a lot of free updates and improvements to the game based on community feedback.
That’s terrific to hear, I’ve been wondering what they are working on. I love a lot of the concepts of ES2, but it hasn’t gelled into a compelling game for me yet. I’m definitely keeping it on my radar, though, because I feel like with some improvements and additions, it could be really good.
Thanks for the update!
Yeah, the game is just a bit dull. Not nearly as bad as ES1, though. Still prefer MOO2.
I reinstalled and have been playing a bit recently. No game-breaking endless end-of-turn bugs any more! It’s fun, but it’s taken me a while to get over the learning curve. You basically have to learn every race separately, and when a single game can take many hours to play, that’s a whole lot of ramp-up time.
The other two dev blogs for that update:
PRESSURE RETAKE & CONSTELLATION CONTROL
PIRATE LAIRS & EMPIRE, HERETIC’S QUEST REWARDS, & MORE!
Play-to-Win Community Challenge
While it’s a free-play weekend, play at least once from Nov. 16 (6 PM GMT) to Nov. 20 (6 PM GMT) to help unlock additional free content next month!
How much is this game like Endless Legend? I was initially intrigued by EL but soon lost interest due to what I’d try to describe as something like “soulless”. I just couldn’t care about the factions involved and the action became very repetitive. To me. Yet it had some nice features.
My fear is that this is just EL in space. (Or EL is just ES on terra firma.)
I will say that I’m a big fan of ES2. I really feel like it moves the genre forward on a variety of fronts. In particular, the way they flesh out each race with a backstory that unfolds via quests is really nice. The race mechanics are also quite varied with some falling into very traditional archetypes but others extremely novel. For these reasons I find the claim that the game is “soulless” hard to wrap my head around, although I do think the learning curve may have a lot to do with that. Some of the more novel races in particular can be particularly hard to understand and often basic mechanics are only superficially explained.
As far as comparing it to EL, I find the hex-based movement on a map, as well as the hex-based combat, gives each game a very different feel. There’s no winter equivalent in ES2 and where EL has more nuanced city development, ES2 has a whole political layer as well as population type layer than EL doesn’t. In terms of factions, all I can say is that I like the ES2 factions better than those in EL and find the differences to be more striking, although I’ve played ES2 more it’s quite possible I’m shortchanging EL’s faction diversity.
Overall, despite last year’s promise of an amazing rebirth of space 4Xs with 3 AAA titles, this is the only one that really clicked for me. MoO in particular was a huge disappointment and I’m still waiting to give Stellaris another try. But it’s largely because of ES2 that I haven’t gotten back to it. I’d highly recommend at least trying it this weekend since it’s free.
How is ES2 now? The price seems right during the Steam sale.
I tried Stars in Shadow but found it too shallow to want to play for very long.
Something seems off about it. I actually liked ES 1, but after playing 2 games of ES 2 I just never went back.
I bounced off it hard personally. The art style is beautiful, but I just couldn’t get into it.
They’ve fixed a lot of the launch bugs. But the AI still doesn’t seem able to play the game. And the addition of space pirates has completely broken it.
I also continue to question the underlying design of this game. But the pirates now overwhelm everything else to the point that I can’t really tell what is going on.
Maybe check out something like Star Traders: Frontiers instead, that looks interesting.