ENFER: My mind is going. I can feel it.
Mark: I just took away your bonus to upkeep, stop being a baby.
I have bounced off of this hard, multiple times. It just seems like a jumble of various systems that do not quite work together. I find myself bored and at the same time overwhelmed with too many choices. I quite liked EL but did not really enjoy ES1 and this seems much closer to a very polished ES than the more elegant EL.
I really enjoyed my first game of ES2. I played it just like I normally would in Civ games, being a builder and ignoring others unless attacked. Took me almost 20 hours to win on Normal difficulty (with the tutorial on since it was my first game). Oddly enough, I won a conquest victory because I was retaliating against a war declared on me and I was in an alliance.
Really, my only nitpicks were that the ground battles weren’t worth watching and I wish I could see the effects of improvements on the planets and systems rather than just numbers. There’s still a lot I probably didn’t do optimally (as usual with strategy games), and I’ll definitely be playing again.
The new espionage faction they’re designing sounds incredible.
These are words that have never been strung together in a sentence for any strategy game in the history of humanity.
The design is normally not where these things fall over.
I enjoyed a game of ES2 this weekend, too. It has a lot of balance issues and rough edges, and some of the design falls flat - particularly in the hands of the AI. But what 4X doesn’t? Overall I am very fond of the game (though I have disabled Supremacy - I dislike so much in that expansion).
Some artwork for the stealth-based faction, coming sometime in 2019 I imagine…
awesome
I have about equal parts love and criticism for Endless Space 2 (so many good features; so many holes in the game design and AI) but I can never fault the art. They always produce great, creative artwork.
I look forward to the many-eyed-spooky-stealthy-ghost-snakes.
Yea me too. I can only hope they put much more effort into AI.
I hope so too. But I disagree this is about effort. I think this is about returns on investment. It’s a really hard problem that is essentially a furnace to shovel money into as far as development goes.
I’m less forgiving of the more mundane problems with balance, bizarre combat behaviour (why do fighters/bombers always fly to the top flotilla first?? Why??) and simply backwards game mechanics (market place ‘inflation’ for example).
I’m not a fan of the diplomatic AI. You’re getting along great, have all sorts of treaties in place, and 5 turns later you’re at war.
They usually do that when they think their military is stronger than yours, or out of position (i.e. at war with someone else). It’s not very bright, especially given hero bonuses and movement stacking on ships allows extremely swift redeployment (another balance gripe).
(There’s a very slow move to make a mod to adjust this balance, but intermittent updates breaking mods makes maintenance a pain for modders, which is putting them off. Modding the AI is basically too difficult to be fruitful.)
That’s my complaint with every 4X AI I’ve played, it drives me nuts. I recently shelved Aggressors: Rome for the same reason. The only game that I feel adequately addresses this gripe is EU4, where the AI weighs long-standing alliances and where you can build Trust and Favors by helping them out in wars and that sort of thing.
I guess I want the AI to play more of a role as opposed to approaching it like a boardgame. Backstabbing you because your fleet moved out of position might make sense if trying to win a boardgame, but it feels really stupid in a game that’s simulating galactic empires.
That’s a matter of taste though. And an AI that behaves as you describe becomes very easy to exploit by encouraging it to act against its interests.
I would not mind a choice, but getting one functional AI seems hard enough, let alone two!
Oh it’s absolutely a taste thing, I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise. :) But I will say that with the boardgamish approach of “backstab at any time there’s a perceived advantage”, I think it detracts from the entire diplomatic layer. What’s the point in spending so much time, effort, resources, or research on developing an alliance that can get torn up because you moved your fleet or fell behind a military tech? If you already have to double down on the military and you have all those ships laying around, you might as well use them. And then the majority of games devolve into the same old Conquest mode, in my experience.
Endless Space 2 doesn’t stand out any worse than other 4X games in this regard, it’s just a common frustration I’ve had.
I play quite a lot of the game and I never see this. As long as I maintain a proper military, the only time I’ve had an AI “turn on me” is when I’m in the middle of a war and relatively weak, which makes sense.
I don’t think the diplomatic AI is amazing or anything, but I’d rank it pretty reasonably.
Stars in Shadow does it quite well - the game is exclusively single player, and diplomacy more mechanical. That makes it both characterful and balanced around manipulating the AI.
I’m with you Kevin. I want them to behave more how I would expect them to in reality, not like playing a game. Now that does mean it maybe easier to take advantage of them, but I still prefer it to a backstabbing AI that just tries to win.
Thanks for pointing me to Stars in Shadow. This and the DLC looks really great! Thinking about grabbing it.