April Fools thing that is an actual dating sim / visual novel for Horatio.
It is free, so someone try it. :p
Horatio is the most beautiful and perfect being in the universe, so it makes sense.
Um, you bet I’m trying this.
Endless Space 2 will be free to play/try this weekend on Steam.
There is a new expansion coming September 12: Awakening.
I’m game, as always.
“Typically, what ES2 factions have in common is that they start the game focused on growth and expansion,” Amplitude explain. “As the Nakalim, however, you will begin as an extremely technologically advanced society that has recently been awakened from a dormant state. Your mission will not be to expand, but rather to seek ancient relics and reconquer lost lands, and to maintain your lead all the while staving off decline.”
Love it.
Sounds awesome. Just hope they actually improved the AI and the AI can play it properly. They have these fantastic systems for each race, but the AI is always lagging.
I haven’t looked for ES2 yet but I wonder if there is a mod that might help.
I just found out about Endless Legend Community Patch which is supposed to overhaul several systems and provide a marked improvement of the AI.
Interesting. I was pretty excited that Amplitude released AI modding tools for ES2, but for a while it seemed like the community just never achieved critical mass to overhaul something as complex as AI or other systems. I’ll have to look for that community patch if I ever re-install the game again.
ELCP goes further than normal (steam workshop-)mods by modifying files that are usually referred to as “hardcoded”. By doing this I have a deeper access to the games code and can therefore change stuff that is inaccessible otherwise. This allows me to make improvements to the game like fixing bugs, modifying the UI and (my personal favorite) improving the AI.
However due to the “invasive” nature of this patch, you have to download and install it manually like in the good olden days.
Haven’t yet tried it myself, but plan to.
Please let us know how it goes. If it’s all positive I’ll get it too.
I gather from the fact nobody has posted about this game in 18 months that it’s not considered a masterpiece around here.
I am just finishing my first real game of it; I mostly am doing so because I’m trying to prepare myself for Humankind (which is way more up my alley) and get accustomed to their style of doing things.
I think it is pretty great but it has a lot of problems, none of them major but it all adds up.
The endgame of my current run through the galaxy is literally the most tedious shit I have ever done on a computer, and that includes filing taxes. By points I’m the second most powerful, I’m allied with 1,3 and 4 (and have been as long as I can remember); it has been popping up to tell me that we are close to victory for at least four hours. I finally looked at the victory conditions and actually we aren’t close to victory whatsoever. I mean we won hours ago, if the AI were humans we’d just send our fleets on a rampage and be done with it to put the bad guys out of their misery, but as it is the AIs are always signing peace treaties with our enemies that I am compelled to go along with (occasionally it gives me an opportunity to spend 1500 diplomatic points to veto the treaty, but not always). Then I end up with supposed peace with my crappy little mosquito of a neighbor, but they are blockading my international trade routes by virtue of sitting between me and most of the galaxy at a choke point.
I just called it a win and am going to start over at a higher difficulty level.
Things I like: being able to travel outside star lanes (what are “star lanes” anyway? very bizarre that abstraction appears in literally every 4X space game ever made and there is no basis for it in reality; they aren’t wormholes because it takes several turns to travel along them, whereas an actual wormhole 99% of your travel time would be at slower than lightspeed in the solar system to reach the wormhole, then you’d instantly arrive in the target system…); back to things I like: shooting probes off into space looking for stuff (but there’s nothing there! at least not after 1/3 of the way through the game).
How do presumed mammals settle a gas giant? :-O.
At least Stellaris tries to stick to some kind of vague sense of reality along those lines; you can maybe build a habitat that orbits a gas giant, but you can’t land on the gas giant and build towns. Seriously wtaf…
Yet it’s more fun to play that Stellaris, and neither is particularly fun to play when it gets down to it. I dunno.
(This is the only forum I have ever visited that scolded me via an automated message for reviving an old topic…I gather it would prefer I start an “Endless Space 2 circa 2021 thread”?)
The thing about pretty much every 4X space game ever is that the winning strategy is to just build everything on every planet. Despite all the histrionics about how terrible Civ VI is, at least it forces you to think a little bit about specializing your cities through the whole district thing. Or, for example, there is a wonder that gives you x% more Great People points and of course you only want to build that in a city that is already generating a considerable amount of Great People points. Not that it has anything to do with reality; Oxford Mississippi is generating exactly zero great people points in the real world yet can put William Faulkner and Lane Kiffin on it’s resume.
That’s when it gets really dumb, when your cities are maxed out, you’re researching new buildings every 2 turns, and then popping them up on every planet, and it just never ends; it’s a pyramid scheme in space.
No, not at all, this forum thread works just fine. Just an automated message from the forum software. If anything, this site is notorious for necroing 14 year old threads only tangentially related so as to not make a new one. :)
On the star lanes point, they get used because they’re an approximation to terrain.
Players aren’t particularly experienced or skilled in fully open maps (a front line in space makes zero sense when you can easily travel on a vector that bisects gravity wells to assault core locations).
Master of Orion managed to make it work with their network design and the limits on travel distance (again, makes no real sense in space where to fuel costs are only at acceleration and deceleration).
So we end up with star lanes by default (see stellaris’ post release changes around transit types for civilisations) because players can understand them and how to travel on them and defend choke points etc
I think soon you’ll discover an extremely major flaw.
This would be ny favourite empire building game if not for difficulty balance. Mind you, I don’t expect a smart AI, just the one who can put up any fight at all, send some fleets my way, get enough bonuses to win economic victory if Icm not fast enough. ES2 is the only 4X game I’ve ever beaten on the bighest difficulty level. And it was like my 3rd game at all, first one on the highest difficulty, with a faction I haven’t played before. I’ve tried couple more games later when theycve updated the game. And it was total victory where I chose to go for conquest victory cause it was faster than waiting for an inevitable turtling victory.
I adore all the interesting choices and complex mechanics. I weep cause there’s no point at all in using them. Once you learn the basic you will be able to win in your sleep ignoring most of the mechanics.
BTW, the message about clise victory was probably about one of the competitive quests. I remember being similarly confused.
I think the main reason why MoO was able to make it work is very limited scope compared to most modern games. Being concerned about the enemy being able to attack most of your colonies is not as stressful when it’s like 6 planets, and most can have automated defence against small fleets. In Stellaris you have hundreds of systems under your control, you really want to have some sort of a frontline.
Agreed.
Also, it’s far easier to teach an AI how to use Star Lanes than the other systems!
I loved the game. My main criticism of it was the awful AI once the game gets to the middle stage.
It would be interesting to see how this plays out on a very large map of Remants of the Precursors. I think the MOO approach can scale as long as the speeds are kept reasonable relative to the distances - and there is some commitment to your destination. That makes sending a large fleet a long way into your enemies core a big commitment with it’s own risks.