Cmon, you know you wanna!
Two months from now it will be 80% done instead of 40%, and still available at the EA price. Hell, probably on sale for the holidays.
I love Amplitude’s games, but this is a tough one for me to justify as it stands today.
Well, it sure looks pretty!
I am someone who never played Endless Space 1 (although I have it), enjoyed Stellaris but otherwise don’t have that much experience with Space 4x, and enjoyed Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless.
I looked over the full overview of the game features here, and to be honest it doesn’t seem like there are many unique features in the game or major new ideas compared to other 4x games (although of course the existing ideas might be implemented better here).
Except the Senate and to a lesser extent the population aspect. I really like how you had pops in Stellaris (borrowing a term from the Paradox game Victoria 2), but until there are some expansions in that game the internal politics are so far fairly uninteresting. The Senate in this game, however, reads like the Senate in Victoria 2, and so I am very interested.
Assuming this feature is fleshed out in the Alpha, I would be very interested to hear impressions on it from alpha players.
So, basically, this is in the state Stellaris was in when it was released?
-Tom
I think you should give ES 1 a try. I liked it so much more than Stellaris. I have 100+ hours in ES. It’s not great, but it was solid and worth playing.
Not a bad idea, thanks. For some reason I thought ES 1 was universally panned.
It’s wholeheartedly panned by Brian Rubin, but there are a lot of people that like it.
[quote=“Tim_N, post:107, topic:77211”]Not a bad idea, thanks. For some reason I thought ES 1 was universally panned.
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ES1 had a very mixed reception, but mostly it was positive until a few months after release when people had some experience with the game.
ES1 looks and sounds fantastic and 80% of the GUI is incredibly good. The remaining 20% of the GUI gets seriously annoying after a while, there’s very little depth to the tech trees compared to other 4X games, and while the AI can definitely challenge you, it doesn’t do a very good job of it because it’s very luck-based because the AI player that derps out the hardest and the fastest will feed its neighbour and so on, so one empire typically ends up snowballing far beyond what you would expect was possible, and assuming you play with a bunch of AIs, then chances are obviously that the snowballer is gonna be one of them.
Disharmony, the DLC, changed things in a great many ways, all of them for the better. But while Disharmony’s AI isn’t nearly as problematic as the one in the base game, it’s arguably weaker because it’s smarter and less likely to snowball. Oh yeah and the GUI is also much improved. I don’t know whether these changes com without Disharmony, which I believe is a pay to play DLC. But either way I would recommend the game with the DLC.
To me personally, ES1 was the most fun I’ve ever had learning how to play the game, but also one of the most disappointing when I had learned how. Because as mentioned, there isn’t a whole lot of depth compared to what you usually find in 4X games. But I certainly feel I got my money’s worth. It looks great, sounds great, and mostly plays great. But 100 hours is probably pushing it in terms of how much time you can sink into it, because it’s a relatively simplistic game for a 4X. In fact it’s the game I recommend people play if they’ve never played a 4X before.
But yeah I can certainly understand why the reception - especially a couple of months later - was very mixed.
Endless Space gets a bad rap around these parts but I loved it and still adore it. ES1 emphasized empire management, exploration, and research and I enjoyed how it focused on those aspects.
I guess if you are a hardcore min-maxer and need to suck the marrow from every inch of a game Endless Space will eventually not compare well to something like Distant World.
For the average player Endless Space is fantastic and some of the best race mythos building in the businesss. It has a minimalist aesthetic that makes me feel lonely (like STALKER) and I love that.
Don’t listen to the hive mind and enjoy a really great space 4X.
I liked some aspects of ES1, but the infinite identical combats killed it for me. It’s ridiculous for a small empire to crank out multiple full fleets every turn. Even with autoresolve this means it takes forever to finish a war. Stacked AI fleets on a key system means you just sit there attacking and attacking and attacking until you get bored or they finally develop a higher tech level… So AI production levels should have been divided by a factor of 10.
Heh, I think ES2 is already better than Stellaris. Then again, Stellaris never grabbed me, whereas I really enjoyed ES1. Some initial thoughts on ES2 after a few hours of gameplay:
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The turn-one decisions were interesting, and this alone drew me in – it prompted me to look at every info screen, ponder the map, think about stuff. On tech, for example: There were 16 age-one techs to choose from; actually, as I’m playing the Sophons, in theory I could choose from 16 age-2 techs as well, but they’re all too pricy. I read earlier in this thread that there’s no “tech tree” yet within each age, so maybe the 16 choices will be reduced to 8 or 4 by launch, but they all seemed roughly equal in value to me, so maybe not? I also had to choose among 4 or 5 production options – another ship, or various types of infrastructure. And of course I had to guess which way to point my scout. I think I might also have had the option to send a scout’s onboard “probe” off into a random direction in space – I didn’t discover that ability until the tutorial prompted me about it around turn 10.
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There are at some neat features I don’t remember from ES1. The onboard “probes” are one example. Quests are another: around turn 10 or 12 I got my first quest, and soon I had a couple quests going on simultaneously. They remind me of the Endless Legend quests, which is a good thing. The Senate and politics seem more in-depth, but I don’t really understand them yet. The combat planning UI is different, but I don’t know if combat will be any deeper than it was in ES1 – I’ve only done one fight so far. It was a draw, but it was interesting.
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Some AI stomped my nascent settlement in a neighboring system! I don’t know if it was pirates or another civ or what. Interesting fog of war. I like that I didn’t get away with spamming a colony ship and sending it somewhere unescorted.
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I like the slick UI and helpful tooltips, but as always I wish there were more hotkeys.
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It’s pretty. Not sure if I’ll tire of the pretty planet flybys when you first find a new system.
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I like the music, but I haven’t yet heard the beautiful main theme from ES1. I hope it makes it into this one.
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After about 20 turns or so, I’m still finding the decisions interesting. I’m playing very slowly because I’m poking around every screen.
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Yes, some features are missing, but so far I don’t much care. Only 2 victory conditions (score and military?) are enabled. There’s a 100-turn limit for now, though they say that may change soon. Only the expert tutorial is available. Some planet-detail screens are disabled. As mentioned, the tech three may acquire more of a treelike structure; not sure yet.
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Still seems plenty fun to me!
Did ES1 have the feature that when you colonize a planet, it doesn’t start with population, and you have to wait for migration to reach the 1 pop threshold for it to become an official colony (and gain sovereignty over the system?). I thought that was pretty nice.
ES2 certainly has that feature. That’s how I lost my first budding colony, called an “outpost” – someone stomped it before it grew to 1 pop. I now have another outpost somewhere else.
I started a game very briefly last night. Played just a handful of turns and had one of those religious fanatics sucking population out of my homeworld. I thought that was pretty rude but there was little I could do about it, as I hadn’t had the time to build a single structure or build any defenses. I shouted some real profanities at 'em though, so hopefully I hurt their feelings at least.
I think it’s a nice way to do things. Different races can also get into a colonization race for a system, and you can spend influence to draw extra people from your nearby colonies, or even poach population from other outputs in the system.
I can see it evolving into a system where there is a fringe of semi-independent outputs set up by non-state actors and “colonization” is less about sending a ship and more about exerting sovereignty over the frontier.
Yeah I played around with it for about half an hour last night. The visuals are great and I like the interface. Many of the features aren’t implemented yet so in that sense it’s kind of bare bones. Still happy with my purchase.
In my brief time with it, it felt more like a turn-limited demo for a game that was already out than an alpha. It feels like a lot of visual polish on the parts that they have done.
Is the combat the same that it was in Endless Space 1? Please say yes.
-Tom
I hope combat system is transparent and understandable in ES 2, because I never understood it in ES 1.