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Truga posted:But stellaris is real loving good???
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Sep 13, 2017 14:59
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I put way more hours into Stellaris because I *believed* it would get better vs ES2 which is actually a way more polished "experience" which I pretty quickly consumed. It's like watching a really good 2 hour movie vs watching Lost or something where you just keep slogging because you hope there's a payoff but it's ultimately extremely disappointing. That's always been my experience with Stellaris, keep sinking hours in hoping it will become fun or maybe that next DLC will fix things. Nope.
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Sep 13, 2017 18:55
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stellaris has a lot of cool content to find which can keep your attention for a good period of time until you gradually become crushed by how poor the underlying game is
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Sep 13, 2017 18:58
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Baronjutter posted:I put way more hours into Stellaris because I *believed* it would get better vs ES2 which is actually a way more polished "experience" which I pretty quickly consumed. It's like watching a really good 2 hour movie vs watching Lost or something where you just keep slogging because you hope there's a payoff but it's ultimately extremely disappointing. That's always been my experience with Stellaris, keep sinking hours in hoping it will become fun or maybe that next DLC will fix things. Nope. Jeb Bush 2012 posted:stellaris has a lot of cool content to find which can keep your attention for a good period of time until you gradually become crushed by how poor the underlying game is
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Sep 13, 2017 19:04
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:stellaris has a lot of cool content to find which can keep your attention for a good period of time until you gradually become crushed by how poor the underlying game is Yeah, I liked stellaris a lot at the time but it was too much of the complete removal of the mini work left up to the AI, whereas ES leaves too much busy work with no top level activities to speak of...
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Sep 13, 2017 19:41
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I've sunk 300 hours into stellaris and maybe 3 of those felt boring because the game turns into a slog once you've already won the game and just need to mop up to get the game over screen, but that's true of almost any game that allows maps that big. I just stop playing and start a new game when that happens  AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I get the feeling that this opinion is in the minority. It's a very different game though. I liked ES1 a lot (I bought in early because it was the first thing in forever that look kinda like a decent MOO thing, they added sowers a few months later and then I played non-stop for like a month), I loving love EL, and stellaris scratches a very different itch for me. I *like* the early pop micromanagement, and when my empire gets big enough that it starts to become tedious inbetween worrying about wars or whatever (at like 7-8 planets), I just chuck everything into sectors and forget about it, which I also like because then I can focus more on other things, which also helps since it's kinda a RTS game and I mostly play multiplayer. I also don't mind that combat is "go here and fight", but then my favourite RTS games are warcraft 2, supreme commander and planetary annihilation. Anyway, looks like I'm buying ES2 since people who I assume mostly also played ES1 in here seem to think it's good, so I'll probably like it. RIP my weekend.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:41
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Truga posted:uhh "very positive" on steam seems to disagree. I left the discord, stopped reading its thread, stopped playing the game, and stopped following its development because I am of the opinion that there is no saving it. I'm waiting to buy ES2 because I have gotten the impression that it still needs some work and I do not want to buy into any hype or get it before it is "ready". AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 19:55
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If steam reviews of paradox games were to be trusted then all EU4 DLC is a horrible over-priced scam wake up sheeple.
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Sep 13, 2017 19:59
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I personally do not know anyone who likes it; watching a ton of goons change their opinions on it after it was released was fun to watch. Same, every single person I know who was hyped about it and got it went from "Ok this game is unfinished but has great bones! It's going to be the next EU4 after expansions!" to "There's some pretty big flaws but wiz will totally gut the needed bad mechanics" to "forget about it, it's unfixable due to core design flaws and mechanics and they're just tacking mana tickers on top" 
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Sep 13, 2017 20:01
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Regularly reading the stellaris thread, I think many people buy into stellaris wanting either a paradox grand strategy game in space, or a clone of their fav space 4X, but it's different from both so there's many salty people. Me and a bunch of my friends play together and we're always having fun, but I did get in pretty late (was talked into it instead of buying ES2 that was about to leave early access IIRC, by my friends) and I went in knowing absolutely nothing about what to expect except "space strategy with decent customizable empire gameplay variety", and for me it definitely delivered that, especially post utopia. I will say though that if you don't like the base game, any DLCs are definitely not going to fix that. And that's fine, not every game is for everyone AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:I'm waiting to buy ES2 because I have gotten the impression that it still needs some work and I do not want to buy into any hype or get it before it is "ready". vvvv: except all the things you keep calling flaws is things many people seem to like, so
Truga fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 20:26
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Truga posted:Regularly reading the stellaris thread, I think many people buy into stellaris wanting either a paradox grand strategy game in space, or a clone of their fav space 4X, but it's different from both so there's many salty people. waving away complaints about a game with "oh those people just expected the wrong thing" is a pretty standard move, but no, people were expecting a 4x game with grand strategy-ish twists, and that's exactly what they got. the problem is that they got a seriously flawed one
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Sep 13, 2017 20:31
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I bought Stellaris a while back because people said it was a grand strategy game, which sounded awesome! Except that it's actually a game about clearing tiles on planets and micromanaging your exploration ships and after an hour of that I was already bored and had basically zero resources. Miserable slog was about right. Grand Strategy implies it's about the macro not the micro, but Stellaris had layer upon layer of micro management topped off with garbage level real time combat. I see people post cool things about it, but it seems like Dwarf Fortress to me: awesome concept, neat to read about, painful for (many) people to actually play.
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Sep 14, 2017 00:24
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Just reinstalled es2 and lost my day to it. I found Stellaris too dull. The fluff is cool and the scope is great (some great music too) but its just too slow and lifeless.
Surprise Giraffe fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 00:35
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Surprise Giraffe posted:Just reinstalled es2 and lost my day to it. I found Stellaris too dull. The fluff is cool and the scope is great (some great music too) but its just too slow and lifeless. ES2 has a really good flow to the game. It's VERY easy to sink a ton of hours into it in one sitting. It's a drat good game. They've taken all the good things for ES1 and EL and made a really good game here.
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Sep 14, 2017 17:16
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The Gate posted:I bought Stellaris a while back because people said it was a grand strategy game, which sounded awesome! If it helps, there are mods that let you automate your science ships from the beginning of the game. You still have to manage tiles yourself though (or put them into sectors and let the AI mismanage them terribly)
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Sep 15, 2017 17:07
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ES2 will have DLC. The question will be when. I know they wanted to get fighters & bombers in first, as that was one of the "promised" features they had in their overview for the game. Probably different races will be DLC. Come on vaulters, full race. Not offshoot of the UE.
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Sep 15, 2017 21:31
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IAmTheRad posted:Come on vaulters, full race. Not offshoot of the UE. This is like wanting the Massachussets Bay Colony in Civ because the United States isn't specific enough. The UE are what the Vaulters became after they left Auriga.
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Sep 15, 2017 23:02
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No they're not. The UE and Vaulters are both distinct offshoots of the collapsed Mezari empire.
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Sep 15, 2017 23:07
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Ainsley McTree posted:If it helps, there are mods that let you automate your science ships from the beginning of the game. You still have to manage tiles yourself though (or put them into sectors and let the AI mismanage them terribly) I just think that including tiles on planets is needless, boring busywork. Functionally, it's not really any different than just building a building in any given 4X game, except you have to wait longer to start and do a bunch of extra clicking to get there. Meh.
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Sep 16, 2017 00:19
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The Gate posted:I just think that including tiles on planets is needless, boring busywork. Functionally, it's not really any different than just building a building in any given 4X game, except you have to wait longer to start and do a bunch of extra clicking to get there. Meh. yeah this is the thing that eventually killed any desire to keep playing the game for me. even the anemic military system wasn't a dealbreaker, but the tile development system is both awful and constantly demands your attention if you don't want your economy to fall behind
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Sep 16, 2017 00:23
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Man es2 needs an Android port. The UI is simple enough to be touch friendly.
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Sep 16, 2017 05:48
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Bring back Sowers, maybe as an expanding minor faction.
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Sep 19, 2017 13:09
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It's possible, they're still referenced a few times in fluff. But what would they get to set them apart from the Riftborn? They largely have the same gimmick.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:25
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:It's possible, they're still referenced a few times in fluff. But what would they get to set them apart from the Riftborn? They largely have the same gimmick. The sowers are more passive aggressive about it.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:49
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Sower unique buildings include the SHADE Array and a tea farm.
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Sep 19, 2017 21:57
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I have a Google Doc lying around somewhere about how I wanted the Sowers gimmick to be a single pop that never grows but can terraform worlds into paradises that lure other faction's citizens to go live on them instead, like a really belligerent gardener that wants everyone to look at his Dust begonias. Building a colony ship is replaced with sending out another Sower to another system to repeat the process.
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Sep 19, 2017 22:35
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Picked ES2 up and played through a game as the UE over the weekend (on a lower difficulty to learn things), and now I'm kind of torn between wanting to jump into another game immediately and shelving it for a while until it gets a few of the rough edges sanded down. The AI and diplomacy are still pretty messy to say the least. The AI freaking out because you have a scout with a pea shooter equipped fly through their space still seems to be a problem, although from reading the last few pages it seems like that was supposed to be fixed months ago. I really wish the AI's motivations were much clearer. Just give up and admit that Civ IV did this perfectly 20 years ago and copy that. Simple + and - list that shows what's making them like you and what's pissing them off. I had a nice peace/science/trade agreement set up with the riftborn but for some reason we kept switching back to cold war every few turns, tanking my trade route, and then I'd have to bribe them with a stack of dust and resources to get the deals back on. From what I could deduce, it seems like this was being caused by someone in the alliance that I was invited to and then forgot about. But I'm honestly still not sure, because the game does nothing to tell me that. I'd just hit next turn and see a diplomatic status update claiming 'you switched to cold war'. Uh, no I didn't? If my alliance is making decisions, I wish the game would clearly explain that, and preferable give me some kind of vote in the process. And also an option to ultimately leave the alliance if they decide to switch to war/peace with a race that I don't want to declare on. Not just an out of nowhere 'a thing happened' alert with absolutely no other context. Also it takes the AI way too long to make decisions. EL uses almost exactly the same UI with a like/dislike bar that updates as you add things to the trade window, but it does it instantly, instead of spending 10 seconds 'thinking' about it. And the option to suggest terms that the other race will accept literally never worked for me. It just hangs the trade screen forever until you close it. Again, this is all stuff that Civ had working just fine decades ago. It's not like slapping a slick presentation and fancy UI on top of it should make the underlying code any more complicated, right? And I think maybe the game isn't spawning certain resources until someone actually researches the tech to exploit them, which is a bit of a problem. That should really be baked into the universe to start with. Like the green lightning bolt thing (quadrinix?) didn't spawn anywhere in my universe until I'd actually unlocked that tech. And since I'd explored every subterranean resource on my worlds, that meant I had to poke around worlds that the AI had left unexplored until I found some. What happens if every world gets fully explored before you unlock that tech? You just never get to use any building that requires it? And you're locked out of the monument victory, too. Oh and system governors are dumb and will replace planetary improvements with something different for no good reason. Oh you want science focus? Let me replace all of these dust focused desert worlds instead of building the actual useful science upgrades.  Which means you're kind of stuck micro-managing your empire forever unless you're already so powerful that it doesn't matter, in which case you should probably just go win the game already. Anyway, lots of venting over details, but overall the beautiful art and music really draw you in and make the underlying spreadsheet columns come to life. And as intermittently annoying as it was, the overall experience was pretty good. I just hope some kind of deep AI and diplomacy overhaul is slated for some time in the future.
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Sep 19, 2017 23:56
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BobTheJanitor posted:And I think maybe the game isn't spawning certain resources until someone actually researches the tech to exploit them, which is a bit of a problem. That should really be baked into the universe to start with. Like the green lightning bolt thing (quadrinix?) didn't spawn anywhere in my universe until I'd actually unlocked that tech. And since I'd explored every subterranean resource on my worlds, that meant I had to poke around worlds that the AI had left unexplored until I found some. You need two techs: the tech to survey Quadrinix and the tech to mine Quadrinix. The former comes automatically from going up the bottom tree - you can't actually see Quadrinix anomalies to scan them until you have it.
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Sep 20, 2017 00:10
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The Deleter posted:I have a Google Doc lying around somewhere about how I wanted the Sowers gimmick to be a single pop that never grows but can terraform worlds into paradises that lure other faction's citizens to go live on them instead, like a really belligerent gardener that wants everyone to look at his Dust begonias. Building a colony ship is replaced with sending out another Sower to another system to repeat the process. That sounds amazing. You should track down that file!
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Sep 20, 2017 06:31
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Cease to Hope posted:You need two techs: the tech to survey Quadrinix and the tech to mine Quadrinix. The former comes automatically from going up the bottom tree - you can't actually see Quadrinix anomalies to scan them until you have it. Must have just been weird luck, then. I had nothing spawn anywhere on my extensive collection of systems, and didn't find anything until I started poking around the AI's worlds with leftover anomalies. Fortunately there was some on a Craver world not too far from me, and I'd basically started the game with them on my doorstep and had to beat them back into a little corner anyway to keep my game from being the forever war.
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Sep 20, 2017 15:12
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Resources are definitely baked into a specific "region" not necessarily matching the constellations or whatever they're called, but I think they still spawn randomly from anomalies so it's possible to end up with almost nothing high-level if you've done a bunch of early exploration. Not sure about the latter though and especially not sure if it applies to strategic resources or just to luxury, but that's what it feels like when playing at least. fakeedit: A different way to put it is that I've experienced unlocking level 3 anomalies but only finding mushrooms everywhere until I also unlock the higher level luxury resources.
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Sep 20, 2017 16:06
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I burned out on ES1 due to portal memes and other such G2G idiocy. Is that still a thing in ES2?
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Sep 21, 2017 08:03
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I picked this up over the past few days, as for above, the only meme thing I have seen so far is sometimes on the full race selection screen Horatio will tell you to make him great again
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Sep 21, 2017 08:48
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Tree Bucket posted:That sounds amazing. You should track down that file! Okay, I found it. I'll paraphrase what I've got since I don't know if anyone wants to read my rambling bullshit. So this is entirely dependent on if/how the game implements migration in any way, but the Sowers Affinity would be that every time they complete a building on a star system or terraform a planet, that star system becomes Attractive, which will lure non-native populations to travel to your worlds. The timing of the buff can be reset and kept perpetually up if you get enough industry, and the strength of that buff can be increased through techs. There might also be some options for kicking out unwanted populations. A Sower population never grows, provides food if no improvements are in the build queue, and provides industry when something is. There can only ever be one per system, and building a colony ship spawns a new Sower pop instead of consuming the pop. This is essentially a planet-bound Vodyani Ark. Sower pops are ecologists primarily, with some religious and industrialist leanings. Starting party is, of course, Ecologists. A Sower turning up is a galactic event. It lands in a system and begins to convert it to a paradise for the Endless. It doesn't communicate, and it doesn't seem to care if people move in. It just works and works and works. The Empire's dispossed and political enemies flee to these planets to seek a new life and encounter a wonder-land of dust-powered post-scarcity bordering on sheer magic. When the enforcers turn up to extradite these traitors, the Sower blossoms into a host of ships like dandelion seeds, obliterates the incoming danger, and reforms to continue the work.
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Sep 21, 2017 10:38
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Any thoughts on strike crafts? In ES1 their introduction wasn't that game changing iirc.
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Sep 21, 2017 11:39
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A patch just dropped that makes getting Bombers and Fighters easier to get - Bombers are now on the same tech as fighters. That's good - the separation seemed a little dumb to me.
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Sep 21, 2017 20:25
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The tech tree still has a lot of dumb in it. Some techs feel like fillers, which I guess would happen when you decide your tech tree has to be a specific shape and have at least X and no more than Y techs in a section. You end up with some techs that just do one underwhelming thing, and others that have an empire, planet, and system improvement all crammed in one. In general I've never been too happy in any of the Endless games with the way they partition things off so specifically, especially with the military techs. It's sort of unrealistic, if that even really applies to games about sci-fantasy space monsters. It's not like there were a lot of technological breakthroughs in history that had only purely military or purely civilian applications. But probably it's just because I tend to get tunnel vision in my 4X games, and unless someone is currently attacking me I never opt to research military technologies, up until the point that their tanks are rolling over me and I'm hurriedly trying to get my scientists developing pointy stick technology. So I kind of wish they would distill more techs down into providing both military and empire building options. But I doubt that's likely to change, 3 games in they seem pretty committed to the idea. Also having the game winning science techs on the same tiers as other techs feels like it makes all the other techs on that tier kind of pointless. Gee, should I research getting more money or winning the game? It would almost make more sense to push them out to a new tier by themselves, and maybe rebalance the cost of everything else down a tiny bit if that makes science wins unobtainable in a reasonable time frame. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure that's the way the original ES did it.
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Sep 21, 2017 23:16
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Just downloaded the EL artbook and it's fantastic, thinking of taking it to a printers and getting a book copy made, because gently caress reading PDFs.
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Sep 22, 2017 00:51
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BobTheJanitor posted:It would almost make more sense to push them out to a new tier by themselves They basically are, the science cost to research the victory techs are huge compared to everything else.
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Sep 22, 2017 01:29
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Splicer posted:I burned out on ES1 due to portal memes and other such G2G idiocy. Is that still a thing in ES2? No. Amplitude learned their lesson and curate the g2g stuff pretty heavily since Endless Legend. Its been to the games' benefit as both community designed factions have been pretty cool.
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Sep 22, 2017 01:59
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