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I bounce on and off with Cravers but they're definitely one of my favourites. I ended up making a custom variant without the depletion if I wanted a more traditional game but still doing their storyline
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Jun 3, 2019 05:01
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EL finally clicked with me and I have questions. I haven't bought the latest two DLCs, but I plan to. Are the Mykara still underpowered? What's the best victory type for the forgotten? How about the Morgawr and Kapaku? Are there any factions that just can't function when playing tall? I like going tall and peaceful and I've found this surprisingly easy to do most of the time (though peace is not an option with cultists and I truly doubt you can do it with the shrooms) and I know broken lords want to spread out, but I don't know about some of them. Like Morgawr, forgotten and Kapaku. Who's really bad at Endless Sim City?
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Jun 18, 2019 03:48
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Ragnar34 posted:EL finally clicked with me and I have questions. Forgotten are pretty good at both a supremacy victory and a science one. Despite generating no science of their own, if you get a good dust economy going you can make up for it (helps that they can steal techs to make up the difference). Their units are slightly defensively weak compared to their counterparts but that's why you're meant to use spying to weaken your enemies; blast their fortifications down to nothing around their cities or use a spy action to severely weaken their units. UNLIKE the spying add-on in Endless Space 2, the spying in EL is great and works fine. Mykara aren't underpowered at all in my opinion, but you do have to play to their strengths. They can move troops around fast like Vaulters, but take over unclaimed territories like Cultists, and tiles they fungi-fy they can use as those teleporters. They also have a couple of buffs for dealing with Urkans which is really sweet. You can't have a horde of disposable soldiers auto-generating like Cultists but you can move what forces you have around the map in record time to compensate. Speedball fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jun 18, 2019 |
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Jun 18, 2019 05:13
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Coming back to the Legend again, trying Mykara. Feels like a faction you have to understand and master, this map control is something else and I was very wrong thinking initially that this is a peaceful faction. Their bonus from capturing every faction city was a strong hint about them. This game is really not what it seems. It really subverts and expands the genre, the problem is it's mimicking the conventions so well that you might be tricked into thinking it's the same as Civilization or GalCiv or (god forbid) Stellaris. All the rest of 4X/empire building games I know allow you some freedom in development supplemented by a variety of victory paths, but it's more of asking what you're going to focus on. In something like Civilization you might not focus on, say, trade, but not doing them is just a bad play. You might not get deep into the religious game (and due to how difficulty works on a higher difficulty you won't unless you really focus on it) but you still have to get that pagan belief and then embrace one of the religions. At first, when you look at EL you think those faction unique abilities are gimmicks adding to replayability. But eventually, you see that whoever you play as you have such a variety of paths that it makes the game unlike anything else. It makes the game hard to get into initially. You still think that you need to have that Civilization vertical growth in every direction. If there's a resource you need to exploit it, if there's a quest you need to complete it, if there's a unit you have to build it, if there's a faction you have to do diplomacy with it. But in this game, you can truly ignore some things and it's fine. You'll probably never ignore research completely, but it takes some practice to realize that science is not the king it is in every other strategy game here. And expansions doubled down on it. The original game did a good job using various factions to explain that you can play without ever doing diplomacy or starting a war, or by playing tall. Even though initially you may feel like some mechanics were only added for a specific faction to use and are less useful to other mechanics (sadly diplomacy often feels like this). But then you got a lot of additional mechanics that you are free to ignore or endorse. With expansions, you have giants, legendary deeds/wonders, espionage, invisible units, pillaging, pearl resource from exploration, additional exploration during eclipses, naval exploration, naval forts, urkans... And most of it you can ignore. This game has more mechanics you should only pay lip service to in any given session than most 4X have mechanics in general.
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Jun 21, 2019 08:52
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I love Mykara with all my heart (tied for favorite faction with the Forgotten), but honestly, power-level wise they're not great (also lol @ dlc launch when they started with search parties instead of cultivation). I think the ELCP mod does a good job of tweaking their numbers to bring them more in line (and the mod is worth it even if you turn off all the balance changes, for just the sheer amount of AI and bug fixes). Having said that, some hot Mykara tips: - The overall dynamic is similar to Cultists: you're a predominantly militant faction with a somewhat slow start, soft-claiming land as your sphere of influence and having to routinely go out and murder those who simply settle in provinces you want. The difference is that while the Cult embarks on wars of attrition with their innumerable free hordes, you're operating more of a small elite team (due to your natural production bottleneck) that pulls double duty by pouncing on fools, teleporting away to heal up while hoovering up pearls and then teleporting again to land another blow. - Always micro your starting units and learn to kite with them. They usually end fights unscratched or dead and sometimes even the direction you attack from makes or breaks a fight (because of terrain). When you get other units, switch their weapons to grant attack debuff. - Do not fall into the trap of spamming blooms for FIDSI. Having that food go towards more pops is way more effective in that regard. Prioritize extractors, with some strategic teleports near them so you can defend them quickly. Volcanic regions own bones, because they have a bunch of resources and (unless there's Kapaku nearby) nobody will settle there - and your blooms don't care about the food malus! - The best minors to assimilate are Sillics and Dorgeshi (though don't tackle the latter with Ipotanes) to counteract your inefficient extractor penalty. Bos with their food bonus are pretty sweet too, but again - you won't tackle them with starting units. - Tech the starting hero towards the martial half of the racial talent tree (+20% offense is great and movement unaffected by terrain is *crucial* to make the rapid response gimmick work, the ruins can be placed really awkwardly). The single point investment in the tier 1 food skill is not exactly a waste, since it'll carry you over until you buy the second fungusman to properly develop into a governor. Save up cash for him, skipping bloom buyout during the first eclipse of the game. - The tier 1 food talent is bonkers good, but the food cost reduction one is garbage. -100% food upkeep sounds insane, but if you actually crunch the numbers it's actually pretty bad. - Overgrown cities no longer tank your approval, but they still count as full cities for empire size penalties! It is therefore usually best to raze them a turn before the next empire plan once you've gotten the assimilation trait. Perhaps some properly sprawling capitals can be worth keeping for a while. - Know your assimilation bonuses, because some are pretty useless. Like the Drakken: a pitiful influence saving on minor assimilation (that you'll maybe use once or twice in a game) and +2 influence from your single starting province minor village (yep, it doesn't work on fungalized minors on neutral territory). Wish Clans gave marketplace discount  .- It's poorly documented, but the late game watchtowers (both the pearl and ordinary tech ones) provide FIDSI from the adjacent hexes too. - Racial technologies straight up suck, only bother with units (and even at that the Gorgons are optional). - Summer blitzkrieg recipe: once an eclipse hits, declare war, dust buyout a ruin next to your victim's borders and stream troops in. Fun fact: you might notice the Mykara are now coded to never have the sisters of mercy hero available, because her skill preventing negative food income made it possible to make literal infinite blooms.
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Jun 21, 2019 10:37
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Lichtenstein posted:- The tier 1 food talent is bonkers good, but the food cost reduction one is garbage. -100% food upkeep sounds insane, but if you actually crunch the numbers it's actually pretty bad. When I saw this bonus I thought that the game tells me that I have to turn the hero into a governor as soon as he reaches level 3. But now that I have >300 food income on 18 pop city I can see it was a trap. And apart from initial +1 food on everything this hero doesn't help the economy in other ways. Defense bonus was nice for that one fight when my neighbor attacked me but now I have to go fro +5% FIDSI bonus and winter immunity and those are meh. I thought an eclipse is supposed to make overgrowth faster and wondered why am I not seeing this, but you say it opens an option to buyout? Oh boy. On what speed are you all playing? Fast looks like the right one without it all dragging, but I'm worried about balance. It feels like Empire Plans, for example, are much harder to use because you don't get enough influence.
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Jun 21, 2019 11:02
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Fast mostly biases against military strategies, esp cultists and necro who have lots of slow troops. The trickiest part about Endless games is that they're really about what you don't do. The big hint is in the tech column: in nearly all other 4x you research everything, but in EL especially, that is a trap. You have to choose, and "just get more" is a bad choice.
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Jun 21, 2019 13:18
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I feel they've backed down from it in ES2. In EL there are not so many techs that anybody should get, and most of those are obvious and early (resource extractors, army size upgrade, market, basic FIDSI income - even those can be probably ignored) but in ES2 I can't imagine any situation where you shouldn't grab trade companies or black hole travel or supply upgrades.
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Jun 21, 2019 13:26
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ilitarist posted:When I saw this bonus I thought that the game tells me that I have to turn the hero into a governor as soon as he reaches level 3. But now that I have >300 food income on 18 pop city I can see it was a trap. And apart from initial +1 food on everything this hero doesn't help the economy in other ways. Defense bonus was nice for that one fight when my neighbor attacked me but now I have to go fro +5% FIDSI bonus and winter immunity and those are meh. If you're playing a game challenging enough to ever worry about being conquered, the retaliation talent is actually hilarious. You can stack it with the Pearl-based retaliation buildings for iirc 100% of your fortification value being inflicted as damage per turn. Good luck sieging that. quote:I thought an eclipse is supposed to make overgrowth faster and wondered why am I not seeing this, but you say it opens an option to buyout? Oh boy.
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Jun 21, 2019 14:30
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ilitarist posted:I feel they've backed down from it in ES2. In EL there are not so many techs that anybody should get, and most of those are obvious and early (resource extractors, army size upgrade, market, basic FIDSI income - even those can be probably ignored) but in ES2 I can't imagine any situation where you shouldn't grab trade companies or black hole travel or supply upgrades. Yeah definitely. Nearly all techs in EL are situational, but in ES2 that only describes half or so. Probably even bigger is that tier is a larger determinant of tech cost than previous research, so if you skip a valuable early tech it's easy to grab it as a 1 or even 0 turn tech later (I do this often with the one that lets you draft pops into manpower). It creates a rhythm for sure but it's less unusual from a 4x standpoint
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Jun 21, 2019 15:06
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Finished the game on the serious difficulty (5 of 7). Seems I've outgrown it as after a midgame I was able to secure an easy alliance with a big power and eventually won a scientific victory ditching the leader several turns before the end. Naturally, I also traded one of the victory techs for some earlier techs. Fast feels right indeed: I think on a standard 6 player map I had enough time for supremacy victory if I realized earlier that I have to go militant. In the end I've gone scientific cause holding land as Mykara is unreliable anyway. And in general I feel that winning "peaceful" victory even if it's mostly about victory makes for a better game, you don't get this boring mopping down of enemy remnants. Quest line reminds me that ES2 did it much better. There was some choice involved in ES2 and main quest line was, in a way, an additional tech tree. Here I have interesting texts to read but the actual quests are pretty boring and eventually they send me far away for a little gain. Sadly EL still provides some challenge and interesting games while ES2 suffers immensely from the fact that you can win the game through alliances even when every AI outperforms you.
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Jun 21, 2019 20:13
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Tulip posted:Yeah definitely. Nearly all techs in EL are situational, but in ES2 that only describes half or so. Probably even bigger is that tier is a larger determinant of tech cost than previous research, so if you skip a valuable early tech it's easy to grab it as a 1 or even 0 turn tech later (I do this often with the one that lets you draft pops into manpower). It creates a rhythm for sure but it's less unusual from a 4x standpoint Back in beta tech costs were handled more like EL, but with all the "mandatory" techs like planet colonization and trade companies, they reverted it back to ES1 style after enough people complained.
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Jun 22, 2019 23:13
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Clarste posted:Back in beta tech costs were handled more like EL, but with all the "mandatory" techs like planet colonization and trade companies, they reverted it back to ES1 style after enough people complained. I was one of the complainers  The beta system wasn't good but they may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. A large part was what you said - a much larger percentage of techs were non choices. But I can imagine a few better ways to resolve it (colony techs being tier rewards or more often piggy backed onto larger techs). The current system isn't bad by any means though, just less obviously Amplitude-y than in EL.
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Jun 23, 2019 00:23
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I was also one of the complainers, and in fact I suggested the system they ended up using (not that they copied me necessarily, it was a pretty obvious compromise between EL and ES1). I do agree that lumping more things into the automatic tier rewards could have been a nice way of handling it though.
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Jun 23, 2019 01:30
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Morlugon from the Endless Legend subreddit has made a PnP conversion of Endless Legend into a system called FantasyAGE. Thought I would share it here. The document is pretty slick and got a big thumbs up from some folks at Amplitude. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WztQ4GPCdHjt5lLq-hcP7dfTH2Bzfdis/view
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Jun 26, 2019 01:47
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 Endless Space 2 is 66% off on Steam.Seriously thinking about picking it up. I couldn't get into Stellaris to save my life, but I'm really craving a space 4X kind of game again.
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Jul 3, 2019 12:59
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You should, it's good! Especially if you like your factions to have different stuff going on.
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Jul 3, 2019 13:03
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It's good and fun. Different enough from stellaris that I bounce between them.
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Jul 3, 2019 16:53
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Stellaris is a paradox game and is really pretty fundamentally different from a MOO or galciv, in terms of the pacing and win conditions and how much poo poo is on the map. ES2 is weird but it's definitely in the same genre.
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Jul 3, 2019 17:35
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I'm one of those edgy whiney dudes who have >100 hours in the game and whine about its problems. I have many problems with ES2 and how its impotent AI/difficulty settings make mastering systems pointless. But I'd say that I got dozens of hours of pure joy from this game even if I'm not going to touch it anymore. Game mechanics, variety in approaches, the music, the visuals - it all makes the game feel great. I may have more hours in Stellaris but only a few of those hours were any good, most were spent looking for something to entertain myself with. So I'd say ES2 worth every penny it costs. It's not a 500 hour game like what Paradox or Creative Assembly sells you, but you won't be bored by it until you're done with it.
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Jul 4, 2019 09:15
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Before anyone runs off to play Stellaris because they've finished with ES2, I might cation them that the game is a 4x in sales pitch alone, combat/conquest in that game is so utterly borked that your first interaction with taking land from your aggressor will result in despairing cries of 'Why oh god why would they make it like this?!'. Go reinstall a clunky title from 20 years ago before playing Stellaris and expecting a 4x, is what I'm saying.
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Jul 4, 2019 15:15
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Serephina posted:Before anyone runs off to play Stellaris because they've finished with ES2, I might cation them that the game is a 4x in sales pitch alone, combat/conquest in that game is so utterly borked that your first interaction with taking land from your aggressor will result in despairing cries of 'Why oh god why would they make it like this?!'. Counterpoint stellaris is dope, wars make sense, and you take the things you said you were going to take when you started the war.
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Jul 4, 2019 16:20
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I like both Stellaris and Endless Space 2, but only Endless Space 2 is an easy recommendation. Stellaris is great but difficult to recommend to most.
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Jul 4, 2019 16:30
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Stellaris actively sends me to sleep.
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Jul 4, 2019 16:36
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Stellaris is Schrodinger's videogame at this point. It's great until it's not and it's bad until it's not. It has some really robust mechanisms/systems that are awesome, and others that are in dire need of polish. It is definitely a different beast than ESII and I agree with Illiterist's post about it. I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't fill this thread to with opinions on Stellaris because everyone is right.
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Jul 4, 2019 23:09
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pnumoman posted:I like both Stellaris and Endless Space 2, but only Endless Space 2 is an easy recommendation. Stellaris is great but difficult to recommend to most. Endless Space 2 is real easy to pick up and play, and Stellaris is harder to pick up and play but I find it's WAY easier than something like Crusader Kings 2
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Jul 5, 2019 00:50
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:and I agree with Illiterist's post about it. Till today I never ever thought that my nickname can be easily connected to my poor handling of English (please get rid of all of those articles and do something with all of those unpredictable prepositions). And today two different people make this connection in two separate threads. Does the universe try to tell me something?
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Jul 5, 2019 09:30
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I’m convinced paradox games are a practical joke against me, personally and everyone is pretending to like them
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Jul 5, 2019 12:19
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Amethyst posted:I’m convinced paradox games are a practical joke against me, personally and everyone is pretending to like them That is only true about Stellaris.
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Jul 5, 2019 12:36
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ilitarist posted:Till today I never ever thought that my nickname can be easily connected to my poor handling of English (please get rid of all of those articles and do something with all of those unpredictable prepositions). And today two different people make this connection in two separate threads. Does the universe try to tell me something? I think your posting is fine.
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Jul 5, 2019 13:49
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Ah, understandable!
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Jul 5, 2019 14:23
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So I'm probably not even halfway through my first playthrough of ES2, and what stands out to me vs. Stellaris is that it seems to be way easier to see how I hosed up when I gently caress up. With Stellaris, it would look like everything was going gangbusters for hours, and then suddenly some prick shows up with a single fleet that's 3x as powerful as my entire military, and I could have gone back 100 moves and never seen what the gently caress went wrong. Something about it was just profoundly unintuitive for me. 
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Jul 5, 2019 17:26
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So, out of curiosity, what would people say the faction balance is? I'm of the opinion that it's really not all that bad, with a major exception for the Vodyani since they're so much more map vulnerable than the rest. For the rest I'd say UC and Horatio are worse than average, and UE, Hissho, and Riftborn are above, but it's not all that sharp of a tier list.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:06
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I've only played UE extensively since it's by far my favourite faction but they're the best. also have the best soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KysITV4t5Esean10mm posted:So I'm probably not even halfway through my first playthrough of ES2, and what stands out to me vs. Stellaris is that it seems to be way easier to see how I hosed up when I gently caress up. Your situation in stellaris will depend a lot more on RNG. Since there's far less planets to colonize, you will get hosed over for a "fair" starting location every now and then, since only 2 extra colonizable planets are guaranteed, and colonizing as many planets as early as possible is the most important thing. That said, I feel like the whole 4X snowball thing is *much* more pronounced in ES2 than stellaris despite that. In stellaris your all poo poo should be online in the first 20% of the game, and after that it's just making numbers go up/boosting efficiency. In ES2, there's usually a distinct point when you start getting enough resources to just stamp out entire fleets every turn, and going from "keeping up with neighbours" to "everything is a total joke now" in the span of like 10 turns, as long as you did everything right in the last 80.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:28
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Tulip posted:So, out of curiosity, what would people say the faction balance is? I'm of the opinion that it's really not all that bad, with a major exception for the Vodyani since they're so much more map vulnerable than the rest. For the rest I'd say UC and Horatio are worse than average, and UE, Hissho, and Riftborn are above, but it's not all that sharp of a tier list. In single player games, Horatio and Riftborn generally seems to do the best, while Unfallen and Vods have a terrible time. In the hands of a human player... I'm really not sure. I certainly have trouble getting the Lumeris to tick along as smoothly as UE or Riftborn. e: Dishonourable mention to the Umbral Choir; I quit after a little while when it turned out that assimilating a minor faction simply deleted them from the map. Fun times.
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Jul 6, 2019 00:28
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Vaulters are pretty great since they can just dump a living colony every few turns with their Argosy mothership, no outpost stage needed.
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Jul 6, 2019 01:54
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Tree Bucket posted:In single player games, Horatio and Riftborn generally seems to do the best, while Unfallen and Vods have a terrible time. Lumeris are mostly good because you can land grab like absolute crazy. They don't get as good of scaling in the very late game as Riftborn or UE, but if you have a deep bench of good systems, that's pretty great. You also get a native +approval, which gives a lot of leeway for overcolonizing.
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Jul 6, 2019 05:02
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Cravers because they eat people and I like to think Skroig has a little place among the stars  Or Riftborn because their music and art design is amazing!
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Jul 6, 2019 07:51
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If aesthetics is the main measure, Riftborn are #1. That loving piano...
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Jul 6, 2019 15:36
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The Riftborn theme is incredible, FlyByNo got visited by a hell of a muse for that one.
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Jul 6, 2019 15:45
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