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Chadzok, what does that mean? You can control the EL units directly in combat if you desire, or you can autoresolve. edit: do you mean the secondary targetting if your first choice is killed? Or how units move if their pathing changes from your original choice per turn?
Mizaq fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 23:03
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From what I've read about the combat; it goes like this: You control the units directly in a turn based manner. Battles are limited to 9 battle turns. Those 9 battle turns are spread out between 3 game turns. So you will take your first 3 battle turns on the game turn that your armies meet. During your next game turn, turns 4-6 of the battle will commence. Game turn number 3 will allow battle turns 7-9 to occur. This allows for tactical battle, but also an extra strategic layer since you can choose to move reinforcements from the main map during the game turns, and put them into the battle for the later battle turns. I like it so far. The Human Crouton fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Aug 23, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 23:04
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That sounds Really Good. ^^ @ Mizak: To be honest it's been a while, and even when I did play I was 100% autoresolve. I think it was more that the combat turns were ascynchronous or something? What I mean is just one unit at a time, turn based, instead of setting all the orders and then watching it play out, which is how I remember EL combat. Chadzok fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 23:10
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quote:Show off your tactical skills by mastering terrain elevation with city-building and full tactical battles. This also makes me believe that other nations will be able to join in battles as they are happening.
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Aug 22, 2019 23:13
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The Human Crouton posted:From what I've read about the combat; it goes like this: Huh, this mechanic would simultaneously help with making any WW1-era conflicts a potential trench hell between high strategic mobility for the defenders and high killing power of artillery units as well as make the WW2-era strategies more possible if the game will be putting in stuff like motorized infantry and tank destroyers.
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Aug 22, 2019 23:42
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Danann posted:Huh, this mechanic would simultaneously help with making any WW1-era conflicts a potential trench hell between high strategic mobility for the defenders and high killing power of artillery units as well as make the WW2-era strategies more possible if the game will be putting in stuff like motorized infantry and tank destroyers. Okay, that actually sounds excellent.
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Aug 23, 2019 03:30
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ES2 is getting a new expansion! https://www.games2gether.com/amplitude-studios/endless-space-2/blogs/702 It appears the Academy becomes an npc faction.
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Sep 4, 2019 04:57
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There's also a new playable faction they haven't talked about. Anyway, the game doesn't need new features but the reason to engage with the old ones besides multiplayer. Meanwhile, I'm playing Civ6 and find its AI opponents relatively competent and entertaining. I find it sad and confusing.
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Sep 4, 2019 09:46
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Endless Space 2 and Endless Legend are on a free weekend on steam until Monday at 10:00am Pacific and are also on heavy discount.
AAAAA! Real Muenster fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Sep 5, 2019 |
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Sep 5, 2019 21:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvHRIVkbBwg Nakalim Prologue!
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Sep 7, 2019 00:49
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I started to play some Endless Space 2 this weekend after having the first game and playing a few false starts over the years. The first thing that hits me is the game has absolutely amazing atmosphere, sound design, and music. None of those things should be a major draw for a 4x but I’m going to have a hard time going back to GalCiv III. So far so good!
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Sep 7, 2019 22:38
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Speaking of GalCiv3, how is it? I have it but I keep bouncing off it despite enjoying GalCiv2, and I feel like I have no idea what the gently caress I'm doing.
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Sep 8, 2019 00:33
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Rhjamiz posted:Speaking of GalCiv3, how is it? I have it but I keep bouncing off it despite enjoying GalCiv2, and I feel like I have no idea what the gently caress I'm doing. I played it for about 8 hours and thought it was one of the most boring and confusing 4xs I've ever played. I barely remember anything about it except that I absolutely hated it. I think I may have hated it so much because it treated space just like a land-based 4x with hexes and everything. So it's basically Civ only you can't decide where to place cities, and all of the tiles are water.
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Sep 8, 2019 00:39
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Is there a place I can go to get a brief synopsis of how all the Endless games tie together as far as dust, aurigua, vaulters, etc? I understand there’s some connections but because it’s in a strategy game I have a harder time absorbing it.
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Sep 8, 2019 04:37
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chaosapiant posted:Is there a place I can go to get a brief synopsis of how all the Endless games tie together as far as dust, aurigua, vaulters, etc? I understand there’s some connections but because it’s in a strategy game I have a harder time absorbing it. The basic premise is that in the distant past there was a super-advanced spacefaring civilization called "the Endless." They basically ruled all of known space, that's why it's called "Endless Space." They've left behind plenty of artifacts, but most importantly is "dust" a form of particulate nanomachine computer that is essentially magic. It reads people's thoughts and does whatever they want, and the more you have of it the better so everyone wants more. No one else is technology advanced enough to understand how it works, so they can't make more of it. Eventually the Endless split into two factions, the Concrete Endless (who preferred physical bodies) and the Virtual Endless (who uploaded themselves into the dust). They had a civil war that destroyed their entire civilization. Many of the factions were created by the Endless in one way or another, either as slaves or tools or simply experiments. For example, the Sowers are a sentient terraforming machine, while the Cravers are genetically modified cyborg battle slaves. This is most apparent on Auriga, which is explicitly an Endless laboratory world: everything there is an experiment by the Endless. Since even the environment was being controlled as part of the experiment, it eventually collapses into an eternal ice age without the Endless around to maintain it. The Vaulters are just some guys, they're not important. Clarste fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 04:47
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Vaulters were descended from the crew of a ship that crashed on Auriga. they eventually got off the planet again and ended up in Endless Space 2.
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Sep 8, 2019 04:51
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Also, the Sowers aren't important at all either (and got demoted to minor faction in ES2), but "renegade terraforming engine" is my favorite faction and I'm glad they got a shout-out in the backstory of the one of the EL factions. The lava guys fled their homeworld because it was being aggressively terraformed by the Sowers.
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Sep 8, 2019 04:56
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I'm not super into the story, buy my understanding of the Vaulters is that they are a people who constantly awaken during the end of the world and put all of their resources into hibernation/bomb shelter technology only to have their descendants wake up right when the world is ending again.
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Sep 8, 2019 05:00
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Clarste posted:The basic premise is that in the distant past there was a super-advanced spacefaring civilization called "the Endless." They basically ruled all of known space, that's why it's called "Endless Space." They've left behind plenty of artifacts, but most importantly is "dust" a form of particulate nanomachine computer that is essentially magic. It reads people's thoughts and does whatever they want, and the more you have of it the better so everyone wants more. No one else is technology advanced enough to understand how it works, so they can't make more of it. I'm pretty sure it's never just outright stated explicitly but the Broken Lords are basically prototyping for the Virtual right?
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Sep 8, 2019 06:17
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No, Broken Lords have appeared after the Endless Civil War. They don't probably even use similar tech cause they have to consume dust all the time and they're still tied to physical bodies. They probably just watched too much Full Metal Alchemist. With the timeline it's important to realize that Endless Civil War happened long before every game. Chronologically Dungeon of the Endless comes first. Mezari are progenitors of the United Empire, they are humans but like Star Wars humans, so no connection to Earth or our reality. Their prison ship broke over Auriga and escape pod with characters you control has fallen deep into Endless research facility. People on this ship gave birth to Vaulters you see in Endless Legend. EL happens shortly before Endless Space, it ends with Auriga dying and some people escaping. During ES2 Endless might sort of return or not or whatever. Opbot DV8 from Mezari ship is the character who travels through all games.
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Sep 8, 2019 08:10
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Clarste posted:The Vaulters are just some guys, they're not important. They're the PoV that forms the spine of the series though?
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Sep 8, 2019 08:35
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Defiance Industries posted:They're the PoV that forms the spine of the series though? I mean they're clearly a dev and fan favorite, but personally I don't find them very interesting and honestly they don't add anything to the setting of the series imo. They're just dudes who happened to be present for some stuff.
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Sep 8, 2019 08:49
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They're a good first faction for learning an Endless game, at least- teleporting, defence boosts, extra science. Plus (I know this is ridiculous) I like to think my civ could at least plausibly be the good guys... Anyway, there's some interesting stuff on G2G about the Nakalim. They start with the first 2 rows of the tech tree already researched.... but can't make their own science. Their other big trick is uncovering relics that shoot out mega-influence to convert systems, and the Academy loves them. The Human Crouton posted:I played it for about 8 hours and thought it was one of the most boring and confusing 4xs I've ever played. I barely remember anything about it except that I absolutely hated it. Is that the one with a War faction and a Science faction and a Trade faction.....? You can't get away with lazy design like that after witnessing Horatio's splendor.
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Sep 8, 2019 09:17
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Vaulters are pretty protagonist-y but they're not the most gripping or unique. I think in a fiction that was more text-heavy (like, say, a book) some of the weirdness of the vaulters would have some real fun room to breath (their intense fusion of religion and science, and their mix of exploration and 'spending generations hiding in bunkers'), but you're getting snippets of them right next to snippets of the Riftborn and The Cult Of The Eternal End soilitarist posted:No, Broken Lords have appeared after the Endless Civil War. They don't probably even use similar tech cause they have to consume dust all the time and they're still tied to physical bodies. They probably just watched too much Full Metal Alchemist. I mean, the part where they need to consume dust all the time and have physical-ish bodies is what made me think "huh, this is a prototype of the eventual good tech." Missing features and glitchy, but conceptually similar. I'm ok with my fuzziness on the timeline, but my impression had been that EL starts basically at some point in the Endless Civil War - the game starts when the Endless stop maintaining the lab and I figured the war was what kicked that off. In ES2, I felt the Cravers had some hints about the timeline in their prologue which implies that the disappearance of the Endless is fairly close to the start of player control and to the late stages of their quest involving actual still-living Virtuals, which made it feel like the civil war ended in the last couple generations rather than thousands of years ago
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Sep 8, 2019 15:38
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Tulip posted:Vaulters are pretty protagonist-y but they're not the most gripping or unique. I think in a fiction that was more text-heavy (like, say, a book) some of the weirdness of the vaulters would have some real fun room to breath (their intense fusion of religion and science, and their mix of exploration and 'spending generations hiding in bunkers'), but you're getting snippets of them right next to snippets of the Riftborn and The Cult Of The Eternal End so I've always been under the impression that the Endless Civil War was generations if not hundreds or thousands of years ago, as no faction ever mentions them as being within living memory. And the Vodyani prologue mentions finding not the Virtual Endless, but their "relics" and striving to serve their "memory". Basically by the time proto-Vodyani find the Virtual relics on their homeworld, the Virtual Endless have been gone for a long time.
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Sep 8, 2019 16:33
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Tulip posted:I mean, the part where they need to consume dust all the time and have physical-ish bodies is what made me think "huh, this is a prototype of the eventual good tech." Missing features and glitchy, but conceptually similar. In general Endless 4X games are weird in that they sorta have you discover secrets of the universe and transform into omniscient planetary/galactic empire... And on the other hand your faction is very much locked into stasis. I can understand cultural limits like Roving Clans not being into war, or biological like those winter dudes transforming in winter. But Broken Lords being able to transfer their bodies into armor before they know how to build a market is strange, even stranger is that they can't do anything with their main schtick even when they get to space travel. Or every faction being locked into 3 units they have. So it's not clear whether this is a story about civilization transformation or is it a narrative about a single generation (as quests do suggest). It's much less organic than, say, Alpha Centauri.
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Sep 8, 2019 16:39
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Rhjamiz posted:I've always been under the impression that the Endless Civil War was generations if not hundreds or thousands of years ago, as no faction ever mentions them as being within living memory. And the Vodyani prologue mentions finding not the Virtual Endless, but their "relics" and striving to serve their "memory". Basically by the time proto-Vodyani find the Virtual relics on their homeworld, the Virtual Endless have been gone for a long time. The Cravers prologue, start conditions, and quest seem to imply that the Endless are a very recent memory to the Cravers, which has two ways of being resolved 1. The Cravers are extremely long lived (a terrible trait for your barely controlled bioweapon) 2. The Endless were some combination of rare and aloof I prefer 2, mostly because it makes it easier to resolve both "oh the Endless were around like 30 years ago, just not in this part of the galaxy for like 3000 years" and the relative totality of the Endless war (Rome didn't disappear, it sunk into lower and lower relevance; small populations are much more vulnerable to near total annihilation). ilitarist posted:In general Endless 4X games are weird in that they sorta have you discover secrets of the universe and transform into omniscient planetary/galactic empire... And on the other hand your faction is very much locked into stasis. I can understand cultural limits like Roving Clans not being into war, or biological like those winter dudes transforming in winter. But Broken Lords being able to transfer their bodies into armor before they know how to build a market is strange, even stranger is that they can't do anything with their main schtick even when they get to space travel. Or every faction being locked into 3 units they have. So it's not clear whether this is a story about civilization transformation or is it a narrative about a single generation (as quests do suggest). It's much less organic than, say, Alpha Centauri. I mean, so far no strategy game is as well thought out as SMAC, but yeah. I think you're mostly right about EL - it takes place as the Endless give up on Auriga, and the maintenance falls off and the game represents a couple generations (something that's hard to rationalize with population growth mechanics but let that slide). One thing I will say about Broken Lords: I think they know how to transfer their bodies the same way humans generally "know" how to focus a telescopic lens, detect the largest nearby mass, and how to convert dirt into new intelligences - it's basically built into our/their bodies. So I think they "know" how to do it at a very non-formal level. That they know it before knowing markets isn't that surprising, markets qualify as a pretty recent technology on the human scale. Tulip fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 16:52
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Clarste posted:I mean they're clearly a dev and fan favorite, but personally I don't find them very interesting and honestly they don't add anything to the setting of the series imo. They're just dudes who happened to be present for some stuff. They're the Jubilee of the Endless series. 
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Sep 8, 2019 21:34
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I just started playing Endless Legend after hearing it compared to Civ. I'm in my first game now. It's funny - I keep feeling like I'm falling hopelessly behind in my progress, and then both times I've closed out of the game so far, I find out that I'm in first or second place in most metrics. It's just that the world itself is much harsher, both in terms of weather/conditions and in terms of random NPC enemies. I like that it's difficult just to survive in this world totally aside from the AI opponents.
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Sep 10, 2019 01:45
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showbiz_liz posted:I just started playing Endless Legend after hearing it compared to Civ. I'm in my first game now. It's funny - I keep feeling like I'm falling hopelessly behind in my progress, and then both times I've closed out of the game so far, I find out that I'm in first or second place in most metrics. It's just that the world itself is much harsher, both in terms of weather/conditions and in terms of random NPC enemies. I like that it's difficult just to survive in this world totally aside from the AI opponents. Normal difficulty in the Endless games is like a leisurely stroll.
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Sep 10, 2019 01:55
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I will admit/admire how the neutrals really hammer home how puny of an army you have and how expensive it is to get a proper stack going earlygame. The AI is full of fluff and buff, aggressive expansion, diplomatic snobbery, and pouncing on any scouts, but it's all a house of cards if you actually decide to gently caress It, time to murder some neighbors. Turns out they had 1.5 decent stacks, totally underequipped/underlevelled and (on the lower difficulties) absolutely no industry to reinforce once the poo poo hits the fan. But if you're playing nice, the tension's definitely there. In EL, that is.
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Sep 10, 2019 03:36
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I forgot how annoying the closing faction quests are where they suddenly need you to colonise a specific province halfway around the world. Especially when you’re roving clans.
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Sep 10, 2019 15:33
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Rhjamiz posted:Speaking of GalCiv3, how is it? I have it but I keep bouncing off it despite enjoying GalCiv2, and I feel like I have no idea what the gently caress I'm doing. GalCiv 3 was a lot more fun before they started requiring governors for starbase and planet expansion, and limited those governors. Broke the biggest maps, but I think playing the biggest maps was not the desired playstyle by the showrunner, either the CEO or whomever was directing the game at that point. They also implemented ridiculous rare-resource requirements for many starbase upgrades and faction population increases, so the only way to really play many factions in large maps is to play extremely vertical and just burn everyone else to the ground. Anyway, I've played a ton of GalCiv3, and it's not as fun anymore, plus they recently made another big change that enemy factions who surrender automatically destroy all of their colonies instead of ceding control to another faction. This was patched with no warning and wasn't made optional (but might be optional in the future). They are trying at the company level, but sometimes forget what made them great. It also lacks the UI polish of ES2, and the music is not quite as good, but FlyByNo makes that a high bar anyway. GC3 quests pale to what the Endless-series of games has pulled off. I don't recommend GalCiv3 to a new player in late 2019, four years ago ok, but now? Pass, wait for the next iteration. Stardock is huge on customization, so GC4 will eventually be pretty loving sick if they polish it up and keep the customization (they need people out there customizing it though, the modding community needs to be bigger). Mizaq fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Sep 10, 2019 |
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Sep 10, 2019 18:00
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Mizaq posted:GalCiv 3 was a lot more fun before they started requiring governors for starbase and planet expansion, and limited those governors. Broke the biggest maps, but I think playing the biggest maps was not the desired playstyle by the showrunner, either the CEO or whomever was directing the game at that point. They also implemented ridiculous rare-resource requirements for many starbase upgrades and faction population increases, so the only way to really play many factions in large maps is to play extremely vertical and just burn everyone else to the ground. Anyway, I've played a ton of GalCiv3, and it's not as fun anymore, plus they recently made another big change that enemy factions who surrender automatically destroy all of their colonies instead of ceding control to another faction. This was patched with no warning and wasn't made optional (but might be optional in the future). They are trying at the company level, but sometimes forget what made them great. It also lacks the UI polish of ES2, and the music is not quite as good, but FlyByNo makes that a high bar anyway. GC3 quests pale to what the Endless-series of games has pulled off. I don't recommend GalCiv3 to a new player in late 2019, four years ago ok, but now? Pass, wait for the next iteration. Stardock is huge on customization, so GC4 will eventually be pretty loving sick if they polish it up and keep the customization (they need people out there customizing it though, the modding community needs to be bigger). Ouch, yeah all those changes sound absolutely awful. Playing on massive maps was half the draw, honestly. Oh well, Distant Worlds it is, I guess.
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Sep 10, 2019 18:17
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http://www.sullla.com/GC3/retrospective.html Oldie but seems still relevant.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:22
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Serephina posted:But if you're playing nice, the tension's definitely there. In EL, that is. Sadly EL is one of those games where playing efficient is irritating. Several expansion features are focused on exploration (does it count as a pun?). You get winter pearls and twilight temple repeating visits. And another expansion made seas full of stuff too. So to play effectively you have to store dudes in every town and send them harvesting stuff each winter or twilight. When you explore land you look for good regions to settle, enemies to attack, you interact with villages and geography in general. With seas, you just sail them and look for temples. Those bonuses aren't that great. But those expansion features commit a sin that the base game (and other expansion features) didn't have: they're too effective to ignore. Other features make you adjust your playstyle to exploiting them. Not spying, not chasing most of age achievements, not using Giants or Giants 2.0 is a valid choice. However with those exploration features building a single unit is all you need for a great profit in exploration bonuses. Those are features that cost almost nothing in game currency but require a lot of your attention for menial tasks. Curiously, ES2 has nothing like that. Nothing at all. That makes me hopeful for Humankind.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:31
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Yeah I really prefer not using full expansions in EL. There's a very...overgrown feeling to playing with more than a few at once.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:36
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ilitarist posted:Curiously, ES2 has nothing like that. Nothing at all. That makes me hopeful for Humankind. Weird. The interactivity of the world is one of my favourite things about EL. I hope they keep the quests and exploration elements 
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Sep 10, 2019 23:12
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ilitarist posted:That makes me hopeful for Humankind. I agree that pearls in particular are a lot of busy-work (I've not bought the more recent DLCs), but skipping them is totally fine. Or rather, just gathering the bare minimum as you walk past. There's only a few pearl buildings, they're relatively cheap for a tall-ish empire, and you won't miss them if you skip them. If anything the Era wonders are probably the most 'skip this at your peril' of them all. Chadzok posted:Weird. The interactivity of the world is one of my favourite things about EL. I hope they keep the quests and exploration elements
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Sep 10, 2019 23:19
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 lol, Brad Wardell, founder of Stardock, creator of Gal Civ and all-around lovely human being is such a lovely libertarian he can't help but shoehorn his ideology into his games and and in so doing actively worsens the (already pretty lovely) game. And I thought only SJW's were ruining the industry by forcing their ideology into games. just lol
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Sep 11, 2019 01:01
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