|
Agree that the Vaulters and Hisso DLC are, in my opinion, the best additions. I do like having the smaller quest DLCs too, but perhaps not as essential or substantial. Harmonic Memories is also really good as it adds more sweet FlyByNo tunes including my favourite Forgotten Moon. Penumbra adds an espionage / hacking system which feels a bit half-baked imo and doesn't add enough to the game to be worth the hassle of managing all the hacking. Awakening I did not get because of mixed reviews and a general vibe of it not being great.
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 09:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 17:47 |
|
|
I bought awakening and disabled it after two plays, it's garbage. The smaller dlcs are good too I agree, I'd forgotten about those.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 10:52
|
|
|
Hisso are cool as hell but Behmoths are half-cooked and broken (and the AI uses them poorly to their detriment). The only major-faction dlc that I'd call unambiguously positive is the Vaulters one, the rest can go bake. Shame, since EL was quite the opposite.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 11:05
|
|
|
I found most EL DLCs after Guardians to be bad too. But I like Forgotten as a faction. Plus espionage and pillage fit nicely in the scheme of things. Most other new mechanics (except maybe Urcs or whatever they're called, those Giants 2.0) require very little resources to use compared to the benefit you provide. This means that without expansion you play faction that focuses on, say, exploration and science, everything else is there to support those main avenues of progression. But with expansions everyone should exploit sea holdings, pearls, additional income from eclipses etc making every faction less unique. Using espionage is an option, not getting involved with pearls is bad play. ES2... The only expansion that felt bad to me was that hacking one. There devs don't even give you an option to ignore that system, it constantly reminds you that you could be hacking right now. Behemots might be very cost-effective but at least you can spend those resources somewhere else. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Jan 22, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 11:12
|
|
|
There's a general structural problem with Endless DLC where, because it's so important to strategy to decide which techs you don't research, adding even a small number of techs is just generally destabilizing. Penumbra has probably the best solution, which was to piggyback hacking benefits to existing less-popular/powerful techs. In EL the thing is that most of the expansions pull your attention pretty heavily in the direction of their introduced mechanic, so if you've got more than a couple then the game turns into kind of a mess. You only have so much industry to do things with and if you ignore a major system too much you can get really blindsided by somebody who went in on it, and so instead of playing a game of strategic decisions you make a bunch of blind auctions and if you did good on all of those then you get to make strategic decisions, or else you just get owned by the one person who went hard on oceans or whatever. ES2 just doesn't have enough expansions for that to be as much of a risk, plus unlike how oceans or giants are implemented, you can play pretty successfully while ignoring behemoths. Hacking is a tougher one to justify ignoring, it doesn't require much investment but goddamn it accelerates early game expansion and warfare a lot. My somewhat unpopular opinion is that Penumbra (hacking) and Shifters (pearls) are extremely good DLC, because they deal with two things that are genuine problems of the base game - Penumbra accelerates early game hacking and is one of the best tools for dealing with "Conscription," which is probably the worst design choice in vanilla ES2; Shifters adds so much texture/interest to winter and man people hated EL winter before Shifters came out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 14:45
|
|
|
I kinda agree? Guardians where a mixed bag yes, the giants where un-cool and needed separate research. But! It added the much needed wonders/missions, which where brought up to core for ES2 (even if there's less of them). I agree Shifters is cool and I always keep it on, even if it's been pointed out that collecting pearls is busy-work (whoops) and spoils some of the fun for me. But it's not a seperate tech, it has its own stuff. They fixed it in Inferno, which was basically winter pearls mk2; no tedious collecting resources with small stacks, the boosts where rare and you wanted to use your deathstack to collect them then quickly go hit something. 100% agree on Tempest, it's awful and totally orthogonal to normal gameplay. Shadows does espionage very well, but unfortunately the AI can't handle it so I guess the silver lining is it's a passive system to leave enabled for if the player ever wishes to use it? Can't recall if it has any unique techs for razing, it's been a while. So basically even if you don't *love* them, all of them except Tempest can be enabled by default with no real loss. Conversely, enabling Supremacy in ES2 runs into the problem you mentioned of suddenly there's a lot of extra behemoth-unique techs, which the AI just loves to get into and ruin its already-poor chances of doing well midgame. I do still think you're nuts for liking the hacking when not playing Umbral. Weirdo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 15:09
|
|
|
Tulip posted:There's a general structural problem with Endless DLC where, because it's so important to strategy to decide which techs you don't research, adding even a small number of techs is just generally destabilizing. Penumbra has probably the best solution, which was to piggyback hacking benefits to existing less-popular/powerful techs. But you see, it's all about the cost of the paths. If hacking and pearls were hidden behind research (the way even basic things like market are) then ignoring them would be a viable strategy. Your winning strategy that worked in a game without pearls would still be viable, but maybe now contenders using pearls could be more of a problem to you. But making those things available to everyone at small costs removes choice. Previously you could have a struggle between a faction that relies on Military, Diplomacy and Trade and, say, a faction that relies on Economy, Researc and Heroes with artifacts. After EL expansions you get pearls and sea exploration that have extremely little initial cost. Now every faction you play is also a Pearl faction, an Eclipse Exploration faction (you might decide not to bother with exploration and never research techs for that, just sweep your home regions. However when eclipse kicks in you get huge rewards for microcontrolling your troops that defend your towns anyway to visit nearby temples). Instead of unique factions with their own paths to victory you get gameplay systems stapled-on that make all the factions less unique. It's a game where some factions don't start wars or build new cities as part of their identity, those additional universal systems that you'd be an idiot to pass destroy that uniqueness.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 15:35
|
|
|
I can't really recall but can you disable just the Behemoths, I assume not because theyre tied to the Hissho story.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 16:45
|
|
|
No you can only disable the entire DLCs.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 16:58
|
|
|
ilitarist posted:But you see, it's all about the cost of the paths. If hacking and pearls were hidden behind research (the way even basic things like market are) then ignoring them would be a viable strategy. Your winning strategy that worked in a game without pearls would still be viable, but maybe now contenders using pearls could be more of a problem to you. But making those things available to everyone at small costs removes choice. Previously you could have a struggle between a faction that relies on Military, Diplomacy and Trade and, say, a faction that relies on Economy, Researc and Heroes with artifacts. After EL expansions you get pearls and sea exploration that have extremely little initial cost. Now every faction you play is also a Pearl faction, an Eclipse Exploration faction (you might decide not to bother with exploration and never research techs for that, just sweep your home regions. However when eclipse kicks in you get huge rewards for microcontrolling your troops that defend your towns anyway to visit nearby temples). I largely don't think this is a meaningful paradigm for discussing the actual experience of playing. Like I can agree with "an all-expansions game of EL is a mess," but the rest of the post just kind of feels incoherent. Flipswitch posted:I can't really recall but can you disable just the Behemoths, I assume not because theyre tied to the Hissho story. If you disable behemoths you disable hissho. Not just essential to their story but to their core mechanics.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 17:07
|
|
|
Tulip posted:I largely don't think this is a meaningful paradigm for discussing the actual experience of playing. Like I can agree with "an all-expansions game of EL is a mess," but the rest of the post just kind of feels incoherent. A game like EL or ES is a choice of investment of your resources into various paths of victory. Bad DLC mechanics are not about sending giving you one more path to supremacy you can use; they add mechanics you have to participate in. If you play 10 games in 4 of them you might never engage in war, in 2 you won't build new cities, in 3 you ignore diplomacy altogether, in 1 you don't have research. In 10 of those games, you'll be gathering pearls and advancing the separate pearl-only tech tree; you'll be visiting eclipsed temples. Ignoring them is not a choice of concentrating on other specific paths but just a bad play.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2021 17:26
|
|
|
ilitarist posted:But you see, it's all about the cost of the paths. If hacking and pearls were hidden behind research (the way even basic things like market are) then ignoring them would be a viable strategy. Your winning strategy that worked in a game without pearls would still be viable, but maybe now contenders using pearls could be more of a problem to you. But making those things available to everyone at small costs removes choice. Previously you could have a struggle between a faction that relies on Military, Diplomacy and Trade and, say, a faction that relies on Economy, Researc and Heroes with artifacts. After EL expansions you get pearls and sea exploration that have extremely little initial cost. Now every faction you play is also a Pearl faction, an Eclipse Exploration faction (you might decide not to bother with exploration and never research techs for that, just sweep your home regions. However when eclipse kicks in you get huge rewards for microcontrolling your troops that defend your towns anyway to visit nearby temples). It sounds like you want expansions that add NO new content outside of the new faction? You said it yourself: techs come with a large opportunity cost, and a lot of factions just don't have the leeway to do everything at once. You might be alone in wanting DLC that adds nothing to the base game (the one DLC that tries, Tempest, everyone hates). Pearls et. al. being available to everyone is kinda the whole point. edit: I mean, you could just toggle those DLCs off in-game when you're not playing that specific faction, so you get the best of both worlds? Serephina fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jan 23, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2021 00:20
|
|
|
I like Tempest. Morgawr are the coolest.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2021 02:22
|
|
|
Serephina posted:It sounds like you want expansions that add NO new content outside of the new faction? You said it yourself: techs come with a large opportunity cost, and a lot of factions just don't have the leeway to do everything at once. You might be alone in wanting DLC that adds nothing to the base game (the one DLC that tries, Tempest, everyone hates). Pearls et. al. being available to everyone is kinda the whole point. The example of an idea I like is espionage in EL compared to ES2. In ES2 everyone has to engage with espionage in some ways both offensively and defensively. Faction traits and research (?) upgrade this ability. In EL espionage is one more way you can use heroes. You can already assign them to cities or armies, and now there's a new path for them with an obvious cost and benefit. It's integrated seamlessly. Pearls are not just available to everybody, unless your strategy involves not having any units at all it's obvious that you have to microcontrol your armies to gather pearls. I am also irritated that those new features require a lot of clicks from you for relatively minor benefits. But as those clicks don't consume any resources that can go to better places those clicks - that are the same for every factions you can play - are necessary and boring part of every EL playthrough.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2021 08:32
|
|
|
wologar posted:I like Tempest. Morgawr are the coolest.  Also I think most of these problems could be solved with a Paradox style rules screen when you set up a game that lets you toggle certain mechanics on and off or change how prevalent they are.
|
|
#
?
Jan 23, 2021 13:51
|
|
|
Played some free dungeon of the endless this weekend. I’ve found it really frustrating so far. I constantly feel like I just can’t get enough resources, or that I’m spending them too quickly only to go into a death spiral. I don’t feel like I’m ever making interesting trade-offs, just deciding whether I’m going to die horribly on one side of the map or the other, or if I am really lucky I’ll survive just to get wiped out on the second or third floor. I can see what they are going for and I catch glimpses of a fun experience here and there. If only the game was little better about helping you learn from your mistakes.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2021 12:31
|
|
|
Does Awakened DLC for Endless Space 2 still make the game actively worse for everyone? Did they still not fix it?
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2021 23:45
|
|
|
It's terrible, skip it. Amplitude have said they don't have the resources or time to fix it either so it is entirely skippable. Does anyone here use any of the community balance patches? The EGS patch seems interesting.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2021 23:53
|
|
|
El_Elegante posted:Played some free dungeon of the endless this weekend. I’ve found it really frustrating so far. I constantly feel like I just can’t get enough resources, or that I’m spending them too quickly only to go into a death spiral. Dungeon of the Endless is an actual hard game. It broke me. I was not expecting the jump in difficulty from ES2 to Dungeon and it crack my back over it's knee.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2021 03:49
|
|
|
El_Elegante posted:Played some free dungeon of the endless this weekend. I’ve found it really frustrating so far. I constantly feel like I just can’t get enough resources, or that I’m spending them too quickly only to go into a death spiral.  use your industry to build more things that make industry i've beaten it a trillion times on normal difficulty, you just need to get a gauge for how large the floors will be (admittedly rough if you get wiped early) and structure your plans around that; "start with three industry generators" is a good rule of thumb for quite a while though also spend your research on things that make more resources it's a traditional snowball vs anti-snowball game - if you fall behind the curve you are going to get owned There are many, many, *many* fiddly bits to optimize, much more than you would expect (waves can't spawn in rooms inhabited by your dudes, for example), but it's fundamentally an effort to resource-snowball. Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Jan 25, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2021 03:56
|
|
|
Does anyone here use any custom races? I've been wanting to play the Hissho but I don't really grokk with their specific skills. I'm wondering how I could tweak them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2021 21:35
|
|
|
Can someone help me find the name of the ES2 music track with that really smooth sax playing in it? Might be an Umbral Choir track, if they do racial specific ones, I don't know.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2021 22:45
|
|
|
Jack Trades posted:Can someone help me find the name of the ES2 music track with that really smooth sax playing in it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weAPrKP2nS4 First thing that came to mind.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2021 23:07
|
|
|
Rhjamiz posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weAPrKP2nS4 Yes, that's the one, thanks.
|
|
#
?
Jan 25, 2021 23:30
|
|
|
KirbyKhan posted:Dungeon of the Endless is an actual hard game. It broke me. I was not expecting the jump in difficulty from ES2 to Dungeon and it crack my back over it's knee. You're right, now I wish I had bought it during the sale. gently caress! It would be nice if free weekends could have a little extra extension to let you buy the game once you've had some time to think it over. Not every purchase is an impulse purchase. Hopefully they'll put it back on sale when Endless Dungeon drops.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2021 04:19
|
|
|
mitochondritom posted:Agree that the Vaulters and Hisso DLC are, in my opinion, the best additions. I do like having the smaller quest DLCs too, but perhaps not as essential or substantial. Harmonic Memories is also really good as it adds more sweet FlyByNo tunes including my favourite Forgotten Moon. This seems like a good excuse to share this really awesome video of Flybyno playing Unstable Molecule and Forgotten Moon live on a harp.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2021 04:57
|
|
|
Umbral Choir is the most unique 4x experience I've ever had. Is there any other 4x that can give you that "playing the parasite empire" thing?
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2021 15:08
|
|
|
Speaking of the Umbral Choir, I'm having a hell of a time basically being locked into a single path where an enemy AI just has defensive programs on every path I could hack through. I can't ever seem to successfully get a hack off so I'm trying to branch out. Is there a button I can use to force a hack over empty space? I know Ctrl click is for forcing ships to do that but it doesn't seem to work with hacking.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2021 00:32
|
|
|
DarkAvenger211 posted:Speaking of the Umbral Choir, I'm having a hell of a time basically being locked into a single path where an enemy AI just has defensive programs on every path I could hack through. I can't ever seem to successfully get a hack off so I'm trying to branch out. Is there a button I can use to force a hack over empty space? I know Ctrl click is for forcing ships to do that but it doesn't seem to work with hacking. Just left click a path. Left click doesn't just pick the destination, it makes a route. Also if you are having problems with defensive programs just hack them with a longer route. You need undefended part of the path to be twice as long as the defended path of the hack to guarantee a success. Less so if you have a higher hacking speed than them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2021 00:36
|
|
|
Yeah I figured that out eventually. Though it's extremely brutal since it's vital I start spreading sleepers and sanctuaries, I need to get 2 sleepers before I can place a sanctuary but the AI seems to just immediately purge my sleeper and if I go for long trace routes I'm waiting like 15 turns to actually do anything. I can't get 2 down before they purge them, unless I start close, and I can't start close because I get traced immediately
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2021 00:57
|
|
|
Jack Trades posted:Umbral Choir is the most unique 4x experience I've ever had. They're not quite as out there, sticking to more traditional mechanics, but the Forgotten in Endless Legend ultimately follow a similar path of mostly-invisible faction quietly murdering stray scouts (praying not to get forced into a defensive war) while picking a victim to leech off and disrupt, before eventually launching a massive debuff-powered surprise alpha strike from shadows and moving to the next target. You do have normal cities (that you're nevertheless massively encouraged to keep "stealthed" by denying map exploration with your invisible armies, sustain your entire midgame tech by stealing it from others and have the invisible armies roam your enemies lands doing hit & run pillaging on everything they own. The latter is, like, secrectly important, in that while it won't make you an economic powerhouse, it'll make all the dudes running around more or less pay for themselves (so in a roundabout way "justifying" aggresively going for this standing army of observers running around everywhere - and that has advantages of its own) - all the while slowing your chosen victim down. Do note however, it's one of those factions where you cannot autoresolve battles, they've got the kind of finicky glass cannons that can pull off stupid bullshit if microed carefully, but are super inefficient if you're just bashing numbers against each other.
|
|
#
?
Jan 31, 2021 04:27
|
|
|
Umbral Choir is cool, and when you play as them, hacking is kind of neat. however, how does everyone feel about disabling penumbra when you're not the one actively playing UC? I feel as though vs AIs, hacking them doesn't feel very impactful, but when you get hacked and your government goes into anarchy and you lose your laws, its debilitating and unfun. I already play with awakening disabled, because I think the academy fleet is BS and unfun, so I feel disheartened to disable another DLC. I like supremacy because, while I don't like behemoths personally, I will admit that in some games having a super weapon or the threat of the superweapon is a good way to end things that may just drag out otherwise.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2021 20:51
|
|
|
I think most of the thread are anti-Penumbra. I'm pro-Penumbra because it accelerates the early game and makes wars more interactive and less draft-hell-y and anti-Supremacy because I think Behemoths are poorly implemented and balanced, but different strokes for different folks. Hell different strokes for different games, I'll use different stuff for different runs.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2021 21:57
|
|
|
Mjolnerd posted:I feel as though vs AIs, hacking them doesn't feel very impactful, but when you get hacked and your government goes into anarchy and you lose your laws, its debilitating and unfun. Russian border.txt
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2021 22:27
|
|
|
I initially bounced off of Endless Space 2 (which happens to me often with space 4X games) but went back to it after getting a better understanding of FIDSI and other mechanics from playing Endless Legend. It's so great. All of the factions seem powerful and unique and the design is wonderful. I think my biggest regret about the Endless games is that Civ feels like it was designed by a 15 year old now.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2021 21:31
|
|
|
dy. posted:Civ feels like it was designed by a 15 year old now.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2021 23:01
|
|
|
I haven't played Civ since Beyond Earth. Have they evolved at all? That was my one concern(?) about Humankind. The genre feels kind of static.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2021 15:50
|
|
|
The latest Civ shook things up initially with districts ("de-stacked cities"), and has an ongoing subscription thing where every few months they threw some crazy mix-n-match options at the wall to see if the community likes it. Apocalypse mode, secret societies, heroes, corporations, etc. It keeps the game fresh for those who love civ, but doesn't really change things if you didn't like the game to begin with.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2021 16:12
|
|
|
To be clear, there’s no “on going subscription” for Civ VI. There’s the expansions, and a season pass. And like most season passes, you can buy the DLC piece meal.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2021 16:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 17:47 |
|
|
I lost interest in Civ after Civ 5 was a steaming pile of poo poo that had god-loving-awful combat, lovely city management, a stupid as gently caress tech tree, an insanely stupid religion mechanic, and didnt really do anything new or exciting. It also had a solved system for how to take the, uh, things-I-cant-remember-the-name-of that were like Ideas in EU4; the one that only worked if you had 4 cities broke things and was always the most optimal choice, which was not fun. Also the AI was dumb as gently caress. The fact that during sieges, cities and ranged units *inside* the city got to shoot sieging units, but not vice-versa... in an annihilation combat game.... still blows my mind to this day - worst combat/siege system I ever saw. I have hope for Humankind because I like the genre and Amplitude has shown that they can make some puzzling decisions here or there but they make games with elegant and engaging gameplay. I played the Open Dev thing they did on Steam and their combat has me worried in a different way (tedious-but-required because 'autoresolving' will be super inefficient (like it can be in Total War games)). I liked some of the ideas they showed hints of/sorta showcased in the city development portion of it though.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2021 03:21
|
|