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Riftborn would be amazing if they could terraform your planets into sterile cubes. Unfortunately they cannot.
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Feb 3, 2020 03:01
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Riftborn are amazing because they have possibly the best song (I can't choose between them and UC) and definitely the best writing. And while you can't make their planets into actual cubes you can make them into sterile balls, which, still pretty good.Mokinokaro posted:Yeah the riftborn are probably my favorite ship designs too. The Unfallen and Horatio kind of tie for second (I really love the organic designs for Unfallen.) I think I like all the ship designs except maybe Lumeris. Sophon are a little less for me because all of their ships look too samey. Tree Bucket posted:My favourite ship in the game is that tier 2 Riftborn beastie that basically has nothing but weapon slots. It can be upgraded to have yet more weapon slots. "Hm, I should get the upgrade so that this paper-thin glass cannon has some staying power" "INEFFICIENT. THIS SHIP IS DESIGNED TO KILL. IT NEEDS MORE GUNS TO KILL FASTER."
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Feb 3, 2020 03:23
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Yea, the Riftborn's teir2 Hunter is basically a static weapons platform designed to be towed into action that someone acidentally slapped an engine module on. That idiot. I think all the ships are gorgeous, even the ones that are intentionally vanilla to give contrast (Lumaris, etc). Could you imagine if the ships actually closed to short range and you had shots of them doing swan dives around each other? So pretty!
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Feb 3, 2020 03:29
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I was happy thinking they've fixed AI but my next game on the same settings showed that it was a fluke. Endless difficulty means that you don't provoke anyone super early and you're golden. With sad eyes I look at a lot of mechanics that I can ignore. Some hackers cause a revolution on my capital planet every 20 turns or so and it's just an irritation. Enemy AI blew up my best system which was nice but it still doesn't make him win the war, it just reminded me that behemoths exist and when he shot the next round I've researched shielding and built it before the charge reached my system. I'd say current Endless difficulty feels like one step above normal. It's entertaining, in a way, and I'm not bored playing it. But it's sad to know that there's no point in putting more effort in it or learning mechanics cause single player can't give me anything more apart from trying some obscure achievements. And come on, do I understand correctly that there's no defense from hacking? There's random roll to determine if I track it and shut it down but that's it? And the game is very insistent that I have to hack all the time.
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Feb 3, 2020 08:30
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You can reinforce nodes to load the dice a bit in your favor but that's it. There's also a way to check for enemy nodes on your planets.
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Feb 3, 2020 15:12
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Do you mean sleepers? Those programs you can apply say that they remove any "detected" backdoors. And I don't recall ever seeing anything about a detected backdoor. So I put encryption on my capital and that's kinda it?.. There are some techs that give more bandwith and more defensive power so I guess I can just sit there defending my capital. And I won't be able to defend all my borders so sleepers and backdoors are inevitable. What irritates me is that in addition to hacking not being optional offensive hacking is not optional too. You can't reroute that offensive power into defense, the game reminds you to hack all the time even if you're surrounded by friends. If the game would demand optimization and planning to win it then UI/balancing insistence on hacking optimization would be understandable, but it does not. So I consider this system to be bad for a game like ES2. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 15:30
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Mokinokaro posted:Vodyani are really cool but probably the most complex to play. Have fun with them. The Vodyani also sound like Tommy Wiseau
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Feb 3, 2020 15:53
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Huh. I thought having a defensive program would guarantee a trace, but maybe it is only a chance? I know backdoors are detected by defensive programs on the system in addition to being removed but I'm not sure what triggers the detection? Could be chance, time, or use of the backdoor? Reasonably sure the defensive program that "tracks the progress of hacks passing through the node" or whatever should guarantee a trace.
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Feb 3, 2020 17:15
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GoldStandardConure posted:The Vodyani also sound like Tommy Wiseau I've been trying to place the Vodyani accent for years! Some sort of South African-Transylvanian hybrid. Even IN HOly WAR, diPLOmacy reMAINs an OPTion ilitarist posted:What irritates me is that in addition to hacking not being optional offensive hacking is not optional too. You can't reroute that offensive power into defense, the game reminds you to hack all the time even if you're surrounded by friends. If the game would demand optimization and planning to win it then UI/balancing insistence on hacking optimization would be understandable, but it does not. So I consider this system to be bad for a game like ES2. I've gotten all the ES2 expansions, and have only uninstalled one of them. Guess which one.
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Feb 3, 2020 21:03
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GoldStandardConure posted:The Vodyani also sound like Tommy Wiseau anyway how's your spiritual life
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Feb 4, 2020 08:52
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It's heresy, I did not hit the Lost. I did noooot. Oh hi Isyander.
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Feb 4, 2020 09:32
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While we're at it, I don't really get all of those main story quests. In EL they all were bind to the story of the faction getting civilized and deciding to ditch Auriga. Not very memorable but easy to understand. With ES2 I don't really remember most of the stories and they don't really end. They are also connected to some other stories like that Isyander guy appears in several of them. I've just won as Vaulters and their story was looking for Opbot who went to Academy and then had shown us Auriga 2.0 which is a cool system with another branch of Vaulters. Empire had emperor's sister plotting against him or something. Riftborn had welcomed the whole race from another dimension and it changed absolutely nothing. I think some sort of unique story victory would be interesting, like in EL. Personal way to domination. It would add some grand strategy vibe as in you're not playing for the challenge but for the experience of a unique path to victory.
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Feb 4, 2020 10:07
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Agreed, the EL stories where far better. The only reason I can think for the drastic change is that most people didn't finish their Quest Line in EL and so they decided to chop things down to like 4 super easy chapters. Still doesn't make them any good tho
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Feb 4, 2020 10:16
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I remember reading ages ago that they were shortened so people would actually complete them - but I have no idea where I read that information. I liked the Riftborn story where you can slowly go completely power mad and encase your own people in stasis.
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Feb 4, 2020 11:03
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I've never finished the Vodyani one because it required me to like blow up three planets or something and that took forever so I'd just beat the game first.
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Feb 8, 2020 21:50
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I'm trying to figure out how to win a science victory in ES2 before turn 230. I think it's sort of impossible unless everything goes right? I beelined the things I absolutely need, the science improvements and the most basic necessities for money and such, and then the loving neighbors declared war, all of them, one by one, because I ended up next to two and a half war-focused civs and I look like food to them. Vaulters seem pretty good at turtling their way through defensive wars because all of their ships are everywhere at once, so that's cool, but I don't see how I'm supposed to build enough ships to keep my systems while also building all the science improvements, or researching the necessary not-dying tech while also picking off the science techs. I refuse to switch gears to a military win because combat is boring and the entire galaxy seems more committed to the foreverwar than I'm willing to be. Am I doing something wrong? Is this one of those 4x games where you're just supposed to always be conquering systems no matter the victory type? Which civs are allowed to play semi-tall and semi-peaceful?
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Feb 8, 2020 22:46
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Back before Amplitude changed things to make the science victory more difficult, an everything-goes-perfectly victory was before turn 80. I'm sure that it's significantly later nowadays, but would be shocked if it wasn't possible to consistently beat turn 200, even with the weaker factions: on some galaxy sizes, that's enough time to win a military victory and then spend the next 50 or more turns researching. There's a lot to say about how to avoid or prepare for war, but given the victory time and the difficulty that you're having balancing going for the win and defending yourself, I suspect that the problem is that your economy isn't growing as fast as it should be. My personal record for a vanilla-faction science win was a Riftborn game where I ended up next to the Cravers, but they were never able to threaten me, or even slow me down that much. You can check out my post history in the thread for advice on how to put yourself in the same position with an explosive early-game. It's based on the pre-expansion game, but should still be useful. You should look at the Riftborn, Sophons, United Empire and presumably Vaulters. Most of my victories with the first two were off the backs of empires that grew to about 8 systems and fought no more than one major war. The semi-tall and semi-peaceful approach can work.
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Feb 9, 2020 01:30
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I think my last MP game the victor was a Vodyani with science at like 130ish while I was invading them.
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Feb 9, 2020 03:05
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Game update, all the idiots bounced off me. Portals are loving great. I can't see how I'd pull that off at a higher difficulty level, but I won't complain.HundredBears posted:Back before Amplitude changed things to make the science victory more difficult, an everything-goes-perfectly victory was before turn 80. I'm sure that it's significantly later nowadays, but would be shocked if it wasn't possible to consistently beat turn 200, even with the weaker factions: on some galaxy sizes, that's enough time to win a military victory and then spend the next 50 or more turns researching. There's a lot to say about how to avoid or prepare for war, but given the victory time and the difficulty that you're having balancing going for the win and defending yourself, I suspect that the problem is that your economy isn't growing as fast as it should be. My personal record for a vanilla-faction science win was a Riftborn game where I ended up next to the Cravers, but they were never able to threaten me, or even slow me down that much. Read your posts. Good advice, though honestly I was already doing most of it (youtubers, prior 4x experience) except for the trick where you strip ship designs down to the hulls and then buy the modules after you've built them. Does that still help? That sounds like a cool trick for the Lumeris, if it's cheaper than buying out an already modded ship. And do you still think Horatios suck? Your reasoning makes sense and matches my experiences, but maybe there was a balance patch since then or something.
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Feb 9, 2020 05:25
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It's been a while since I've last played, but the Horatio and retrofitting to "buy" modules are probably in the same state that they were: major changes to game mechanics or factions have mostly happened soon after they're introduced rather than years later. Interestingly, the Lumeris's role as the dust faction makes them get less value out of the trick unless they end up in a costly war. Early on, they're spending dust on two things that the other factions aren't, and so have little to spare compared to the factions that are using the trick to get faster colony ships. Later, they're likely to want the buyout tech anyway, so it just makes their dust-to-industry exchange rate better in some cases, rather than letting them spend dust that would otherwise be useless, as it does with factions that skip the tech. It's still great if they end up needing a large military, but not too impressive otherwise. I'm not sure what else is missing from your play. Most of the economic optimization in the game is stuff that any 4x veteran will naturally think about. If you're not doing it already, it's a nice boost to constantly export the final unit of population from systems that fill up. This trick is a tedious amount of micromanagement, but also saves up to 300 food per turn per system that would otherwise be full, since food produced by a full system is mostly wasted. If you do use the trick, it's useful to think about how the food overflow mechanics interact with it. When you constantly spaceport out the last pop in a system, anything between 150 and 299 surplus food is functionally equivalent: you'll regrow the last pop every two turns either way. Thus in a system with a food surplus of a little over 200, for example, it can be best to keep the last two slots empty, allowing it to export two pop every three turns. Meanwhile, it might be worth juggling population with conditional food bonuses around if it means pushing you from a surplus of 290 food to 300.
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Feb 9, 2020 09:30
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I'm still learning which techs I can skip. I bet that's a lot of it right there. For example I only just realized I probably don't need to research, say, toxic planets when I've only got one in the entire empire. And are you implying the buyout tech isn't always necessary? That didn't occur to me. Juggling pop between systems is something I've been meaning to get better at. The horatio game forced me to learn more about it, but I got out of the habit afterward.
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Feb 9, 2020 12:23
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Ragnar34 posted:And are you implying the buyout tech isn't always necessary? Exactly. One dust spent on retrofitting buys much more industry* than one spent on buyouts, so if you produce little enough dust that you can spend most of it buying ship modules, there's not nearly as much value in the buyout tech. There are still cases where it's worth paying a premium on buyouts, e.g. getting new colonies up and running faster, but not necessarily enough cases to justify also increasing the cost of every tech for the rest of the game by a few percent. In games where I want two other techs from that ring and quadrant (usually marketplace access and ash colonization), I skip buyouts more often than I take them. In contrast, toxic colonization is frequently something that you can afford to pick up. If you're worried about war and need influence and have only one toxic planet with no important resources, it's not a bad skip, but it's worth considering in most other cases. There's certainly an art to juggling pop. I find that as long as you're keeping your core systems from filling up before your empire does and handling faction-specific stuff, the within-system juggling is much more valuable than between-system. Unlike between-system movement, where every turn in transit costs the FIDSI that the pop could have produced, it costs nothing but your time. The rewards add up, whether it's staying just above an approval threshold, shaving a turn off of a build time or focusing on whichever FIDS that the system needs to produce right now. *save for extenuating circumstances, mostly heavy investment into buyout cost reduction.
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Feb 9, 2020 14:06
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I picked this game up on sale and have finally got around to playing it. Feels so close to being great, but it feels not quite there. I probably will play through the game only a few times. What races do you recommend? I tried the United Empire as a starter and they seemed decent.
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Feb 25, 2020 05:25
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Riftborn have the best writing/music, and they're also insanely strong anyway. You'd really miss out if you don't play them. Cravers are very neat but if you are a compulsive optimizer they will eat up a lot more time than necessary. Horatio are conceptually fascinating and it'd be a mistake to not at least give them a spin, but there's also the free visual novel about Horatio if it's just the concept.
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Feb 25, 2020 06:33
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Horatio are considered weak but with non-competetive AI it doesn't really matter, so I'd definitely advise a game as them. Gonna splice them all! As Tulip said Riftborn are like a faction of iphones, they're neat and sound great. But honestly, they all have some unique stuff about them and they all have cool aesthetics. The only ones who bore me are fish mafia cause it feels forced.
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Feb 25, 2020 08:45
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Tulip posted:Riftborn have the best writing/music, and they're also insanely strong anyway. You'd really miss out if you don't play them. I feel like I will finally get to the full bonus from minor civs on a rift born run with out tons of micromanagement and maybe suboptimal play.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:47
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Getting a weird situation in ES2. Last turn, a foreign fleet began blockading one of my systems. I asked them to leave my domain, and they agreed. The next turn, their fleet, still in the same system, again began to blockade the system. Is this legal? How can I prevent this from happening?
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Feb 28, 2020 15:29
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Krazyface posted:Getting a weird situation in ES2. Last turn, a foreign fleet began blockading one of my systems. I asked them to leave my domain, and they agreed. The next turn, their fleet, still in the same system, again began to blockade the system. Is this legal? How can I prevent this from happening? Are they Vodyani? I kinda suspect the religious pseudo war law let's them ignore that sort of poo poo.
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Feb 28, 2020 16:56
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No, Sophons.
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Feb 29, 2020 01:11
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Krazyface posted:Getting a weird situation in ES2. Last turn, a foreign fleet began blockading one of my systems. I asked them to leave my domain, and they agreed. The next turn, their fleet, still in the same system, again began to blockade the system. Is this legal? How can I prevent this from happening? Is it actually a colony that they're blockading? If it's an outpost that's outside your influence, then it isn't actually in your territory (so they're not obligated to leave), and you'll need to actually sign peace or extend your influence to cover the system in order to stop them.
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Feb 29, 2020 02:01
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It is my territory! A full colony, under my influence and everything. It was originally an independent minor species, but I integrated them (and then integrated them, playing as Horatio) ages ago. I'm at Cold War with the Sophons, FWIW.
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Feb 29, 2020 02:31
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I just checked it out, and it seems that blockading an enemy colony is just something that you can do during cold war, no special circumstances needed. That's news to me, but it means that your options are destroying/chasing off the enemy fleet, closing borders and then expelling it again or getting either a peace treaty or an alliance. The demand for them to remove their fleet might be a bug, might have worked but let them move back into the system the very same turn that it kicked them out (technically correct behavior if your borders aren't closed, but no less frustrating for it) or might be some corner case of the demand system that I don't know about.
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Feb 29, 2020 03:24
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I remember reading in this thread months ago that the Nakalim were hinted to be ancient humanity as their homeworld was a disfigured Earth - has that been changed since then? Now that I'm playing with them it looks like the texture changed.
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Mar 2, 2020 23:30
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Thom12255 posted:I remember reading in this thread months ago that the Nakalim were hinted to be ancient humanity as their homeworld was a disfigured Earth - has that been changed since then? Now that I'm playing with them it looks like the texture changed. Yeah, it's been changed. When they were first released their homeworld was blatantly earth with a few million years of continent drift. They changed the texture since then.
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Mar 3, 2020 00:52
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Aww, booo. That’s no fun.
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Mar 3, 2020 18:05
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Since the series is on sale and I bought Endless Space 2 on release but nothing else, I'm curious if there is a priority list of DLCs that I should get, or just buy the bundle.
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Mar 27, 2020 01:01
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Bholder posted:Since the series is on sale and I bought Endless Space 2 on release but nothing else, I'm curious if there is a priority list of DLCs that I should get, or just buy the bundle. Do not buy the Awakening expansion. It is unbalanced to the point of being unfun (the academy will often just snowball all over the rest of the galaxy on you due to the special rules they operate by.) Folks are also pretty mixed on Penumbra because the hacking system can be rather obtuse. I don't mind it myself. The only two expansions I recommend without caveats are Vaulters (mostly just adds their faction) and Supremacy. The other dlcs are more music and quests.
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Mar 27, 2020 02:38
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Personally I dislike Supremacy the most, but then again I've listened to the thread and still don't have Awakening. Overall the game is very complete in its base form. They didn't release a mediocre game and then add features that should have been there in the first place as DLC. The DLC that I'd say is the most unambiguously rad is Harmonic Memories, because you're just buying an album of really good music.
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Mar 27, 2020 13:32
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Awakening is definitely the weakest expansion - I disable it because it just isn't fun Also dungeon of the endless is getting a switch release!
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Mar 29, 2020 22:51
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So I've got Endless Space 1 and 2 and haven't spent a lot of time with either. Is there, at this point, ever a reason to play ES1 over 2? Or is 2 the same factions and same story with updated graphics/gameplay?
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Jun 4, 2020 02:11
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