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One thing I really like about EL and ES that makes the Cravers and Necrophage stand out is that they don't just have war and peace, but also cold war, which allows limited hostilities and is the status quo. Cravers and Necrophage can never have true peace, but they can get things down to a cold war.
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Sep 15, 2016 03:19
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Eliminating another faction early on can be a crucial part of playing Cultists. For saying you're on one city, you need a surprising amount of space to take advantage of the "Gain FIDS from converted villages" thing. If you're hemmed in, your capital won't be as productive as you hope. The more villages you can keep up, the more powerful you get, and the fewer neighbors you have the more villages you can keep up.
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Sep 21, 2016 05:52
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Has there been a completed EL LP? It seems like it would be timely for one to start now or soon-ish. I'd volunteer but I'm really bad (I used to be able to beat the game consistently through Serious but I fired up last night and was struggling on Normal); also I only have Frozen Fangs.
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Oct 2, 2016 17:34
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So I'm fairly seriously considering doing an LP of EL (there's technically an ongoing LP, but it hasn't had a post since July). I've started doing some writing for it, but I'm really bad at EL. I used to be able to beat Serious AI, but my recent wins have all been against Normal and/or humans. I plan to show off mechanics and some strategy, but I'd like some input on whether or not I'm wrong-headed about several pieces of strategy. For example, splitting the starting army. I can see pros and cons of splitting the starting army (more ruins, but it's basically a death warrant for all your starting units and you won't clear out minor villages), and pros and cons of keeping them together (clearing out minors so that settling is safer, but settling is kind of blind). Is this a correct thought or is there one way that's clearly better? My experience has been that, even as Broken Lords, you want to start with your population largely on Industry, because it's multiple Dust per Industry to buy things out and until you get Dust Refinery and Dust Depository in Era III, you aren't producing Dust at that high of a rate.
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Oct 5, 2016 01:04
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HundredBears posted:I do something similar with most factions. Language Square is usually the best choice for your first tech and something that every (non-Necrophage) faction should have before turn 10: the economic boost of settling a region with two or three pacified and intact villages is very strong. The extra quests and reduced need to burn villages makes splitting the obvious choice. Sometimes you want to delay splitting or recombine early in order to complete quests (Broken Lords in particular might want to build a Stalwart as their second or third thing in their starting city and then bring everything together to advance their faction quest), but my default is to split on turn 1 for scouting and have everyone start heading home by turn 20. I play on Fast, so the timing is going to be a little off. Are you expanding at a rate of 1 city per empire plan while also getting that tier two bonus? Does that require like 2 pop per city on influence? My typical list for T1 techs is, not particularly in this order, Mill Foundry Seed Storage Empire Mint Mercenary Market Sewer System Alchemist's Furnace Open-Pit Mining T1 Unit Which is enough to advance to Era II. Do you stick around for an extra tech to cram in Language Square, or do you forgo one of the above (which all seem pretty crucial to me)?
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Oct 5, 2016 03:11
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HundredBears posted:I'll usually put down two cities per empire plan, stopping once I have 4-7 cities (depending on faction, luxuries, good regions, etc.), and yeah, that averages out to two workers per turn per city on influence, in addition to the four influence per city per turn to get the 33% building cost reduction that's crucial to all peaceful strategies. It's one of the reasons that it's so nice to have the extra workers from Language Square. On Fast, it might not be worth going for the second empire plan switch to Dust unless you have a good start, dye or the +Influence on anomalies event that was added in the DLC, though. I haven't played on Fast, but I suspect that your economy will be weaker than on Normal, making it too slow to use the strategy of rushing Glory of Empire in one or two cities and then running all Influence there. I'm thinking about the pacing of pumping out that many cities and it'd be difficult to manage without keeping your capital and second city at one or two pop, which kind of precludes also keeping multiple pops on influence. It'd have to be an extremely strong start. A crucial difference about fast is that roaming armies show up on turn 10, so getting out an unescorted settler requires basically building founder's memorial and then the settler immediately. Speedball posted:The other thing is that a lot of Era 1 techs are really really useful while later ones are more specialized. You don't have enough science or time to get *everything* but you can do well to get a lot of early stuff. E1 techs are crucial for expansion, no doubt. Moreso than any other era, E1 is the time that I'm really hurting to make the best decisions. Speedball posted:*cough* Sorry.... I was gonna start it up again once I started feeling better, then we got the news of the next expansion coming out... Don't worry about it, I'm planning on doing several shorter playthroughs on fast speed rather than one deep playthrough, so it'll hopefully be different.
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Oct 5, 2016 05:16
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HundredBears posted:I'll usually put down two cities per empire plan, stopping once I have 4-7 cities (depending on faction, luxuries, good regions, etc.), Oof, did this last night and I wound up empire wide happiness of 9. I managed to recover but man did that hurt. I'm just not managing to cram this timeline all together into a cohesive whole. This is good advice, thanks. Conspiratiorist posted:Courtesy of some french dude on steam, this guide explains how to break the game over your knee, no skill required: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635764665 1800 hours  This is a really in depth guide. Didn't know about the settle & salt trick. Some of that's stuff that's outside how I was thinking - I tend(ed) to think that food was good for starting cities, so that they can recover back to two pop in time to pump out additional settlers. It's a little long for me to read all in one go but I'll definitely try to get through it. I'm pretty hyped.
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Oct 5, 2016 18:28
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So, double post so I can see what people think of my LP efforts so far (I'll be posting this to the sand castle as well). I ginned this up last night - it goes up until first winter (because I got sleepy) over four posts. Posts 1-4 are just dummy posts, they won't be used in the actual LP, but I will be using the OP. The pictures used in posts 1-4 are therefore not edited in any way, since they were just intended as placeholder. OP First post Second post Third post Fourth post
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Oct 5, 2016 18:35
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Conspiratiorist posted:Oh yeah, leave it to competitive players to show you that everything you thought you knew is wrong. I had a similar experience with Civ V and MoO2 after reading up on multiplayer tactics and watching competitive matches. The one that broke my mind when I was younger was Civ 3. The trick here that was cool that I want to try is the level 2 empire plans on turn 10. HundredBears posted:You might be overbuilding districts. Things vary by faction as always with this game, but the general rule is that the first Borough Streets is a good return on investment but not so good that you can't skip it to save on approval. Thus you end up with Sewer Systems cancelling out the -20 approval from the first wave of expansions, leaving you Content at worst (and Happy if you have +approval anomalies or can run any luxuries at all) and Central Markets more than cancelling out the approval penalty from the second. At that point, you're already at 5 cities (and may have stopped one earlier if, for instance, you're getting exactly 2 of a valuable luxury per turn and can't eke out any more from the market/quests). I think I was hitting too many regions too quickly, I couldn't fit in any districts but I was at 7 regions on turn 30 (third empire plan). My timing on getting out cities vis a vis sewers and markets was clearly off, I'll have to work on that. Several of my regions could have waited, since I successfully blocked off my borders. quote:It looks good. I'd like to see a more in-dpeth overview of the surrounding regions when it comes time to expand (which maybe you were planning for the actual LP anyway), but it was a smart choice to skip over the minutia of exploration. It's easy for 4X LPs to overload readers with details that are important to know when playing the game but that they aren't going to remember across the days in between updates. One detail that I do have to quibble with is your description of the village destruction quest as a bad one. Titan Bones are amazing for the +50% Industry and it's well worth giving up some exploration to be able to activate them before settling on turn 10. Needing more depth for the expansion plans is a good call. I'm trying to keep the whole thing from getting bogged down in too much detail, since that's not really the intention of the LP, but I probably elided too much there. Some pictures of the region's highlights would have been a good idea. My reaction to that quest was primarily about the difficulty of actually getting that quest done in time to do anything with it - my forces were too spread out to gather together before my next expansion hit. One thing I did totally forget about when evaluating that quest is that I might have been able to buy five more titan bones on the market to make it usable at two cities. LP is live. Come cast your votes.
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Oct 6, 2016 00:24
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I'm stupid as poo poo and got the deluxe ES2 and now I can't figure out where the soundtrack is on my computer 
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Oct 7, 2016 06:45
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Flipswitch posted:I don't think it's actually out yet and is coming with the full game? I didn't look though. ...why did I not think of that. Thyrork posted:Ah, excellent. I'm a month behind but glad to see someone did go and make a megathread for the Amplitude stuff. I'm enjoying it, the Cravers capture that feel of desperately needing to expand that I loved so much in ES1.
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Oct 7, 2016 13:36
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Yeah I don't think they've yet worked out the new siege mechanics. Like in ES1 besieging a planet was a function of having ships in the system, which could be countered other ships in the system. The only fleet defense mechanic is stopping the enemy ships from leaving the system, which does nothing if they bring in a fleet that has better ground forces than you.
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Oct 8, 2016 06:15
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IAmTheRad posted:
Who're you playing as? If you're Lumeris I think you just have to be faster, if you're Vodyani I think you're just kind of supposed to not give a poo poo and start leeching, and if you're Cravers, they did the hard part for you. If you're Sophons you seem kind of hosed though. Right now there seems like a degeneracy problem with Cravers. They're designed to need to take over others' space, but there's only one or two minors per player and then you end up taking over other majors' capitals, which knocks them out of the game. It seems like one of the following situations is liable to play out with the default settings: 1) the various Cravers wipe everybody else out in the early game then duke it out over a dying galaxy, 2) the Cravers and the non-Cravers are non evenly distributed and the non-Cravers wind up with cramped tiny empires on the other end of the galaxy 3)a Lumeris superstate emerges far away from the Cravers. I guess there's 4)Cravers get wrecked by Vodyani. Maybe 6 players for a medium galaxy is just too small? Sophons still seem pretty screwed to me, either they get invaded by militarily superior forces or the Lumeris just take over too fast for them to deal with.
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Oct 9, 2016 05:50
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I think that before ES2 was a thing, the 'canonical' end to EL was Vaulter's quest victory. There's a lot of art for the game with humans, so I'd actually think we might see two human majors, plus probably the Vaulters and Horatio as minors. Otherwise the most awesome piece of art wouldn't make sense  Darkrenown posted:I'm playing some EL for the first time since not enjoying it at release: Can I not build districts over ruins? It's rather annoying since they are blocking the direct route to a sweet tile. Yeah ruins and minor villages are permanent, or at least last longer than the game does. Hopefully you're enjoying it more now, it didn't click for me at first but it's become my favorite 4x. IAmTheRad posted:I already got Endless Space 2. I'm enjoying it even while it's an unfinished early access game.  Darkrenown is pretty invested in Stellaris.
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Oct 9, 2016 15:59
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Darkrenown posted:I'm sorta enjoying it this time around, but it hasn't quite clicked yet. Broken lords might not have been the best first game choice either, but they looked the coolest. Basically I am running around killing minor factions and spending much of my Dust healing instead of making population. A lot of people suggest them for a first faction and I've never felt like it was good advice. You can get yourself trapped into a low-dust dust death spiral and the ROI on population spending is nonobvious. They used to play super tall but now they're probably the widest-playing faction, which means happiness can be a challenge. Plus you never learn about using food. Drakken is probably the best to start, for learning principles. They start with a really good starting tech (Language Square), ruins are a bonus tile so that makes settling a little more forgiving, they suffer less from falling behind in tech, and they have a get-out-of-war card. Tanith posted:Am I going crazy, or did you flip this image horizontally for some reason? I could swear that when I saw this as a loading screen, it was going the other way. Yeah I found that image on the Wiki where they seem to have flipped it. Good catch though, I couldn't read that without really squinting. IAmTheRad posted:It's been flipped for some reason. It's bay 60. Not bay a0 Bay 06  Some cravers peacefully moved into my empire and I am not happy about it.
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Oct 9, 2016 18:48
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Dallan Invictus posted:
Do it, the more it comes up the more visible it is the more likely they are to act on it. I think you make good points, and if you link it I'll corroborate. Demiurge4 posted:It's a design choice. Endless legend does it too. I think the rationale is to make the early game feel like the exploration phase and era 2 is the beginning of the space history where borders have been established and conflict erupts (hence why invasions are gated behind and era 2 tech). Yeah this is a big problem to me as well. The flavor texts for the eras they've implemented so far are Era I: Ad Astra! posted:As intelligent beings who once looked up to the stars to learn to travel between them, an age of endless discovery begins Era II: First Contact posted:No longer content with cataloging the wonders of planets, stars, and systems, the empires of the galaxy seek to understand them -- and each other -- in detail. Era III: Wealth of Worlds posted:As borders solidify and competition increases, empires start to look within themselves for growth and opportunity In my experience, you're fighting a war somewhere in the middle of Era I, and I've figured out what the diplomacy of the galaxy is going to generally look like by Era II. Somethings are, I think, well placed, but colonization techs are too spread out and there's too many 'must have' techs: in Era I, it feels like the entire econ and influence sectors are needed, which is 8/10 before you're even considering colonizing or military, not to mention that skips out on Non-Baryonic Particles, which seems pretty goddamn important. The pacing in general seems off - the first era seems like it should be about exploring your near cluster and meeting a minor or two, when, again, I'm fighting wars and exploring 50%+ of the galaxy. If that's the case, the first era should probably be like 20 turns. Maybe it will be better on Fast. In other words: Clarste posted:Era 1 just takes too long to get out of and is missing too many mechanics. Speaking of minors: I think EL has a good balance for minors. There's multiple per major, and there's a variety of ways to interact with them, and sooner or later they're a significant strategic concern. And they're always fast to work with. ES2 minors take a lot of time and resources, and there's not enough of them. Part of the reason I'm fighting Era I wars so much is that Cravers pretty much exist off of war expansion. If there's not enough minors, that means fighting majors. I think minors deserve a major rethink.
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Oct 11, 2016 01:43
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Fangz posted:I guess it's just a matter of strategy to time your discoveries and production allocations so that you can always be doing something useful with them. This is a critical piece of strategy in EL, yeah. I think what most of us are feeling here is that it's not really possible with the current gear : atom ratio in ES2, especially not when you want lots of colonization techs that give 0 things to do with your gears. I'd personally most like them to compress the tech up time, ESPECIALLY in Era I where you seem to need almost everything just to get your feet off the ground. Clarste posted:From the official forums: That's pretty cool, so we've got 6 near-definite factions, plus at least one human faction, leaving us with one true mystery major left. It's good to have a Concrete artifact as a faction. e: For those who don't want to look for it, here's their "to do" list." It lists 2 Major Factions as a high priority item, so I guess that means they feel pretty confident about Sowers. Tulip fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 07:34
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Just a reminder that if you want to have some influence on ES2's development, use their official forums. They do seem to genuinely listen to and interact with people in it. Some hot button issues appear to include force truce, the tech tree/column, and the combat system. For the tl;dr
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Oct 12, 2016 18:26
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BL are probably the best faction for going wide, due to the fact that you can control the way your population grows and it's best to spread out the population as much as possible. There's little reason to break 10 population.Bogart posted:It's so hard for me to stop focusing on food in Endless Legend at any cost coming from...Christ, 1k hours of CiV. Help me, endless goons. Play BL, ignore food entirely. Food's not that great of a resource, getting populations above 8 is a pain and getting them above 10 is largely pointless. Industry and dust are victory.
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Oct 13, 2016 02:43
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Jastiger posted:I'm playing as the new faction and lol how can they have Spying. The Forgotten makes sense cuz they can go invisible and can don a disguise, as can many others. I've always imagined the cities of EL, even Necrophage cities, to be incredibly diverse. Otherwise the whole "population conserved" thing makes about zero sense and makes significantly less when a city is captured by BL.
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Oct 14, 2016 17:41
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uber_stoat posted:Yeah, it's hard to justify a truce with an alien race that intends to literally eat everyone in the galaxy. I don't really like this interpretation of the Cravers. Like, Cravers need to constantly expand in order to deal with unique aspects of their population pressure, which logically means expanding to include the furthest reaches of the universe they can get to, but that doesn't mean that their intent at any given moment in time is in line with the long-term implications of their philosophy. They're still thinking, sentient beings, capable of decision making that is or is not rational.
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Oct 17, 2016 02:12
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Take the privateers tech and create a giant mercenary stack of death. Destroy his city without damaging your alliance.
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Oct 18, 2016 20:45
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Daemons are hideously good. Kazanji are actually my favorite to integrate.
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Dec 24, 2016 02:20
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I've certainly enjoyed every Tempest game I've played less than I've enjoyed the median non-Tempest game.Stabbatical posted:So I tried to play a bit of Endless Space 1 as I had it in my library from the same time I bought Legend. It has not aged well. The UI is less elegant and the battle system/screen was incomprehensible. Interested in getting ES2 though, assuming it builds on the improvements from EL. Not very. It has more superficial similarities to ES, what with being a space 4X, though that doesn't mean much. They've clearly learned a lot of lessons from EL, and they've done a much better job of making each faction feel unique than ES1 did, but it's hard to articulate how a given lesson from EL lead to a ES1-->ES2 change, other than some relatively superficial stuff like influence and roaming quest armies. ES2, it must be said, is very cool so far. I've only played a very little bit since an early build, and I haven't really found my sea-legs regarding the election mechanic, but so far I like that particular aspect. The 'choice' techs is an interesting design decision and I'd have to play a more militarily nail-biting game to tell if it's a good decision or not.
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Mar 18, 2017 18:56
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Lichtenstein posted:How different do the factions feel? From watching it from afar it seems like mostly differently coloured +numbers and vodyani that do stand out EL-style. So I haven't really played Sophons or Horatio, and you already know Vodyani, so for the other three... So United Empire's gimmick is that they can spend influence to buy techs, improvements, and resources, and that when they build an improvement they get influence. This leads to a positive reinforcement cycle where you can build up systems really fast, even if they're relatively industry poor. I also found that, depending on what choices you make in their quest, you can get a pretty big difference in what your empire looks like. I also found the bonus influence great for 'buying' out minor factions. Lumeris expand insanely fast - they just use dust to establish an outpost remotely, rather than sending in a colony ship. They can trade outposts to other factions, so you can really influence the shape of the galaxy. Cravers get huge FIDS production bonuses on planets, but slowly deplete the resources of those planets over time. This means that you're in a constant expand-or-die, and you get a huge bonus for enslaving other factions, encouraging you to go to war early and often, particularly against minors. I've found them all pretty exciting so far, though I mostly played during a much earlier build and only recently picked it back up again.
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Mar 19, 2017 01:04
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So I'm on track to winning my 2nd game as UE, so I feel like I've got a handle for them at some level, but every time I play Sophons, I faceplant. Hard. I feel like the UE can do in 20 turns what the Sophons do in 60. It doesn't inspire confidence that in the UE game, I punched up against a Sophon ~30% higher score than me and walked all over them compared to fighting a Vodyani that was 20% lower than me. Any Sophon specific suggestions? I had a similar problem with Vaulters in EL - I don't see the value in having the choice to build 50 things but not the ability to build them.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:17
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See, the problem I have with Vaulters is that I can't get off more than like 2 expansions before I get murdered. The teleportation and holy resource bonuses don't matter if you just fail in the early game and die immediately. I really don't entirely understand it, it's not like Drakken have significant production bonuses but I have no trouble with them. I'm actually having a worse problem with the Sophons. I've had 3 games in a row where I either lost 2 colony ships or went bankrupt before I got both basic industry buildings built in my home system. I know they have a slow start but this is ridiculous. It feels like I'm playing 2-3 difficulties higher than when playing UE or Vodyani.
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Mar 20, 2017 20:43
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Clarste posted:There hasn't been anything resembling a balance pass yet, so it's pretty likely that the Sophons are just weaker. That said, the basic strategy with them is to snipe game-changing technologies as early as possible. Prior to the tech tree revamp, this generally meant going after colony development ASAP, since being able to get +50 per turn of anything within the first dozen turns of the game is pretty miraculous, and doesn't require extra production to take advantage of. It's possible that the tech tree revamp made this less powerful though, since it's easier for anyone to shoot for that. One thing I just noticed that is kind of funny is that Public-Private Partnerships is +10 on Temperate, not Cold, so Sophons aren't even guaranteed to get the max bonus for their starting tech on their starting system because their starting planet is always Cold. So yeah it's possible that Sophons need a tune up. I wouldn't take my experiences as gospel though, I'm just kind of bad at science focused strats. I think there's a slight bug, they're supposed to start with Basic System Development but still need to research two stage 2 techs to get it on their economy screen. That said, I'm trying it out right now, we'll see what happens.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:55
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Small annoyance: now when you're in the start game menu, you can't see all the faction traits at once for your selected faction.Clarste posted:You build them in systems, taking less than 1 turn each. As in, they don't interrupt your production at all, but you still need to wait a turn to use them. They also cost dust and strategic resources, depending on exactly which one you're making. Once you have them (up to 3 at a time), they appear in a stockpile in the upper left corner and you just click on them to deploy them on any system you want. It doesn't matter which system you build them in, they're always go to the same global stock. This seems like a really hackish solution to getting to Ardent Mages-style spells, so hopefully that'll be addressed. Clarste posted:Anyway, I just played a quick game and I seemed to do okay with the Sophons. Beelined for system development and explored as fast as possible for a good luxury resource. I actually got pretty unlucky and the first two resources I found were both totally useless, but then I found a cluster of Eden Essence or whatever it's called that gave me +50 Influence per turn for each system. Then I just bought up every single minor faction on the turn I met them and snowballed. Yeah this advice helped quite a bit, thought I got Jadonyx. I still felt like I was massively behind the power curve compared to, well, any other faction. And it seems a bit RNG dependent - you pretty much have to find a habitable planet with Jadonyx, Dustciduous Trees, or I guess Eden Incense. Maybe Superspuds would work too? It just feels really dicey compared to what you can do with other factions. I think something that would help would be starting with a minor that isn't Pilgrims. Epistis (+industry) would be the simplest, but Bhagaba, Amoeba, Mavros (lol), or Haroshem would help them. Again it's possible that I'm just a bad.
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Mar 24, 2017 13:31
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So I just found out about Starports, that makes Cravers a fair bit more optimizable. "Starport" is a system action in the bottom left of the system management screen. If you have a level 2 system, it has a 3 slot starport, +1 slot per level. You drag and drop pops from the system that has a starport, then select another system in the Starport window, and next turn a logistics ship will depart from system one to system two. With most factions this let you populate a food-poor system (such as gas giants) quickly. With Cravers this lets you optimize your slavery system quite a bit more than just hoping and praying the right pops spawn into the system. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:Hows it all coming together with the new update? Solid enough to pick up yet or maybe just wait until final release still? My understanding is that the game is on sale until release, so if you know you're going to buy it, may as well buy it as soon as you've got the money for it. It's still, y'know, pretty incomplete, and I think needs some balancing, but I'm finding it a lot more enjoyable and engaging than Civ6 and it's certainly got more interesting systems than ES1.
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Mar 25, 2017 13:53
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Megazver posted:Not a fan of the redone science screen, either. Yeah, it's more like ES than EL now, but guess what, EL had a better science screen. Do you mean purely UI wise or in terms of underlying design? Because they changed the underlying design such that the EL style would have been really messy. I'm generally fine with the tech map, my complaint is that I don't like the unit designer but there's no way they're trashing that.
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Mar 25, 2017 17:43
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Just played an MP game. Me as Riftborn, D as Lumeris, and B as UE, plus 5 AIs. D and I started 1 jump apart, and when his influence borders started intruding on my capital's borders I basically decided it was war because he was going to very rapidly swallow my core system peacefully and drowned him in robots. It was fun fighting an opponent who adjusted and adapted their weapon systems to what I was using, as opposed to the AI's near complete randomness. Riftborn are good, but it's really hard to separate my feelings about their actual performance from my feelings about their music, which is probably my favorite. I think they might be even stronger if it were easier to attract non-Riftborn to your planets. Filling them up with entirely Riftborn leads to monster systems, but it takes a long time and means you're wasting a lot of F. I did find a system with multiple I producing gas giants, that settled instantaneously. I do recommend using your starting hero as a governor and taking the +resources when possible, Riftborn are thirsty for titanium and hyperium. MP desyncs like crazy. I don't know if anything really fucky happened as a result of it, but it was like every other turn. The other players reported some minor input lag, but nothing like "AI moved a hero" or any of the bullshit that sometimes happens when EL desyncs.
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Mar 26, 2017 20:04
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Clarste posted:I noticed that the AI actually does adapt in the latest patch. My usual strategy of all lasers, all the time, was quickly met by enemy fleets with 100% energy defenses. That's really good news.
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Mar 26, 2017 22:31
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Baronjutter posted:I have no idea what I'm doing but man the design, the sound, the music, the vibe of this game is awesome. As much as I love stellaris it's so nice to come to something where every race was designed by hand and is full of unique mechanics and content. I've dove in as United earth, have no idea what I'm doing but there doesn't seem to be any other rival empire in my little cluster of stars. I finally got the tech to slow-boat it between clusters, I assume eventually I'll uncover more hyperlanes or what ever? Tl;Dr no, you've got to use probes. Stars (and nebulae and asteroid fields and rogue planets etc) are grouped into "constellations," which are generally all connected by lanes (there are sometimes "isolated" stars that are technically part of a constellation but have no lanes to any planets). There's a game setting controlling the size of constellations - "Unique" means the whole map is one constellation (basically pangaea setting), "few" means they're generally large, and "many" divides the galaxy into a large number of small constellations. The vast majority of my play time is on "unique" so I'm not sure how large they are otherwise. You can't order ships to travel to destinations that they can't see the lane for without the slow-boat tech, and you can't order a slow-boat unless you can see the destination. The you're not just trapped in your starting constellation is that your exploration ships can send probes out into the void. Each ship can store up to 2 probes, which regenerate automatically on a timer, and can send them out in any direction. The probes reveal a radius around them, and travel for a few turns before they stop sending intel home. Once you've revealed a new star you can order any ship to travel to it and it'll take the fastest known route. On 'unique' galaxies, I rarely build more than 1 or 2 exploration ships past my initial one. On 'few,' I feel like a couple more are warranted to try to get a feel for the general direction of the galaxy. The few times I've played on "many" it seemed like 5 or 6 was warranted, but I really have no idea. A caveat: the probes you send out into the void are the same probes you use for exploring anomalies on planets, so there's a tradeoff between fogbusting and treasure hunting. -- Yea this is a totally different beast from Stellaris. You don't ever really see large federations made of small, medium, and large powers, and there's really not an endgame crisis. You are the endgame crisis. UE is probably the most straightforward to play. Having shitloads of influence makes it easier to 'buy' minor factions, and you can spend the influence on techs and buildings, which means you're a lot more flexible. UE has good ships, you can have more planets, and Industrialist laws are pretty easy to use well (Mineral Misers Act is beastly in my experience).
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May 11, 2017 09:05
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Baronjutter posted:How do I adjust galaxy settings? on the new game page there's the word "galaxy" tucked barely visible along the bottom as well as a cropped picture of a galaxy but clicking does nothing. Is there no small/large settings? People were talking about constellations settings and all that but I'm not seeing it anywhere. That's...weird. Here's what I see when I start a new game, highlights in red and purple mine:  All those fields inside the red box are adjustable. If you click the circle inside the purple highlight this pops up:  I can't find anything in options that is like "advanced mode" or anything like that I could enable/disable that would change that. What does your new game screen look like? Clarste posted:Actually you can dump as many probes as you like into the design, it just makes the ship more expensive to build and have less weapons/engines. There are also some upgraded probe technologies that hold more or regenerate them faster. This is true.
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May 12, 2017 00:35
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NmareBfly posted:Yeah, the 'known issues' section is worth noting, just to be cautious of a few things: Probably not. "Spaceport" is the feature that lets you move pops from one system to another. If you're Cravers it's a pretty big part of minmaxing micro, but I've found it to be of middling-low importance for other factions.
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May 18, 2017 18:02
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Comstar posted:What are the different factions in Endless Space 2, and how do they play? The United Empire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTbS8BEa1oI Aka the UE. The UE are the ‘human’ faction, and unsurprisingly the most ‘vanilla.' All of their traits are easy to take advantage of - they get free influence for everything they construct as well as their core pop giving more influence, they have a higher cap on the number of systems they can colonize before suffering overexpansion penalties, they get more manpower from both their secondary pop (Hissho) and their Patriots trait, and they start with two of the most frequently chosen starter techs. Their 'core' ability is that they can spend influence on techs, buildings, and resources. The absolute piles of influence you get give you a great deal of flexibility. You can invest it back into your infrastructure, expand more quickly into minors, or pump it into making more diplomatic deals. Combined with the focus on industry, you will rarely find yourself in the frustrating position of having too many things to build and not enough industry to build them. Hortatio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exRFQXX3oeg aka Being John Horatio. The Horatio are vain biologists, all clones of one super-rich, super-powerful Horatio Prime. They tend to be a more peaceful faction. Horatio require a little more finesse than some other factions.Their core population gives more food and more happiness by default, but really the point of Horatio is that you can sacrifice non-Horatio faction populations at the altar of Horatio to splice their genes into the Horatio genepool, making your Horatio more powerful and beautiful, which intrinsically means that Horatio requires a little more micro. Thanks to their cloning prowess, heroes hired by Horatio recover faster. Horatio ships cost more (and have kind of lovely hardpoints), while their planets suffer both less overcrowding problems (on top of the beautiful Horatio giving bonus approval) and have more population slots. Their secondary population, Z'vali, have more science output and additional approval. Horatio themselves tend to prefer the ecologist faction, and start as a dictatorship, so you start the game being able to colonize all non-gas planets. All in all, Horatio are a bit of a late bloomer. Until you have acquired (and sacrificed) a decent variety of pops, you're not able to really display the beauty and power of Horatio, and bonus food with bonus pop slots are not bonuses that lead to an early lead. Fortunately, you do have a lot of colonization options, and you have a good approval buffer. Horatio. The Vodyani https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yupbwsSfGsE Nomadic Space Vampires. Vodyani are the weirdest and probably swingiest faction. They worship the Virtual Endless, which is kind of insane, and are in some ways obligated to be the nastiest crusaders in the galaxy. Popwise, Vodyani have some weird traits. They're religiously oriented, grow incredibly slow, and have powerful bonuses to FIDS (but not influence). More importantly, each Vodyani pop occupies one population slot on each planet in the system colonized. Even more importantly, improvements and population are not tied to system, but to the arc ship that is temporarily tethered to the system, meaning you can pick up and move to a new system at your heart's content. Also, instead of colony ships you get "Leechers," which go to other people's planets and kidnap their people to reduce them to 'essence' that you use to build more ark ships and Vodyani pops. Vodyani infantry are more powerful than other infantry, and their ships are faster. Heroes also gain +2 XP per turn just for working for you. Vodyani pops are religious, which gives you a weird grab bag of laws, notably the ability to treat Cold War as hot war, and a law that gives yet more experience to your heroes. All in all, the Vodyani capture a sort of Space Mongols play style, which requires some amount of flexibility of thinking. The Lumeris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z_Ug6piiqI Merchants extraordinaire, the Lumeris can expand incredibly fast, and turn around and use that expansion as a trading resource. Their major trait is that they can sell trade outposts through the diplomacy menu. They don't use colony ships at all, instead they just spend a pile of dust and instantly get an outpost, allowing for quick expansion. Because they don't start with a colony ship, they instead have a second explorer, and they have a higher probe stock on exploration ships, making them great for early game discovery. In addition, they have higher approval and can ignore Cold War blockades on trade ships, which helps make them both more dust and colonize faster and more effectively. They also use dust to influence minor factions instead of influence, allowing you to save that precious precious influence for trade deals. Lumeris themselves tend to vote pacifist, which is the 'dust and luxuries' political party. Despite this, they don't really have any penalties or bonuses to waging war, save that their secondary starting population, Gnashast, have defense bonuses during ground battles. Lumeris are significantly better than other factions at creating a large trading empire, and tend to be a more peaceful faction since that leads to better trade agreements and allows you to better take advantage of the ability to sell outposts. The Sophons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5R0G_RZykVA Mad scientists, the Sophons specialize in science at the cost of all else. Including having a reasonable research strategy. The sophons have two traits that make them kind of kooky at science: the first is that they get a significant research bonus to techs based on how many other players have NOT researched that tech, and their preferred (and thus starting) political party is Scientists, who let you research an era ahead. In addition to their primary pop giving a science boost, their secondary population, Pilgrims, are also science producers, though more religiously focused. Sophon ships have much faster movement, and they reveal the length of outgoing starlanes as soon as they touch a system, making them very efficient explorers. The most explicit drawback of playing the Sophons is that they are significantly worse at infantry ground combat, which is a significant penalty to early war. They have an implicit drawback of being very likely to have tons of techs but not be able to build what they've researched because, while researching extremely fast, they don't have a bonus to production (there is a science law that reduces the cost of system improvements). The Sophons require a flexible mind to take advantage of, and a pretty good familiarity with the tech tree in order to make the most of their research bonuses. Each game of Sophons comes out pretty different in my experience. The Cravers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4rgswnjpZg Slaver warlords, the Cravers never know peace and are basically the bad guys from Independence Day. The primary trait of Cravers is that, so long as their is one craver pop on a planet, non-Craver pops are dramatically more productive (with an approval penalty). Because they are being enslaved and eaten. However, Craver pops themselves generate Depletion Points every turn; once a planet has too many depletion points, it becomes an emptied husk of what it once was, and the Craver pop itself loses its pretty crazy production bonuses. All of this means that Cravers benefit substantially from having starports and significant amounts of population micromanagement. The rest of their traits make them better at war: cheaper ships, larger fleets, better infantry, and of course being unable to go to Peace so long as militarists are in the Senate. Fortunately(?) you're a dictatorship, so you can arbitrarily put another faction as your sole party, though it will hurt. Their secondary pop, Harsoshems, are food producers, which can be tricky to manage. Because of the way they deplete planets, the Cravers are not just good at war, they practically need it, though not quite as badly as the Vodyani. However, you do not have any approval bonuses and in fact have approval maluses, making expansion potentially costly. The Cravers are the only faction I've played where my government was overthrown by domestic pressures. The Riftborn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8H8DedCW_I Survivors from a transdimensional cataclysm, the Riftborn must build their pop manually and have a heavy industry focus. They can also gently caress with time. Riftborn pops have a hefty bonus to dust, industry, and science outputs, but as a tradeoff they must create new Riftborn via the construction queue. As a result of their weird non-biology, they don't spend food or dust on colonizing new systems, instead spending Titanium and Hyperium. They also have a weird approval bonus on sterile planets paired with an approval penalty on fertile planets (and also have a unique ability to terraform planets to sterile). Their ships are slower and less flexible than other factions, typically having no flex hardpoints. Their secondary population is Remnants, who have bonuses to dust and industry production; both populations favor the Industrialist party. In addition to using titanium and hyperium for colonization, they also use it for constructing "singularities," basically spells that gently caress with time. Specifically, the titanium one gives a ton of bonuses to the system its used on, while the hyperium one gives a ton of penalties. You don't have to be at war with somebody to use the penalty one, so that's a nice way of doing some asymmetrical warfare. Late game, you also get stasis, which stops EVERYTHING from happening on that system. The Riftborn are a little inflexible, but quite potent within their specialization. Their great production lends itself to both butter and guns, and their ability to use hyperium and titanium as if they were dust or food gives you even better potential optimization. Do be aware that their ships are really, really slow, which makes warfare awkward. The Unfallen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKHLH_e12o0 Tree people with a weird, weird way of expanding. Instead of building colony ships, you get "vineships." A vineship goes to system and creates a vine between that system and your network of vine'd systems. As soon as your vine is completed, you can immediately turn that system into a full-on colonized system (assuming you have the right colonization techs), completely skipping the outpost phase. But beware, should the vines be cut, you lose all systems that are cut off from your vine network. The Unfallen are disposed toward diplomatic friendship, gaining benefits to both war and approval based on having friendly relations with other major factions. Unsurprisingly, Unfallen have a strong disposition to the Pacifist faction. The Unfallen lend themselves to very peaceful play, and can start really, really fast. Unfortunately, Unfallen do not have extra pop slots nor do they have bonuses to any production other than food, meaning that you can create a large empire of unremarkable systems. Fortunately, as is the case in 4X, a strong early game can be leveraged into a strong game in general.
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May 20, 2017 17:12
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Speedball posted:Another really nasty game-breaking bug. Naturally, Riftborn can't harvest Titanium till they research the tech that has it, despite their trait that they start on a planet with some. Okay, so they ALSO start with a Hyperium source, and the relevant tech is already researched. Except my guys aren't harvesting any of it. At all. Yeah I've seen this as well. I just checked the main forum, it's apparently a common, reported issue, so it's likely to get worked on. What other bugs have you been having? So far I've just had that and lots of MP desyncs.
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May 20, 2017 20:36
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New bug: I got a +pop event on an outpost, and now the outpost can't make progress towards being a colony. Woo. e: 2 turns later it just turns into a colony, even though it said there was no progress being made  Frustratingly, this means the pop is now Haroshem, and I got 0 Riftborn.
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May 20, 2017 20:59
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CharlieFoxtrot posted:I wish the tech tree was easier to parse and more information was actually visible at once. I know it doesn't have the same era system as Legend but the layout in that game made the dependencies and relationships between techs much more comprehensible Aside - the lines between techs are not dependencies. The lines are cost reductions. You just need to have the era unlocked to research a tech. Or have scientists in power. Overminty posted:Absolutely agreed, I just need it to come out on google play now so I can listen to it all the time. It's on Bandcamp, if you're willing to buy from them.
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May 23, 2017 14:23
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