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I'm going to go with recommending UE as well - they get more influence and start with a law that increases dust, so you are less likely to get in a hole on either of those resources. They also start with what I consider the two most important T1 techs. Honestly I just generally consider them the faction you're least likely to screw yourself with.
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Jun 2, 2017 16:48
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Civ is the easy comparison, but it's a little messy, since in Civ the question is "Is my science science-y enough?" while in EL it's "Am I using my dust/industry efficiently enough?" The Civ habit of treating research as a winning stat in EL is deadly, since if you have something researched but can't build it, there was no point in researching it. You also don't really 'specialize' cities in the same way as you might in a Civ game. You try to make every city the best that it can be, given its geography. The combat situation is very, very different. EL splits the middle on 1UPT, and allows you to form an army made of 4-8 units (depending on tech), and generally you want to have at least one army made up of complete badasses for field battles, and then whatever for the backfill. You wind up with neither stacks of doom nor carpets of doom. Some people hate the combat, some people love it, but it's not as straightforward as Civ's "stack one unit as hard as possible."
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Jun 27, 2017 07:35
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I'm about halfway into one game as Umbral Choir. Not liking them. Biggest problem is that hacking feels really unreliable. On top of being a slow expansion mechanism. Just feels bad to fail, repeatedly, for what feel like dice rolls. For clarity, I started sandwiched between an Unfallen and a UE. I've been dividing my hacking between the two, more on the Unfallen. I have 1 sleeper in their entire empire near turn 70. Basically every action seems to just be dice rolls with little strategic interaction. Which may be a symptom of a larger if less annoying problem: these guys are opaque. I've never felt lost in EL or ES before, every other system has clicked, even if I've been totally wrong about whether or not my plan will work. But here I'm just stumbling in the dark. On the other hand, I don't feel weak. There's one other human, playing Hissho, who's #1 and I was able to force a stalemate in a conventional war with 1/3 the points. Which gave him Keii but also meant he wasn't invading somebody with actual territory, while hacking continued unabated. Anyway, I like UC more than their last attempt at stealth with Forgotten, but it still just is much less fun than normal gameplay.
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Jan 30, 2019 15:09
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Generic Octopus posted:The hacking will be unreliable until you start increasing your "hack speed" via programs/tech/hero skills/etc. Before you start ramping that up, you'll need to route your hack through other systems so that their trace takes longer to reach you; if you try direct routes early on, you'll fail constantly, since traces move faster toward the source of the hack than hacks move toward their target node, plus once your hack signal arrives at the node, it actually takes time to hack it, while a trace just needs to reach your source node. these are good points, though I think I'll have to try fiddling with map settings - in my ongoing game, the starlanes wound up being largely single file (unique cluster, 2 arm, large), so not many ways to reroute. I'll see how these influence my play next time me and my bud get a chance.
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Jan 31, 2019 15:56
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So, perhaps a terrible idea, but I was thinking of doing an ES2 SSLP. Main question is: has this been done recently? Don't want to be hyper redundant, though I don't see a recent one in LP. (I say terrible because I did about 40 turns of an EL one a few years ago, which ran out of steam cuz I hosed up the screenshot procedure and made way more work for myself than necessary)
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Feb 5, 2019 16:06
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Haven't played the most recent two EL packs, but I consider Tempest and Shadows to be mostly downgrades and generally disable them unless another player really wants one of the factions. The added mechanics for both feel unfun and draggy, and mostly unravel a lot of EL's focus. Guardians is quite good, since it enhances rather than dilutes most play styles, and Shifters makes winter more interesting.
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Feb 11, 2019 15:25
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Lucas Archer posted:Okay, feel like I’m getting the rhythm of EL now, and have a sense for how fast things move. I didn’t realize there even was a turn limit until I delved into the options. I’m a perennial re-starter, so knowing I have a hard stopping point is helpful in combatting that. WW are very industrial, Vaulters are very good at science but they've got some other neat attributes (teleportation and extra uses/bonuses with strategics) Drakken are kind of the most generic, but their oddest gimmick is that they can force peaceful diplomacy options on other players. Which actually rules, so being alone as Drakken is pretty boring yeah.
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Feb 12, 2019 21:46
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I've found hacking to be a very good way to accelerate a peaceful assimilation of an early minor, since it halves the cost of friendly diplomacy and minors are bad at stopping this. After that, the one that fucks up the opposing ground warfare is a god send since it means they can't conscript and you're likely only one system away. The worse part of Penumbra is the faction, who are almost like a dead spot on the map and not fun to play as. One really good thing about the expansion, design wise, is that the hacking techs are attached to existing, already useful techs. The Endless style, where the decision is as much about skipping techs as choosing them, makes expansions that add new techs (Tempest, for example) for their gimmick much less attractive.
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Mar 18, 2019 18:53
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Generic Octopus posted:There are defensive programs you can place on your systems to gently caress with enemy hacking, they're visible in the tech tree and attached to many things you'd research anyway. the hacking isn't great but since they put the abilities as add-on to existing tech it's much better than most of their secondary systems I know it's not popular but I really do like that it gives a decent avenue to conquering planets that isn't planet cracking. Conscription can make it take far too long otherwise
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Apr 18, 2019 15:35
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Penumbra isn't a great DLC, but it's a much better one than Shadows.
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May 15, 2019 02:02
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Amethyst posted:I've only played base EL. What are considered the essential dlcs? None. The game is very complete in base form. If you feel a need to buy DLC, I say Echoes of Auriga.
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May 16, 2019 14:23
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Amethyst posted:Turns out I actually own all of the dlcs except the last two majors, somehow. Buying every stupid bundle without a second of thought is cool Defiance Industries posted:I would recommend Shifters as the one content one to grab. It gives you something to do in winter besides hit end turn Shifters isn't bad tbh. Since you already have them I'm going to go a step further and say probably play at least a game (like, not necessarily to completion but like 30+ turns) with all or nearly all disabled. Tempest and Shadows in particular add a lot of mechanical complexity that should not be part of your assumed lexicon of "base game." Most Amplitude expansion/DLC stuff is "yes and" sort of DLC, so it can turn into an unstable tower of confusion pretty fast.
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May 19, 2019 02:09
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ChickenHeart posted:Are there any drawbacks to swapping populations around in the same system? What about using the spaceport (aside from the travel time)? Short answers: no, no, no, yes. Slightly longer answer: I'm assuming you're even asking because you want to take advantage of like +F on Sterile and such, in which case go hogwild. Cravers however are a real pain in the dick. For optimum income, you want 1 craver per planet and the rest filled with non-cravers, but this creates a shitload of unhappiness. You also want to move Cravers off planets when they are near-depleted. Cravers are a huge pain for micro.
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May 31, 2019 13:59
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it's a shame, I love them conceptually and they're my favorite video intro, and I loved the rhythm they had in es1, but in es2 it just grinds to a halt and I regret not playing UE.
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May 31, 2019 16:01
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Fast mostly biases against military strategies, esp cultists and necro who have lots of slow troops. The trickiest part about Endless games is that they're really about what you don't do. The big hint is in the tech column: in nearly all other 4x you research everything, but in EL especially, that is a trap. You have to choose, and "just get more" is a bad choice.
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Jun 21, 2019 13:18
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ilitarist posted:I feel they've backed down from it in ES2. In EL there are not so many techs that anybody should get, and most of those are obvious and early (resource extractors, army size upgrade, market, basic FIDSI income - even those can be probably ignored) but in ES2 I can't imagine any situation where you shouldn't grab trade companies or black hole travel or supply upgrades. Yeah definitely. Nearly all techs in EL are situational, but in ES2 that only describes half or so. Probably even bigger is that tier is a larger determinant of tech cost than previous research, so if you skip a valuable early tech it's easy to grab it as a 1 or even 0 turn tech later (I do this often with the one that lets you draft pops into manpower). It creates a rhythm for sure but it's less unusual from a 4x standpoint
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Jun 21, 2019 15:06
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Clarste posted:Back in beta tech costs were handled more like EL, but with all the "mandatory" techs like planet colonization and trade companies, they reverted it back to ES1 style after enough people complained. I was one of the complainers  The beta system wasn't good but they may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. A large part was what you said - a much larger percentage of techs were non choices. But I can imagine a few better ways to resolve it (colony techs being tier rewards or more often piggy backed onto larger techs). The current system isn't bad by any means though, just less obviously Amplitude-y than in EL.
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Jun 23, 2019 00:23
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Stellaris is a paradox game and is really pretty fundamentally different from a MOO or galciv, in terms of the pacing and win conditions and how much poo poo is on the map. ES2 is weird but it's definitely in the same genre.
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Jul 3, 2019 17:35
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So, out of curiosity, what would people say the faction balance is? I'm of the opinion that it's really not all that bad, with a major exception for the Vodyani since they're so much more map vulnerable than the rest. For the rest I'd say UC and Horatio are worse than average, and UE, Hissho, and Riftborn are above, but it's not all that sharp of a tier list.
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Jul 5, 2019 18:06
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Tree Bucket posted:In single player games, Horatio and Riftborn generally seems to do the best, while Unfallen and Vods have a terrible time. Lumeris are mostly good because you can land grab like absolute crazy. They don't get as good of scaling in the very late game as Riftborn or UE, but if you have a deep bench of good systems, that's pretty great. You also get a native +approval, which gives a lot of leeway for overcolonizing.
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Jul 6, 2019 05:02
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If aesthetics is the main measure, Riftborn are #1. That loving piano...
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Jul 6, 2019 15:36
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Why are people making video guides for turn based games? That's utterly baffling. A PowerPoint is better for these purposes.
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Jul 25, 2019 20:34
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appropriatemetaphor posted:Why are people doing a thing to get paid when they could do it and get nothing I am highly dubious that there's big bucks in Endless Space tutorials . Fister Roboto posted:Can't get likes and subscribes for those. yeah yeah, just bad educational materials are annoying to me at a core level
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Jul 26, 2019 00:45
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ilitarist posted:There's also a problem with EL that it becomes sorta too bloated. yeah this is a problem with how they make expansions. It's sharper in EL than ES2 (the most "bloaty" ES2 expansion is the Hissho one, which is generally 1) not that bad and 2) worth it), but they're only slowly learning how to manage it. In EL I won't even play with all the expansions - Shadows and Tempest in particular feel bad to play compared to simply not having them.
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Jul 26, 2019 15:54
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obscure, overcomplicated combat mechanics you can only indirectly control is a genre staple at this point. In CK2 you can affect the tactics your commanders choose based on the commanders' ethnicity in addition to the troop composition. Last I saw the spreadsheet was multiple pages long and even then incomprehensible. I'm still totally at a loss for when squadrons are a good idea, though I think I have a handle on when to use boarding pods (not often as it's unlikely the enemy ships will gel well with your fleets).
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Jul 29, 2019 14:57
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ilitarist posted:My position on CK2 is that Paradox should stop pretending there's something clever happening there and should expose AI priorities, stat effects, and those tactics too. There are plenty extremely unobvious points with those mechanics (like councilor stat giving diminishing returns after 15, doctor relationship from -1 to +1 being equivalemt to him getting 5 learning, zealous ruler actively using his right to get land from infidel vassals etc) that you might not realize after hundreds of hours because they change often and there's so much stuff happening at the same time it's impossible to notice any reason behind it. CK2 is illustrative, since battle results are far more determined by which side has the most men than by anything else. Wars are won far more by vassal relations and timing to weak rulers than by the tactical system. ES2 warfare is largely an outcome from empire management. The closest war I got into with a player recently came down to "I can outproduce total ships but had unsustainable consumption of strategics, while they had far more adamantium and antimatter production" and ultimately I lost. Most wars are mashing one person's industrial production against the other's. If the two are pretty close then mastery of the tactical system can be the deciding factor but who wants to fight a fair war? The biggest disruption to this is hacking, since if you do the one that screws up ground defenses (preventing "conscript") you can capture systems far more efficiently than typical and that has turned wars in the mid game pretty well.
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Jul 29, 2019 15:51
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Falcorum posted:Let's take a moment to remember that in SotS2, asteroids could abduct fleet admirals. Also the repeated, numerous ways in which things could spawn in the middle of things they were orbiting. The steam page for update history has "CTD" 39 times and "crash" 18 times.
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Jul 29, 2019 23:53
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Personally, I think the best tactical system for a 4x to emulate is King Of Dragon Pass. Don't even have to know where your army is, get to concentrate on the important stuff like sacrificing cows.
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Jul 30, 2019 12:41
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:This really stood out to me and spoke to me at a deep level, because I really love the Total Warhammer games but I've gotten to the point that I can win on the Strategic level by having lots of money, good troops, good lords and heroes, and I know where I need to have my armies, so I only very rarely find myself fighting tactical battles anymore last total war I played with any real depth was barbarian invasion and that campaign was beatable using no tactical battles, with only peasants as recruits. It's almost a design virtue, even if it's personally irritating. You want players to win, you want them to flex on some fools. But if you make a system that has multiple axes of mastery and you are not explicit as hell that players need all of them, it should be a game that is beatable by being good on only one axis. Or you'll piss your players off for "punishing players" or "lack of diversity." All that said, the ground invasions in ES2 are probably better than the naval system mostly because they're extremely transparent.
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Jul 30, 2019 19:26
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https://steamcommunity.com/app/392110/discussions/0/1640919103692489579/ Patch 1.42.21 There's some changes in here, many of which are basically fixes to weird cases where calculations would cause unreasonable negative numbers for one reason or another, but this one is pretty big: quote:Universal Aerodynamic (Era 4) now grants +3 Command Points This is a really pretty enormous change to early-middle game combat. In the early stages, naval conflicts are hyper determined by command points - there's just not enough variation in modules for quality to matter as much as quantity, and the power difference from going from 4 to 7 command points is way bigger than going from 21 to 24. AC giving +3 command points was an enormous advantage, but also one that could be caught up on quite quickly. Now it's much more useful if you've researched both your attacker and protector hulls, and so it's going to hurt the ability of empires who are caught off-guard to catch up navally. I won't have the chance to fire up the game for the rest of the week, let alone actually test anything, but these changes, taken together, seem to mostly be bad for the pretty common strategy of "I'll worry about the military quadrant after I've gotten everything else up a few tiers."
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Aug 13, 2019 17:24
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Serephina posted:More than a few small changes in there mate! The trade one is kind of bizarre. Trade agreements don't affect the pacifist laws in the same ways as peace/alliance, which have profound affects, so it's not going to slow down what pacifists really care about, and trade/science agreements are basically just a willy-nilly thing to do. The other ones you mention are good, Saints & Sinners was a monster law. ilitarist posted:Don't see a point in touching that game till "overhaul the AI" is in the patch notes. Enjoy never playing another 4X between now and the sun swallowing the earth I guess.
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Aug 13, 2019 21:31
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It's possible we're playing different games but Civ5&6 as well as the Paradox series, which are the main ones I hear talked about, are dramatically easier, especially in terms of AI. Civ AIs in the hex era are at the level where they aren't opponents, they're resources.
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Aug 13, 2019 21:39
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Meridian posted:It's far too early to speculate but I have concerns about builds being "civilization" choices throughout the ages instead of the choices you make with the different civs. It's probably completely unfounded, but just something that came to mind. this is probably my strongest reaction The weaker issue is that mechanically I worry about it being one of those "modular system turns out to be solvable" things The bigger problem is that basically every video game that tries to tie the whole of a society to mechanics winds up hackish, crude, and lazy. Rise of Nations is one of my favorite games of all time and even I can't defend that aspect.
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Aug 20, 2019 14:19
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A game that reflected most of the more coherent philosophies of history would probably be really unfun since feedback takes centuries and you wouldn't control "an empire" but like "a person who tries to tell administrators and mobs what to do and hopes for the best." Plus you can't "win" history.
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Aug 22, 2019 15:11
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Cynic Jester posted:Sure you can. Oblivion is the final destination of all mortal toil after all. isn't that just late game SimCity/SimEarth
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Aug 22, 2019 15:18
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KPC_Mammon posted:Everything about the genre can be described as repulsive and gross if you only care about a "realistic" portrayal of history. yesh, reality is a lovely video game Also remember that the Spartans were only powerful between the Peloponnesian War and the Battle of Leuctra, which is like 30 years
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Aug 22, 2019 17:23
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Clarste posted:The basic premise is that in the distant past there was a super-advanced spacefaring civilization called "the Endless." They basically ruled all of known space, that's why it's called "Endless Space." They've left behind plenty of artifacts, but most importantly is "dust" a form of particulate nanomachine computer that is essentially magic. It reads people's thoughts and does whatever they want, and the more you have of it the better so everyone wants more. No one else is technology advanced enough to understand how it works, so they can't make more of it. I'm pretty sure it's never just outright stated explicitly but the Broken Lords are basically prototyping for the Virtual right?
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Sep 8, 2019 06:17
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Vaulters are pretty protagonist-y but they're not the most gripping or unique. I think in a fiction that was more text-heavy (like, say, a book) some of the weirdness of the vaulters would have some real fun room to breath (their intense fusion of religion and science, and their mix of exploration and 'spending generations hiding in bunkers'), but you're getting snippets of them right next to snippets of the Riftborn and The Cult Of The Eternal End soilitarist posted:No, Broken Lords have appeared after the Endless Civil War. They don't probably even use similar tech cause they have to consume dust all the time and they're still tied to physical bodies. They probably just watched too much Full Metal Alchemist. I mean, the part where they need to consume dust all the time and have physical-ish bodies is what made me think "huh, this is a prototype of the eventual good tech." Missing features and glitchy, but conceptually similar. I'm ok with my fuzziness on the timeline, but my impression had been that EL starts basically at some point in the Endless Civil War - the game starts when the Endless stop maintaining the lab and I figured the war was what kicked that off. In ES2, I felt the Cravers had some hints about the timeline in their prologue which implies that the disappearance of the Endless is fairly close to the start of player control and to the late stages of their quest involving actual still-living Virtuals, which made it feel like the civil war ended in the last couple generations rather than thousands of years ago
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Sep 8, 2019 15:38
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Rhjamiz posted:I've always been under the impression that the Endless Civil War was generations if not hundreds or thousands of years ago, as no faction ever mentions them as being within living memory. And the Vodyani prologue mentions finding not the Virtual Endless, but their "relics" and striving to serve their "memory". Basically by the time proto-Vodyani find the Virtual relics on their homeworld, the Virtual Endless have been gone for a long time. The Cravers prologue, start conditions, and quest seem to imply that the Endless are a very recent memory to the Cravers, which has two ways of being resolved 1. The Cravers are extremely long lived (a terrible trait for your barely controlled bioweapon) 2. The Endless were some combination of rare and aloof I prefer 2, mostly because it makes it easier to resolve both "oh the Endless were around like 30 years ago, just not in this part of the galaxy for like 3000 years" and the relative totality of the Endless war (Rome didn't disappear, it sunk into lower and lower relevance; small populations are much more vulnerable to near total annihilation). ilitarist posted:In general Endless 4X games are weird in that they sorta have you discover secrets of the universe and transform into omniscient planetary/galactic empire... And on the other hand your faction is very much locked into stasis. I can understand cultural limits like Roving Clans not being into war, or biological like those winter dudes transforming in winter. But Broken Lords being able to transfer their bodies into armor before they know how to build a market is strange, even stranger is that they can't do anything with their main schtick even when they get to space travel. Or every faction being locked into 3 units they have. So it's not clear whether this is a story about civilization transformation or is it a narrative about a single generation (as quests do suggest). It's much less organic than, say, Alpha Centauri. I mean, so far no strategy game is as well thought out as SMAC, but yeah. I think you're mostly right about EL - it takes place as the Endless give up on Auriga, and the maintenance falls off and the game represents a couple generations (something that's hard to rationalize with population growth mechanics but let that slide). One thing I will say about Broken Lords: I think they know how to transfer their bodies the same way humans generally "know" how to focus a telescopic lens, detect the largest nearby mass, and how to convert dirt into new intelligences - it's basically built into our/their bodies. So I think they "know" how to do it at a very non-formal level. That they know it before knowing markets isn't that surprising, markets qualify as a pretty recent technology on the human scale. Tulip fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Sep 8, 2019 |
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Sep 8, 2019 16:52
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Yeah I really prefer not using full expansions in EL. There's a very...overgrown feeling to playing with more than a few at once.
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Sep 10, 2019 19:36
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