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The AI's been a consistent sore spot in the Endless games. In addition to the passivity, it has no comprehension of the games' cool take on diplomacy. Trading is about the easiest ways to abuse the game (if you needed to for some reason), because the variable weighting of resources will not-infrequently turn the AI into a desperate drug addict that happily accepts an offer of 20 Spices for hundreds of its Strategic resources and all of its Dust. All of this is why Endless single player pales in comparison to the far superior multiplayer experience if you lazy jerks ever showed up on time.
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Jan 8, 2019 03:34
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Yeah, I wasn't excusing the bad AI. Obviously, the vast majority of 4x players never touch multiplayer and it sucks that Amplitude (and in fairness, all other developers) are unable to deliver a halfway-decent AI. What I meant is that playing against other humans draws even more attention to how dumb it actually is, and how much that compromises the game- because it's not just passive, it's also too busy eating crayons to notice or be affected by a lot of the cool features that set the Endless games apart. The diplomacy system is actually pretty cool when you have to give it more thought than "try every combination until the opinion bar turns slightly green." Stuff like the Roving Clans' Market Ban, Forbidden pillaging/espionage, even griefing questing enemies become genuine tactics when you have opponents that don't just run on a blind stream of free resources and rewards and are also actually trying to kill you.
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Jan 8, 2019 05:35
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Avasculous posted:Yeah, I wasn't excusing the bad AI. Obviously, the vast majority of 4x players never touch multiplayer and it sucks that Amplitude (and in fairness, all other developers) are unable to deliver a halfway-decent AI. Edit - Total War games still take the prize on this though. I remember that when Empire released, a game about imperialism, it was discovered that the AI was incapable of transporting armies by sea.
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Jan 8, 2019 05:45
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Davincie posted:galciv 2 had good ai, but otoh its a super bland game "Hm... should I spend 12 turns researching Laser VI (+1 damage compared to Laser V) or 14 turns researching Influence Station III (+5 influence compared to II)?" Amethyst posted:Loading up with titanium slugs and sieging with low manpower did NOT work on endless difficulty. The AI can conjure pops out of absolutely nowhere in just a few turns, then draft up an infinite army. You need both slugs and a strong pop advantage if you're going to have any hope of winning a siege. I didn't spend nearly as much time with ES2 as EL, but assuming the AI works the same way, it doesn't actually conjure free units or anything (except faction quest rewards) out of thin air. It just gets enormous bonuses to resource generation across the board based on difficulty, something like 3x everything on Endless. That's why inflicting any attrition on its economy feels pointless: it has way more than enough resources to spam units from every planet constantly, and it's actually easier for you to just conquer the territory than it is to try to bankrupt it.
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Jan 9, 2019 03:18
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Helion posted:Free amplitude game weekend. Jesus. What did they even do a stream for?
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Jan 25, 2019 04:04
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Truga posted:Also, someone starting a manual combat can make the turn take forever. In ES2 that's not as big a deal since it's just cards anyway, but in EL some factions kinda rely on it so.. It's easy to miss in setup IIRC, but there's an accelerated combat animations option that makes something like a 5x difference and is absolutely mandatory for MP EL. We had goon MP EL sessions that were a lot of fun in the past and with the right settings, we could play a complete game in ~3 hours. It's also the easiest way to actually learn the EL games since people are happy to answer questions and not try to annihilate new players 20 turns in. I haven't tried the new expansion yet, but it sounds fun. Do people have any interest in getting MP going again?
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Jan 30, 2019 03:13
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Demiurge4 posted:For those of you interested, I’ll be running weekly games of endless space 2 every Saturday at 1600 gmt for Mapgoons. If you want to join in you can find the mapgoon discord in the private games sub forum. I can't this weekend, but I'll join the next one. I haven't played any of the DLC for ES2, so I plan to complain endlessly about everything they add being "bullshit."
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Feb 1, 2019 03:19
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Bloody Pancreas posted:They're all great and really cheap now, but the consensus seems to be Shifters and Tempest being highly recommended, Inferno and Shadows being pretty good in their own right, Symbiosis too new to judge and Guardians (and the splattering of tiny dlc) being fluff. None of them are bad, but I would rank them: 1. Guardians / the tiny ones - These are the most generalizable. They add Legendary achievements, Titans, and super-districts that are available to all factions. 2. Tempest - Really just because the Morgawr are one of my favorite factions. It's worth noting that unlike the very optional global mechanics added by the other DLC, if Tempest is activated, the ocean is basically mandatory, because half the world's resources get moved there. 3. Shifters - Like Tempest, this activates a "dead" part of the game by giving everyone things to do during Winter, and more ways to counter its effects. I never got into the Allayi, but they're popular. 4. Inferno - The Kapaku were grossly OP at release. I assume they fixed this but I haven't played it since. They're fun, and the Dust Eclipse event that Inferno adds is pretty cool. 5. Shadows - It's really hard to balance a stealth faction, and the Forgotten always felt underpowered. I also thought the espionage implementation was awkward. I haven't played Symbiosis.
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Feb 10, 2019 04:31
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Drakken, like Roving Clans and Morgawr, are way more fun in MP than SP, where the targets of your diplomatic shenanigans are not barely-functioning AIs. I haven't played in a while, but they also at least used to have one of the best militaries in the game, maybe second only to Necrophages.
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Feb 13, 2019 03:01
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Serephina posted:Tempest, otoh, is outright malicious with the way it dicks with resources and tries to force you to engage with a system that's mutually exclusive with normal gameplay, ie building ships for the ocean instead of playing with your neighbors. I quite liked the Morgawr, but would acknowledge that Tempest kind of sucks overall. The strong-arming to participate would have been fine IMO if they actually fleshed out asymmetric navies/abilities for every faction (way beyond the scope of 15$ DLC, admittedly). Instead, every faction except the Morgawr gets access to the same 2 (?) lame, generic boats, and the naval combat the game pushes on you functions exactly the same as on land except with 5% of the unit variety. Avasculous fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Jan 31, 2020 |
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Jan 31, 2020 09:30
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