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ES2 has got me legit hyped, and it's going head to head with Civ 6 for my probably final set of release purchases this year. As much as I appreciate Civ 6 keeping all of Civ 5's expansion features (which is pretty huge), Amplitude are absolute masters at making races feel different to play, which Firaxis has only gotten recently into. It also helps that ES is set in space and feels much more open in terms of possible story and lore, which Amplitude is also great at.
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Sep 18, 2016 18:12
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drat, turning yourself into a living toke in order to bring about peace is pretty wild.
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Oct 9, 2016 14:16
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Any major features gated behind the DLC for Endless Legend? I don't have a lot of spending money at the moment so I can't buy the DLC, but I don't mind playing without the new factions.
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Oct 13, 2016 21:18
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Re: Endless Space 2, the system approval threshold never changes from 5, doesn't it? Which means that I should have the appropriate happiness buildings good to go once I starting expanding beyond 5 systems?
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Jan 3, 2017 17:14
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Christ, if you're Empire, don't even bother about that over-colonization penalty: with the Era 2 tech bringing it up to -50%, three systems over the limit gave me a paltry penalty of -5~ approval. Too bad that ES2 is still way too early access to really enjoy, but fuuuuuuck if it's not the slickest looking 4X I've ever played and I really want to play some more.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:58
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ES2 is getting better but drat if it's insanely inscrutable at times. Did you know that in terms of weapon ranges, Short beats Long beats Medium beats Short? Because I sure as gently caress didn't! Also, if you want to play it right now, I can definitely recommend turning off pirates for the meantime. Their spawn rates are just batshit insane as of this patch.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:31
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Dust is implied to be basically magical nanomachines, so I think it makes sense that it can create more of itself to a limited extent because the Endless thought ahead.
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Apr 16, 2017 13:04
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Is it still worth building small ships once you can roll out medium ships on the regular? Apart from filling out fleet caps, it feels like the larger ships just pack more firepower and health into each fleet point than the smaller ships.
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May 20, 2017 10:50
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Helion posted:Any AI trip reports? Please and thank you. Brief one: Hard, Riftborn seem to be isolationist to the point that despite being stronger than me according to the diplomacy screen, they wouldn't declare war despite me blowing up a colony ship and several scouts in order to lock a free spiral arm down for future expansion.
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May 20, 2017 21:10
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From what I figure, the Academy is a big deal because every single Hero in the game is Dust-enhanced and only the Academy knows how to train them to use their new affinity for Dust to its furthest extent. Funnily enough, considering the existence of Endless Legend after Endless Space, the metaphor I'd use would be that Heroes are basically wizards; they stand above mundane people since they have magic powers but still require tutelage to be more than the average leader.
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May 21, 2017 10:33
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OK, as someone earlier in the thread said, turns out the likely reason why the Riftborn aren't super aggro at all is because holy poo poo those are some slow as gently caress ships. Watching a big fleet approach your border system isn't quite as intimidating when you suss out how far it moves every turn and realize you could have all your border fleets converge on the system 5 turns ahead of its arrival. Now that I know this, and as much as I love playing UE, I might try out a Riftborn game on a higher difficulty after this run since they look like the turtle, super tall race.
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May 21, 2017 16:20
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Dunno if my interpretation of the wording is correct but since the game states that Dust inflation is governed by the amount of Dust everyone in the galaxy makes in total, it implies that everyone is affected by the same rate of inflation regardless of how much Dust they make. Which means the hilariously broken trade mechanic is also the most brutal economic warfare simulator as your maxed out trade companies generate a million Dust every turn, driving the galaxy inflation rate to some ridiculous poo poo like 256x and ensuring that the other factions won't be able to rush-buy poo poo or buy meaningful amounts of resources on the markets... toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 21:10 on May 22, 2017 |
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May 22, 2017 21:08
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Alright, some observations from my second test Empire run that may or may not be correct but whatever: 1) I think that missiles dominate because the combat engine models ship facing; for example, Empire ships usually have one topside hardpoint that turns into a 360-facing turret, while the rest of their weapon slots are built for broadsides. A railgun/laser on these slots will have a gun on each side, but since the engine has ships move parallel to each other like good old Age of Sail combat, you only get each broadside slot functioning at half its total potential. Missiles don't need proper facing, however, and the launcher on the "wrong" side gets to shoot too. Coupled with their good damage, that means missiles punch way harder than the other weapons even if they don't get to shoot as much. 2) I think that bigger ships are usually better than their fleet point equivalent in smaller ships, judging from some napkin math in the ship designer screen where I compared the attack/defense/health ratings of different ship classes. However, bigger ships having more utility slots that can equip projectile/energy damage boosters is what pushes them over the edge since having two boosters over one fudges the math somehow that bigger ships get much better efficiency for their damage boosts. 3) The problem with the above two points, however, is that I'm unsure of how battle phases and targeting work. Does a flotilla target one ship as a whole, or do they get to spread their attacks once the enemy ship has no more defensive ships? A big ship could very well insta-kill a smaller one, but if it only gets to target one ship per phase, does that mean its potential damage gets wasted? How bad is the missile's lower rate of attack in a pitched battle where phases get stretched out?
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May 22, 2017 22:15
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Ah, I remember now: the bigger ship classes have special attributes on their weapon mounts that further boost the weapon. IIRC the Empire carrier's topside turrets count as Heavy weapons; I assume that means they get damage boosts on top of all the other damage boosters you can put on that mean mother. That's why their damage ratings are much better than you'd expect. Still, gotta find out if fewer ships don't waste shots against swarms of smaller ships.
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May 22, 2017 22:34
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Also, Riftborn get to colonize the "lovely" planets right from the start, except these planets usually have massive bonuses to Industry/Dust/Science in exchange for Food, which they don't use. The -20 approval penalty is easily taken care of by the Toys for Boys law, which gives +20 approval in exchange for some Science, can be used by everyone, and has no Influence upkeep whatsoever. Riftborn pops also get a flat +5 I/D/S bonus per unit, which is stupidly good and better than building improvements nearly all the time. Reflecting on this, Riftborn may actually be the least balanced faction if the player knows what they're doing and how to game their bonuses.
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May 23, 2017 16:23
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Antti posted:Lorewise they might be my favourite faction, too. They're just so stressed out by all these meatbags with their fluids sloshing around. The initial quest's writing when describing Vanguard is great. Nice prose on how Vanguard, despite how bleakly white and snowy it is, has all the telltale flourishes and wonders of life. And the next line is something like "Words do no justice to the horror  ."How to break Riftborns even harder: take the military tech that lets you convert pops into manpower. Riftborn pops will never get targeted by it since they have their own mechanic for generating manpower, so you can freely turn all your meatbags into soldiers and use their slots for efficient extradimensional robutts. toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 18:20 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 18:18
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I guess the Riftborn really are the new Broken Lords! And even more broken TBH!
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May 23, 2017 19:01
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Is there really no way to remove spacevines? Goddamn are they annoying. The spacetreants already got eaten by the space vampires and there's no more Unfallen and Guardian pops in my empire; what gives?
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May 25, 2017 19:37
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OK, I can get an edge and eventually stay in the lead in a Serious game without having to abuse trading companies. Hell, for the meantime I think I'll be avoiding trade companies anyway, they're just plain broken. Warfare isn't so hot, however, since the AI apparently is dogshit terrible at designing ships? I mean, when your basic attack ship does single digit damage to whatever I design, your ability to spam ships and grow pops super fast is kinda useless. At least I can confirm that the "bigger ship = plain better than point equivalent in smaller ships" theory is true as of now. Also, I can definitely say that Serious opponents will actually throw ships at you, at least compared to Hard opponents. They definitely do need work in terms of ship design and coordinating fleet movements, however; too many single ships being thrown to their deaths after an initial wave of actual fleets. Once this Empire run is done, I might go for an Endless run with Riftborn.
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May 26, 2017 13:09
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ZypherIM posted:Do the bonuses from each colony development stage stack? Also if you want to play "colonize everything asap" the unfallen work really well for that. Even without trying to get peace pacts and stuff, you have a really high growth rate and some extra happiness bonuses, and not having to build colony ships lets you build more improvements/ships. I can confirm they don't. Ideally I guess you're supposed to tailor your stages to what your situation at the time demands; for example, as UE I would pick food for the first upgrade, production and influence for the second, and double up on influence + 1 slot for production for the third. Davincie posted:they stack, if you do the +4 prod on each tier, and +4 science and whatever on the last one (money? wont even matter anymore) all your systems will bring in insane value Well poo poo. I don't know what to believe any more. I do remember checking between upgrade stages and observing they weren't stacking. toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 20:26 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 20:10
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Baronjutter posted:So once you're at your max colonization capacity what do you do? I have TWO craver empires between me and some of my colonies and my trade buddies and it results in constant blockades and trade disruption. But I'm already about 4 systems over my limit so I don't know what to do in a war. If you really don't want to expand anymore (no more approval buildings or Transvine available), one thing I tried doing was capturing systems, waiting until you consolidate control, and then just straight up evacuating the system. It's slow, but it fucks with the enemy and gives an opportunity for friendlier empires to expand into the now-empty space.
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May 27, 2017 20:12
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The bizarre thing is that I didn't experience the Pending Turn bug in my first (restarted at 300 turns) game post-release until the last patch hit, and then in a new game it's now stalling at 160~ turns. They must've re-hosed something in the process.
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May 27, 2017 21:47
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Well, the hotfix seems to have worked. Kudos, please don't let it happen again.
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May 29, 2017 19:04
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Welp, another pending stall after 14 turns. Maybe I should just play with less civs; Unfallen vines not going away is annoying as gently caress anyway.
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May 29, 2017 19:14
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Strange, is it me or are the best Heroes for leading fleets actually Seekers and not Guardians? Guardians have the stat bonuses, but Seekers also have a decent spread of them and more importantly, have insane travel speed bonuses so your fleet can zip around and cover a wide area of space.
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May 29, 2017 20:42
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LordSloth posted:Yeah! Now it doesn't display turn pending, it just stalls on turn two with "ending turn" instead. Yeah, my poo poo got hosed too earlier. Goddammit, I just want to be hypochondriac extradimensional time robots and listen to their awesome theme song on loop.
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May 29, 2017 21:08
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You can adapt a 4th law as UE without switching from Federation by reaching the final Empire Development tech tier. If you don't have access to enough Industrialist laws, you need to raise the party's level by reaching at least a majority in senate during elections, of which Federations have two slots for. The Industrialists' only real competitor as UE is the Militarists, so unless you have a massive presence from minor factions complicating your demographics, you should always have the Industrialists in power.
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May 30, 2017 11:51
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Baronjutter posted:Empire has never been a full dictatorship, it's supposed to be this weird huge corporate oligarchy with the emperor as the head of state and holding a ton of power, but ultimately forced to defer to system governors and corporations and powerful families on a lot of things, plus a lot of actual laws even the emperor must follow because it's not an absolute dictatorship. Really the whole United Empire feels like a sort of Prussian constitutionalism in space. Give the people some set rights and some limited democracy in order to stave off an actual full democratic (or even communist!) revolution Yeah, the description of the Empire itself even says so on the faction select screen. It's how a space empire would probably end up working if it started from a monarchy, too big to actually have an iron grip over so instead you get the Byzantinian mishmash of noble families and trade guilds. It's a standard space empire trope but still rad. On a sidenote: having played some Riftborn, I may have to recant my earlier belief that they are brokenly powerful when played tall. At least, in a high-difficulty singleplayer environment, your Riftborn pop's bonuses won't actually be enough to straight-up outproduce enemy factions. Which leads to my next point: Riftborn prefer sterile but highly productive worlds, but unfortunately these worlds have much smaller pop limits than the most fertile ones. I can't recall the system improvement bonuses that are unique to sterile/fertile worlds, but in mid-game you're put in this weird position where you lose out on productivity by terraforming towards more sterile worlds but lose pop slots, and in end-game you're caught between terraforming towards the most sterile worlds and hoping the multipliers and improvements make up for the big loss in population. So in a singleplayer game, you may be balancing on a very narrow tightrope with your systems' layout while your enemies just keep growing stronger, since they can count on all their poo poo continuously improving while you have to deal with big trade-offs.
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May 30, 2017 17:46
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Well poo poo, for some reason every one else in this galaxy is out to kill my time robots. Well gently caress them too then, because now I'm getting an insane amount of approval from all the wars, such that I can eat up my Sophon neighbor eventually and overcome the overexpansion penalty from doing so. Now that I've unlocked both fertile and sterile terraforming, I've got to see I'm disappointed with the results from Riftborn. Here I was thinking I would be able to turn my corner of the galaxy into a pristine area of orderly and highly productive worlds, but ironically the Riftborn end up with the most diverse array of planet types compared to the other races since their terraforming chain is so weird. Even worse, I'm not convinced that they can even outproduce their competitors since an empire full of forest/terran/atoll worlds has a lot more population and better overall resource multipliers compared to the mishmash of planet types I get stuck with as Riftborn. drat shame, but I guess I'll see this game to the end if it doesn't stall on me since being the most hated faction for some reason is fun nonetheless.
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May 30, 2017 21:35
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Jesus Christ, Impossible mode is nonstop war. I pretty much only feel comfortable playing as UE in it because I can poo poo out a billion ships with a decent loadout at a clip that can match up against the enemy AI. And that's enemy AI, because these fuckers are certainly not your friends; they will backstab you because I suspect that have some "destroy the human" programming or are hard-coded to gang up on anyone in the middle of a war. The unfortunate problem is that I'm pretty much stuck with the free Militarist Law in my slots now. It's not bad per se, but I can't risk the revolution to another government because most of the laws I'm running are vital to the empire; which means I'm SOL regarding progressing the main quest. Oh well. If 300 turns is the limit for normal speed games, then I have about the latter half remaining to knock off 200 points from the Cravers for a win. I reckon I'll be sending some doomfleet to capture their capital and raze it to the ground once I get all my border fleets upgraded.
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May 31, 2017 17:56
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Avasculous posted:They're not. Their aggression towards other players is largely influenced by their difference in current military score (strength). Fair enough, though they may need to rethink their parameters on military strength since a single elite fleet of mine has managed to kill every ship Horatio has sent at me for the past 50 turns or so. Some of the other factions have also been chill with me since I met them, though they're not neighbors so I can't comment on whether proximity affects aggression since the Vodyani and the Cravers are my neighbors and they've been always out for my blood.
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May 31, 2017 23:19
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OK, finally finished my first game on Impossible as the UE. Avoiding trade companies was doable; otherwise the game would've been even more of a stomp by the end. Considering than the galaxy was running at x12 or so inflation when the highest I remember from a previous attempt was x76 with all 5 companies running at full speed, this was probably a good decision. Might play on Fast speed next time too; the last hundred turns were running like poo poo and basically was just me running down the clock after sniping key worlds from my closest competitor in terms of score to keep them down. But in any case, that was a cool game. Needs a lot of work though; I'll be back after a bunch of performance and balance patches. Eternal war leading to Militarists being in power is fine, but maybe not a 96% senate lead for 255 out of 300 turns. Also, that trade company mechanic, maaaaaan.
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Jun 1, 2017 11:44
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I believe ships at full manpower also get a damage bonus? To discourage endless (heh) ship spam when mediums start rolling out.
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Jun 1, 2017 21:45
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Honestly the ability to buy poo poo with influence is extremely good. Dust buyout prices fluctuate due to inflation, but influence costs remain the same. A mid-game UE can get the ball rolling on a new system very quickly with some influence.
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Jun 2, 2017 20:14
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Yeah, the detail work on planetary anomalies is fantastic. I'm also certain that cyber-flora does have a graphic; I think it was a glowing green carpet on the world, very cool.
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Jun 7, 2017 11:14
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Flipswitch posted:
Amplitude's artists are amazing. I think I've made the comparison before that they're basically the Vanillaware of 4Xs, even down to surprisingly detailed and sometimes obscure gameplay systems. Except less tits. I like how the UE Craver in the first pic is a sergeant. Must be a good example to his squad, being able to shoot a heavy weapon and a sidearm at the same time.
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Jun 24, 2017 23:09
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Tree Bucket posted:Interesting. When a pop "leaves," do they actually reappear on some other planet, or is that pop just gone (presumably scattered among many other planets)? They can migrate, represented by a civilian shuttle making its way to the destination planet.
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Oct 16, 2017 13:52
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I'm assuming these massive swarms of small Craver ships stacked with missiles are rolling my Imperial medium stacks because no amount of flak can overcome the sheer amount of missiles being thrown at me. I guess mixed fleet compositions are good now? At least for countering this?
toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Dec 20, 2017 |
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Dec 20, 2017 15:32
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:the titfrogs always message me saying they're being 'sneaky' while not actually doing anything Generally that means they're sending a fleet from wherever to try and get to you. Unfortunately it usually takes too long so it looks real dumb.
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Feb 6, 2018 15:31
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Always loved playing tall in strategy games, and Hissho being warlike at the same time means they are Space Aztec Samurai Bird Prussia
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Aug 2, 2018 21:19
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