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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. For the Dust/Industry, question, the usual time to switch to a Dust economy is turn 40: at that point you have both the era II plan and Prisoners, Slaves and Volunteers to reduce buyout cost. Most of the multipliers in the game stack additively and I don't think that buyout cost is an exception. Two 25% reductions become a 50% reduction, bringing the Dust cost of buildings down to between the same and around 50% more than their Industry cost and thus making the 7 Dust that you get per worker more valuable than 4 Industry. It can be tough to scrape together enough Influence for both the buyout cost reduction and the building cost reduction plan by turn 40, especially on the higher difficulties where it's smart to make getting peace with your neighbors as soon as possible, but it's worth it. If you manage to get the +3 Dust/worker plan at turn 20, you might want to put workers on Dust either to afford a Hero or in the last few turns before 40 to stockpile some to spend on buildings on turn 41, but yeah, the bulk of your workers should be on Industry until then.
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Oct 5, 2016 02:36
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Tulip posted: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? 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. As to Era I techs, it varies from game to game. I'll often grab Topology while skipping the T1 unit most of the time, skipping Open-Pit Mining if I don't have good luxuries and delaying Mercenary Market if I'm low on Dust. I'll also go back and get another few Era I techs after picking up the key Era II techs in many games. As Broken Lords, you're getting 12 Era I techs for the faction quest regardless, but things are trickier for some of the other factions. Ardent Mages in particular have a good T1 unit and start with two faction-specific techs, which makes picking the remaining seven especially painful. It's thematically appropriate, at least. The thing to remember about Language Square, though, is that two villages are about as good as a free Mill Foundry and three are even better. Get three villages and a hero with Slavery or Industry Efficiency 2 and it's more like two free Mill Foundries. That's worth delaying even a key economic tech until you can go back and pick it up partway through Era II.
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Oct 5, 2016 04:07
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Tulip posted: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. 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). The last round of expansion only happens if you're either in a position to take the approval hit and increased booster costs or you really, really want the resources in those regions. You should hit Era III at least a bit before your third empire plan, plus you'll have finished the key infrastructure in most of your cities, so you have enough spare economic output to get your approval up. The main options to do that are the +approval empire plan, the Era II -expansion disapproval tech and Era III luxuries. Between those and limiting yourself to 5-6 cites instead of 7, you should have enough approval to get up to Fervent and start thinking about building a few more districts. The transitions right after settling might be rough (especially with the weaker economy on Fast) because it's not always possible to get the +approval buildings up quickly. It's ok to spend some time at Content in order to claim important regions and get the economic benefits of more cities. If you're Unhappy, aside from a few turns in your second and third round cities while they get their sewers and markets up, it means that you're overbuilding districts or underinvesting in approval. Sometimes you get a strong supply of wine or Eyeless Ones villages and expansion becomes much simpler. Sometimes you're stuck getting Central Market. Tulip posted: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). 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.
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Oct 5, 2016 22:05
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Settle and salt is a great trick 90% of the time. Salting your capital is a good chunk of the other 10% because you'll lose your palace, costing you 22 dust per turn and an extra city of disapproval. It's far better to wait and settle on turn two.
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Oct 29, 2016 06:37
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Coucho Marx posted:And since approval doesn't affect Dust generation, you can expand or capture all you want and not care. This isn't actually true, approval affects all four FIDS. The thing is, while Food and Industry depend on the approval of the city that generates them, Dust and Science depend on the approval of your empire as a whole. As you've discovered, the pivot to a Dust economy is a very powerful strategy despite that limitation, though. You can make it even stronger by picking up a Wild Walkers hero and speed levelling him up by putting him in whatever city you're about to buy something in whenever his assignment cooldown is up. That will eventually give you a hero that provides a 24% building cost reduction and can be reassigned every turn - never pay 2/3rds price for an important building again.
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Nov 3, 2016 18:30
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prometheusbound2 posted:Is it viable to play this game as peaceful scientists/traders/builders? I keep trying to play this way as Sophons, but run up against pirates and neighbors with stronger navies that then declare war or raid me. I then research military technologies and build up a defensive navy, and all of a sudden the militarists are in control of my government. You can bribe any factions except Cravers into peace with you by offering enough resources as part of the peace deal. It's a strong way to play even when the pacifist party isn't in power and ridiculous with their mandatory law, which is hands-down the most broken law in the game. You'll end up with a substantial amount of militarist support just from fighting pirates, but not so much that they'll take over your government. Lumeris are a great choice if you want to opt out of the military side of the game as much as possible- in addition to being pacifists, they spend Dust instead of Influence to get minor factions to like them, so you can assimilate any nearby minors very quickly and stop worrying about pirates. If some do get through, there's no need to research any military technology; just buy a fleet off the marketplace with your ample Dust reserves.
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May 26, 2017 22:02
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Cease to Hope posted:Speaking of caring about things, Lumeris kind of suck! Buying colonies always costs more than just settling them with a colony ship, and buying/selling colonies is useless. They have kind of the same problem as Sophons where everyone either bootstraps atypically fast (Cravers, Unfallen, Horatio) or has some sort of ruthless midgame engine (Vodyani, UE) while they just do a thing anyone can do but 5% more efficiently. The real Lumeris faction ability isn't that they get outposts with Dust, it's that they spend Dust instead of Influence to get minor factions. It's a strong one. Throw a few hundred Dust at a minor faction, and in ten turns it will pay back your investment, provide you with a hefty Dust/Science income going forward and unlock the quest to assimilate it. Meanwhile, you're saving all your Influence to get peace treaties: the 15% FIDSI boost per treaty from Republic/Pacifist is no joke. My fastest victory yet is a turn 85 economic win with the Lumeris. Even without the brokenness that is trade routes, the game would have been over by turn 100. The other factions (aside from Horatio) can match that, but the only way that they're beating it by more than a few turns is by taking advantage of the AI's military weakness and blitzing conquest/supremacy.
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Jun 6, 2017 22:16
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Node posted:Consider me humbled. I'm on Serious difficulty as the Drakken. I border the Cultists who now have two guardians with a military score of 86k compared to my 12k. The only thing that has saved me is forced truces, and bribing the vaulters to go to war with them. Of course, they aren't actually attacking each other. How on earth can I save myself? Exactly how to salvage the situation, or indeed whether it is salvageable in the first place, will depend on your heroes, economy and level of military technology, but you can help yourself with shenanigans. The AI greatly overestimates the strength of its armies, so it's all but guaranteed to attack your cities without breaking down all the fortifications. If you put most of your forces in whatever city it hits first and win that battle, the damage that you do and the experience that you gain should let you win the rest. Alternatively, you can try outmaneuvering it. Attacking one of the guardians while the other one is out of reinforcement range is obviously great. If they stick together, that means that either they're not in your territory and so you can probably hold off their lesser units even with a huge military score disadvantage, or they are in your territory and you can try running past them for a decapitation strike. The Cultist home region gets a considerable fortification bonus, but elite armies with strategic resource weapons, the right talismans, the right hero skills/talismans and reinforcements are so much stronger than than troops without those edges that you might be able pull it off anyway. You can also invest in influence to benefit from being Drakken. The game has changed since the last time I looked into how much force truce costs, but it might still be possible to produce enough to keep forcing truces whenever the Cultists get close to grabbing one of your cities. Eventually, you'll hit a peaceful victory condition or be strong enough to face them. Even if you can't do that, you're certain to be late enough in the game to grab the +50% health empire plan. It's far from cheap, but if the Cultists don't have it themselves, it's a huge edge.
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Jul 19, 2017 05:29
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In addition to getting lots of non-UE citizens you can either: convert your UE citizens to Mezari, who support science, by advancing your faction quest far enough or use the most expensive election action to support the scientist party. If it works anything like the republic version of that action, which costs Dust instead of influence, 10% support is all you need to win the election. You could also convert your government to a dictatorship and just choose to make the scientists your leading party, but that's not a good idea if your goal is to win the game. Edit: I realized right after posting this that that the answer to which party gets the losing parties' support is probably in the XML. It looks like the losers divide their support among the two (or three in the case of democracy) parties with the most representatives according to a list. Each party has an opposed party, a left party, a right party and two others. I'm not sure whether right or left is the higher priority, but assuming that it's right: a losing party will support its right party if that party is one of the winners, then its left party, then divide its support among the other two (supporting one only one of the two if only that one was one of the winning parties). A party will never support its opposed party. This might not be exactly what happens, since it's all conjecture based on the XML and my in-game experience, but it's probably close to the process used. If you want to see which parties are left and right of each other, you can check out Public/Simulation/PoliticsDefinitions.xml in your game folder. The opposed parties are the natural Militarist/Pacifist, Industrialist/Ecologist, Scientist/Religious pairings. HundredBears fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Oct 19, 2017 |
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Oct 19, 2017 12:47
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He does need to win an election, otherwise he'll have to wait forever to get the political experience to have three scientist laws to run. It'll be much easier just unlock the one- and two-influence/population scientist laws, plus the mandatory scientist law from having it as the leading party. The solution is the other option that I mentioned, election actions. The "Intimidate Citizens" election action takes a fair amount of influence (it's wise to check the cost on the senate screen well in advance of the election to save up enough, also note that getting more colonies will increase the cost) but is very effective. If the scientist party has never been the second party in power, it will likely take two elections to unlock all the necessary laws; if it has been in power, one could be enough. Switching government to a republic and using the "Strong-arm Lobbying" action is also an option. This course has the advantage of making it possible to hold two elections in a row (one after the five turns of anarchy from switching governments, then another at the next turn divisible by twenty) and of switching to the strongest type of government, but does take a substantial amount of dust.
HundredBears fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Oct 20, 2017 |
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Oct 19, 2017 22:34
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The influence cost of an offer is refunded to the faction that made it if the offer gets rejected outright. I've never seen the AI make a counter-offer, but it probably works the same way.
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Oct 23, 2017 20:43
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Fhqwhgads posted:The Cravers are the only faction I haven't played yet in ES2. In the middle of a game now, and I still can't see how you're supposed to war your way across the galaxy considering happiness issues. When you fully deplete a system, are you supposed to conquer a new system, and evacuate the original inhabitants over to the new one, and repeat? To handle approval issues, declare war gratuitously to get the most out of the mandatory militarist law. Note that wars with minor factions count for the sake of that law as well, so you generally want to declare war on them on the same turn that you meet them; it's free, and the pirates that they spawn will attack you regardless. Between minors, the one/two majors factions that you're invading at any given time and maybe a few far-away majors that you declare against just for the approval bonus, you can counterbalance the approval penalties for holding quite a few systems. Add in the Us or Them decree (+20 approval per home system that you hold) later in the game, and you should have enough approval to push yourself over the finish line. Alternatively, you can take a break after taking out your first few neighbors, build up your fleets and then take over every remaining home system at once to win a supremacy victory without having to bother with holding too much territory or managing approval. As for depleting systems, that's something you should mostly avoid. The trick is to grow your non-craver population as much as possible, and as soon as a planet is on the brink of depletion, swap all your cravers to another planet in the system and let the non-cravers work it. You'll end up with a few depleted planets since the cravers have to go somewhere and since you might not build up your non-craver population fast enough to save your first few planets, but this approach should let most of your planets last for the entire game without needing to evacuate systems. Just be sure to take over minors and invade your first major faction very early, in order to have enough non-craver population to pull it off.
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Oct 25, 2017 00:38
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Can anyone help me figure this out? I have a planet with the Tree of Worlds but it does not look like it is giving its happiness bonus? It's part of the +8 from Planet. The game sums up all the approval bonuses and penalties from planet types, anomalies, luxuries and another thing or two--basically any flat + or - approval per population, plus (I think) the tech that gives +5 approval per planet--and shows them to you as that part of the tooltip. It's presumably a design compromise so the approval tooltip isn't four times as long, but it's stupidly uninformative all the same; I filed a bug report because Amplitude used the same convention with an undocumented penalty that the Harmony got in Endless Space 1 because there was no way to tell that it was something that was supposed to happen.
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Nov 23, 2017 18:39
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There's someone currently in the process of updating the wiki (the one at http://endless-space-2.wikia.com/, I think, not the official one) to include the faction quests, although they haven't gotten to the Vodyani yet. If you're willing to wait a week or two, it may very well be up by then. Also, there's an option to view completed quests on the quests screen. I'm not sure if you checked it already and don't remember if it even has all the flavor text and more than the most recent chapter of the faction quest, but it's worth a try if you haven't looked at it. Edit: Actually, it looks like they're just adding the quest rewards and skipping most of the flavor text. Short of digging around in the XML, you may be out of luck. HundredBears fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Dec 16, 2017 |
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Dec 16, 2017 22:33
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Spanish Matlock posted:Now why is method two superior? Well first of all, the first structure is 7x2, but the second structure is 5x3, so consider that. Also consider where in the process you're going to insert whatever legendary buildings you can research, because those also level up to level 3. Of course the level 3 thing only matters for the cult, and generally speaking if you're playing anyone else you're not going to be building 13 tile cities anyway. The two outer hexes on the middle row of method two are only touching three districts, so it actually looks like this: code:
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Dec 29, 2017 08:09
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:Should I start settling multiple additional regions as I start to have the ability to pump out military units? The usual strategy is to settle in waves on turn 20/40/60 etc. Be sure to choose your empire plan before you settle: the point of the strategy is to minimize the influence cost of your empire plan since each city increases it. It's ok to settle a few turns late if you can't quite get your settler out and to the necessary spot in time, though that's not likely to be an issue in your current game. It's also ok to settle a few turns early, put the workers in your new city on influence or science and then build 'Salt the Earth' one turn before you choose your empire plan in order to turn your city back into a settler, although that's also not something too important for your current game: it's more of a gambit to unlock and have influence for the plan that decreases the industry cost of your buildings by 33% at turn 20. You absolutely want more cities. Generally, 5-7 is a good number to have and they should go down right after the turn 60 empire plan at the latest. I personally tend to build two after the turn 20 empire plan and two more with the next one, but that's more of an approach for experienced players. Things can also vary a good bit by your choice of faction, the strategic situation and the availability of luxuries. Each city increases the cost to activate luxury boosters, and that's more of a constraint on expansion than approval in the later eras.
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Dec 31, 2017 03:07
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Cultists have a harder time doing it than most factions, maybe even all other factions, since they can't use the 'settle early/Salt the Earth' trick. I have pulled it off with vanilla cult with default start settings, but it required both a good bit of luck and a careful build order. If memory serves, my start had either two or three good anomalies, and I ended up going Founder's Monument->Public Library for the first two buildings as well as spending a good bit of dust rushing something (maybe Geomantic Labs, maybe another district, maybe even the library). Delaying Mill Foundry turned out to be important due to how little time there is. By the time it pays for itself, you've hit something like turn 15 and don't have anything super-important left to build, so it's better to prioritize the things that give influence and science directly. I think that I also converted a village relatively early by leveling up Andom with exploration, then assigning him to the city and putting everyone on influence (the first village is so cheap that it can justify itself and the 10% empire plan cost increase if it's on the right terrain).
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Jan 9, 2018 07:51
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Stabbatical posted:How on Earth do you do that? There are a great many tricks to use. Ardent Mages use science pillars, Forgotten take advantage of the dust bonus on their Founder's Memorial and Mezari have a science boost on their starting hero, although plain Vaulters generally get by ok even without that by virtue of with the terrain bias on their starts and their factional science trait. Almost everyone wants to explore aggressively in hopes of finding dust to spend on a building, get a Public Library very early and get a settler to build a temporary city in a good science location or a region with pacified villages to help with science and influence. There's a good bit of juggling workers to make things take one less turn and careful planning of the first tech or two and build order as well. If you limit yourself to the building cost reduction plan and skip the (much less important) buyout cost reduction, every faction can manage it in a significant portion of their games. In fact, I just started a Cultist game to make sure it was about as hard to do as I remembered and was able to hit Era 2 with two turns to spare on the very first try, although it had a weird mix of good and bad luck that balanced out as much better suited to the tech rush than the average start for the cult. Serephina posted:Garrosining is mandatory for anyone that has a Governor; they gain xp/turn as leading an army, but nothing for building poo poo. Nope. Governors get a portion of the industry cost of anything their city builds as xp, just like in ES2. It's enough to outstrip the xp from a garrison in most cases and is many times higher in a city with an industrial focus. A garrison for xp is often still worth it, but as much because of how easy it is to spare the industry and upkeep by some point in the mid-game than the moderate benefits: the difference between spending 100 turns in a city with a six-unit garrison and a city with no units is two levels or less on the sort of hero that's been around for that long.
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Jan 9, 2018 11:53
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Xeno-Industrial Infrastructure and Public-Private Partnerships, the two key early-game improvements, give you 10 industry (X-II) or science (PPP) per colonized planet, with another 10 if the planet's temperate and a further 10 if it's fertile. Since colonizing a temperate/fertile planet only costs 160 industry, it pays for itself in a mere 6 turns if you have just one of those improvements. It's a huge boost to your economy at that point in the game and one of the major reasons that the Horatio are so terrible: they start with a planet that's neither temperate nor fertile.
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Feb 4, 2018 20:27
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With the exception of systems that you set up specifically to export Riftborn pop, they fall off in value pretty quickly. The second pop is a great deal at 150 industry and the third is better than most improvements at 250, but the 350 that the fourth costs is often better spent on something else. It can be worthwhile to delay X-II and PPP in favor of the fourth pop for the reasons that The Unlife Aquatic just pointed out, but there are a number of improvements that are more valuable. Some of the food improvements, interestingly enough, are strong as soon as you have a single biological population in the system (they do nothing before then).
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Feb 4, 2018 21:55
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Rhjamiz posted:They do that occasionally and apparently they will accept a gift as tribute but what the threshold is to count as "enough" I don't know. If the bar indicating how much the AI likes the deal is on its side of the screen and green when you offer tribute, it's enough. That one took me a few war declarations to figure out.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:36
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Mjolnerd posted:I guess the quickest way would be to go for supremacy and just bum rush the AI starting systems? It's at the very least competitive with the fastest victory types, and probably the one that lets you pivot from empire-building to sprinting for the finish line the latest. All the victory types can come ridiculously early if you're playing an empire well-suited to them and start focusing early enough, though: it ranges from around turn 70 for a science victory with an excellent galaxy with the Riftborn to a bit after 120 for an economic victory with a weak start.
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Mar 1, 2018 22:43
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Those are for normal. The Endless games have always been short by the standards of the genre, but ES2 is particularly bad due to the way it's possible to skip or ignore vast swathes of the technology tree (note that it's the economic victory, the one least tech-gated, that's the slowest). The bugginess and questionable balancing decisions don't help either: I mention the Riftborn and not the Sophons for the science victory because of the over-powerful and possibly buggy way their science singularities work along with their all-around strength as a faction.
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Mar 2, 2018 00:41
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Avasculous posted:I played Endless Space 2 a bit at release and was kind of underwhelmed. Coming from Endless Legend, the factions felt very samey and the combat felt like a lot of ship customization for battles that virtually always came down to highest number going in. There's been a lot of work on the combat system. It remains very flawed--frequently refitting your fleet to counter your opponents' designs is far too important a part of the game--but it's better than it was and much less about building the one correct design and then winning the numbers game. I'm surprised that you found the factions samey, though. The Vodyani felt like as much of a variation from standard gameplay as the Cultists did in EL, and a number of the others had their fair share of unique mechanics. The Vaulters are apparently less conventional than many of the non-DLC factions, but I doubt they'll seem too different to you if the Riftborn or Unfallen didn't. I too would be up for some EL multiplayer. Any time on Sundays would work well, and Monday evenings (Eastern time) are also possible.
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Mar 31, 2018 03:40
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El_Elegante posted:Do more units sieging a system drop the manpower of it faster? Yes, but if you want to siege a system quickly, the important part is the number of siege modules on those ships. The usual approach is to design support ships with nothing but siege modules and fleet-speed-increasing modules and to have a fleet of those follow your main fleet around. El_Elegante posted:How many trading companies can I found? Can I absorb other trading companies from conquered systems? The cap is three (four for the Lumeris and custom factions with the right trait). You have to build the headquarters yourself: captured HQs and subsidiaries are destroyed.
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Sep 8, 2018 09:30
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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. Besieging worked just fine for me in every game where I used it. If memory serves, getting the system defense down to zero means that you auto-win the invasion as soon as it starts, with no chance for the enemy to conscript. Has that changed?
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Jan 9, 2019 03:20
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Every attack that I've seen the AI field before Era III is beatable by an army of six Nameless with a hero, good trinkets and maybe some strategic resource weapons. Depending on the quality of your start and which factions are nearby, it's probably somewhere between tricky and impossible to get such an army before they start burning your villages, but not unreasonable to have it in place by the time they declare war and get over to your capital. If you're having trouble with that, it's an indication that your economic play needs work. On what turn are they invading? Alternatively, you can rush for the Era II diplomatic tech. If diplomacy works like it does when I last played (which was admittedly before the current expansion), there's a window early in the game where it's cheap to bribe the AI into peace even on Endless. I used that trick more to deal with the AI's love of killing villages during cold war than protecting myself from a war of extinction, but if you're not facing the Necrophages it should solve your problem as well.
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Jan 16, 2019 21:01
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Stabbatical posted:Actually, what would you say good economic play in this game is? What range of dust should one be able to get near the start of the game? I quite like 4x games but I've never gotten the grips of things like those really quick min-max victories that people seem to be able to pull off in them. My games always last ages. With the caveat that it's been a while since I've played and the Cultist-specific advice might be especially fuzzy since most of my Cultist games were a result of a discussion years ago in the last thread: Dust income will be low for most factions in the very early game, possibly even negative as a result of splitting your starting units for exploration purposes. Exploration will often net you enough dust to buy a few things in the first 10-20 turns. That dust should usually be spent as soon as possible (high-value improvements tend to be best, particularly for the Cultists, but some factions and situations call for a hero or upgrades to buy a movement trinket on a settler). After you've built the Founder's Monument, Cultists want to prioritize getting their Public Library (always a good choice for their first tech) and Mill Foundry up. A lot of the min-maxing in the game revolves around empire plans. Not only do you need to pick the right ones, but also minimize their influence cost and engage in a good bit of ruthless optimization to be able to unlock them in time and have the influence to use them. That sort of approach is less important for the Cultists than the other factions, but deciding whether to go for the -33% building cost in the first empire plan is still a very important part of their early game. You can't always pull it off, but it's very powerful when you can. A few of the things most important for the Cultists are: Worker allocation. You can't focus on industry as heavily as most factions want to in the first twenty turns, but you'll still want to spend a significant amount of time on it. Switching to influence for an early village conversion is strong, and you may even need to run science at some point since you have more trouble with it in the early game than the factions that can build cities. Your choice of governor. I'll typically bring the starting hero back to govern as soon as he hits level 2 since the increased influence is too good to pass up, but it's not a bad idea to replace him with a better governor eventually and turn him into a general. Village choice. Sometimes you don't have any good options, but just as with the other factions, not over-expanding or under-expanding and getting good FIDS yields are very important. For the first village, I care about yields almost infinitely more than position, resources or minor faction type. Anomalies are excellent, being on the border of a region is bad, a bias toward food or dust is iffy. The upshot of knowing all the tricks is being able to field that Nameless army sometime between turn 30 and 50 on normal speed. Turn 30 is the sort of deadline that you can only achieve with a ridiculous start and a focus on getting the army out ahead of anything else, but turn 50 is (if I'm remembering everything right) achievable even with a below-average start that picks up a non-military tech or two in Era II. If you don't have any Era II techs by turn 60 on normal speed (or even the next-slowest, which I think is a 1.5x multiplier for most things), there's a lot that you can do to get faster. Just a super-early Public Library and thinking about what else you can do to directly invest in science will help.
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Jan 16, 2019 23:59
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Lucas Archer posted:ES2, I’m bouncing off of hard. I’m completely overwhelmed. Any general tips? There is no before I play page for that one. A good first 30 turns will set you up to cruise to victory on any difficulty. Most of the tips that follow are about playing those turns with the more standard factions: Riftborn, Unfallen and Vodyani all call for significant variations. Also, don't play Horatio if you're having trouble, they're terrible. The early-game resources are industry and science, prioritize them when choosing which improvements to research and build. The main exception to the above is when colonizing: high food yield is essential to turning an outpost into a colony quickly, and planets with high food tend to also be the most desirable for other reasons as well. Speaking of turning outposts into colonies, you should always spend dust at each of your first several outposts to double the speed at which they generate food. Settling your second wave of colonies one turn before your first outpost turns into a colony will let you save dust, since the cost of doing so depends on the number of colonies you currently have. This second wave should typically consist of two colonies, one drawing from your home system for food and the other from your new colony. Consider exploring with your starting hero, then reassigning them to your home system as a governor as soon as the reassignment cooldown is done. This will earn them a good bit of xp (exploring anomalies and being the first fleet from your faction to discover a system are both worth a moderate amount), help you find a good system to colonize faster and not cost much besides the dust to refit their ship with engines and probe modules (feel free to drop weapons and armor to save money). Most heroes don't do much as governors before they get their first skill points. The two key early improvements are Xeno-Industrial Infrastructure (industry) and Public-Private Partnerships (science). For each planet you have colonized in a system, they'll give you +10 of their resource, plus an additional +10 if the planet is temperate and further +10 if it's fertile. The build order of "X-II, colonize any planet in the system that costs 160 industry, PPP" is strong in most newly-colonized systems. Skip every tech that you can get away with skipping, since every technology increases the cost of all technologies that you research after it. In the first ring, this usually means one of the military techs, the tech that lets you colonize Mediterranean worlds, and sometimes the +food improvement tech in the left quadrant. In the second ring, 2-3 techs is the number to research in each quadrant, with the specific ones varying a bit from game to game. The bottom quadrant is especially tricky, since you have have to balance unlocking planet types to colonize with the bonuses that the techs themselves give. Sometimes going for all four may be the best option. You can spend dust by building empty hulls and then retrofitting them to hold the modules that you need. This trick is especially good for getting your second wave of colony ships out in time, but also sometimes lets you skip the tech that unlocks rush-buying (which tends to cost at least twice as much dust per industry as retrofitting). Selling resources on the market can speed up your early game quite a bit. The second-ring tech that unlocks the market is often one of my first few second-ring techs. Clarste posted:Toys For Boys is an excellent early-to-mid game law because the Happiness bonus to industry pretty much just cancels out the penalty. Other than that, set whatever production and happiness laws are available for your government's party. Industry is the only FIDSI that doesn't get a bonus from approval. System approval gives food and influence while empire approval gives dust and science. Toys for Boys is sometimes still good (the Cravers especially want science and can afford both the industry hit and the law slot), but most factions have better things to do with the slot at least until they get another slot from the left quadrant.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:43
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Eschatos posted:Why does Horatio suck? Yeah the extra ship cost is lame but seems like splicing would more than make up for it in the long term. The general rule in 4X games is that early bonuses are better than late ones. Your economy grows exponentially, so even a small advantage at turn 1 becomes a large advantage by turn 60. Horatio not only lack early game advantages, they have early game drawbacks. Starting on a planet that's neither temperate nor fertile is a bigger hit than the ship cost, in all honesty. In addition, splicing is a weak power. By the time you've spliced enough population to get a bonus equal to the Sophons' +25-50% science multiplier, the Cravers' ludicrous +150% FIDS per pop and so forth, the other factions have gained a huge lead. This is exacerbated by the population cost of splicing, which remains non-trivial into the mid-game. Very early in the game, they're faced with the painful choice of whether to splice their starting minor as soon as it hits two pop (costing 600 food worth of pop at a time when that's a substantial setback) or wait and have to deal with having more weaker, non-Horatio population. Horatio have a variety of non-obvious drawbacks as well. Their quest is very slow to get started (unlike the United Empire, they aren't getting the bonus hero any time near turn 20). Their ships tend to have fewer module slots than those of other factions and be biased away from weapons, often the most important slot type. The ecologist mandatory law mostly helps when things are going poorly and even then not by much: the good factions rarely have trouble researching the tech to unlock the less hospitable planets by the time it's worth spending 320+ industry or a colony ship on them. Even after a much-needed buff, dictatorship tends to be the weakest government.
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Jan 28, 2019 15:12
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Tree Bucket posted:They are fun and interesting to play, at least (that said, I'm a dreadful player). He does have a fun aesthetic, to be sure. My very first game of ES2 was as Horatio, it's just a shame that they're a victim of Amplitude's approach to game balance.
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Jan 28, 2019 23:30
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mitochondritom posted:I can't see anywhere else on that screen that comes close. If it were possible to settle on the first turn, the spot one hex to the east of that would be a good bit stronger. Not only does it have more total FIDS, an excessive bias toward food isn't great in a city that will be pumping out settlers early. Given that it would cost an extra turn to get there, though, I'm agreed with both of you that the hex north-west of the oasis is the best choice.
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Feb 7, 2019 23:21
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I'd certainly rather have a point of industry than a point of science in that start, but three food and two industry for nine science is a trade that's hard to pass up. On one hand, it's true that the mages can use the science pillars to prop up their tech, but on the other hand, the pillars mean both that they have lots of things they want to research very early because they don't have any other starting technologies and that hitting era II before the first empire plan is a possibility. It's nice to be able to eke out a little more science.
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Feb 8, 2019 00:21
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The worst-case scenario is hitting era II on turn 21 and having everything but units cost 50% more industry than it would have for the next 20 turns.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:01
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Unfortunately, much of the playerbase's knowledge is spread across the threads of the Amplitude forums (maybe half of it in balance arguments) rather than collected in any one place. The multiplayer community know their stuff and write guides, but they're of course focused on fast speed multiplayer, so only some of it applies. Still, Jojo_Fr's guide on Steam (Advanced mechanics and Competitive Multiplayer) will give you some things to think about.
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Jul 25, 2019 20:33
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Back before Amplitude changed things to make the science victory more difficult, an everything-goes-perfectly victory was before turn 80. I'm sure that it's significantly later nowadays, but would be shocked if it wasn't possible to consistently beat turn 200, even with the weaker factions: on some galaxy sizes, that's enough time to win a military victory and then spend the next 50 or more turns researching. There's a lot to say about how to avoid or prepare for war, but given the victory time and the difficulty that you're having balancing going for the win and defending yourself, I suspect that the problem is that your economy isn't growing as fast as it should be. My personal record for a vanilla-faction science win was a Riftborn game where I ended up next to the Cravers, but they were never able to threaten me, or even slow me down that much. You can check out my post history in the thread for advice on how to put yourself in the same position with an explosive early-game. It's based on the pre-expansion game, but should still be useful. You should look at the Riftborn, Sophons, United Empire and presumably Vaulters. Most of my victories with the first two were off the backs of empires that grew to about 8 systems and fought no more than one major war. The semi-tall and semi-peaceful approach can work.
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Feb 9, 2020 01:30
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It's been a while since I've last played, but the Horatio and retrofitting to "buy" modules are probably in the same state that they were: major changes to game mechanics or factions have mostly happened soon after they're introduced rather than years later. Interestingly, the Lumeris's role as the dust faction makes them get less value out of the trick unless they end up in a costly war. Early on, they're spending dust on two things that the other factions aren't, and so have little to spare compared to the factions that are using the trick to get faster colony ships. Later, they're likely to want the buyout tech anyway, so it just makes their dust-to-industry exchange rate better in some cases, rather than letting them spend dust that would otherwise be useless, as it does with factions that skip the tech. It's still great if they end up needing a large military, but not too impressive otherwise. I'm not sure what else is missing from your play. Most of the economic optimization in the game is stuff that any 4x veteran will naturally think about. If you're not doing it already, it's a nice boost to constantly export the final unit of population from systems that fill up. This trick is a tedious amount of micromanagement, but also saves up to 300 food per turn per system that would otherwise be full, since food produced by a full system is mostly wasted. If you do use the trick, it's useful to think about how the food overflow mechanics interact with it. When you constantly spaceport out the last pop in a system, anything between 150 and 299 surplus food is functionally equivalent: you'll regrow the last pop every two turns either way. Thus in a system with a food surplus of a little over 200, for example, it can be best to keep the last two slots empty, allowing it to export two pop every three turns. Meanwhile, it might be worth juggling population with conditional food bonuses around if it means pushing you from a surplus of 290 food to 300.
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Feb 9, 2020 09:30
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Ragnar34 posted:And are you implying the buyout tech isn't always necessary? Exactly. One dust spent on retrofitting buys much more industry* than one spent on buyouts, so if you produce little enough dust that you can spend most of it buying ship modules, there's not nearly as much value in the buyout tech. There are still cases where it's worth paying a premium on buyouts, e.g. getting new colonies up and running faster, but not necessarily enough cases to justify also increasing the cost of every tech for the rest of the game by a few percent. In games where I want two other techs from that ring and quadrant (usually marketplace access and ash colonization), I skip buyouts more often than I take them. In contrast, toxic colonization is frequently something that you can afford to pick up. If you're worried about war and need influence and have only one toxic planet with no important resources, it's not a bad skip, but it's worth considering in most other cases. There's certainly an art to juggling pop. I find that as long as you're keeping your core systems from filling up before your empire does and handling faction-specific stuff, the within-system juggling is much more valuable than between-system. Unlike between-system movement, where every turn in transit costs the FIDSI that the pop could have produced, it costs nothing but your time. The rewards add up, whether it's staying just above an approval threshold, shaving a turn off of a build time or focusing on whichever FIDS that the system needs to produce right now. *save for extenuating circumstances, mostly heavy investment into buyout cost reduction.
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Feb 9, 2020 14:06
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Krazyface posted:Getting a weird situation in ES2. Last turn, a foreign fleet began blockading one of my systems. I asked them to leave my domain, and they agreed. The next turn, their fleet, still in the same system, again began to blockade the system. Is this legal? How can I prevent this from happening? Is it actually a colony that they're blockading? If it's an outpost that's outside your influence, then it isn't actually in your territory (so they're not obligated to leave), and you'll need to actually sign peace or extend your influence to cover the system in order to stop them.
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Feb 29, 2020 02:01
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I just checked it out, and it seems that blockading an enemy colony is just something that you can do during cold war, no special circumstances needed. That's news to me, but it means that your options are destroying/chasing off the enemy fleet, closing borders and then expelling it again or getting either a peace treaty or an alliance. The demand for them to remove their fleet might be a bug, might have worked but let them move back into the system the very same turn that it kicked them out (technically correct behavior if your borders aren't closed, but no less frustrating for it) or might be some corner case of the demand system that I don't know about.
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Feb 29, 2020 03:24
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