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Hmm, Unfallen for my first playthrough, I think. Anyway I bought Endless Legend on a whim and dived in without knowing much about it, and I've had a great time gradually working out that it is a work of sci-fi rather than just weird fantasy....
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May 10, 2017 07:34
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Avasculous posted:There's actually a cool narrative thread that connects all of the games. Ok, that makes sense. So the vaulters are descended from the Dungeon guys, who are mk 1 humans from Earth? And Endless Space 2 is another look at the same point on the timeline as ES1, rather than a direct sequel...? Also seconding the amazing factions in EL. I love that the crazed pain cultists are also the science guys, and that the elves are the industrial faction.
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May 11, 2017 04:00
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Cease to Hope posted:Horatio and Sophons. Cravers don't really have a resource gimmick but they have to be wide instead of tall. Trust the Endless series to cast a faction consisting entirely of clones of a hyper-narcisistic genius trillionaire as the "normal" faction.
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May 16, 2017 00:20
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In Legend, it helps that you have about 80 points worth of traits to play with, while the real factions only use about 60 of those points. (I'm currently playing as the Chill Mages, which is the Ardent Mages with ~24 pts of extra happiness and Dust thrown on top. I am so bad at this game, but love it dearly.)
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May 18, 2017 14:15
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I've attempted four games, and each time started next door to Cravers and down the road from the Vodyanoi. They are NOT GOOD NEIGHBOURS for a completely new player to have, apparently. Anyway, it's been a lot of fun. The Sophon quest has some great stuff in it!
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Aug 15, 2017 03:52
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I had a quick look at the GalCiv wiki to see what everyone was complaining about, and... yeah. Looks like there's a money faction and a science faction and a bad guys faction and a generic balanced human faction. Compare that with EL's "science guys who are also cultist pain wizards" and "honorable warriors who are also vampires crossed with haunted suits of armour, but with Persian aesthetics." Incidentally, does ES2 do a reasonable job of choosing those auto-suggested technologies? I'm still learning the game and the tech wheel thing is pretty overwhelming, and its hard to know which techs are essential. If any.
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Aug 22, 2017 00:33
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The Deleter posted:I have a Google Doc lying around somewhere about how I wanted the Sowers gimmick to be a single pop that never grows but can terraform worlds into paradises that lure other faction's citizens to go live on them instead, like a really belligerent gardener that wants everyone to look at his Dust begonias. Building a colony ship is replaced with sending out another Sower to another system to repeat the process. That sounds amazing. You should track down that file!
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Sep 20, 2017 06:31
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The Deleter posted:Okay, I found it. I'll paraphrase what I've got since I don't know if anyone wants to read my rambling bullshit. I imagine they'll have some kind of immigration-to-attractive-worlds system eventually; it'd fit perfectly with a lot of their current systems. But yeah, the idea of a faction of paradise worlds inhabited by those fleeing from war and tyranny is too good to pass up-- although this being an Endless game, the devs would probably add some odd quirk or other, as they don't seem to like unambiguously Good factions.
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Oct 16, 2017 04:31
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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)? I've just tried (and failed) my first Riftborn game. I like having fast ships, a big collection of different species and lots of influence to throw around which, as it turns out, is not a great fit for the Riftborn....
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Oct 16, 2017 09:07
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HundredBears posted: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. I had this thread and the US politics thread open at the same time, and got terribly confused for a moment. Anyway, regarding the Endless and Lost quest line where you need to orbit beacon systems- am I missing something? The way the quest is written seems to be hyping it as some galaxy-shattering event, but I'm finding it hard to care about the whole thing. Am I insufficiently immersed in Endless Lore, or is there a whole bunch of background info I've missed out on somewhere along the line...?
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Oct 23, 2017 03:33
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Yes, I've done it the same way; I doubt it's possible without Democracy. It probably helps if you absorb some Sophons or Z'Vali early on to get some more Science votes sloshing around.
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Oct 30, 2017 10:45
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Looks like there is an update for ES2 on the way that will shake up diplomacy, alliances, pirates, weapon balance and the impacts of the academy quest. Eg, you can drop "attack here" and "defend here" pings on the map that allies can see; the AI will place and respond to them too. Sounds like a lot of stuff that the game really needs. They've also got a "write the Unfallen population quest" competition up at the moment, so you might like to give that a go. (Alternatively, vote for my dreadful contribution, "seeds of treason.")
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Nov 14, 2017 00:15
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Yeah, they need to fix the pirates. As the Lumeris, I shouldn't be grateful that I have Space Vampires and Genocidal Space Insects next door as a buffer from pirates! It's Amplitude though, so they're generally pretty quick with this sort of thing. I've been playing a bit of Civ 5 in between ES2, and Civ is so much clearer and more... helpful?... than ES2. I feel like there is a lot for my brain to chew on in ES2, which I love, but it takes forever to work out that terraforming is not always good, or how trade routes work, or how to make fleets not suck.
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Nov 19, 2017 22:24
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I'm not sure it's a game that can be learned quickly- all the nice music and art is there to make the horrifying learning experience as pleasant as possible! Anyway, the tech wheel is certainly daunting. I guess the general rule is to keep each quadrant roughly balanced, to not neglect the earlier techs when the shiny expensive later ones come available, and to be aware of a handful of key technologies: the one that lets you hire heroes, the one that lets you found a trade route, the free movement tech. Oh who am I kidding, they're all important.
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Nov 20, 2017 04:59
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Yeah, it's weird that the pirates act way more like the Cravers than the Cravers themselves. I quite like the challenge of the pirates, but the AI does seem uniquely bad at handling them. Maybe the devs need to smuggle a combat bonus for AI vs pirates into their code somewhere...
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Nov 20, 2017 05:58
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I get the feeling that pirate bases never change the design of their ships (I could be wrong though.) So once you grab a hard counter for whatever they're carrying, things get much friendlier. Here's another question that I can't settle on- is it best to have your starting hero as a governor, or as an unkillable scout admiral...?
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Nov 20, 2017 23:32
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Krinkle posted:If you put them into a city they will do gently caress all until turn 20 when they level up once. If you put them in space and probe the poo poo out of anomalies you can throw them back into the city once they reach 3 soon after turn 9 and actually get some use out of them. Okay, that makes sense. Those early skills are pretty meh until they start stacking up. Incidentally, does anyone else get the impression from the Lumeris loading screen art that the huge fat frog guy has just asked a deeply gross and highly specific favour of the nervous skinny fish man...? It's sort of unsettling.
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Nov 21, 2017 03:19
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What? That can't be right. Auriga is a flourishing wonder-filled Utopia under the benevolent rule of the Drakken. It's got moss pearls and chromatic lands and everything.
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Nov 21, 2017 06:48
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The whole colonisation thing really highlights what a pain this game is to learn. (Much as I like it.) You have to build a settler ship, and stick it on a planet you have the tech to colonise, then make sure pirates and enemies don't eat the little food ships that get sent out, and click the double-arrow symbol on the colony to make sure they're being sent from the right planet, and choose the outpost options to speed things up, and eventually the planet will be yours, probably, at which point you'll realise that the extra planet has pushed your approval over the edge and the extra population has increased the Influence cost of one of your shiny Laws too much and now you can't trade with anyone. Unless you're Unfallen or Lumeris or Vods or whatever... On that note, I'm okay with the Walkers having more generic mechanics. They were an important part of the learning process for me!
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Nov 21, 2017 21:50
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TsarZiedonis posted:I'm in the second part of the academy quest and half of my four member alliance went religious, the other half science. There's no way I'm breaking out of my alliance (the galaxy is basically in a 4v4 of good guys vs bad) just to drive some leaders onto lodestones for some dumb quest. I've had this problem too- the easiest way around it is to get the tech that lets you turn mercenaries into privateers and go "eject" your allies that way. (It helped that my ally only had token scout fleets on the lodestones, though...)
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Nov 23, 2017 21:30
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:My next question for the thread is: I'm glad your question was answered, because that was bugging me too. It really really is Amplitude.txt, isn't it- two fascinating mechanics paired with genuinely interesting lore and a DELIBERATELY MISLEADING DESCRIPTION FOR NO REASONNNNN. On that note, I'd love to be able to help you out, Vodyani Quest Dude, but I've never been able to get more than a few turns into Vod or Craver games because I like at least a pretense of being the Good Guys...
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Nov 26, 2017 23:47
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There had better be one of these for each faction...
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Dec 5, 2017 00:16
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So if I have a doom planet filled with cravers that I am chain-ganging as fast as possible, and they start leaving the system because its at Mutinous, will they appear in other systems, spreading the depletion plague as they go? Or am I better off just shipping them to completely filled planets in the hope they'll remain in orbit forever, waiting for a free slot that will never arrive?
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Dec 6, 2017 05:55
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It's times like this I remember that ES2 came from a French studio. I think it might be some weird gallic humour thing. All the building and resource-related quests are super easy; the real challenge lies in getting the idiot government you nominally control to do what you actually want.... Regardless, setting pirates to "weak" on the starting menu made this game twice as enjoyable.
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Dec 8, 2017 22:49
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it took me way too long to realise that the Argosy acts as a mobile portal. That would have really sped up my horrible two-front war. Also, has anyone had any luck with boarding pods yet? Growing fleets with captured ships might be a fun way to keep a war rolling along.
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Jan 19, 2018 23:37
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A few tiers of Boarding Pods are available for every faction, as well as a weirdly useless-looking "+10% defence against boarding pods" module. They may need some balancing- I sent a small attack-class ship to defend against three small attack-class pirates in a sort of hopeless last-ditch defence- and my ship captured all three enemies in about twenty seconds. So I now have a northern fleet, which is nice. Vaulters are just incredibly, awesomely fun to play; I keep finding myself in these horrible multi-front wars and end up teleporting one or two battle-scarred fleets from one end of my empire to another whenever enemies are incoming. (With the added benefit of being able to replace all my ships' engine modules with more shooty things.)
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Jan 20, 2018 08:48
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It took me quite a while to work out you could burn luxuries in Endless Legend, and about a year to work out you could burn multiple hits of the one Luxury simultaneously...
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Jan 20, 2018 21:21
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That sounds great. If nothing else you can pretend you are simply bringing the Internet to all those planets... What other rad custom races are there? I always get too overwhelmed by the options to even try making one.
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Jan 21, 2018 15:31
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If I had time and any sort of artistic ability, I'd photoshop Horatio's face over all the dudes in that famous "Oath of the Horatii" painting... But yes, the Vaulter comic is pretty grim when you consider that being eaten is the best outcome for anyone who loses a fight with Necrophages.
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Jan 27, 2018 22:33
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:why am i next to the cravers and vodyani every single loving game If anyone has an answer to this, I'd love to hear it. Perennial Vod/Craver neighbours are no fun. The only time that hasn't happened to me is when I played Horatio, and set all my opponents as Horatio, which resulted in the most beautiful galaxy imaginable. (Am considering an all-Craver hellwar galaxy for the next round.) Incidentally, has anyone worked out where the Vodyani accent comes from? It's sort of a weird New Zealand-Transylvanian-British hybrid. Even in HOly WAR, diPLOmacy reMAINS an OPtion.
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Feb 6, 2018 05:57
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The ES2 site has voting up for a new faction. They're adding a new espionage-based race and are getting the community to vote on what the faction looks like, what their home planet is like, what their backstory is etc etc.
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Feb 24, 2018 10:35
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calusari posted:...It feels like I am lurching from crisis to crisis though... Lurching from crisis to crisis is the most fun part of the game, for me. There's something very space-opera-ish about throwing every trick you can think of at a Dust shortfall, having a few turns of smugness at your own brilliance, and then of course, the slowly dawning horror of the realisation that you're bleeding Influence or Manpower or Happiness or whatever.... Sometimes, all the moving parts in the game line up just right, and you get a genuinely interesting storyline coming together!
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Feb 28, 2018 05:29
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Mjolnerd posted:Anyone have any luck using the AOE Blast weapon? I thought the AoE weapon was specifically meant for wiping out a whole lot of small ships at once, and can't really handle the big guys.
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Mar 4, 2018 04:52
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Got the Untold Tales pack. The game was nice enough to spawn four of the new Minor Factions quite close to my homeworld, so I was able to assuage my curiosity early on! If you enjoy getting the most out of population placement, you'll like the new Minors. I've also seen one of the new heroes and one of the new quests, wherein my Nris population was complaining about the lack of convenient bathrooms for octopoids. My sentient tree-people had to upgrade a couple of systems to accomodate them. It was a very ES2 sort of moment...
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Mar 16, 2018 23:22
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Warmachine posted:I just fired it up the other day to try out Vaulters for the first time, and it feels much more nuanced now. My game has devolved into a Great Galactic War where two alliances are at war over the core of the galaxy, and there are 3+ battles taking place every turn. I'm very low on manpower right now because there has been so much fighting. Yeah, playing as Vaulters in the Great Galactic War is always really fun- teleporting your death fleet from system to system as the enemies close in... Incidentally, what are the best galaxy generation settings for really big, really nasty wars? Is it better to under-populate the galaxy to make the ai stronger, or really crowd it to kick off tensions early......?
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Mar 25, 2018 09:37
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Aaagh. I need to secure one last node to end the academy quest in ES2... but my UE ally parked a settler ship on it. So I despatched a privateer fleet to deal with this problem discretely; but apparently the Empire had secured a non-aggression agreement with the pirates just before the pirate faction was wiped out. So I have to either embark on a very nasty war, or forego the kickin' rad academy quest bonuses, all for one stupid half-dead settler ship parked on a star it can't even use. I love these dilemmas.... Incidentally Mokinokaro, what's your av from? It's sort of hypnotic.
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Apr 16, 2018 10:08
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The Shortest Path posted:I keep trying to get into Endless Legend and Endless Space 2 but I'm just not getting them to click, I dunno what it is. It's quite hard to weave a compelling story around ES2 governors, for sure. In Endless games, it seems to be the music and the art that suck you in. (After that- for me, anyway- the "click" comes from optimising slots and populations, and after that, the grand rhythm of lurching from one crisis to the next, each disaster spawned by how I handled the previous screw up...)
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Apr 18, 2018 05:23
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Strategic Tea posted:That's interesting - as much as I love them I always felt the opposite about the endless games. I often feel like I'm running totally unopposed by disasters or by the other empires. When I lose it's not so much that I'm losing to the AI as that they're winning faster than me, if that makes any sense? Yeah, I absolutely know what you mean. But, going overboard on the RP side of things certainly helps generate new and exciting disasters...! On that note, I just can't finish a game as Cravers or Vods. I need to feel like the good guys! Kind of sad, I know...
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Apr 20, 2018 04:27
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Yeah, I'm looking forward to finding out what this next expansion will actually involve- there have been zero hints so far. I'm glad they've gone with the user-submitted poll for espionage faction names, because the names Amplitude came up with were baaaaad.
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Jun 8, 2018 07:40
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Amplitude really are the best, aren't they...
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Jul 15, 2018 08:40
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