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Avasculous posted:The Cult is much cooler than that. I adopted a "kill on sight" approach to the Cult pretty quickly... They really are a great antagonist for a 4X, aren't they. They're genuinely creepy, and they send out lots of nice squishy Preacher stacks to kill, and their actual armies are disgustingly powerful (aaghh, I learnt to dread that *clicking* noise from their archers.) Plus, for us RP types, you have the moral dilemma of whether or not to hire their stupidly strong heroes.
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Jul 23, 2018 09:42
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Sandwich Anarchist posted:Well sure, Space has some awesome interesting stuff, but without a focus on smaller scale personal narrative, it's hard to imagine a fleshed out table top setting coming from it. The game is focused on such macro things like large scale interplanetary population control in the trillions, and entire fleets of ships crewed by large nameless crews. Even ground troops are a resource number. I love the ES2 universe, but it is hard to think of a narrative or character that *wouldn't* fit into it, somewhere. That'd make it a tough choice for a focused RPG or board game.
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Jul 25, 2018 04:39
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I was a beta tester for Supremacy. Hissho feel *really* different from Cravers- their Keii rewards vary depending on how fair the fight is, and any retreat, even a lone scout from a giant doomfleet, will cost you a massive pile of Keii. In fact the best way to gain Keii is to conquer a strong planet and plunder it for resources, but leave it under enemy control (this is a thing all factions can do now, along with completely razing a system.) Secondly, Hissho start with a Behemoth, and are really *good* at building them too. By the mid-late game, Behemoths can destroy solar systems, un-Deplete planets, get science from black holes and strip-mine neutral planets; so that Behemoth focus is really handy... Thirdly, Hissho have a lot of weird economic boosts based on spending/gaining Keii, and all the default Laws are greatly altered to incorporate Keii rather than happiness or whatever. For istance they can burn a quarter of their Keii for a unique system improvement which, rather than boosting dust or research or whatever, gives you a flat FIDSI boost. Finally, and maybe most crucially, colonisation with the Hissho is AGONISINGLY slow. It costs a great big pile of Keii to settle a system, which means until you get the "kill your own population for Keii every three election cycles" ritual, adding a new system will absolutely tank influence and dust across your empire. This point combined with the first and third points mean that Hissho tend to end up with a small number of really really good systems rather than a big paint-the-map empire. My only complaint is that the voice acting for the Hissho diplomacy screen is like somethign from a bargain basement anime. Which may be a point in its favour for some people... I really enjoyed playing the Hissho as the galactic policeman, ony allying with empires in trouble and only declaring war on empires with higher scores than mine, that sort of thing. Going full aztec-samurai-death-cult is absolutely a viable option too!
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Jul 27, 2018 02:59
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The other big deal in Supremacy is the Behemoths. They're beautiful huge ships with a whole lot of module slots; you can use them for boosting FIDSI on your planets, extracting strategic res or FIDSI from special nodes like black holes and resource and FIDSI extraction from neutral planets. You can also use them to terraform planets (even neutral ones) or rebuild destroyed planets, or repair Craver depletion. So they're super versatile, with a nice steady upgrade ramp, and start out surprisingly cheap. Towards the back end of the game, however, you get to unlock the really fun stuff: you can convert individual Behemoths into immobile, warp-preventing, super-defensive Citadels, big stompy Dreadnoughts, or best of all, Obliterators. My first encounter with the Obliterator involved a comet-like object appearing on the map, which moved a bit closer to my second-best system each turn; and the game doesn't tell you what or when the shot will hit- you have to eyeball it. With the result that I was one turn away from finishing my hideously expensive System Shield when the missile hit. Every ship, every improvement, every planet, every hero in the planet was instantly and utterly destroyed. It was not a nice feeling. (If you're wondering, the Shield only halves the damage taken from the Obliterator, as does establishing a Citadel there. You need to do *both* to negate all affects of the Obliterator.) Incidentally, early in the beta, one of the more devoted players succeeded in wiping out every single star system on the map that was not his own, which resulted in some balancing. For instance, the poor Unfallen were given a free automatic Shield on their Homeworld....
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Jul 27, 2018 09:33
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Helion posted:I went back to EL to prep for the dlc and decided to go with the sea monsters. I waited till the elves were in a life or death war, lit up their entire coast with minor rebellions, then rolled into their capital with a stack of demons hopped up on death meth. That may be the most Morgawr thing I've ever done. I've found it really hard to get excited about civs in the Civilization series after the Endless games. There's the civ approach, of "+1 Industry Under Quite Specific Circumstances," and the Endless approach of balancing things by giving everyone absolutely enormous bonuses.
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Jul 29, 2018 06:18
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I would love to MP, but live in Australia, and am part of Endless' core demographic of 30something dads with jobs...
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Aug 6, 2018 00:31
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I've got a busier than usual couple of weeks coming up. For now, i could manage 9pm onwards on saturday Australian Eastern. Which doesn't fit super well with everyone else, sorry....
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Aug 6, 2018 22:00
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Avasculous posted:Well this is a clusterfuck. I am happy to bail for the common good- I have a crazy 2-3 weeks coming up. Looking forward to reading some post-battle reports from everyone else though!
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Aug 7, 2018 06:24
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toasterwarrior posted:Jesus, those rocket trails on the strategic map were, to my chagrin, actually not leftover graphical bugs from the battle scenes. ES2 now offers the uniquely horrible situation of sticking a ruler next to your screen to work what the Obliterator is going to hit, and how many turns it is likely to take, and comparing that against how many turns it will take you to research System Shields and sell all your stuff to buy enough titanium to build the blasted thing.
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Aug 10, 2018 00:38
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Yeah, it's really not great. You literally have to eyeball what it's going to hit, and how long it will take. I had a system saved because the Obliterator shot ended a couple of millimetres away (as it were) from my system the turn I finished the Shield and Citadel conversion; it was certainly a tense few turns. Amplitude are pretty good with gradual improvements though, so I shall hold on to the hope that the upcoming espionage xpack will add some shenanigans with LOS etc to take the guesswork away. Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Aug 10, 2018 |
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Aug 10, 2018 02:45
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Riftborn Engineer #1: Here is my design. For a medium attack vessel. It has twelve guns and, nothing else. Note its sleek curves. Riftborn Engineer #2: This alarms me greatly. Riftborn Engineer #1: Fine. Fine. Here also is my design for, a medium co-ordinator vessel. It has. Many gun AND defence AND support modules. Riftborn Engineer #2: But, do you not see, now it has no space for Fighters. And/or Bombers. Riftborn Engineer #1: RIGHT FINE what if. We were to put the guns on little floating orbs. That jiggle alongside the vessel. Riftborn Engineer #2: I, I, yes, very well.
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Sep 1, 2018 05:07
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El_Elegante posted:Economic behemoths-are these meant to visit un-colonized systems, shoot mining probes and move on? What other uses do they have? Depending on the modules, they can also terraform planets, rebuild planets that have been destroyed, and fix Depletion of planets that have been messed up by Cravers or mining probes. (The FIDSI boosting module is called the Regional Bureau btw, it's amazing to stack.)
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Sep 8, 2018 23:13
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Has anyone tried out the ES2 unique planets expansion yet? I'm thinking of grabbing it this weekend.
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Dec 4, 2018 08:10
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Amethyst posted:Does anyone think "pre-emptive boming" and "guerilla warfare" are good invasion options? The "draft" defense tactic invalidates both of them, imo. Blitz every time. I've never had the patience to test it out thoroughly, but I guess Bombing kills a lot of population, which lessens the amount of Drafting the defenders can try on following turns. It feels like it works okay.
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Jan 10, 2019 07:32
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There's a video buried here in the Amplitude forums. Hacking looks to be very... spatial... https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/forums/65-general/threads/32297-hacking-first-impressions?page=1
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Jan 18, 2019 04:31
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I think hacking occurs on the Strategic view, the same one that displays trade routes.
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Jan 18, 2019 06:18
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Amethyst posted:OK I finally watched the dev stream. Looks pretty neat actually. Lots of potential. They've taken a lot of inspiration from games like Uplink, which is cool Yeah, I like that it is built around the links between planets. It helps counter the big weakness of space 4X games, that their spatial element is rarely as compelling or instantly graspable as a map with forests and mountains and wiggly rivers.
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Jan 18, 2019 11:02
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HundredBears posted: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. They are fun and interesting to play, at least (that said, I'm a dreadful player). For maximum Horatio-ness, you can set all the AI empires to also be Horatio, then fight until only the true Horatio remains. Horatio.
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Jan 28, 2019 21:50
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I just blew up the Vaulter home system with an Obliterator, and then had to quit out because I realised I Had Become The Bad Guy. I was trying to protect the galaxy, not destroy it!!
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Feb 1, 2019 02:37
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Tulip posted:So, perhaps a terrible idea, but I was thinking of doing an ES2 SSLP. Hang on, what's an SSLP?
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Feb 5, 2019 21:27
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Cynic Jester posted:Sexy Sexy Lan Party Aw man, I want to go to a sexy sexy lan party. I've only ever been to the other kind. But yeah, I'd for sure read your LP. mitochondritom posted:Has anyone else noticed that the Vodyani and Lumeris races have the wrong names? Like they should have the opposite ones. The Vodyani are beings of light and are ultra religious and so Lumeris fits them. The Lumeris are gangster frog dudes and so they would fit Vodyani, which seems to be derived from Vodyanoy who are Slavic frog monsters. The Wikipedia entry for Vodyanoy could be a screenshot of a Lumeris from Endless Space 2 and noone would bat an eye. I have 100% noticed and been really bothered by this, if only because I am a China Mieville fan. Why are the luminous people not called the Lumeris? Why are the actual literal fish monsters not named after the actual literal fish monsters? Let's just call the tree people the United Empire, and name the beings that were BORN from the RIFT "Cravers" while we''re at it.
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Feb 6, 2019 05:29
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Horatio are how a 4X player thinks, made into a faction. It'shard to hate Horatio without hating yourself. (Apparently it was a goon who was responsible for getting Horatio's trait of "expensive ships" renamed to the far superior "the Price of Beauty.")mitochondritom posted:Yes it was Perdido st Station and also the Witcher 1 that made me twig that something was awry. I have decided with no evidence at all that early on in development some wires were crossed and it just got stuck that way, either as a joke or by accident. I can't reconcile that its a coincidence at all. I might take this question to the Amplitude forums, the devs seem pretty good at answering this sort of question.
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Feb 7, 2019 04:24
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I've decided to try EL after loving ES2 to bits. Are there any "essential" expansions (particularly for a player who enjoys being canonically The Good Guys, insofar as such a thing is possible in the Endless universe...)KPC_Mammon posted:insert thoroughly excellent post here Thanks for this post, I'll have to give it some serious thought later. What is your reasoning for Carriers always taking armour, by the way?
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Feb 10, 2019 01:09
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Yep. I'm happy to support Amplitude, but I'm really regretting installing Penumbra. You have to wonder if "this isn't actually fun" came up during beta testing at all. I'd uninstall it, but Cloaking is pretty cool at least.
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Feb 15, 2019 22:27
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That sounds pretty cool- starting out with a bunch of planets and struggling to hold them together, rather than the standard pattern of starting with one planet and ramping up.
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Feb 26, 2019 04:42
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And since it runs on the rarely-used strategic screen, it feels that little bit seperate from the rest of the game- almost like you're playing a second, weird game at ghe same time as ES2... Anyway I'm trying out the Broken Lords in EL at the moment- they are super fun to play- but am I missing something with the hp stealing ability of their cavalry unit? It 4hp seems like nothing at all.
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Mar 18, 2019 12:14
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Amethyst posted:Man I'm bummed about this game. The hacking expac really killed off all of my enthusiasm. ...yeah, I've only played it once since installing the expansion. It feels like my options are to ignore hacking, in which case I get messages that My System Has Been Hacked, or to pay attention to hacking, which for some reason really breaks the flow of an otherwise chill sort of game. Can anyone tell me what I am supposed to do when I get a "someone's trying to hack you" message?
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Apr 17, 2019 06:21
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Generic Octopus posted:There are defensive programs you can place on your systems to gently caress with enemy hacking, they're visible in the tech tree and attached to many things you'd research anyway. I guess it's hard to get a feel for whether or not these programs are "working." Is the general idea to drop a defensive program on a system that's given you an alert, or to only drop them on priority systems?
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Apr 20, 2019 02:12
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I quit when I managed to assimilate a minor faction, only to have them instantly disappear from the map. I don't want to be a force for blandness in the galaxy.
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May 15, 2019 04:10
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LordSloth posted:As to endless space’s combat, even if I watch it I find it too useless as a source of useful feedback on tactics or design. There is a switch you can hit on the post-battle screen that shows how many hits each fleet landed on the other, and how many missed or where deflected by shields, and so on. It's something, at least! Amethyst posted:The umbral chior just suck man. They suck to play as and they super suck to play against. They operate on an entirely separate map, what's the point? I think the Unfallen are my favourite race/opponent for the same reason. I like the little puzzle of working out which systems to Vine (or which Vine nodes to capture). Plus the Vines help get around the usual space 4x issue of the map feeling sort of, I don't know, insubstantial-- like in civ or whatever, your monkey brain is great at remembering "these are the fertile plains, this is the awful desert, this is the strategic mountain pass." Space games are going to struggle to replicate that hook.
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May 16, 2019 04:08
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Phlegmish posted:So I played my Normal no-pirate unique-galaxy eight-competitor game yesterday. Most of the AI players were poo poo as usual, but there was a really strong Riftborn civ right next to me that culture-converted two of my systems before I gave up (their alliance was too strong to fight). I don't know if it was due to the settings, maybe Riftborn are always good. The devs said something about the alliance war issue being impossible to fix due to how the ai processes turns, but it was an offhand comment on the game forums and I can't find it now. Anyway, it's really annoying. Diplomacy has just the right amount of inertia up until the first alliance forms, at which point everything goes out the window. I suspect they were aiming for a tradeoff- alliances give you strength at the cost of having control over your own diplomacy- but I feel sure there are better ways of implementing this core idea than what we ended up with. I'm also trying a Hissho no-pirates game at present, and two of the AI have very respectable scores. And I'm enjoying not having to siege down early-game pirate lairs that spawn in the middle of my trade routes..... Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 00:51 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 21, 2019 00:47
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Aaggh, hacking really is the most garbage system. I decided to give it another try, and am now really really regretting it. (Behemoths, however, remain kickin rad.)
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May 24, 2019 12:54
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Node posted:I'm trying ES2 while it is free and I've gotta say its overwhelming even with tutorials. Can anyone recommend a newbie friendly resource like a let's play? There are a bunch of tutorials on Amplitudes' site but I'm not sure how fun/friendly they'd be for a totally new player. The best advice I can think of is to avoid the crazier factions to start with- Hissho, Cravers, Vodyanoi, Riftborn, Unfallen. ChickenHeart posted:I gave ES2 a try over the free weekend and I must say I'm liking it a lot as an alternative to Stellaris. I can't seem to wrap my head around the population/ideology/voting system and my colonizing and improvements decisions boil down to "fund it" but playing space-prospector is surprisingly engaging and the hands-off combat hits a sweet spot for me. You won't find pugs or Gork in ES2, sorry. Plenty of wonderful dry humour, particularly with the Sophons and Horatio. Is there any specific population/politics stuff we can help with? I like that you can play it as an absolute min-max fest of matching populations perfectly with planets and governors... but there's enough give in the system that you can go the full RP route and beeline for a Pacifist or Ecologist Democracy and terraform your planets into tropical atolls, industry penalties be damned.
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May 28, 2019 13:38
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ChickenHeart posted:As for population stuff, how does the relationship work between manpower, food, and planet populations? While I was in a war I noticed that some of my systems were losing population from negative food production, even with food-related improvements, decent approval ratings, and a surplus of manpower. A thing that caught me out for ages was Colonisation- your little outposts consume a decent pile of food from your systems while they grow. There should be a little arrow symbol at the top left of the outpost's screen that lets you change which system is sacraficing its food for the outpost. Tulip posted:it's a shame, I love them conceptually and they're my favorite video intro, and I loved the rhythm they had in es1, but in es2 it just grinds to a halt and I regret not playing UE. I just can't settle into the idea of depleting planets! It's a pity, because they're such an interesting faction, and a good reliable enemy in SP.
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May 31, 2019 23:52
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Tulip posted:So, out of curiosity, what would people say the faction balance is? I'm of the opinion that it's really not all that bad, with a major exception for the Vodyani since they're so much more map vulnerable than the rest. For the rest I'd say UC and Horatio are worse than average, and UE, Hissho, and Riftborn are above, but it's not all that sharp of a tier list. In single player games, Horatio and Riftborn generally seems to do the best, while Unfallen and Vods have a terrible time. In the hands of a human player... I'm really not sure. I certainly have trouble getting the Lumeris to tick along as smoothly as UE or Riftborn. e: Dishonourable mention to the Umbral Choir; I quit after a little while when it turned out that assimilating a minor faction simply deleted them from the map. Fun times.
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Jul 6, 2019 00:28
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There are firing arcs in ES2??
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Jul 30, 2019 00:13
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Iiiiinteresting! Good to see Civ getting some competition, and I'm really happy that Amplitude's still alive and kicking. I wonder if we'll be seeing more of Amplitude's habit of giving factions a really small number of highly customisable units. I may be reading things wrong, but the impression I'm getting is that if you pick Egypt then you get chariots for the rest of the game- presumably they become motorised eventually?- meaning you'll have access to fast ranged units for your campaign....
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Aug 21, 2019 03:54
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Kurtofan posted:I really want to see motorized chariots now Witness me, bloodbag
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Aug 21, 2019 11:22
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Danann posted:Huh, this mechanic would simultaneously help with making any WW1-era conflicts a potential trench hell between high strategic mobility for the defenders and high killing power of artillery units as well as make the WW2-era strategies more possible if the game will be putting in stuff like motorized infantry and tank destroyers. Okay, that actually sounds excellent.
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Aug 23, 2019 03:30
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They're a good first faction for learning an Endless game, at least- teleporting, defence boosts, extra science. Plus (I know this is ridiculous) I like to think my civ could at least plausibly be the good guys... Anyway, there's some interesting stuff on G2G about the Nakalim. They start with the first 2 rows of the tech tree already researched.... but can't make their own science. Their other big trick is uncovering relics that shoot out mega-influence to convert systems, and the Academy loves them. The Human Crouton posted:I played it for about 8 hours and thought it was one of the most boring and confusing 4xs I've ever played. I barely remember anything about it except that I absolutely hated it. Is that the one with a War faction and a Science faction and a Trade faction.....? You can't get away with lazy design like that after witnessing Horatio's splendor.
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Sep 8, 2019 09:17
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