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There's something claustrophobic about the idea of establishing late 20th/early 21st century ideology as a fundamental force in a distant future where Mankind Has Conquered The Stars. Honestly I think Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom does more to address the reality of a post-scarcity economy than most sci fi ever does...Tulip posted:As a rule yeah, basically. The best game in terms of "creating a giant empire that has anything resembling real world governance" is probably friggin EVE. Or this, yes
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Sep 11, 2019 03:53
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I got the newest expansion a couple of days ago. After the disappointment of the espionage xpac, this one was a pleasant surprise. Starting with all those extra techs gives a very different arc to the game- I started out beating up enemies and raiding their planets for fun, and then the battles got a little harder, and then I started losing fleets. (Although I'm sure a better player would have zero challenge breaking this faction.) Anyway, their music and ship design is FABULOUS. And I was wondering why my first faction hero looked kind of weird and stiff, until my next guy came along; I noticed he had a bunch of cuts all along his torso and was holding various organs in jars, and it finally sunk in that my empire didn't "emerge from hibernation"- they were, in fact, all dead and my dudes are basically Egyptian mummies.
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Oct 21, 2019 08:17
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:I love the Nakalim homeworld is just loving Earth, but no one calls attention to it. They're the human progenitors. How did I miss that!? That's messed up.
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Oct 22, 2019 02:13
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I started a game with the hacking xpac disabled, and was amazed at how much better the game became. No more random announcements about my planets being hacked! No, there's nothing you can do about it, and we won't tell you what the results of this are. I am missing the cloaked scouts and the ability to speed up sieges, though.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:20
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Admiral Funk posted:I'm the odd one out for Penumbra I guess. I like hacking and The Umbral Choir both. Are there any hacking/choir guides you can recommend? They are systems that do not reward playful experimentation. (I gave up on the choir after I accidentally discovered that the "reward" for assimilating a minor faction as the choir is for the minor and their ships to instantly disappear from the map. Hooray?)
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Jan 31, 2020 22:32
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Admiral Funk posted:iirc I just sifted through a bunch of random threads for info. Assimilating a minor as UC should turn all of their colonized worlds into sanctuaries for you, and the ships should stay too. Dunno if that was fixed since you played? I might try them again, for my next ES2 binge. Chomp8645 posted:I did not receive any prompting from an outside source to do this, and had no foreknowledge of them or any reviews of their content. I just read their in-game description, and immediately every ounce of my prior 4x experienced screamed that I didn't want them around. Checking this thread now is very satisfying. You've gained enough XP to unlock the skill "detect tedious game mechanic," one of the essential ones really.
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Feb 1, 2020 06:11
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Tulip posted:*sad riftborn sounds* My favourite ship in the game is that tier 2 Riftborn beastie that basically has nothing but weapon slots. It can be upgraded to have yet more weapon slots.
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Feb 3, 2020 02:55
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GoldStandardConure posted:The Vodyani also sound like Tommy Wiseau I've been trying to place the Vodyani accent for years! Some sort of South African-Transylvanian hybrid. Even IN HOly WAR, diPLOmacy reMAINs an OPTion ilitarist posted:What irritates me is that in addition to hacking not being optional offensive hacking is not optional too. You can't reroute that offensive power into defense, the game reminds you to hack all the time even if you're surrounded by friends. If the game would demand optimization and planning to win it then UI/balancing insistence on hacking optimization would be understandable, but it does not. So I consider this system to be bad for a game like ES2. I've gotten all the ES2 expansions, and have only uninstalled one of them. Guess which one.
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Feb 3, 2020 21:03
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It's heresy, I did not hit the Lost. I did noooot. Oh hi Isyander.
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Feb 4, 2020 09:32
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Det_no posted:Congratulations, you reached that magical age where any adult's brain starts getting into previously lame things like Euro Truck Sim, crochet and staying inside. I scoffed at this, but then noticed I'm actually inside right now with a lovely crochet blanket
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Jun 6, 2020 03:26
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Eimi posted:So having played and won with the other factions some Vaulter's still remain my favorite. Partly because I just love their theme, as a woman I always appreciate any faction lead by a woman, especially when they are relatively good guys. Also while portals are amazing, honestly their incredible scout ship might be my favorite thing they offer. Yep, that mega-scout combined with portals is huge fun- it makes for a nice effortless feel to empire management, while the slower colonisation inclines you to care about your worlds. And the fact they are easy to play as good guys is a big deal for me! Serephina posted:coherent, if oddly shaped. Not a bad description of the average 4X player
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Jul 19, 2020 08:18
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El_Elegante posted:Nobody stans for the buxom mercantile frog lady Extraordinary I'm really glad 13-year-old-me could never see the Vodyanoi leader
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Jul 19, 2020 14:48
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I remember reading somewhere (sorry) that the Civ developers worked out that for the vast majority of players would quit the instant they lost a city. Ideally what we'd have is an AI that can and will take your cities/systems, combined with a game mechanic that makes the loss of a city an interesting (albeit still painful) decision point. Like, you've lost your system, choose an option: fund resistance fighters, evacuate civilians or ramp up propaganda, that sort of thing.
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Sep 15, 2020 05:46
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Rimusutera posted:How people frame their condemnation of certain mechanics is a big tell of what I think Tulip is right about here; very often conversations about difficulty and desiring good AI lean hardtowards raised hackles at the AI providing some sort've of active resistance to the player's stated ingame aims. I think this problem also exists in tension with the fact people want their 4X AI to fight each other and/or be pliable on a diplomatic level. There is certainly a gap between what players claim to want, and what they actually want. Civ6 took the right approach in one instance by having ai cities planted right on your borders flip to your control. They took an aggravation and made it an opportunity. I wish developers would take this approach more often, instead of just building comatose ai! I guess what I want from 4x ai is, weirdly enough, what good old Medieval Total War (not a 4x, I know) provided- multiple factions taking over half the map them disintegrating - very dynamic...
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Sep 15, 2020 22:41
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Eschatos posted:So I find the hacking system pretty confusing. Started up a new game the other day, and got to the point where I built a trading company, then noticed that I couldn't actually build a subsidiary anywhere. Clicking on the building view for that system shows 0 buildings and just a horatio hero portrait with the money per turn cost. I assume there's some hack that shuts down buildings for a system. How do I actually get rid of that? I already had the basic defensive program running on that system. That sounds more like an actual glitch; I've never seen that before. That said, I also got rid of that expansion pretty early on. (It was amazing how much I enjoyed my first few hack-free playthroughs; no more worrying about stupid popups arriving to tell me something's gone wrong that cannot be fixed and could not have been prevented.)
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Sep 23, 2020 01:57
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I decided to binge on ES2 again, but for some reason all my turns get stuck in "pending." Reloading the save fixes it, but I reeeeally don't want to do that every single turn! Any thoughts on fixing this? I did a bit of googling and the devs response seems to be a resigned gallic shrug and "there are so many things that could cause this, it's impossible to know which one is making it happen in specific cases."
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Dec 21, 2020 04:00
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Dang. I had problem-free running for years and for some reason now, in the last few weeks, I've got this bug.
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Dec 21, 2020 04:08
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Athaboros posted:I had that problem and fixed it by always clearing the notifications on the right-hand side before ending the turn. Try that, maybe? I'll give it a try! Thanks thread.
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Dec 21, 2020 21:16
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I think it needed sliiiiightly cheaper buildings at the start of the game, and much more expensive stuff at the end. But this is getting into "stuff I'd add to ES2 if I was the game dev" territory, which will eat up the next couple of days if I let it.
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Dec 22, 2020 05:15
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Athaboros posted:I had that problem and fixed it by always clearing the notifications on the right-hand side before ending the turn. Try that, maybe? It worked! Thanks!!
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Dec 25, 2020 05:51
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If I could have Prenumbra's cloaking ship abilities and Umbral aesthetics without the other stuff, I'd be pretty happy!
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Jan 4, 2021 02:40
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The previous reply covered things really well, but there's one other point on exploration probes: advancing through the tech tree makes new batches of anomalies visible, so you will be doing more Probing throughout the game. I think the best use for those early anomalies, oddly enough, is the xp for heroes that uncover them. You can send your hero out with your scout ship to get a few levels in system management really quickly, then send them back to boost your home world.
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Jan 5, 2021 00:23
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Mjolnerd posted:I wonder if that's because Vodyani snowball so hard that its easier to just win than complete the quest. And from memory, the Vodyani quest has some weird stuff in it- blowing up planets or something?- which makes it trickier to accidentally trigger in the course of building up your empire.
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Feb 13, 2021 05:10
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Time for my annual ES2 binge. Tell me your most rad and/or hilariously broken custom factions!
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Feb 18, 2021 05:39
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On that note, if anyone has solutions for Craver removal, I'd love to hear them. My go-to option is "don't have Cravers in your game" which isn't ideal.
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Mar 31, 2021 03:22
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wologar posted:My love of history also started with the first Age of Empires. As I read more books on my favourite events and cultures, I quickly realized that the campaigns in games like AoE2 or Total War are huge oversimplifications or abstractions of what is known. Ahh, the AoE2 Mongols campagin. "Behold, the horde of Genghis Khan approaches!" (3 horse archers and 2 camels appear.) I agree, though- games are magic for getting people into history. As long as we continue learning and searching, it's all good.
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Apr 1, 2021 23:16
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It's a fascinating one, for sure. I remember really enjoying the game early on, and then growing to really dislike it, and I'm not totally sure why. Meanwhile, Civ 6 and ES2, for all their many faults, are games I keep returning to. That point about de-personalisation is a good one. You're a colour, not a leader or even a nation. There's a general feeling of vague fogginess. You can't ever zoom all the way out and see the world; the civs consist of a leader whose name you'll never remember; the city states are grey blurs on your borders that come and go; the battles occur in a greyed-out version of the main map. Even all the unit and building effects get listed in Amplitude's terrible house style of "+1 to unit on unit (movement)" or whatever. And the voiceover guy keeps reminding you of how pointless everything is... It is a really un-lovable game. Clarste posted:I would describe it as highly resistant to roleplaying. Or that, yes.
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Jan 6, 2024 04:58
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That's a great idea. Two or three cultures per game would feel so much more meaningful.
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Jan 8, 2024 08:22
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Yeah, Amp's worldbuilding skills are sorely wasted in a real-world setting. Roleplaying as aztec space-parrot samurai or chivalrous money vampires is fun; give me more of that! Anyway I can't quite put into words why I dislike Humankind. So, I've started replaying ES2 instead. (I'm suuuure the Lumeris and Vodyani names got switched at some point in development. Vodyanoy is a slavic water spirit- let's give that name to the glowing guys! Lumeris sounds like luminous- let's give that to the fish people! Hmm. For more fascinating theories, ask me about the pantograph and preserved insect in Slay the Spire.)
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Jan 15, 2024 11:43
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Serephina posted:Its kinda academic as the computer players are still bad at the game and you'll win regardless, but the combat changes in particular are great fun. Yep. I've been enjoying it, and I've been able to stave off the inevitable "this AI is dumber than a box of potatoes" feeling that always derails me in the end. I've started thinking of ES2 as a star-empire-shaped city builder; I love colonising and seeing number go up and dissecting the speedbump AI empires. I gave up on diplomacy after the patch that makes AI always reject your trade offers.
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Mar 16, 2024 05:42
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