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For a while I thought that ES2 was a great 4X with a huge AI flaw. In my last 3 max difficulty games victory was too easy, and I've never won on max difficulty in any other 4X. Tried it recently and maybe I was unlucky (had bad relationships with Empire and Cravers from the start. Part of this was me confusing them with pirates and attacking, and for some reason I don't see a way to cancel attack once you see the enemy forces) but my rear end was handed to me. Maybe it was also just a first game with Vaulters. So now my interest has risen again, could it be AI has improved and ES2 is the best 4X game ever with no "but" in the end? A question about hacking. I sometimes get a prompt that my hack is tracked and that I should maybe cancel hack. But I don't see any way to do it! Also is there a way to trigger that hack defence or is it just random? The only thing I can do to defend is to add encryption program to my system, right? Also can you cancel attack you initiate?
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Feb 1, 2020 12:35
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Thanks for the advice! I think most 4X games have deep issues with the AI that you can't just fix by bonuses. The usual, you know: AI roleplays and doesn't touch you as long as you don't piss them off. And even on max difficulty it's easy to overproduce AI. He doesn't care if you win the game and if you start fighting AI late you can be close enough to defeat it easily. Same happens in Civ. So I'm not sure if this can be fixed easily.Admiral Funk posted:ilitarist, you can cancel hacks by right clicking on the hack in the upper left of the hacking overlay. Hacks that are being traced have a red arrow there. Canceling a hack in progress gives you a penalty of 30 to your bandwidth for a while. Thanks!
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Feb 1, 2020 20:02
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I was happy thinking they've fixed AI but my next game on the same settings showed that it was a fluke. Endless difficulty means that you don't provoke anyone super early and you're golden. With sad eyes I look at a lot of mechanics that I can ignore. Some hackers cause a revolution on my capital planet every 20 turns or so and it's just an irritation. Enemy AI blew up my best system which was nice but it still doesn't make him win the war, it just reminded me that behemoths exist and when he shot the next round I've researched shielding and built it before the charge reached my system. I'd say current Endless difficulty feels like one step above normal. It's entertaining, in a way, and I'm not bored playing it. But it's sad to know that there's no point in putting more effort in it or learning mechanics cause single player can't give me anything more apart from trying some obscure achievements. And come on, do I understand correctly that there's no defense from hacking? There's random roll to determine if I track it and shut it down but that's it? And the game is very insistent that I have to hack all the time.
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Feb 3, 2020 08:30
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Do you mean sleepers? Those programs you can apply say that they remove any "detected" backdoors. And I don't recall ever seeing anything about a detected backdoor. So I put encryption on my capital and that's kinda it?.. There are some techs that give more bandwith and more defensive power so I guess I can just sit there defending my capital. And I won't be able to defend all my borders so sleepers and backdoors are inevitable. 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. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 15:30
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GoldStandardConure posted:The Vodyani also sound like Tommy Wiseau anyway how's your spiritual life
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Feb 4, 2020 08:52
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While we're at it, I don't really get all of those main story quests. In EL they all were bind to the story of the faction getting civilized and deciding to ditch Auriga. Not very memorable but easy to understand. With ES2 I don't really remember most of the stories and they don't really end. They are also connected to some other stories like that Isyander guy appears in several of them. I've just won as Vaulters and their story was looking for Opbot who went to Academy and then had shown us Auriga 2.0 which is a cool system with another branch of Vaulters. Empire had emperor's sister plotting against him or something. Riftborn had welcomed the whole race from another dimension and it changed absolutely nothing. I think some sort of unique story victory would be interesting, like in EL. Personal way to domination. It would add some grand strategy vibe as in you're not playing for the challenge but for the experience of a unique path to victory.
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Feb 4, 2020 10:07
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Horatio are considered weak but with non-competetive AI it doesn't really matter, so I'd definitely advise a game as them. Gonna splice them all! As Tulip said Riftborn are like a faction of iphones, they're neat and sound great. But honestly, they all have some unique stuff about them and they all have cool aesthetics. The only ones who bore me are fish mafia cause it feels forced.
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Feb 25, 2020 08:45
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Even if some of ES1 concepts were more interesting that game didn't have those concepts realized beyond intro video and some bonuses. ES2 factions have their own questline, a lot of art and major mechanical differences. And you still have mathematical concepts materialized from another dimension as well as intergalactic jungle. Plus it was strange that, say, Empire and 2 factions born of it (elite specops and hippie explorers) start in the same symmetrical position. Now many of those interesting factions are minor races.
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Jun 4, 2020 06:30
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Unique planet will probably give you a bigger benefit in the short term. If you have time you can terraform planets into whatever you want. Long term size and quantity of planets matter more. But it's not a game where you play 500 turns so short-term benefits are more important, I think.
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Jul 1, 2020 10:51
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Most expansion features are designed in a way that lets you ignore them. Like there are those giants that are not giants and it's probably a good idea to dedicate some resources to it. But maybe not. They're not like ES2 hacking or earlier EL pearl features. The exception is probably the Eclipse thing. You can search temples again during the eclipse. So it pays to have some cheap scout units in your cities to go out and clear out temples during the eclipse (I think it's the same thing as dust storm?..). But you've already probably had those around for winter pearls so it doesn't change much.
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Jul 26, 2020 09:11
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Also you can terraform other factions territory! Broken Lords even thank you for that.
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Jul 26, 2020 20:20
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Serephina posted:edit: I'd be more concerned with other minor balance quibbles. Like how some lategame industry improvements will literally never pay for themselves, other useless buildings, and combat being less deep than it has potential to be. ...and the fact that I don't know what are you talking about yet max difficulty AI let's me win whatever victory I want. I may sound whiny and repetitive but really it's because this game is the best 4X I've ever play and I can't play it. It's like I feel I spent 2 hours for naught when I realize that I enter midgame already victorious and I haven't even started analyzing geopolitics, ship designs, possible conquests, grand research paths. They're still patching it but they ignore AI issues I think.
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Aug 17, 2020 08:03
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Serephina posted:So I bought the big bundle of Amplitude a while back and am enjoying all the DLC in ES2. My problem is now that 3/3 games that I've started had hit the softlock of the "pending" end turn. Internet searches tell me that it's a catch-all failure state that's been around since prerelease and all sorts of things cause it. Other than signing up for a g2g account and hopefully having the devs personilze a savegame fix, anyone know of possible workarounds? I've been trying to enable dev mode/cheats and force end the turn, but apparently that's not enabled anymore? Sigh. I had this issue appearing reliably in every game shortly after release. Even if I loaded an older autosave at some point the game just locked anyway. I didn't find any way out of it, I just waited till they've patched it. Maybe they didn't patch it enough and it's still reproducable on some systems. Maybe they reintroduced the bug. It looks like AI stuck in a loop so it's entirely possible AI improvements or new mechanics might have broken it.
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Sep 3, 2020 10:27
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Serephina posted:The AI cannot play this game at all, I wonder what the heck ever challenged me before. Even on endless, they refuse to actually wage war, and can't built a death stack worth poo poo. Welcome to the club. The game is beautiful and the mechanics seem so interesting up to the point you realise that basic grasp on the mechanics is enough to obliterate max difficulty AI. Really makes me wonder about developers priorities. They make expansion after expansion and now there are stabilization finishing patches or whatever. So you'd think they're addressing problems of players who played the game several times. But nope. Stellaris has problems with AI too but in that game you can crank up the difficulty so that even passive AI poses a challenge.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:04
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What Serephina said. Plus we aren't just talking about complexity of AI computations. Stellaris modless AI is notoriously bad, but then you get a crisis which is an enemy with no economy or diplomacy. Plus you have intermidiate threats like Fallen empires and Leviathans who are very strong and just sit there. You basically get a horde mode added to the game and you can make crisis harder. So it doesn't matter as much if other "players" are bad or predictable. They're there to be subjugated, annexed or allied. Plus as I understand if you turn up the difficulty higher they can still pose some danger, you'll just see that their planets are underdeveloped and they only beat you with magical free economy of theirs. Still you get some challenge. With ES2 there's no challenge, that's the point. It's not about AI not being human-like or smart. If the game would decide that it's turn 130 so no everyone who hates the player should move huge fleets against me it'd be dumb cheap move but it would still be a more interesting game posing some challenge. Maybe you can get something like that if you play with custom debuffed faction and turn off alliances or something. But I'd expect such measures to be necessary only when I've mastered the game and seek the highest challenge. As it is now I barely understand any expansion features (never interacted with pirates, only use hacking cause the game pesters me with it, don't build behemoths) or endgame features (only use terraforming when the system begs to be all-cold research center, always forget about improved laws or fleet tactics) and I still chose which victory I win. It's not AI, it's about difficulty balance.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:52
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mmmm posted:Many, many players of 4x games would love to have a time-constrained single-player option that approximates the multiplayer level of challenge -- but we gots nothing in ~14 years of game dev. It's enough to make one say "gently caress AAA". Shameful. Age of Wonders 3, Thea, Stars in Shadows. Plenty of others can give you all the challenge you need. True, only AoW3 can be considered AAA. And you rarely see *symmetric* challenge, as in AI wins by playing the same game as you do. But I'd argue in a game as complex as any 4X the only way AI can win by playing the same rules as you do is not playing the same rules as you do and never got caught. Civ4 more or less did that brushing over some systems like terrain improvements (AI cities performed as if they were managed perfectly even if the terrain wasn't improved optimally).
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Sep 15, 2020 09:09
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mmmm posted:Thea seems like such an oddball game that I didn't think of it as a real 4x contender -- that's the one with the big PvE focus, right? I've put Thea there cause you've specifically talked about a challenge, not about a good AI. I know you probably meant good symmetric AI (which doesn't really exists in a pure form, it's always asymmetric AI mimicking as symmetric) but Thea is an example of a game with a varied challenge and no real contenders.
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Sep 16, 2020 08:07
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Giants expansion also adds wonders, competitive quests as well as, ahem, giants. All important core gameplay additions.
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Oct 15, 2020 19:29
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Eh, giants are hit or miss. But I think without them your unit variety is too limited. For most of the game, you have what, 4 units? Giants come late and they're kind of icebreaker units.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:09
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ELCP changes the balance and supposedly makes AI better.
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Oct 18, 2020 08:12
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Some systems in this game are hidden in the UI and can surprise you when you discover them. Like land armies having their own tech tree, kinda. Or politics system that feels like it belongs in a much more complex simulation. But yeah, the only difficulty in the game is to understand early game rythm so that pirates don't strangle you. And iy's the same for almost all factions. I'd say you'll win your first game on Normal if you've played any empire building game.
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Jan 1, 2021 10:47
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I found most EL DLCs after Guardians to be bad too. But I like Forgotten as a faction. Plus espionage and pillage fit nicely in the scheme of things. Most other new mechanics (except maybe Urcs or whatever they're called, those Giants 2.0) require very little resources to use compared to the benefit you provide. This means that without expansion you play faction that focuses on, say, exploration and science, everything else is there to support those main avenues of progression. But with expansions everyone should exploit sea holdings, pearls, additional income from eclipses etc making every faction less unique. Using espionage is an option, not getting involved with pearls is bad play. ES2... The only expansion that felt bad to me was that hacking one. There devs don't even give you an option to ignore that system, it constantly reminds you that you could be hacking right now. Behemots might be very cost-effective but at least you can spend those resources somewhere else. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Jan 22, 2021 |
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Jan 22, 2021 11:12
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Tulip posted:There's a general structural problem with Endless DLC where, because it's so important to strategy to decide which techs you don't research, adding even a small number of techs is just generally destabilizing. Penumbra has probably the best solution, which was to piggyback hacking benefits to existing less-popular/powerful techs. But you see, it's all about the cost of the paths. If hacking and pearls were hidden behind research (the way even basic things like market are) then ignoring them would be a viable strategy. Your winning strategy that worked in a game without pearls would still be viable, but maybe now contenders using pearls could be more of a problem to you. But making those things available to everyone at small costs removes choice. Previously you could have a struggle between a faction that relies on Military, Diplomacy and Trade and, say, a faction that relies on Economy, Researc and Heroes with artifacts. After EL expansions you get pearls and sea exploration that have extremely little initial cost. Now every faction you play is also a Pearl faction, an Eclipse Exploration faction (you might decide not to bother with exploration and never research techs for that, just sweep your home regions. However when eclipse kicks in you get huge rewards for microcontrolling your troops that defend your towns anyway to visit nearby temples). Instead of unique factions with their own paths to victory you get gameplay systems stapled-on that make all the factions less unique. It's a game where some factions don't start wars or build new cities as part of their identity, those additional universal systems that you'd be an idiot to pass destroy that uniqueness.
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Jan 22, 2021 15:35
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Tulip posted:I largely don't think this is a meaningful paradigm for discussing the actual experience of playing. Like I can agree with "an all-expansions game of EL is a mess," but the rest of the post just kind of feels incoherent. A game like EL or ES is a choice of investment of your resources into various paths of victory. Bad DLC mechanics are not about sending giving you one more path to supremacy you can use; they add mechanics you have to participate in. If you play 10 games in 4 of them you might never engage in war, in 2 you won't build new cities, in 3 you ignore diplomacy altogether, in 1 you don't have research. In 10 of those games, you'll be gathering pearls and advancing the separate pearl-only tech tree; you'll be visiting eclipsed temples. Ignoring them is not a choice of concentrating on other specific paths but just a bad play.
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Jan 22, 2021 17:26
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Serephina posted:It sounds like you want expansions that add NO new content outside of the new faction? You said it yourself: techs come with a large opportunity cost, and a lot of factions just don't have the leeway to do everything at once. You might be alone in wanting DLC that adds nothing to the base game (the one DLC that tries, Tempest, everyone hates). Pearls et. al. being available to everyone is kinda the whole point. The example of an idea I like is espionage in EL compared to ES2. In ES2 everyone has to engage with espionage in some ways both offensively and defensively. Faction traits and research (?) upgrade this ability. In EL espionage is one more way you can use heroes. You can already assign them to cities or armies, and now there's a new path for them with an obvious cost and benefit. It's integrated seamlessly. Pearls are not just available to everybody, unless your strategy involves not having any units at all it's obvious that you have to microcontrol your armies to gather pearls. I am also irritated that those new features require a lot of clicks from you for relatively minor benefits. But as those clicks don't consume any resources that can go to better places those clicks - that are the same for every factions you can play - are necessary and boring part of every EL playthrough.
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Jan 23, 2021 08:32
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Yep. Big problem with difficulty. No matter how much stuff AI has they don't use it. The game basically has no challenge after you learn the basics.
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Feb 8, 2021 14:29
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Yeah, lack of narrative events quickly reveals ES2 as a competitive board game first and foremost... And then it turns out the game is easy on max difficulty. On a more positive news, EL gets some changes from fan patches integrated into a main game. Expect better AI.
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Mar 31, 2021 20:45
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When I was a kid and launched Civilization 1 I was blown away by how big the history of the world is. Just imagine, fro all this time life changed for millions of people, there were great empires I have never heard of. Then I was blown away but Europe Universalis 2 detailed map explaining me what exactly is HRE, or Rome Total War showing huge marching armies up close. Nowadays I look at Total War and feel repulsed by misrepresentation of ancient combat. And the scale is so off! Europa Universalis simplifies so much and presents tribes and bueracratic empires as extremely similar entities, giving countries some sort of "ideas" that insist on England being a naval power even if it conquers half of Europe and is content on staying home. And Civilization... Well, you know. It has always pushing the idea that no matter what are your roots, every civilization could walk the path of becoming USA. Humankind is weird. I too see it as a robot trying to implement multiculturalism idea. Not sure it will bother me in the game itself. But your explanation is certainly interesting.
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Apr 1, 2021 15:19
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Even more worrying is interacting with other empires. EL/ES2 were one of the few 4X games where you care about your neighbors. But how are you going to deduce personalities from a faction that is Babylonian-Pict-English-Thai or whatever? And here's a brand new feature video about diplomacy that tries to answer that question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8wq26ci3ns
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Apr 1, 2021 15:48
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A mini-DLC for both Legend and Space 2 drops today. EL also integrates some of the EL Community Patch. Little hope ES2 will become more interesting, but EL probably deserves a couple more runs.
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May 6, 2021 06:20
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Serephina posted:I think the 'trouble' is that it's a 4X series that can be consumed and set aside; people will play Civ all day every day, and Stellaris-enjoyers have brain worms, but by the time you've won with every faction there's not enough oomf to go back and do it again. This is mostly due to the weak AI, but looking at Civ there might be some other magic missing. Maybe it's just a player-base thing due to brand recognition, not enough chatty newbies or whatever. Civ has many more factions even if the differences are minimal. And it has, like, more stuff in it. Taking Theocratic government this time and using some policies you haven't touched previously might feel worthy of a new session. Playing Drakken and getting deep into the military might be very different mechanically, but you don't get anything from it in terms of narrative. Also, Civ AI might be bad but the difficulty balance means that you actually have to make some effort to win on higher difficulty settings. You'll be swarmed by enemy armies. Y'all have to try Old World. And if you're more grand strategy inclined - Field of Glory Empires. Those games have good ideas about late-game boredom. Basically, both allow you to win by getting double the amount of "victory points" than any other contender. Humankind has the same idea from what I understand.
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Jul 12, 2021 08:11
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You might not know it but the best Endless game (Dungeon of the Endless) is on mobile. At the moment Android version is on sale.
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Aug 9, 2021 05:48
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When the game is about managing a whole civilization I don't consider people managing their own transport to be a cop-out. Also all quest lines require you to go half the world away. This way you can't turtle and get a sneaky win.
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Oct 6, 2021 06:16
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It may look good but the map itself is incomprehensible to me. If there's no icon on an object I can never guess if it's anomaly or temple or maybe resource.
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Jan 20, 2022 08:03
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True, there are ways to work around the issue. I spend most of my time in strategic view in this game. I'm used to modern strategy games giving up on readability and just putting an icon on everything (see Civ or Total War) but EL doesn't even do that, it wants me to look at the map and take notice of different types of glitter. I haven't played Humankind but I understand it goes the mainstream way by making it all about icons.
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Jan 20, 2022 13:21
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There is some of that, like I think you can turn off eclipses in EL, maybe even naval stuff?.. They also have in-game DLC enabler so you don't have to go to store app and remove DLCs.
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Jan 21, 2022 12:46
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Node posted:I like Endless Legend a lot, but one thing I never could figure out was a way to benchmark how well I was doing. Lets say you're playing at normal speed. How many regions should you have colonized by, uh, turn 100? How many full armies should you have? I realize this is different depending on your faction, but I'm just looking for a general goal to measure myself by. It's different depending not just a faction, but a lot of things. The beauty of Endless Legends (and Humankind and Endless Space 2) is there are truly different approaches. I know what you're talking about, in a game like Civ or Galactic Civilizations you one day realize how important is the early rush and it improves your game significantly. But Legend has many ways to project power and "expand", which is highlighted by factions who can't expand in a traditional way at all. In this game there are few drawbacks to commuting to any strategy and it's mostly about opportunities you lose instead. If you have a close neighbour then you can build 2 or 3 military units in a time it takes to build a settler, jumpstarting a new city may require as much dust as buying a couple of powerful mercenaries. Maybe there's a lot of maritime resources nearby. Maybe committing to your quest and getting it's rewards before you expand much will make you strong.
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Apr 29, 2022 07:35
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I guess a more accurate answer is not to measure yourself by the number of cities. A lot of 4X games (including Endless Space 2) teach players that the power of the faction is measured in the number of colonies (excluding Civ5, kinda) but the way EL is balanced every city spirals in terms of production. You want as many cities as possible once happiness is no longer a concern and you have enough dust to buy all the necessary facilities in new cities, but in early and mid game it's much more about land grab to prepare for a future war (or to make sure you won't need a war with a specific faction) and doing quests rather than building cities for the sake of economy.
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Apr 29, 2022 09:09
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HundredBears posted:I have to disagree with this. Cities have fantastic return on investment in the early game so long as you can handle the approval issues and aren't in a weird situation with luxuries. Getting to 5 after the second empire plan is great for most factions. You mentioned you postpone building military units until late 30's, which the same time you describe, right? I'm no expert in this game, but I can't imagine getting to 5 cities, not building military, and not having those cities sieged by neutrals as well as your capital lacking even basic buildings.
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Apr 29, 2022 15:38
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When you put it like "AI is not strong enough" you probably provoke people into rolling their eyes and talking about how AIs can't effectively play such big and complex games. But I know what you really mean by this: AI provides less challenge than 90s TBS AIs who only new how to cheat a big army and send it your way. Especially ES2 AI just doesn't do anything to stop your from winning no matter what difficulty you're playing on. Even Civ6 and other gentle games have higher difficulties where AI at least tries to ruin your day. In ES2 you have all those beautiful mechanics and they're all pointless.
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Oct 30, 2022 13:42
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