I'm surprised to find no mention of Endless Space 2 at RB. If there's a thread for it, I must be blind.
Anyway, I skipped this title for a while, due in part to warnings of fatal crashes not fixed at release and slow to get fixed, but those issues are long in the rear view mirror at this point. I jumped in a few months ago and have played quite a steady diet of it since then. A 4X game (of *any* subgenre, mind you) that I'm still playing after completing fifteen games? That ought to say quite a bit right there.
Let's talk about strong points in the game. Why is it fun to play?
1) The races are significantly distinct. (This is not all up side. The AI (at least currently) lacks the mojo to play every race to its proper potential.) From the player's perspective, alone, however, this *is* a huge up side. You play Civ3 or 4 and you're playing the same race every game, except for the UU and one or two minor leanings for flavor. THIS game sets a whole new bar for factions that play differently one from the next.
2) Six or seven victory conditions is too many. Nobody has ever gotten close to balancing more than maybe three. ... Until now. (And this is not the only Sirian Rule of What Not to Do in a 4X Game that they broke. Put another way, this is not the only "that's never been done before, successfully" that was done right and done well for the first time. Ever.)
3) The star lanes cliche sucks. Always has. ... Until now. ... Endless Space 1 did a pretty good job of allowing the star lanes to melt away in mid to late game. Endless Space 2 does it better. Does it so well, even, I'm not even bothered by the presence of the star lanes.
4) Rock/Paper/Scissors is gone. It's gone. There's just beams and projectiles (missiles and guns blended into one mechanic). When has a game ever shrank its core system (combat, in this case) from three options to two and made it better? Here. This time. It's not ambrosia, but it's better than Endless Space 1 and that's saying a lot. Also, you don't generally end up getting to choose anyway. You go with what you have the resources to build. The ability to adapt your fleet to try to keyhole on what the enemy is doing in their fleets is quite minimal. There's enough options among components, including some weaker versions of stuff that requires no strategic resources at all, for strategy to matter, but you're going to have to do a lot more than just build the best ship design to win a war in this game.
5) The "unbeatable fleet" from Endless Space 1 is gone. Heroes make a big impact on a fleet as an admiral, but you're just not going to blank out enemy fleets of similar tech level. (They have heroes, too, but that's not the only reason).
6) Defense matters. Racking up planetary defenses can put the brakes on invasions. You might lose a couple of systems to well-timed, well-placed AI DOWs and attacks, but recovery is possible. It takes a while to secure a captured world, and even longer if you make use of Tactical Surrender at appropriate times. The AI understands this too, by the way, and is quite good at seeking Truce from your Allies to blunt your gains when you are on a roll. The AI also understands the value of dogpiling, and sometimes DOWs out of pure opportunism if, for instance, your fleets are busy on the far side of your empire with a different foe (offense or defense).
7) The galaxy shapes and types create a good variety of strategic and tactical situations to manage. Some empires are compact, some are stretched quite long and thin. Some have only one or two fronts, some are surrounded. Some galaxies have clusters of minor civs, while others have them spread out nicely. You can turn off various map balancing elements, alone or in combos, to craft all manner of assymetrical situations, which (if you're on the short end of the straw) can add difficulty levels just by itself -- or take them away, if you hit the lottery. Races can be chosen, can be random-but-unique, or can be truly random. (There are some races where you are going to be in for it, if multiple copies of the same race randomly show up on your doorstep.) The right combos of races can create runaway AIs, even, if the AI's best-played races get to pick on its worst-played.
8) The game has beaten me. This may be an artifact of AI improvements in the latest patch / new DLC, which isn't terribly old. I was just starting to get comfy with the notion I had a handle on the game completely when they fixed a few issues and upgraded AI performance. There's nothing quite as interesting as having a defeat screen pop up when you were just a few turns from reaching victory yourself (by a different victory condition).
So where are the cons? Well, there are a few.
A) The AI *isn't* ace at playing every civ. You can tell it's the AI, not the civ design, if you play every race yourself and figure out the micromanagements needed on some of the trickier races.
Who does the AI suck at playing? The Vodyani and the Unfallen, especially, but also the Vaulters and the Riftborn to a lesser extent. They USED TO suck at the Cravers, but it looks like that's one race they taught the AI how to MM properly in the latest patch, because the Cravers are topping the score charts quite a bit now. The AI is ace at playing the Lumeris and the United Empire. Those races are almost always strongly played.
There's nothing weak about the Unfallen or the Vodyani, inherently, but they require a skilled and concentrated effort in order to expand at a proper pace. The AI just doesn't handle this well enough -- and both of these races are extra vulnerable to attack, requiring a higher priority on active military defense with fleets. They are also the most vulnerable to pirates, which are not a threat the AI is great at managing.
B) Alliances can make some games way too easy. If you end up in an alliance that includes your top two rivals, you can coast to a victory of your choice, even if you do have to share the glory with your friends. (This can make the Cravers a severe threat, however, as you won't be able to neuter them just by allying with them.)
C) A few tricks of the AI get to be tiresome. Every AI you declare war against telling you they'll get around to you in time (if they are at war with anyone else, including your alliance members) is poorly handled. And you may need to make sure you stock some extra Influence so you can re-declare a war when one of your allies makes the most INCONVENIENT truces imaginable. (You're just about to retake a lost system, for instance, and look! Your enemy suckered your ally into signing a truce, to pull your defeat from the jaws of victory. But-- of course, you can avoid that by not entering alliances. When NOT to join an alliance is an Interesting Dilemma.)
D) The political system is tied too heavily to each race's native political leaning. Your population composition contributes more to your your political options than does your strategic choices -- and the need to defend yourself forces Military faction upon you as a major party in every game you play.
E) You have to turn off some of the victory conditions from time to time in order to experience parts of the game field that otherwise get obscured by beelining to the faster-available victory conditions. (I praised the conditions, earlier, as the best-ever balance for a large pack of victory conditions, and it's so, but that doesn't mean there aren't some conditions you won't see much under normal circumstances.)
F) You pretty much never get to have much choice about luxury resources. Far more important to upgrade your systems with something, ANYthing, and get to the ability to negate the unhappiness of a system due to "having too many systems" than to hold out for a "better" mix of luxury resources or to try to buy them off the market. The only mechanic in the game that lets you expand your empire in the late going is the ability to cancel out the growth penatly on any fully-modernized star system. You simply HAVE TO go with whatever mix you have available, as soon as it comes available enough to make a choice at all.
I took my time moving up the difficulty levels. There are seven levels? I think I played one game at Level 4, three each at levels 5 and 6, and now a bunch on Endless (Level 7, the highest). The game requires quite a bit of micromanagement, although nothing as dull and mindless as things like the build order in Master of Orion 2 or from lack of overflows in Civ3. Most of the MM arises from the particulars of the races.
For instance, the Cravers are slave drivers and will create TEN unhappy units for each other race unit present on a given planet, with at least one Craver present there. So, a new unit of Cravers population randomly added to a planet where you had only other races present can slam your Happiness from Ecstatic to Mutinous in one go. You simply must babysit this mechanic, checking your planets at least as often as every time they grow, so you can keep new units of population from completely tanking the output of a system with morale crashes. The AI MUST HAVE been taught how to manage this better in the latest patch. I always assumed their previous incompetence with Cravers was due to morale crashes from randomly placed population growth. There's also the option to prevent some or even many planets from being fully Depleted by removing all Craver population units from nearly-Depleted planets and stuffing those worlds with any other pop points. (Not consuming your minor races in the Feeding Pits is a primary strategy. Cravers actually do best when they have one to two minor civ pop points per Craver unit. Managing happiness, bonus output and Depletion is a clinic in heavy, old school style MM, but I find it rewarding enough not to be bothered by the work load. YMMV.)
The Unfallen require their colony ships to sit unmolested in orbit of a target system for 20 turns. The number of turns decreases per extra colony ship added to the colony fleet. So 20, 10, 7, 5, 4 turns for fleets of 1 2 3 4 5 colony ships. Three or four colony ships are needed per fleet to make the wait tenable. And an Unfallen faction can be snuffed in the cradle if their colony ships are disrupted early, which makes them need to emphasize early military more than any other race, even though they are the most peaceful faction in the game. Those Unfallen vineships are ungodly expensive, though, so it can take a while to ramp up to having two fleets of four ships or three fleets of three ships, and quite hard to get to three fleets of four ships each. Once you get there, and assuming you're protecting your fleets properly, the Unfallen can zoom ahead of other races in colony pace, but everything depends on being strong and uninterrupted in the earliest going. The AI just isn't good enough to handle this race well, although in the right circumstances, they have done OK a few times.
The Vodyani have to upgrade their Arks with lots of modules. My Endless difficulty Vodyani victory? I think I had over 90 Ark designs by the end. Every time I needed to add some modules to an ark in the early going, I first had to design my current ark to look like the one I was going to upgrade, then add the components. It's just too hard until you're filthy rich to make all the Arks the same design. Besides, you don't even WANT to be doing that. You want border systems to have strong Influence, so you "sacrifice" some Ark modules to outputting Influence instead of gathering Essence. And you may want some industry modules in your best systems for fleet construction, and some Science modules in your cold-planet science producer systems. And you need plenty of Essence, always, so you can't overdo any of these Ark module alternatives. And it costs crazy gold to upgrade older arks with new module slots, but you better find a way. ... The AI, in theory, could be totally ace at this kind of tedious micromanagement, but so far, they just aren't.
The Riftborn have no consequences for creating outposts, so there is no reason not to roach them around, but the AI handles them the same way it does all the other races who, for one reason or another, all have to pace themselves on grabbing new systems. There seems to be a design flaw with the Riftborn, though: their best worlds still have the fewest population slots. Terraforming for the Riftborn is a gameplay trap. Don't do it. Much.
Anyway, all things added up, the game is quite a bit of fun. There's a lot of modern junk in the game, but very little of it plays like junk. They found just the right mix of old school distinction to go along with modern sensibilities such as having too many victory conditions and animating the space battles. This is easily the best empire builder game since Civ4, and in some ways, it surpasses Civ4, too. You owe it to yourself to give it a try.
- Sirian
Anyway, I skipped this title for a while, due in part to warnings of fatal crashes not fixed at release and slow to get fixed, but those issues are long in the rear view mirror at this point. I jumped in a few months ago and have played quite a steady diet of it since then. A 4X game (of *any* subgenre, mind you) that I'm still playing after completing fifteen games? That ought to say quite a bit right there.
Let's talk about strong points in the game. Why is it fun to play?
1) The races are significantly distinct. (This is not all up side. The AI (at least currently) lacks the mojo to play every race to its proper potential.) From the player's perspective, alone, however, this *is* a huge up side. You play Civ3 or 4 and you're playing the same race every game, except for the UU and one or two minor leanings for flavor. THIS game sets a whole new bar for factions that play differently one from the next.
2) Six or seven victory conditions is too many. Nobody has ever gotten close to balancing more than maybe three. ... Until now. (And this is not the only Sirian Rule of What Not to Do in a 4X Game that they broke. Put another way, this is not the only "that's never been done before, successfully" that was done right and done well for the first time. Ever.)
3) The star lanes cliche sucks. Always has. ... Until now. ... Endless Space 1 did a pretty good job of allowing the star lanes to melt away in mid to late game. Endless Space 2 does it better. Does it so well, even, I'm not even bothered by the presence of the star lanes.
4) Rock/Paper/Scissors is gone. It's gone. There's just beams and projectiles (missiles and guns blended into one mechanic). When has a game ever shrank its core system (combat, in this case) from three options to two and made it better? Here. This time. It's not ambrosia, but it's better than Endless Space 1 and that's saying a lot. Also, you don't generally end up getting to choose anyway. You go with what you have the resources to build. The ability to adapt your fleet to try to keyhole on what the enemy is doing in their fleets is quite minimal. There's enough options among components, including some weaker versions of stuff that requires no strategic resources at all, for strategy to matter, but you're going to have to do a lot more than just build the best ship design to win a war in this game.
5) The "unbeatable fleet" from Endless Space 1 is gone. Heroes make a big impact on a fleet as an admiral, but you're just not going to blank out enemy fleets of similar tech level. (They have heroes, too, but that's not the only reason).
6) Defense matters. Racking up planetary defenses can put the brakes on invasions. You might lose a couple of systems to well-timed, well-placed AI DOWs and attacks, but recovery is possible. It takes a while to secure a captured world, and even longer if you make use of Tactical Surrender at appropriate times. The AI understands this too, by the way, and is quite good at seeking Truce from your Allies to blunt your gains when you are on a roll. The AI also understands the value of dogpiling, and sometimes DOWs out of pure opportunism if, for instance, your fleets are busy on the far side of your empire with a different foe (offense or defense).
7) The galaxy shapes and types create a good variety of strategic and tactical situations to manage. Some empires are compact, some are stretched quite long and thin. Some have only one or two fronts, some are surrounded. Some galaxies have clusters of minor civs, while others have them spread out nicely. You can turn off various map balancing elements, alone or in combos, to craft all manner of assymetrical situations, which (if you're on the short end of the straw) can add difficulty levels just by itself -- or take them away, if you hit the lottery. Races can be chosen, can be random-but-unique, or can be truly random. (There are some races where you are going to be in for it, if multiple copies of the same race randomly show up on your doorstep.) The right combos of races can create runaway AIs, even, if the AI's best-played races get to pick on its worst-played.
8) The game has beaten me. This may be an artifact of AI improvements in the latest patch / new DLC, which isn't terribly old. I was just starting to get comfy with the notion I had a handle on the game completely when they fixed a few issues and upgraded AI performance. There's nothing quite as interesting as having a defeat screen pop up when you were just a few turns from reaching victory yourself (by a different victory condition).
So where are the cons? Well, there are a few.
A) The AI *isn't* ace at playing every civ. You can tell it's the AI, not the civ design, if you play every race yourself and figure out the micromanagements needed on some of the trickier races.
Who does the AI suck at playing? The Vodyani and the Unfallen, especially, but also the Vaulters and the Riftborn to a lesser extent. They USED TO suck at the Cravers, but it looks like that's one race they taught the AI how to MM properly in the latest patch, because the Cravers are topping the score charts quite a bit now. The AI is ace at playing the Lumeris and the United Empire. Those races are almost always strongly played.
There's nothing weak about the Unfallen or the Vodyani, inherently, but they require a skilled and concentrated effort in order to expand at a proper pace. The AI just doesn't handle this well enough -- and both of these races are extra vulnerable to attack, requiring a higher priority on active military defense with fleets. They are also the most vulnerable to pirates, which are not a threat the AI is great at managing.
B) Alliances can make some games way too easy. If you end up in an alliance that includes your top two rivals, you can coast to a victory of your choice, even if you do have to share the glory with your friends. (This can make the Cravers a severe threat, however, as you won't be able to neuter them just by allying with them.)
C) A few tricks of the AI get to be tiresome. Every AI you declare war against telling you they'll get around to you in time (if they are at war with anyone else, including your alliance members) is poorly handled. And you may need to make sure you stock some extra Influence so you can re-declare a war when one of your allies makes the most INCONVENIENT truces imaginable. (You're just about to retake a lost system, for instance, and look! Your enemy suckered your ally into signing a truce, to pull your defeat from the jaws of victory. But-- of course, you can avoid that by not entering alliances. When NOT to join an alliance is an Interesting Dilemma.)
D) The political system is tied too heavily to each race's native political leaning. Your population composition contributes more to your your political options than does your strategic choices -- and the need to defend yourself forces Military faction upon you as a major party in every game you play.
E) You have to turn off some of the victory conditions from time to time in order to experience parts of the game field that otherwise get obscured by beelining to the faster-available victory conditions. (I praised the conditions, earlier, as the best-ever balance for a large pack of victory conditions, and it's so, but that doesn't mean there aren't some conditions you won't see much under normal circumstances.)
F) You pretty much never get to have much choice about luxury resources. Far more important to upgrade your systems with something, ANYthing, and get to the ability to negate the unhappiness of a system due to "having too many systems" than to hold out for a "better" mix of luxury resources or to try to buy them off the market. The only mechanic in the game that lets you expand your empire in the late going is the ability to cancel out the growth penatly on any fully-modernized star system. You simply HAVE TO go with whatever mix you have available, as soon as it comes available enough to make a choice at all.
I took my time moving up the difficulty levels. There are seven levels? I think I played one game at Level 4, three each at levels 5 and 6, and now a bunch on Endless (Level 7, the highest). The game requires quite a bit of micromanagement, although nothing as dull and mindless as things like the build order in Master of Orion 2 or from lack of overflows in Civ3. Most of the MM arises from the particulars of the races.
For instance, the Cravers are slave drivers and will create TEN unhappy units for each other race unit present on a given planet, with at least one Craver present there. So, a new unit of Cravers population randomly added to a planet where you had only other races present can slam your Happiness from Ecstatic to Mutinous in one go. You simply must babysit this mechanic, checking your planets at least as often as every time they grow, so you can keep new units of population from completely tanking the output of a system with morale crashes. The AI MUST HAVE been taught how to manage this better in the latest patch. I always assumed their previous incompetence with Cravers was due to morale crashes from randomly placed population growth. There's also the option to prevent some or even many planets from being fully Depleted by removing all Craver population units from nearly-Depleted planets and stuffing those worlds with any other pop points. (Not consuming your minor races in the Feeding Pits is a primary strategy. Cravers actually do best when they have one to two minor civ pop points per Craver unit. Managing happiness, bonus output and Depletion is a clinic in heavy, old school style MM, but I find it rewarding enough not to be bothered by the work load. YMMV.)
The Unfallen require their colony ships to sit unmolested in orbit of a target system for 20 turns. The number of turns decreases per extra colony ship added to the colony fleet. So 20, 10, 7, 5, 4 turns for fleets of 1 2 3 4 5 colony ships. Three or four colony ships are needed per fleet to make the wait tenable. And an Unfallen faction can be snuffed in the cradle if their colony ships are disrupted early, which makes them need to emphasize early military more than any other race, even though they are the most peaceful faction in the game. Those Unfallen vineships are ungodly expensive, though, so it can take a while to ramp up to having two fleets of four ships or three fleets of three ships, and quite hard to get to three fleets of four ships each. Once you get there, and assuming you're protecting your fleets properly, the Unfallen can zoom ahead of other races in colony pace, but everything depends on being strong and uninterrupted in the earliest going. The AI just isn't good enough to handle this race well, although in the right circumstances, they have done OK a few times.
The Vodyani have to upgrade their Arks with lots of modules. My Endless difficulty Vodyani victory? I think I had over 90 Ark designs by the end. Every time I needed to add some modules to an ark in the early going, I first had to design my current ark to look like the one I was going to upgrade, then add the components. It's just too hard until you're filthy rich to make all the Arks the same design. Besides, you don't even WANT to be doing that. You want border systems to have strong Influence, so you "sacrifice" some Ark modules to outputting Influence instead of gathering Essence. And you may want some industry modules in your best systems for fleet construction, and some Science modules in your cold-planet science producer systems. And you need plenty of Essence, always, so you can't overdo any of these Ark module alternatives. And it costs crazy gold to upgrade older arks with new module slots, but you better find a way. ... The AI, in theory, could be totally ace at this kind of tedious micromanagement, but so far, they just aren't.
The Riftborn have no consequences for creating outposts, so there is no reason not to roach them around, but the AI handles them the same way it does all the other races who, for one reason or another, all have to pace themselves on grabbing new systems. There seems to be a design flaw with the Riftborn, though: their best worlds still have the fewest population slots. Terraforming for the Riftborn is a gameplay trap. Don't do it. Much.
Anyway, all things added up, the game is quite a bit of fun. There's a lot of modern junk in the game, but very little of it plays like junk. They found just the right mix of old school distinction to go along with modern sensibilities such as having too many victory conditions and animating the space battles. This is easily the best empire builder game since Civ4, and in some ways, it surpasses Civ4, too. You owe it to yourself to give it a try.
- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
