Endless Space 4x-All

Blondish83 wrote:

Actually; there was a MOO3.

LALALALALALAAAAA I CAN'T HEAR YOU...

I had a negative initial impression, since the game is kind of opaque and you don't know what the hell is going on for a long time. However, I think the release game may be better documented--have a manual or something. And the very things that irritated me may make the game pleasant to play--A lot of the game is up there to be seen, once you start to figure out what the tiny icons are. Reliance on a graphic interface is GOOD, once you begin to understand it.

I still don't know how to evaluate trade deals. Would like to. Any comments?

Figuring out the icons is critical. Luckily, they make it pretty easy by color-coding things so you can see at a glance what major category things fall in:

So there are 4 basic resources: Food, Industry, Dust, and Science (FIDS). Planets generate these + system improvements add to that. Each of these has its own color: Food is green, Industry is orange, Dust (think "currency") is gold and Science is blue. Whenever you see anything that has one of these colors, you know to which of these categories it pertains. Planetary exploitations and system improvements are colored for the resource it improves.

There's also 2 other resources: strategic and luxury. Strategic resources are found on random planets and are required to build advanced ships and weapons. These are colored purple and show up over the systems' names where they are (assuming you have researched the tech that "discovers" them). Luxuries are not needed at all; they are luxuries and provide bonuses of various type. They are colored white and show up along with the strategic resources. To claim a strategic or luxury resource, you have to colonize a planet that has that resource. If your empire has 4 or more of one of these resources, you get a bigger bonus.

So, for example, let's take the case of Bluecap Mold. Bluecap Mold is a luxury item. It is "discovered" by researching Xenology, one of the earliest techs in the Diplomacy and Trading tech tree. If you colonize a planet that has Bluecap Mold on it, you get the following bonuses: the planet it is on has the following: +10 happiness, +1 food for every population unit, +1 dust for every population unit, and the empire gets +8% approval (this is different from a system's happiness). If you have four Bluecap Molds (you can have up to three on a planet), you get the following bonus: +20% dust on the empire as a whole. So, as you can see, this is not necessary but is certainly advantageous to have.

Finally, there are other concepts that are color coded: pink is for happiness producing improvements, red is for combat-related items, silver is for diplomacy related items.

This game is easy to play but is pretty deep strategically. There's no substitute for playing, trying things out, asking questions here or on the Amplitude forums, playing some more, etc. Steam says I've put in about 26 hours and I am just now starting to figure how some things really work. Of course, I am old and slow so it usually takes me a while to sort things out. Just sit back and enjoy discovering things in the game is my advice. It may be nonsensical at first but it all comes together rather nicely.

Shawn, Cory, Toddland and I had a good MP session a couple of weekends ago. I'd love to do another, but my weekends are going to be tight for the next few weeks. But I'd love to hear more tips, tricks, and stories.

Early colonization is key, and you can skip over systems to grab better ones further out. Once you have researched some of the earlier techs then you can start colonizing the systems you left behind. It's only important to get defenders up after the first 20-30 turns as pirates will start to come out and you might want a couple of defenders for that instead of scouts. To stop pirates you have to colonize all the systems around you that you haven't taken over.

To colonize fast you want food to start off with. That's why you want systems where food is easy to grow first. So systems with Terran, Ocean, Jungle etc, Arid and Tundra are also decent but not as good. Once you are generating enough food in each system then you can think of colonizing the other more difficult planets within the system and once your empire has grown big enough and you have researched enough tech then you can think about colonizing the more difficult systems.

If you think of the tech like four points on the compass, West is all the stuff you need to make your citizens happy and bigger fleet capacity. The bigger your territory the more you need the research on the west part of the tree. The South is all the tech you need to help you colonize the different planets and it also is where you research the different ship types. The East is all about scientific advancement, from better engines, to better abilities for battle, to better minerals etc. The north is all about guns, missiles and defenses!

I find the West and South tech trees to be the most important ones at the start of the game, although you can't ignore North and East completely, and the deeper into the game you get the North and East tech trees become more and more important.

Blondish83 wrote:
mwdowns wrote:

Holy crap, what a beautiful game this is. And since there wasn't a Master of Orion 3 and it's been a while since GalCiv 2, this game picks up right where they left off. Played a couple hours of it this evening and...I see myself losing a lot of time to the game over the next year.

Actually; there was a MOO3. It was terrible and I would not recommend it. There are mods that make it playable if you really want to get into it.

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/maste...

I really have no idea what you are talking about. That link is dead to me.

It's out. Note that updating to the release version will break existing save games. Which is a bummer because I just conquered the Pilgrims and me and the Sophons were about to get it on.

Oh well...

tboon wrote:

It's out. Note that updating to the release version will break existing save games. Which is a bummer because I just conquered the Pilgrims and me and the Sophons were about to get it on.

Oh well...

I bought this late last week and have only made it to Turn 2 on any one game, so it's all good. I think I've studied all the UI elements now that I have a decent idea of what to do for at least a few turns.

tboon wrote:

It's out. Note that updating to the release version will break existing save games. Which is a bummer because I just conquered the Pilgrims and me and the Sophons were about to get it on.

Oh well...

Well, that's the unfortunate downside to having steam keep my games all updated, I guess. I suppose I wasn't exactly having a stellar game, though. Maybe steam just saved me the embarrassment of a horrible defeat?

A possibly helpful note: when researching very cheap technologies, you can research more than one per turn, so stack 'em up.

Research and production both roll over, so yeah stack stuff up.

Also, need something fast and have more money than you know what to do with? That little gold dust icon to the right of thing being built is the buy fast button.

I just saw a minor bug where none of my ships would move. I'm not sure what caused it, but I couldn't get anything to go anywhere. I say it's minor, because I was able to save and restart the game to fix it. I wasn't able to just load, I had to close the game and start it up again. It's been fine since, though.

ok y'all have done enough enabling to put it on my wishlist, but luckily(?) it is expensive enough that I can hold out in the hope of a sale.

Today I fixed a problem I've been having with this game since the alpha... every time I would run it, it would install VC++ runtime. To solve this, I downloaded the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable packages from Microsoft, used the Control Panel->Programs->Programs and Features to uninstall the currently installed runtimes, installed the ones I downloaded, then rebooted. After that Endless Space did its setup thing only once. Now I can launch the game without running an installer every time.

I have a quick question. Can you play a game with only like 20 stars to fight over? is that viable?

polypusher wrote:

I have a quick question. Can you play a game with only like 20 stars to fight over? is that viable?

Setting the map size to tiny gives you 16 star systems to fight over. I've never tried it so I can't say how viable it is, but I don't see why not.

Pirates are true bastards. How do scavengers get ships that are so tough?

Does this game do cloud saves?

Wembley wrote:

I just saw a minor bug where none of my ships would move. I'm not sure what caused it, but I couldn't get anything to go anywhere. I say it's minor, because I was able to save and restart the game to fix it. I wasn't able to just load, I had to close the game and start it up again. It's been fine since, though.

Next time it happens, check the top of the screen to see if you see "L-Shift" or something similar flashing. I had the "ships not moving" problem before, and it occurred because I had hit Shift-Tab to use the Steam overlay, and the game thought I was still hitting shift.

Dudes. I am a huge fan of space games. I love Sins of a Solar Empire. I can't decide if I should buy this or not, though. I'm lukewarm on Civ V. It's great, just doesn't get hooks into me.

Should I get this? I've watched some videos and I'm intrigued, for sure. I just don't know what all is there to engage me and keep me plugged in.

polypusher wrote:

Does this game do cloud saves?

Nope.

theimmortalbum wrote:

Dudes. I am a huge fan of space games. I love Sins of a Solar Empire. I can't decide if I should buy this or not, though. I'm lukewarm on Civ V. It's great, just doesn't get hooks into me.

Should I get this? I've watched some videos and I'm intrigued, for sure. I just don't know what all is there to engage me and keep me plugged in.

If you are looking for more Sins, this is not the place. Hands-off combat, hands-on empire management. Much more like Civ than Sins.

theimmortalbum wrote:

... but the only space "4x" I've ever played is Sins, which I just have to be in the right mood to play.

BLASPHEMY!!!!

Son, you need to experience Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2, Imperium Galactica 2, Space Empires 1/2/3/4, Galactic Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations 2 to really get the feel of a 4x.

Although you can probably just get away with MOO and MOO2 in order to avoid going to hell

PAR

par wrote:
theimmortalbum wrote:

... but the only space "4x" I've ever played is Sins, which I just have to be in the right mood to play.

BLASPHEMY!!!!

Son, you need to experience Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2, Imperium Galactica 2, Space Empires 1/2/3/4, Galactic Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations 2 to really get the feel of a 4x.

Although you can probably just get away with MOO and MOO2 in order to avoid going to hell

PAR

So, if I don't feel like trying to get half of those old games to work, is Endless Space an acceptable substitute? I really want to buy this game, I just need to hear that I won't put it down in a day!

tboon wrote:
theimmortalbum wrote:

Dudes. I am a huge fan of space games. I love Sins of a Solar Empire. I can't decide if I should buy this or not, though. I'm lukewarm on Civ V. It's great, just doesn't get hooks into me.

Should I get this? I've watched some videos and I'm intrigued, for sure. I just don't know what all is there to engage me and keep me plugged in.

If you are looking for more Sins, this is not the place. Hands-off combat, hands-on empire management. Much more like Civ than Sins.

So I'm not necessarily looking for more Sins. I guess I'm just wondering, does this game have hooks? I can only play Civ V so long before it just becomes the same thing over and over. I've got a huge nerd-on for space, but the only space "4x" I've ever played is Sins, which I just have to be in the right mood to play.

theimmortalbum wrote:

So, if I don't feel like trying to get half of those old games to work, is Endless Space an acceptable substitute? I really want to buy this game, I just need to hear that I won't put it down in a day!

lol, I honestly don't know man. I bought it at the beta stage but have been so damn busy I havent had time to play yet Want to sit down this weekend and do so though!

But reading the comments in this thread it seems to be pretty good but not hugely action packed. But I'll let others answer that until I get some hands-on time w/ it.

PAR

par wrote:

BLASPHEMY!!!!

Son, you need to experience Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2, Imperium Galactica 2, Space Empires 1/2/3/4, Galactic Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations 2 to really get the feel of a 4x.

Although you can probably just get away with MOO and MOO2 in order to avoid going to hell :)

I was reading that the term 4x was first used when describing MOO.

theimmortalbum wrote:

So, if I don't feel like trying to get half of those old games to work, is Endless Space an acceptable substitute? I really want to buy this game, I just need to hear that I won't put it down in a day!

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/master_of_orion_1_2

theimmortalbum wrote:
par wrote:
theimmortalbum wrote:

... but the only space "4x" I've ever played is Sins, which I just have to be in the right mood to play.

BLASPHEMY!!!!

Son, you need to experience Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2, Imperium Galactica 2, Space Empires 1/2/3/4, Galactic Civilizations and Galactic Civilizations 2 to really get the feel of a 4x.

Although you can probably just get away with MOO and MOO2 in order to avoid going to hell

PAR

So, if I don't feel like trying to get half of those old games to work, is Endless Space an acceptable substitute? I really want to buy this game, I just need to hear that I won't put it down in a day!

Look, I really like this game a lot and want to turn as many people on to it as possible (so the devs make more cool stuff!), but, it is very Civ-ish. If Civ did not hold your interest, I doubt this will either, to be honest. The mechanics of all 4x games are pretty similar (that's why they are in the 4x games category ). I'd hate to give you bad advice, especially when it comes to spending your money.

So, who would be interested in trying to get a multiplayer game going? I'd like to try and get one started next week. I work weekends, so I'm looking for people that are available to play midweek (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), starting anytime from about 8:00 PM EST and after. I'd like to try and play at least once a week. Any interest/takers?

tboon wrote:
theimmortalbum wrote:

Dudes. I am a huge fan of space games. I love Sins of a Solar Empire. I can't decide if I should buy this or not, though. I'm lukewarm on Civ V. It's great, just doesn't get hooks into me.

Should I get this? I've watched some videos and I'm intrigued, for sure. I just don't know what all is there to engage me and keep me plugged in.

If you are looking for more Sins, this is not the place. Hands-off combat, hands-on empire management. Much more like Civ than Sins.

Well, that sold me, thanks!