Endless Space 4x-All

DUMB-ASS OBVIOUS THOUGHTS

Maybe someone here hasn't thought of all of these and won't mock me for saying them. These are things I thought of that were obvious, but I didn't catch on to right away.

1. It takes people to fill colony ships. Therefore use the hero administrator food options to increase food production.

2. You can't afford to garrison star systems. Therefore build a few large fleets, and position them where the threats are.

3. You can't take it with you. When you have a bulging treasure, you should be using most of it to hurry production of the things you need. Such as big hairy ships in troubled areas.

By the way, can't I make friends with any of you other guys and play some multiplayer games to learn ES better?

I won't lie. The thought of Civilization in space sounds kinda awesome. Definitely adding this to my wishlist and will watch with great anticipation.

Redundant

Lars wrote:

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?

I am interested. Sent you (I think) a friend request.

mastrude wrote:

1. It takes people to fill colony ships. Therefore use the hero administrator food options to increase food production.

It's obvious but quite important in the early game, although food production becomes less and less important as the game goes on, so going adding the Director abilities is not necessarily a slam dunk. You might want to add the Negotiator abilities for Science and Dust boosts instead; these are probably more useful in the mid-late game. There are other ways to increase food production:
1) Use the food exploitation (which means new colonies should colonize systems with Terran, Ocean, Jungle, (and later) Arid, or Tundra planets and colonize those planets first).
2) Research food techs then build the improvements.

Once the system has been fully colonized, excess food is a waste. At that point any positive food means resources are being wasted. You want to minimize food creation to the point where population is stable. What that means is that you can change the planetary food exploitation to something else you might need more of, like dust. We can always use more dust.

So I had a couple of colonies that were relatively young, protected by a fleet of 4 cruiser/battleships. In sweep 6 pirate ships. I defeat them, but take damage. In sweeps 6 more pirate ships. I defeat them, but take more damage. The next turn 6 more pirate ships come in and destroy my ships. Since I was having money issues, it took me a while to build more ships. How the hell can there be that many pirates?! After the pirates took over those three systems, an AI race sweeps in and picks them off from the pirates. Why don't they get the endless waves of pirates the way I did?

tboon wrote:

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, I went ahead and bought the game. I woke up and realized I had left Spec Ops paused on the PC (didn't mean to fall asleep) so I went, shut that down, and for kicks started up Endless Space. I started a new game as the.. something. Sophons? 1 turn quickly turned into 20 and when I realized 30 minutes had passed (and it was like 1 AM), I had to shut it down.

I love it already. I love Civ. Civ just isn't my thing, though. This being a mixture of that and Sins, with the phase lanes so you have chokepoints and the like.. is awesome. I need to set up my G2G account so I can start voting on things, but I dig it so far.

Is surplus food not shipped to other planets for use?

Nope

polypusher wrote:

Is surplus food not shipped to other planets for use?

Food is shared between other planets in that system, (really everything in a system is shared) but no food leaves the system.

Yonder wrote:
polypusher wrote:

Is surplus food not shipped to other planets for use?

Food is shared between other planets in that system, (really everything in a system is shared) but no food leaves the system.

And my answer was based on reading your question as being between systems. Sorry if I misled you.

Ok, potentially dumb question, but is there a user manual for this game somewhere? In particular, I'd love to see a list of keyboard commands...

Serengeti wrote:

Ok, potentially dumb question, but is there a user manual for this game somewhere? In particular, I'd love to see a list of keyboard commands...

http://cdn.steampowered.com/Manuals/...

I don't think there are any keyboard shortcuts though.

I just finished my first 4-empire medium game, with a resounding win. For those who are wondering, this game is very much like MOO and MOO2, without the tactical combat, but with some of the balance problems and some really wacky bugs.

Notes:

- The AI, at least on Normal difficulty, is strategically stupid in combat. For example, I rolled in with one of my fleets and a level 10 hero on a system with about ten or twelve enemy fleets. They all attacked me, one after the other, even though the first fleet was completely annihilated in the first barrage. My fleet came out of it with minor damage, a level 15 hero, and twice the combat power.

- On the other hand, the AI is quite good at managing systems and expansion, and their economies are efficient enough to build large numbers of ships. There were some weird quirks where the AI refused to settle systems right next to them; I ended up sending a set of colony ships through a friendly empire to reach some systems on the other side of the galaxy that all the surrounding AIs ignored for over 100 turns. There's also some oddness with planet exploitation assignments - I ran across one system that had a full population, but every planet was still set to food exploitation. Other systems were perfectly normal.

- The AI is extremely slow to respond tactically. In the final war, I was using laser weapons almost exclusively, along with heavy anti-kinetic defenses. My opponent didn't build any ships with lasers or missiles to counter my ships until nearly 100 turns after the war began. This led to the majority of the fights lasting only one round, or even one barrage in some cases, as my lasers tore apart his defenseless ships while his kinetics just bounced off my hulls. By the time he got around to responding to the threat, he'd already lost six systems and hundreds of ships.

- The AI was able to impose a 20-turn Cease Fire on me, twice, without my consent. Both times, this happened just as I was about to completely defeat him - the second time, I had strong fleets at all of his remaining systems and was invading them all. This "Cease Fire" had some very interesting qualities: he was able to attack my ships at will, but I could not move my ships to, from, or through any of his systems. He wa also able to blockade one of my systems with a little 22-strength ship, while the ten heavy fleets in the system stood helplessly by.

- There's balance issues with kinetic weapons, and the AI appears to really like them - both of the empires I eventually destroyed were using them almost exclusively, as was one of the two pirate forces I dealt with. The problem is that they are hideously inaccurate, so even reasonable defenses are more than enough to ignore them entirely - if you have the equivalent level of deflector, you'll rarely even get hit, let alone take significant damage. I had one fleet that had one ship with lasers, and four others with kinetics. The laser-armed ship was responsible for virtually all of the damage in the fleet, while the other ships bounced round after round off the enemy hulls.

- Speaking of which, lasers are seriously overpowered. Against evenly-matched shields, they will rip your ship apart. You can actually see this in the strength rating of the weapons - lasers are slightly heavier than kinetics or missiles, but have 1.5-3 times the strength rating. As the ship grows more experienced, the laser combat power grows correspondingly - it wasn't unusual for me to see a laser ship with 3-4k MP versus an otherwise equivalent kinetic ship with 600 to 1,000 MP.

- Missiles are largely useless. It's due to one important factor - how often they fire. Lasers and kinetics fire about 3 times as fast as missiles, and the missiles take much longer to reach their targets. In the time it takes your missiles to hit an enemy, they've already given you at least a full round of damage. This reduces missiles to an irritant that sometimes takes out enemy ships long after yours have been destroyed - not really the optimal scenario.

- The number of command points you have matters, because the combat AI doesn't concentrate fire unless forced by destroyed ships. Thus, the more ships you have the more their fire is spread out, and the more efficiently your defenses are employed. This also means frontloading damage is the way to go, because if you can knock out one or two of their ships in the first moments of the fight, that drastically increases damage to the remaining ships as their defenses become increasingly overloaded.

- The pirate ships I encountered were entirely front-loaded damage with few to no defenses, which is why they were so irritating. However, it also means they are easily countered with larger numbers or higher-defense ships - they become unable to adequately penetrate your defenses, and your guns pick them apart. Once you reach that threshold your fleet can destroy any number of pirates with little to no damage, gaining large amounts of experience along the way. This works particularly well if you can set up a choke point with with a few unsettled systems beyond it; the pirates will stream in, and your fleet and hero gain xp and combat power.

- Throwing one or two small, fast ships into your fleet makes it much faster, as the higher level engines add speed across the fleet. I found adding a weaponless scout to each fleet with sensors and a big engine was far better than tacking on a ship with a few lasers that gets blown away in the first barrage - the AI de-prioritizes unarmed ships. Later on, they can even add to the defense or offense of the fleet with support modules.

- Trade is weird. It works kind of like Civ trade does - the routes just appear, if you can contact a system that's far enough away (and if they have something to trade?). You'll want to at least pass through every system you can reach for that very reason. Some of my systems never had any trade routes, while others would get a couple routes for a while, and then they would disappear. Meanwhile, the city with my trade hero had 9 steady routes and was pulling in nearly 1,000 research and 500 dust at the end. The Smuggler attribute is key for a trading-heavy race, because it keeps you from experiencing sharp drops in income and research due to blockades.

- The combat doesn't bog down like MOO or MOO2 did - you pick your cards and hope you do well, but either way it's over pretty quickly. I really enjoy the animations - very visceral and exciting. The cards are strong enough that they can have a serious impact on a fight, especially one that's relatively even.

- Managing your systems is easy and intuitive, and the tutorial helps with most things that are too complex to grasp immediately - and once you discover that production can be manipulated from the system list screen, things go very quickly.

All in all I love the game, and I'll be playing it all weekend.

I do miss espionage.

So, this may be a dumb question that I may have overlooked in this thread, but has anyone else ran into the problem of not getting a fleet to actually move out of a system? I was able to create a colony ship, move it from the hangar to orbiting it's home system, and give it a move order. However, the ship still just hangs around the system it's orbitting. I made sure that I selected the specific ship, right-click to it's destination, and had the phase lane highlight to denote movement, but the damn ship doesn't move. Not sure what I may be doing wrong here?

I've had the game get stuck in thinking I was holding the Shift key down. If you tap Shift and the ship moves, that was probably the issue.

I've also had ships get stuck in a system in enemy territory when I didn't have open borders. This can happen in my own system if it's in enemy territory, it seems. Not much to do but declare war or get open borders.

Goddammit, even the freaking strategy games have launch DLC now.

Blech.

Malor wrote:

Goddammit, even the freaking strategy games have launch DLC now.

Blech.

?

mastrude wrote:

1. It takes people to fill colony ships. Therefore use the hero administrator food options to increase food production.

This one bit me, as I didn't realize until halfway into the game that you could construct a new colony on an in-system planet. The reason is that I rarely clicked on the planets to look at them, and thus didn't see the button to build the colony. Moon exploration and anomaly correction are also accessed that way, and cannot be accessed from the system list/empire summary page (which is where I normally did all my production manipulation).

It has two prices, tboon -- the basic game, and then the basic game plus stuff of unknown value. Pretty crap decision, in my opinion.

Aetius wrote:
mastrude wrote:

1. It takes people to fill colony ships. Therefore use the hero administrator food options to increase food production.

This one bit me, as I didn't realize until halfway into the game that you could construct a new colony on an in-system planet. The reason is that I rarely clicked on the planets to look at them, and thus didn't see the button to build the colony. Moon exploration and anomaly correction are also accessed that way, and cannot be accessed from the system list/empire summary page (which is where I normally did all my production manipulation).

About 3/4ths of the way through a game and I figured this out. I'd colonized the majority of my worlds using colony ships. What a waste, but good to know for the next game.

The main balance issue with kinetics comes from the range. Missiles are most accurate at long range and are penalized a little at medium and more at short, kinetics are the opposite, and beam weapons are best at medium with minor penalties at long and short.

The issue is that ships aren't sturdy enough for this to be a viable system. If combat was set up so that less damage was done in general so ships lasted one or two battles then you would have a chance to cycle through each range band and give everyone a shot. As it is combat in the long range band is generally decisive, most of the enemy fleet is destroyed long at long range when their weapons are terrible, and finished off early in the medium range where, though they now have a chance, their enemy is doing just as well or better, and is relatively undamaged.

So I tried playing last night and found I really need to read something more than the tutorial in order to understand some things.

Assumptions/Questions:

  1. Unlike MOO or CIV, planets are not individual in construction? Meaning, planets dont have individual queues but share a single queue with all other planets in the system.
  2. Does the building of an improvement in a system mean its shared across all planets in that system? I kept wanting to build improvements on individual planets but it seemed impossible.
  3. The whole concept of exploitation is confusing to me. Is it system wide or by individual planet? And if its individual planets, if you go to "build" that exploitation it gets queued in the system queue so all planets in the system work on getting that single planet on a specific exploitation?
  4. In regards to #2 above, with the research of a new planet improvement it will show up as buildable in all system menus. Again, you only need to build it "once" for all planets to take advantage of it?
  5. The tech tree seems a bit disorganized. Planet improvements seem to be spread across multiple trees (the left and bottom trees specifically). Not that this is really an issue, just confusing.
  6. Is there anyway to retreat when entering a system? Lost many colony ships due to pirates being on the other end of a "lane" and I didnt know it.

Was looking around for a good guide but I'm assuming because its so new there are't any.

Maybe I am wrong here, but so far this game seems to have taken most of the micromangement out of the 4x genre and made it quite simple (ie doing things on a system-wide level instead of a planet level).

PAR

Malor wrote:

It has two prices, tboon -- the basic game, and then the basic game plus stuff of unknown value. Pretty crap decision, in my opinion.

Aside from a novelty hero and some skins, the only thing of real value in the more expensive version of the game is extra G2G points, which you can use to influence future development of this and other Amplitude games. You don't use up the G2G points, they're like electoral votes, giving your votes more weight.

I think it's an interesting and unique thing to add in an enhanced version of the game.

Malor wrote:

It has two prices, tboon -- the basic game, and then the basic game plus stuff of unknown value. Pretty crap decision, in my opinion.

The "DLC" doesn't alter the game in any meaningful way, as Badken mentions. What does it matter?

There are four things you can do with individual planets:

Colonize them
Choose how to exploit them
Explore their moons, if they have any
Build counters to any negative special effects they may have

Everything else is system-wide. Each system only has one build queue for both improvements and ships. Basically the only thing you do with planets is get resources from them (FIDS, luxury and strategic). Everything you build, including fleets and the four planet-specific actions, you build at the system level.

System improvements have system-wide affects. Many have different per-planet benefits, based on the type of planet (terran, arctic, desert, etc.). Some improvements apply only to the system as a whole, like trade bonuses or expanded influence area.

Don't send out unescorted colony ships.

Malor wrote:

It has two prices, tboon -- the basic game, and then the basic game plus stuff of unknown value. Pretty crap decision, in my opinion.

Oh. I didn't even notice that until now. /shrugs

About the only thing I've like to see is the game pause in single player mode when you are selecting your battle cards. I have NEVER finished reading them due to the timer. Selection based on panic is not how one should run a war. My commanders are supposed to be professionals.
--
TAZ

You can look at your fleet's tactics by selecting the fleet - there's a button over the individual ships (forget what it says exactly). Generally, your empire has a certain set of tactics and you can research more. The makeup of a fleet may alter the tactics available, I believe. Also, heroes can add any tactics that are specific to them.

Sorry, not calling them cards.

But yes, trying to decide which ones to select in the short amount of time given can be aggravating.

One other thing, you can see what the enemy fleet's make-up is by hovering over the ships while the battle is "starting" (the screen with the odds before going into the battle proper). Useful to make better decisions about which tactics to use. This is also timed and can be a little aggravating as well.