Endless Space 4x-All

tboon wrote:

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.

You know, in the nearly 30 years that I've been a gamer, I don't think I've ever run into a game mechanic that was improved by being timer-limited. Without exception, having to race against a clock just irritates the crap out of me. Having restricted time based on mechanics, such as how fast the enemy is closing, is fine, but don't put a goddamned clock up there and then count down how long I have left.

Does anyone know how the speed of invasion works?

It seems that highly populated systems take longer to invade. Does piling more fleets on the system help? I have one enemy system that I simply cannot invade. I can put fleets on it and select invade (I get the little clock animation over the button) but the invasion never makes any progress. I've put 10k+ worth of fleet "power" on it and nothing ever happens.

It's the last system that this AI owns, but it's not their home system. They had declared a cease fire on me (boy I hate that bug), but that expired and we are now in a state of war.

par wrote:

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?

I think of it like this: the exploitation mode is that planet's economic setting. In general, you want to choose the mode that is the most beneficial (you can see the bonuses by hovering over the terrain picture on the planet screen). Sometimes, however, you need food, or production, and you can set the planets accordingly.

Also note that eventually you can terraform planets to various types, which can alter which exploitations are the most efficient.

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?

Correct, if they can. There's improvements that only make sense in certain situations, like Careful Sweeping - it actually costs you if the system has 0-1 moons.

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.

It's because they aren't grouped that way. the West tree is Diplomacy and Trading, while the South tree is Exploration and Expansion. So system improvements that affect trading and species interaction are in the West tree, while abilities like terraforming, new resource identification, and colonization tech are in the South tree. Likewise, defensive system improvements like Stealth Construction are in the North tree (Galactic Warfare) and system improvements such as Global Tech Park, a research exploitation, are in the East tree (Applied Sciences).

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.

No. You can try to run during the fight, but they get to shoot, which usually means your colony ship is destroyed. There's a card you can get later that permits an attempt to escape without being shot at, but it can be countered.

Orphu wrote:

Does anyone know how the speed of invasion works?

It's based on the total ground attack value of all your fleets in the system, versus the defensive value of the system. Regular space weapons are penalized, and are not as powerful, while the dedicated ground attack items are more effective. More populous systems tend to have more defense because there are system improvements that add defense based on population - Dark Energy Rifle, for example.

Does piling more fleets on the system help?

Yes.

I have one enemy system that I simply cannot invade. I can put fleets on it and select invade (I get the little clock animation over the button) but the invasion never makes any progress. I've put 10k+ worth of fleet "power" on it and nothing ever happens.

Build some dedicated ground attack ships - a few of those should crack it. Your fleet power takes a penalty when doing invasions, so it's not as much as it seems. It's also possible to have pretty insane defense on some systems - large population, good tech, a good leader, and racial bonuses can make a system really tough. My home system in the first game, for example, had a defense of 7556 in the middle of the game, and that was average and unenhanced.

Hey, thanks so much Aetius! Any suggestions on what to go for in the early game? Should I focus on expansion or defense? What techs are some of the "gotta get ASAP".

PAR

I really enjoy this game. If you look at my Steam stats, you'll see that it's pretty much consumed my weekend! And I'm super excited to see where the devs take it in the next year or two. It's also so cool that the community over at the Amplitude forums has a unique level of input into the game.

That said, I find myself agreeing with the review Rob Zackny did over at gamespy. 3.5 stars out of 5 is not bad at all for a first game from an indie company. And from the review and his Twitter comments yesterday, you can see where the missing 1.5 stars went: the game lacks personality. This is an odd thing on the face of it.

Endless Space has the appearance of lot of personality. First, you have the ancient, extinct race of the Endless and their tech littering the galaxy. Then there are the really unique races. Of course there are the stock humans (split between a very TEC like United Empire, and the scientific hippies the Pilgrims) and your bird race (Hissho) and the little grey men (Sophons). But then you get some cool stuff like the Horatio...a race of, uh, Horatios. Or the Cravers, a locust swarm of a race the consumes their worlds and moves on. And your robotic Sowers, making the galaxy a move livable place. Finally you've got the Amoeba race. Yep. Amoeba. Finally the look of the game is really cool, from the minimalist looking UI (not really minimalist when you start hovering your mouse over anything on the screen) to the great ship designs for each race.

This game should just be dripping with personality. And yet, I come away from it feeling like I'm missing something. Zackny invoked Alpha Centauri at one point. I will do it here, while also bringing up other games which had tons of personality like MOO2 (I can still name most of the races from that game, and some of the techs too...and oh, what a joy to discover Orion and plan for your eventual seige there) or GalCiv 2 (sorry didn't play one) or Sins of a Solar Empire. The thing is, I invoke these and say they had personality, but I can't really put my finger on what it is that sets them above Endless Space. I mean, it seems like all the ingredients are there for Endless Space, gameplay-wise this is just a great mash-up of MOO2 and GalCiv2 with a pinch of Sins and Alpha Centauri.

It seems like I'm a bit of a downer on this game, but I'm not. I'm playing it, and I'll continue to play it. I just hope that the great thing Amplitude has going with Games2Gether makes this 3.5 star game into a 5 star game over the next year or so.

mwdowns wrote:

I really enjoy this game. If you look at my Steam stats, you'll see that it's pretty much consumed my weekend! And I'm super excited to see where the devs take it in the next year or two. It's also so cool that the community over at the Amplitude forums has a unique level of input into the game.

That said, I find myself agreeing with the review Rob Zackny did over at gamespy. 3.5 stars out of 5 is not bad at all for a first game from an indie company. And from the review and his Twitter comments yesterday, you can see where the missing 1.5 stars went: the game lacks personality. This is an odd thing on the face of it.

Endless Space has the appearance of lot of personality. First, you have the ancient, extinct race of the Endless and their tech littering the galaxy. Then there are the really unique races. Of course there are the stock humans (split between a very TEC like United Empire, and the scientific hippies the Pilgrims) and your bird race (Hissho) and the little grey men (Sophons). But then you get some cool stuff like the Horatio...a race of, uh, Horatios. Or the Cravers, a locust swarm of a race the consumes their worlds and moves on. And your robotic Sowers, making the galaxy a move livable place. Finally you've got the Amoeba race. Yep. Amoeba. Finally the look of the game is really cool, from the minimalist looking UI (not really minimalist when you start hovering your mouse over anything on the screen) to the great ship designs for each race.

This game should just be dripping with personality. And yet, I come away from it feeling like I'm missing something. Zackny invoked Alpha Centauri at one point. I will do it here, while also bringing up other games which had tons of personality like MOO2 (I can still name most of the races from that game, and some of the techs too...and oh, what a joy to discover Orion and plan for your eventual seige there) or GalCiv 2 (sorry didn't play one) or Sins of a Solar Empire. The thing is, I invoke these and say they had personality, but I can't really put my finger on what it is that sets them above Endless Space. I mean, it seems like all the ingredients are there for Endless Space, gameplay-wise this is just a great mash-up of MOO2 and GalCiv2 with a pinch of Sins and Alpha Centauri.

It seems like I'm a bit of a downer on this game, but I'm not. I'm playing it, and I'll continue to play it. I just hope that the great thing Amplitude has going with Games2Gether makes this 3.5 star game into a 5 star game over the next year or so.

Here's why I disagree with Rob's review.

I agree that personality/ies will send this game over the top, but it's not aiming for that in the same way AC was. Not all 4x space opera needs to be MOO2 or AC. Not all should aspire to be, and it's too easy to ding a game on things it wasn't even trying to do. That said, I would be over the moon if the experience DID have more of those elements, but I feel that ES nails what it set out to do, and luckily for me, that experience jives very nicely with what I want to play now.

par wrote:

Hey, thanks so much Aetius! Any suggestions on what to go for in the early game? Should I focus on expansion or defense? What techs are some of the "gotta get ASAP".

Early game is all about exploration and expansion. Ideally you want to find Jungle, Terran, or Ocean worlds in systems with 4+ planets. If you take the race that has the bonus to happiness, or built a custom race with it, you can expand recklessly and just colonize anything you come across (colony ships are incredibly cheap in this game, very different from MOO. Happiness is the limiter to expansion).

Enemy ships take an extremely long time to complete an invasion in the early game, so you can ignore defense until you actually need it, then just get a couple of cheap kinetic/deflector techs and build enough ships to fight off the immediate threat.

If you successfully make peace with all the races, you can ignore the top tree entirely and rush the expansion and happiness techs, picking up a couple of cheap economic/research techs along the way. This should build you such a strong lead that when someone eventually does declare war, you can pick up some tonnage techs and then fly through the top tree and go through several marques of ships over the next 10-20 turns. Convert all of your built-up planets to ship production and you'll be fine. Then you can either keep going the military route and start smashing people, or just build enough to defend your systems and go for one of the peaceful victory types.

HedgeWizard wrote:

Here's why I disagree with Rob's review.

I agree that personality/ies will send this game over the top, but it's not aiming for that in the same way AC was. Not all 4x space opera needs to be MOO2 or AC. Not all should aspire to be, and it's too easy to ding a game on things it wasn't even trying to do. That said, I would be over the moon if the experience DID have more of those elements, but I feel that ES nails what it set out to do, and luckily for me, that experience jives very nicely with what I want to play now.

I can see where you're coming from. I am new to the party as far as the game goes (I'd had it on my wishlist for a while, but never dug any deeper than watching the video on Steam and thinking, looks fun) so I don't know how the alpha and beta stages went, but is that something that they'd said they were skimping on (that phrase is a bit stronger than I want, but I'm slow tonight and can't think of an alternative) "personality"? I put that in quotes cause, really, personality is something that I think just organically happens when a game comes together like the A-Team.

Really, though, HedgeWizard, I think we're on the same Endless Space love-train. Most parts of the game are definitely jiving with me right now. I just hope that at some point that all of it comes together with the story of the game and transforms it into a classic.

Coldstream wrote:
tboon wrote:

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.

You know, in the nearly 30 years that I've been a gamer, I don't think I've ever run into a game mechanic that was improved by being timer-limited. Without exception, having to race against a clock just irritates the crap out of me. Having restricted time based on mechanics, such as how fast the enemy is closing, is fine, but don't put a goddamned clock up there and then count down how long I have left.

I am not a big fan of the time based mini game version of battles that it does either. I would rather it ask me before battle what 3 cards I want and then allows me to watch if I want, or instant resolve based on my choices.

Bought it on a whim and a "ooh its pretty" screenshot reaction.
Hello ES.

HELP! How can I play better at the start of the middle game?

I've gotten past some initial problems, but playing the AI on easy difficulty the game is kicking my butt, ending with 3 times my score. I don't really know what the AI is doing to cream me.

Two games ago, I took over 2/3 of the galaxy by moving very fast at the beginning. I ran out of money and approval and barely squeaked through to the end of the game. My score was less than half the AI's.

Last game, I deliberately stopped after peacefully colonizing 1/4 of the galaxy. I then focused on diplomacy and applied sciences, to try to get techno boosts and make my empire more efficient. This was at turn 80 or 100. The AI had colonized about 1/4 of the galaxy too. At that point our scores were close. From that point, the AI proceeded to kick my butt. The score gap widened until when I quit around 250, the AI had triple my score.

I'm looking for advice about the middle game. Any good rules of thumb I can gather in will be very welcome!

A mistake.

Mr Crinkle wrote:
par wrote:

Hey, thanks so much Aetius! Any suggestions on what to go for in the early game? Should I focus on expansion or defense? What techs are some of the "gotta get ASAP".

Early game is all about exploration and expansion. Ideally you want to find Jungle, Terran, or Ocean worlds in systems with 4+ planets. If you take the race that has the bonus to happiness, or built a custom race with it, you can expand recklessly and just colonize anything you come across (colony ships are incredibly cheap in this game, very different from MOO. Happiness is the limiter to expansion).

Enemy ships take an extremely long time to complete an invasion in the early game, so you can ignore defense until you actually need it, then just get a couple of cheap kinetic/deflector techs and build enough ships to fight off the immediate threat.

If you successfully make peace with all the races, you can ignore the top tree entirely and rush the expansion and happiness techs, picking up a couple of cheap economic/research techs along the way. This should build you such a strong lead that when someone eventually does declare war, you can pick up some tonnage techs and then fly through the top tree and go through several marques of ships over the next 10-20 turns. Convert all of your built-up planets to ship production and you'll be fine. Then you can either keep going the military route and start smashing people, or just build enough to defend your systems and go for one of the peaceful victory types.

A couple of caveats: your military weakness will eventually affect your relationships with other races. My first war was started because I did not realize just how massively I was outnumbered by the race to my galactic south. My ships were far superior, but I had only a handful - they had several hundred. The game (apparently) only takes MP into account when calculating the "military weakness" relationship modifier.

Second, keep in mind that growth is not necessarily horizontal. What you're really looking for is population growth, and there's a number of technology and race traits that can expand your empire size vertically. I tend to do both in the beginning of the game - technologies that allow the settlement of local planets that aren't too bad when it comes to food (desert, arid, tundra), and technologies that increase the population caps. The combination of the two gives you a very fast population growth, which in turn drives your FIDS score (although, don't expect to be first in FIDS for a while - most of your opponents will be well ahead of you in the early game).

I might be in trouble. According to steam I have 21+ hours in this game and I only played it Saturday and Sunday. Jam3 and gaald stole my weekend.

Complex wrote:

I might be in trouble. According to steam I have 21+ hours in this game and I only played it Saturday and Sunday. Jam3 and gaald stole my weekend.

That's....hmm...Impressive?

Actually, yeah. That's only about 10 hours both days, so it's cool. It's the freaking weekend, man! Enjoy it! Hell, it's been so hot everywhere for so long it's probably safer if you did just stay in for half the day and play Endless Space

I don't spend that much time on games normally. I got into this because a chunk of our sins group started playing this. I think my biggest problem with this game is the combat. Auto seems to loose a lot and manual takes a ton of time. In the 5 player (with three AI) is taking a lot of time for some turns because people are in combat. I wonder if there is a mod that can fix this?

The whole reason for the timer / cards battle system is to keep multiplayer turns turning. A few minutes per turn is nothing compared to any previous multi 4x game. The system should stay exactly like it is they can actually just lessen the overall timer from a minute to 45 secs and add a retreat option to auto and manual so you can resolve early game scout retreats.

So far the multiplayer net code in and of itself has been really impressive as well as the amount of time turns take. Granted im the culprit of long turns cause I micro the heck outta everything. Better govenor AI could also help.

I finally got around to playing the "final" version this past weekend for my review. Yup, still love everything except the combat, which I actually despise.

jam3 wrote:

The whole reason for the timer / cards battle system is to keep multiplayer turns turning. A few minutes per turn is nothing compared to any previous multi 4x game. The system should stay exactly like it is they can actually just lessen the overall timer from a minute to 45 secs and add a retreat option to auto and manual so you can resolve early game scout retreats.

So far the multiplayer net code in and of itself has been really impressive as well as the amount of time turns take. Granted im the culprit of long turns cause I micro the heck outta everything. Better govenor AI could also help.

Do you queue your improvements? I also dislike the AI but I queue everything. Also after I hit end turn I keep working, modifying queues and tax rate. Nothing is final until the turn actually ends. So don't double your tax rate while waiting for others to end their turn just to see how it effects your approval rating. You know, that might be a big difference in that you have started and probably played more as single player. I have played mostly as multi so I am use to hitting end turn not actually ending my turn. I think 75% or more of my user actions are after I hit end turn.

Yep i queue everything but there are alot of cost / benefit decisions , queue rearrangement, dust spending/planning-savings, population rearrangement, queue clears for ind-dust/sci for shotgunning a tech or getting massive cash fast etc (just to name a few things) that all can be pertinent to when you hit the end turn button.

Veloxi wrote:

I finally got around to playing the "final" version this past weekend for my review. Yup, still love everything except the combat, which I actually despise.

Just keep in mind that the 1 minute combat sequence and how it plays out has alot to do with the net code and multiplayer. The solution gives you some eye candy and makes multiplayer combat both workable and tolerable for all players. From a single player perspective the combat pretty much sucks but from the point of view of making multiplayer actually workable and reasonably pretty over an auto calculation its a pretty good solution.

Oh, awesome, I hate multiplayer too.

Veloxi wrote:

Oh, awesome, I hate multiplayer too. ;)

Well if building empires and massive armada style fleets doesn't end up with the payola of crushing the last breath outta some friends, or the high five of comrade in arms as opposed to some souless ai, I just can't help ya there.

So, can you increase your "Academy" size such that you can have more than 3 hero's? Can't seem to find anything like that in the research tree.

PAR

Friends? What's that?

Seriously, never been a big fan of multiplayer in general.

par wrote:

So, can you increase your "Academy" size such that you can have more than 3 hero's? Can't seem to find anything like that in the research tree.

PAR

west tree (food / dust / heros / trade / diplo) Its on the top part of the tree and it has "game theory" in the name the leading adjective differs by race.

Veloxi wrote:

Friends? What's that?

Seriously, never been a big fan of multiplayer in general.

Ok maybe I was mislabeling, dudes I know from GWJ who want to play the same games as myself.
i.e, instant friends just add steam (hah a pun as opposed to just add water)

Setup vent

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/2...

Join the Steam Endless space group

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/GWJ-ES

And then find ways to lose 8 hours of your life at a time.

Add people in the gwj community you meet to steam friends

jam3 wrote:
par wrote:

So, can you increase your "Academy" size such that you can have more than 3 hero's? Can't seem to find anything like that in the research tree.

PAR

west tree (food / dust / heros / trade / diplo) Its on the top part of the tree and it has "game theory" in the name the leading adjective differs by race.

That one increases by two, there is a second one further on to the left and down that increases it again by 3. I don't think it is race specific.

I picked this up last week and got so far as to... start a game. Unfortunately, this game seems to have a tutorial that simply lists what UI elements are, but does not describe why, how, or when you want to actually do things.

That's OK and honestly not surprising (4x games are all about the glacial mastery of such systems), but I did crawl back to the old pair of shoes that is Civ V G&K since I wasn't quite up to the challenge of figuring out something new at the time.

I plan to give it another shake this weekend, but I was wondering if there's a community "quick start guide" somewhere that might get me up to at least basic speed quickly.

Best way to learn the game

1) Read the manual, play the tutorial

"Question: Is there a manual and where can I download it from?
Answer: Find the game in your Steam Game Library and click on the "Manual" choice in the menu on the right side."

1a) Mouse over everything in the game to get a tooltip, for instance in the system view mouse over the population bar in the top as well as the little clock icon that shows the number of turns til you get new population youll get different information from each one

2) Read the FAQ

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/...

3) Register and participate on the forums, use your G2G points

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/...

4) Know how to win
* the turn limit for scored victory is 300 turns, noone has really explained diplo victory in exact detail, wonder is currently considered the easiest to obtain
http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/V...

5) Understand hero abilities

http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/A...
* beginning game - get an administrator to level 2 and get Civil Engineering (+25 ind on system ) and at lvl 3 get Efficient Schooling (+20% ind on star system ) is an easy early game strategy to massively pump up your initial systems abilty to build things. With the pilgrims Hero bonus you ca produce colony ships in 2-3 turns by turn 2 or 3

6) Realise the tech tree is just going to take awhile to learn

I am still learning it, it deserves its own thread to really go over where stuff is in the trees.

Things to find in the trees

Each tree has one luxury resource unlock
The east tree on the bottom has purple colored strategic resource unlocks which give fids bonuses as well as requirements for ship modules and terraforming,
you can't see these until you unlock the tech.
Wormhole Travel
Warp Travel
Techs that remove bad anomalies
Terraform or "transformation techs"
Techs that up your Command Points ( ships per fleet )
Techs that up your tonnage (space in ships for more pew pew)
Techs that up your number of potential heroes (academy)
Diplo techs, getting a "cooperation agreement" starts trade = alot more shiny with platonic love.

7) Know how to fight

http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/C...

8) know the Lore, it just gets you into it.

http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/H...

9) Know the little weird stuff

Free Combat camera
Hit "Free Camera" lower right during a space battle then use mouse wheel for zoom, right click for rotate and arrow keys for pan

Question: How do I set a specific route for my fleet?
Answer: You can queue movement orders by pressing and holding down SHIFT and then right clicking the star systems you want your fleet to go through. Forcing a fleet to move through empty space can be done by holding down CTRL (you must have Warp Drive researched). In addition if want wish to queue movement and travel through empty space at the same time, press and hold CTRL+SHIFT.

Influence/approval and early game strategy, the culture color circle and understanding planet type disapproval. Influence doesn't start from a new colony til 30 turns after it has been settled, Once a system is within your influence races your're in cold war or peace (without an open borders agreement) cannot enter systems in your influence and colonize them. Find easy to settle planets first ocean/terran/jungle (no approval penalty) and arid/tundra(-5 approval, mouse over the size and planet type to see the base values, i.e. where it says "medium arid") and make sure they don't have crushing approval penalties, leave bad systems alone and let your influence spehere protect them from aggresive colonization. Make sure to look at anomalies and the early game food luxuries (hydromiel, dustwater, blucap mold, redsang) as they can drastically effect colonization decisions. Once you have a reasonable dust income from the easy to get happy planets go for the realy hard systems and buyout some approval improvements to get them online fast.

New population grows on the last colonized planet which is annoying since thats usually not your food producer, you can drag and drop the little blue mepoles between planets.

In the tech tree you can shift select to queue research order which is pretty crucial since you can learn more than one tech in a turn if you have enough points to research all the techs selected, you never lose research points.

I haven't completly tested it but the same also goes for improvements and ships in the build queue, you can build more than one at a time, especially through buying and it doesn;t appear that you lose industry it just goes to the next thing in the queue. There is some weirdness of having an empty queue or deleting (dbl-click) and the readding or adjusting (left click drag) the queue order and the saving of industry points.