Endless Space

So, anyone pick this up?

If possible I might pick it up on the Summer Sales...

No demo hurts though...

I've just recently purchased it and played a bit. Didn't get into any combat, since I went a little overboard making it easy so I can learn how things work (Huge map, one other empire, newbie difficulty), but I think next time I start it up I'm gonna try to set things up so I have more opportunity for conflict/diplomacy.

Everything I got from it, however, reminded so much of Master Of Orion 2 that it almost hurt, but in a wonderful way. I admit that it's partly because of nostalgia, since I grew up fiddling with Mo O 2 (although as a kid, never brave enough to play on anything but the easiest setting, and even my young mind knew full well how broken Creative was, as I refused to play without that trait), but everything about the game looks great. The UI is pretty easy to get the hang of and nice to look at. One feature I really liked was how the military and colony tabs make it very, very easy to check out where things are and what they're doing in your empire once things start getting a little big. I also like that it shows you the entire research tree from the start, so you can better plan out your moves. Hiring and customizing heroes is also nice, as they gain XP and level up, giving you points to spend on traits/perks (which either improve their base stats or grant them entirely new abilities). And once again, the game tells you what everything does, from the tooltips over the hero's stats giving an indicator of what they influence, to a big ol' box to the side that tells you EXACTLY how that hero influences everything as derived from their stats and perks. Each hero also has 2 roles/classes, assigned, to make it easy to get a feel for how their stats go from the start.

The game also seems to have an option to create your own empire with their own list of perks and traits. In fact, I'm gonna go check that out now.

Also, Horatio is freaking funny...

Sadly my plans to teraform the galaxy were cut short by the Empire.

They were my allies and just went "Guess what, we're killing you"

And I didn't focus on military as much so I got effed.

My review copy can't come fast enough.

Endless Space has its own page now.

Bought it. It's fun. The next in line of over a decade of people trying to remake the magic of MOO 2, but that's not a bad thing. I think it might have slightly too much emphasis on "expand expand expand" and the warfare that necessarily follows from that, but I did manage to get a peaceful victory with the Amoebas. Depends on your neighbors I guess.

Hehe. Moo. XD

(Yes, I do know what it stands for :P)

This game is really fun! I just keep losing horribly. Still, I'm learning, and that feels good.

You have to build lots and lots of ships. Or super-awesome ships. Or both.

Also, maybe it's just me but the "repair" command is kind of overpowered. I just spammed that in every battle. Just by not losing ships to attrition is greatly changes the tide of the war, even if it doesn't help too much in battle.

edited 16th Jul '12 5:06:04 PM by Clarste

Hell, I ended up fighting part of a war where I was using pure suicide ships with as many missiles as I could stack on them. Worked until they swapped from pure Beam/Reflect to Missile/Flak set ups and I ended up with so many saves the game lagged in the menu screen. Sure, I lost a ship for every one of theirs, but mine were destroyers that took me a turn to make at my Forge World. Theirs were dreadnoughts.

Protip: Build CIS-OORT Satellites and anything else that expands your influence! If there's anything that helps keep you safe it's the fact that the enemy can't actually attack planets and ships in territory during a cold war, but that doesn't mean their influence can't take over your planet. The "defense" fleets are surprisingly good invaders.

Also built myself a custom Sheredyn faction. Swapped the economic bonuses for a few penalties and made it a darn good production race, since I love lots of ships.

edited 16th Jul '12 9:45:39 PM by TheInferno

You should try Cravers if you like lotsa ships. Their ships are 20% cheaper to produce and they not only start out with more CP than other races, but some of their faction exclusive tech gives out more CP bonuses than another race can get. They truly are swarmers. Their over-exploitation trait isn't that much of a penalty, either, since it takes 40 turns after colonization just for FIDS to drop to normal levels, and then another 20 after that before you start taking penalties. Just be sure to get some good agriculture tech to jump food up so the population grows quickly so you can get more out of the over-exploitation.

Only con to Cravers is that you can't be at peace, making the trade & diplomacy tree sorta useless except for the planetary exploitations, system improvements (which you'll want, as it has food, happiness, and dust boosters), as well as the CP and academy size boosts.

Edit: And I just realized I'm posting this with a Craver avatar, displaying a sort of bias. To be fair, Hissho are also great suicide swarmers since they get 50% off weapon modules. Probably makes kamikaze destroyers cheaper to produce than the 20% cheaper ships from Cravers, but I haven't checked the specifics (namely, does the Craver trait apply only to the base ship cost, or the cost of ship + modules?). Plus Hissho get improved accuracy and damage (plus a cumulative +5% for every battle won for 15 turns, resetting with each victory) making their suicide ships go a longer way than the Cravers.

Also, considering that the AI has already adapted, you might want to try your luck loaded up with beams and armor (for the extra health so they might live long enough to fire another volley or two) and try swapping between beams and missiles whenever the AI adapts. Also, shields are more effective at stopping beams than any other defense module, so if the AI is using a lot of those then it might be worth loading the suicide ships with some actual defenses beyond extra HP to help them dish out some more pain.

edited 17th Jul '12 4:31:57 AM by IthilionTheBrave

I actually had so many saves my game was lagging, and towards the end the saves were a good 10 KB bigger than any other save, so I deleted them all pretty much. Did I mention I was at about turn 275 or so?

Besides, it would have taken forever to even take a world and since my fleets worked by attrition fighting... the Sowers had pretty much won.

I need to play the Cravers and the Hissho sometime, especially since the Hissho do that research thing. I was considering doing something similar (or the Dust version of that they have for custom races) for my custom Sheredyn, especially considering their economic woes. The main reason for playing custom Sheredyn though is running around the galaxy going "FOR THE EMPRAH" in shiny gold ships <_<

I used a missile-focused strategy with the Cravers before. I never needed to bother changing techs since I just overwhelmed their flak defenses with more missiles. The flaw with missiles is that while they're really powerful they take so long to hit that your ships end up dying too (or almost dying). I'd rather use beams to end the fight quickly (kinetic is incredibly weak at long range).

Oh, and I thought only shields worked on beams? There are three types of weapons, and three types of defenses, right? So you can either look at what the enemy is using and stack only that to be completely untouchable, or you can try to balance your defense and survive anything. Personally, I prefer the balanced approach with lots of healing.

On another note, the Horatio ability to clone heroes is incredibly amusing.

edited 17th Jul '12 3:29:20 PM by Clarste

Yeah, only shields work on beams, but if you want to up survivability in general without spending a lot of tonnage on various defense modules you can just load up on armor modules for more HP. Not as good as stopping the damage entirely, of course, but every bit helps.

Armor modules don't stack. Or at least, they don't stack with themselves, they might stack with lower level versions... I tried that.

No, they most certainly do stack. That, or my game is somehow bugged.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/1155422234392578847/863353E7C41D62F67E4C3F7EAA7F8489D7869691/

http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/1155422234392581598/6960C0E1FC241FA3E6E67B62E11756E712DA9684/

These were done on a fresh game in normal. Higher level mods might not (I can see the ones with percentage boosts not stacking, for example), but I'll have to investigate that later.

Is there anywhere I can find a total list of all the traits? I don't have the game quite yet, but theoryciving never hurt.

I just started playing the other day and am currently getting curb stomped in every battle against the United Empire, with a couple wins here and there via missile spam zerg rushes. Is it even possible to come back when the enemy's average fleet has about 3 times the MP as your own?

Just find out what weapons they favor and build lots of defenses towards that. It's, well, not exactly a rock paper scissors thing, but unless they're way ahead of you in tech it's the kind of battle system where what you're equipped with matters way more than anything else. Play it right and you can be literally invincible.

edited 28th Dec '12 4:02:02 AM by Clarste

Yep, the AI is generally designed to use 2 weapon types and two defense types. Just be ready to have ships that exploit different things ready for when the AI tries to adapt to your designs.

Well, unless they changed it since I last played. It as been quite a while.

yeah, so I was trying to do that, but their dreadnoughts have ludicrous defenses for everything and their cruisers have overlapping defenses, though maybe there's a slight weakness to beams. As far as weapons go, it looks like mainly beams and kinetics, but they still have plenty of missile boats.

Oh, I wouldn't pay much attention to their defenses. Just build lots and lots of beams. Missiles take too long to hit so you get damaged even if you win, and kinetic is too short ranged. The AI rarely if ever stacks one kind of defense, so just have enough beams to pierce their shields.

But having hoards of cheap missile boats take down dreadnoughts is really satisfying the one in ten times it happens :(