That all you got?
Mine was a bird race that used to live in big tree-cities but the worsening winters killed the trees and force them to move to the mountains. I haven't voted on anyone yet.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Oh, okay. Well, read through ideas carefully before you vote. And please read mine as well. Though seriously, don't vote for my idea if you think it sucks. I don't want people to vote for my ideas if they don't actually want them.
That all you got?
Right now I just want to play Endless Space. I've had some kind of coding error that screws with the battles and Amplitude tech support has been NO help at all.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Bump~
I've been playing this a lot over the past few weeks, and been having a blast ever since I threw the difficulty down to essentially nil. Love seeing the AIs field their dozen or so more normal ships against my giants, only to get wiped out despite theoretically being more than twice as strong.
Also fun: At the end of my spiral arm (I've been playing almost exclusively on 8 or 4 arm spiral galaxies), there's a system with one Arid and five Lava planets. Sure populating the place took a while, but it was easily my first system to clear 1000 Industry... while still having farms for exploitation. It's currently at 1800ish, with me very much being at endgame. I was also lucky enough to have Auriga be on my arm, which hadn't happened before.
Amazingly, there are five systems on one arm which still aren't populated. Being the Vaulters, there's no harm in me rectifying this, thanks to the teleports, but it's still kinda out of the way. Green (who were also Vaulters, somehow) only colonized the other half of their arm.
Overlording the Underworld
If you've got it on random there's a fair chance of getting more than one player of the same faction. Doesn't stop them from going to war.
How do you design your ships? I tend to go for a "throw every weapon on it and see how it goes" mentality, but I've done the specialized route in the past.
That all you got?
I do a bit of specialization myself, like when I get fighters and bombers I'll have a ship that is mostly just a fighter-carrier with a few weapons, or ships specialized for invasions.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
One Winged Egret
Half beam weapons, half defense divided equally among all three categories. Throw in some utility like repair systems before dividing, if necessary.
The game mechanics reward either paying attention to what the enemy is doing or having so much a single weapon that it overwhelms their defenses. Against a human player it might not work, but it's fine against the AI which just seems to throw random stuff on random ships.
Invasion ships and fleets are kept entirely separate. Just throw 100% siege weapons on them.
edited 29th Jan '15 12:10:23 PM by Clarste
I've actually had quite a lot of success with repair systems and spamming the ability repair command in tactical.
One Winged Egret
I don't think there's any reason to use any command other than repair. I just spam that.
My tactic has tended to be Short Circuit (+accuracy, esp. at long range)-Repair-Repair.
Overlording the Underworld
Right now against the Horatio I've been using the anti-missile tactic. Because I spammed everything, including missiles. And now Horatio's spamming beams and missiles. He was focusing on kinetics to the exclusion of everything else. And then he incorporated lasers into the mix. Now he's dropped kinetics entirely, while I still use them.
I've also begun incorporating fighters and bombers into my anti-ship fleets. It's fun to be on the warpath and to watch the battles happen.
Overlording the Underworld
So I'm doing a Harmony run, and I realized something. The lack of dust means there's almost no functional way to transfer the industrial capacity of one system to others. There's parking ships in orbit, but compared to Dust buyouts that's a fairly weak system. Which would be ironic for a Harmonious race if it weren't outright stated that Dust messed up the Harmony's link to each other.
That all you got?
I would say picking Harmony is a bit of a Self-Imposed Challenge considering your FIDS just turns into FIS.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Overlording the Underworld
If you roll out spammer designs for industrial ships, you can make those FIS work for you. Harmony's all about spamming industry, considering orbiting fleets increase resources. And I think it was a nice touch that the Tax slider for them is a balance between research and food rather than nonexistent.
That all you got?
Wait, fleets in orbit increase industry? Or is that just for the Harmony?
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Too much adorableness
Harmony only. Their unique mechanic to help offset the inability to rush buy. And it increase ALL FIDS, not just industry...
edited 17th May '15 7:53:10 PM by onyhow
Give me cute or give me...something?
Overlording the Underworld
Actually, it's not Harmony exclusive. The Automatons get their own version tied to a specific tech. The exclusive part is that the Harmony don't need to research anything to make it happen themselves.
Overlording the Underworld
Endless Space 2 is currently out in early access on Steam!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/392110/
If I'm reading this right they have about half of everything already in there, though they still need to balance the gameplay and add in features like custom factions. They've added something called Amplified Reality which pops up when you hit space bar and shows you detailed views of your planets and ships. Sounds pretty badass to me. We'll have to see how it really works in-game. We already had information-access to our worlds and ships before. I hope it's more detailed, then, otherwise it's just an extra button to remember.
That all you got?
Aw, it's only on Windows :(
Oh well, hopefully it'll be on Mac when it comes out.
Anyway it looks a lot better than the first Endless Space in terms of gameplay. Midgame will hopefully be a lot more interesting.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Overlording the Underworld
Okay, okay, okay! Here we go! Can you tell I'm psyched?
I haven't gone past my first turn but I wanted to drop impressions on you while I had them. The game is gorgeous and as funny as the others. It's got a lot of circles and roundness, I guess to make it look softer and more inviting, but it's just as complex as the others. There's an overlay you can hit that gives you information on your empire at a glance. Gameplay wise, it's the same as the others. Look at your options, set up a queue, send some fleets to explore other worlds. You can find different things to explore. and you send expeditions to look into them. I've got two queued up. One to explore the geology of my planet, and another to check out some life readings on a nearby world. My homeworld has three population points. Only two of them are Sophons! There's actual minor civilizations just like in EL. And there's politics. I'm not sure exactly how that works, so I'm not commenting on it. It's like they took the best cues from Endless Legend and mixed in some Stellaris there for fun.
Last thing for this post: The factions. There are four of them.
1. The Sophons: They're scientists like we've always seen. They've had their bonus tweaked so that it depends on how many other factions already know a tech you're learning. They're also the only normal colonizers in the game.
2. The Cravers: Same as always. Conquerors. They eat and eat and have to keep expanding or else they lose FIDSI. I don't know how they play, I chose Sophons for this run because their playstyle was the most familiar.
3. The Vodyani: That's right. A new faction! Without going into backstory, they use motherships instead of planets. They have access to a full system as soon as they enter it, and they eat the locals in order to produce more Motherships. It looks like they threw in some Star Ruler 2 there with some of this stuff.
4. The Lumeris: Think the Roving Clans from EL mixed with the Hutts from Star Wars. They can actually buy star systems instead of colonizing them. They just drop down outposts and call it a day it looks like. I will probably play with all four factions over time, so I will likely know more details later on.
I know I rambled, I just wanted to get all of that out for you. It's still in Early Alpha. They even do their notice about it being Early Alpha and explaining what that means, so you know things are going to change. It's pretty and I'm having a blast looking at it. I haven't gotten into any fights yet, but I will tell you how that goes!
One Winged Egret
Just gonna repost my impressions from a different forum:
Combat itself is incredibly straightforward, even simpler than the original ES. You just choose a tactic and watch it play out, except you only get 1 tactic for the entire battle instead of 3.
I played a game as Lumeris and while I did end up utterly dominating the galaxy with infinite money and influence, I found it hard to actually be at peace with anyone. Even the Sophons hated my guts from the very beginning, and in fact declared war on me before it was even possible for me to research diplomacy. Which is sort of a more general thing I noticed: all the diplomacy techs seem way too advanced. By the time I'd even researched "peace treaty", I'd already gotten into a doom war and wiped out an empire. It also seems to be impossible to negotiate for peace: after a certain amount of time the game just declares that someone won and auto-allocates tributary payments from the loser.
Also I found it impossible to advance in the story quest because I chose the option where they wanted me to get 80% pacifist in the Senate, but the act of building up enough warships to not die tipped my population to around 50% militarist and it never recovered.
Another thing of note is that it's rather hard to find planets you can actually colonize. By default you can only colonize planets that are exactly like your homeworld (which are much more specific than they used to be: Lumeris get Atoll (not Ocean) and Sophons get Svelte (not Terran)), and the colonizations techs don't end up being super-cheap like they did in ES (because of the scaling tech cost thing). I actually couldn't find any colonizable worlds for a huge fraction of the game, and ended up expanding by assimilating minor faction homeworlds instead. And, uh, conquering the Sophon homeworld. Although one of those minor factions were those robot guys and I guess they have some form of tolerance because they could colonize the other worlds in their system immediately. Which made that system such a powerhouse compared to all the other crappy systems everyone had at the time that it became my de facto capital and I steamrolled to victory.
Overlording the Underworld
Ha! I thought I detected traces of Stellaris in there. Guess I was right. I'm working on assimilating my neighbors into my empire too.
Anyway, I have screenshots from space combat!
One Winged Egret
This was the endgame influence radius of said de facto capital, btw: [1]
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Overlording the Underworld
I lucked out with a +50 Influence loot, and used it to assimilate the neighbors. Now I just need to stabilize myself and I should be okay. Emigration is kicking their asses though, I have a colony growing besides them.
Aww, so who you voted for? And which one was yours? :)