The Future of Endless Space 2: A New Faction With Old Friends

Great to to hear! You at NGD did a superb job with the last two EL expansions. I think you are ready to lift off from Auriga's surface into Endless Space... ;)

This will put us up to 12 playable factions, yes?  That sounds like a good round number on which to stop, honestly.  I would strongly suggest this be the LAST faction for ES2 and that any future development be focused on improving functionality, readability, the new player experience, and CUSTOM FACTIONS.  The Endless games have a wonderful foundation for custom creations in the faction editors but that system is SORELY lacking in balance, clarity and usability.  Giving players the ability to mix and match is ALWAYS a ticket to popularity, but if the system is easy to break (and let's face it, it is) then it doesn't add much longevity.

When designing the new faction, I strongly urge--scratch that--IMPLORE the team to keep the component parts in mind for custom factions going forward.  A peek into the thought process has revealed that faction components are actually one of the last things in the process and I think that reversing that can open up tons of replayability.  The way affinities tie together tightly (some TOO tightly,) the way population and faction traits are, shall we say, a bit wonky and imbalanced, and the way some traits are simply so powerful for the cost that they're automatic choices could use some serious review and updating.  There are so many possibilities for variant factions, yet so many pitfalls that keep great ideas from being feasible and making so many decisions for us.  PLEASE keep a closer eye on this, Ampliteam; custom factions are a terribly undervalued part of the game.

That said, every expansion so far HAS introduced major new mechanics that bear investigation and I expect this one will maintain the standard.  Looking forward to it.

I look forward to the future content

Sublustris wrote:

Damn. I had a hope Amplitude would polish current problems with last two DLCs and make a promised tech tree lore pass, before "abandoning" ES2. I've also hoped they'll make just one more great game changing DLC, like Shifters and Tempest were for EL.

Anyway, I guess it's time for Amps to concetrate on new projects. I know NGD will make a good job, but somehow I'm still upset from the news.

Those will likely still happen, you know.

Cinder33 wrote:

All I want to say is LESS focus on factions and MORE focus on improving gameplay and the turn by turn boredom.  Give the universe some life.  I have no idea why you ignore the community when they say improve the gameplay.  Who in here is saying I want more factions?!

Well, there's only 11 right now. Don't try to BS and say YOU speak for all of us, man.

So, this sounds great and I'm already looking forward to #12, should be sweet.

Exciting news, looking forward to hearing more about this unique faction. Also looking forward to a possible rebalance of tech/market economy/behemoths.

Funny thing, I've guessed the next project could be something along the lines of "Awakened Empire".
I can only guess further it might be Religious-based, possibly tall, possibly a turtle at first. 

This expansion WILL be fun.

I like the new idea for a faction, something radically different would be nice. 

I think you should try to add systems that encourage the player to play differently, as games can get kind of samey after a while. My suggestion would be more impact full galaxy modifiers e.g.

"Unstable Galactic Core" 

The galactic core is unstable and will periodically emit massive gamma bursts. These add modifiers to empires e.g ship costs are reduced by 15% but new ship health values are decreased by 10%.

"Supermassive Black Hole"

A supermassive black hole is placed in the center of the galaxy, control it a and complete a quest to construct a superstructure that will give your empire large boosts e.g. As the Riftborn you can construct a passage to your reality, large fleets will periodically spawn at the black hole under your control. 

The idea is that you wouldn't have all of these enabled and that these would be impactful enough that you will alter how you would play. 

I would prefer the next expansion to place more emphasis on the battles part.

If the next expansion can have battles like the ones in endless legend, by giving more controls for gamers during battle. I feel this would make this game perfect and reignite the flare for replayability of the game within ES2 fans.

Currently the battles in ES2 is a bit boring and repetitive as there is nothing we can control after selecting the tactics and battle placement.

Adding additional factions and super weapons is more or less a bit repetitive as the last few DLCs is into adding factions and super weapons.

The mechanics of managing planets, diplomatics and resources to me is already at what can be considered perfect. 

So I feel it is time for NGD to take a different approach. Otherwise this great game may well end up to be another repetitive game.

Definitely agree with the others that we have a lot of unique factions and we should center more around diplomacy, expansion, and just balancing in general. 

P.S. BTW ..some nice space monsters would be a good ultimate experience...

Argonauty wrote:

P.S. BTW ..some nice space monsters would be a good ultimate experience...

I m afraid you won t get those. There was an idea going in that direction, but the endless universe doesn t seem to harbour space monsters.

Great news

This sounds very interesting. However whenever I play ES2 it feels like many core mechanics still need a big overhaul. I do not get this feeling with Endless Legend. Its a complete game and the expansions add meaningful content because the core gameplay is solid.     

I hate repeating myself, but I am very sad this some of the most important problems are not adressed:

• Food and growth
• Dust and inflation
• Influence
• Marketplace
• viability of luxury ressources
• overall combat, but mostly stacking fleet accellerators
• everyone forced into economic behemoths

Many, many times have we discussed some of these. Factions which high food output cannot make use of it because growing 1 pop a turn only requires a certain amount and food above this threshhold is not very useful. In every Horatio game I end up at manpower capacity so all my excesss food is entirely useless. Food requirements need to scale with amount of pops in a system, or in another way. Every game you can build 2 food buildings which are unlocked very early: The +10 food and 5 on hot/cold aswell as the +2 food per pop. This, together with Hero bonuses and other FIDS bonuses from lategamebuildings is enough to continually grow your population. 

The game features later game food buildings but a quick look at them reveals that they are not much better, and obviously not needed. When you see that a building requiring antimatter and a building requiring quadrinix yet grant the same food output, the latter requiring a much more advanced ressource and twice as much industry to build, you should realize that this was not well thought through. 

Inflation is a huge problem and makes Dust quite worthless over the course of the game. This ties in with the marketplace. The minimum sell values are too high and it is entirely possible to have a dust deficit and live off of selling ressources. In fact simply producing more special ressources is way better than producing more dust, as it becomes less useful over the course of the game. 

Influence is still too easy to stockpile in the lategame. I suggested to simply remove the % influence bonuses on influence buildings and instead give flat influence bonuses on these buildings. Or you increase the influence costs of laws, maybe by adding more of them. Make building Behemoths cost influence. 

I heavily dislike stacking fleet accellerators.  I don't know if Aitarus' combat balance mod is up to date, but I could not imagine playing without it. You guys should consider importing atleast some of its features. Its not fun to play in multiplayer on fast speed and around turn 50-60 your opponent shows up with 50 speed fleet on your home system and invades it because they were out of vision before and you did not have time to prepare. 

Before the Umbral Choir dlc release, I thought espionage actions should require luxury ressources, specifically the useless ones just so to give them some usage besides selling on the marketplace. If you are not able to make these luxury ressources more equal in power and usage, like in Endless Legend, consider either removing the bad ones or come up with another usage. 

I still heavily dislike Behemoths. Because Economic Behemoths are simply too powerful. Everyone is forced to build them and they get unlocked too early in the game. It would be better if they were unlocked much later and be much more scarce so that the decision between each type was much more impactful. Thanks to adding economic Behemoths, factions have lost a lot of their identity and different ways to play. If you do not utilize Behemoths, then you lose. They are a way to snowball your economy, rather than a lategame wonder which takes a long time and ressource investment. 

Some tweaking for Government types.

Dictatorship is still the worst. Federation is too strong. I suggested to only grant 1 colonization slot per governor or overseer Hero. Right now Federation is a free expansion victory as you can simply buy 10 heroes and colonize 10 more systems for free. 

You should take a look at Aitarus' politics rework mod. He added more laws and increased cost. This fixed the influence stockpiling problem easily. He also made Dictatorship viable by granting better laws similar to republic - with bigger drawbacks and costs. 

I know this all sounds negative but these are my main gripes with the game and for a long time I have not seen a big effort from you guys to fix them.  No matter how much content you add, it will not cover some of the core flaws of the game.  The game is truly beautiful in immersion, aestethics, soundtrack. But at this point it is simply held back by the problems I posted.

Please consider fixing the core part of the game before you add more stuff. 

Best regards,

a fanatic fixer

Argonauty wrote:

P.S. BTW ..some nice space monsters would be a good ultimate experience...

+1, I wish we could upvote

Like others here I'm very excited about new content (including a new core feature and faction), but I just hope it will add a bit more to the replayability of the game.