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

sheredynplayer wrote:

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. 

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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

I'm not a fanatic neither a master of this game but I have to agree. I haven't play supremacy and behemoths but I read tons of reviews about it, and their incredibly important, op role made me NOT buying that DLC. It would be cool playing them but if they are really so strong that everyone is "forced" to use them, no thanks.
Rest of the points of the quoted comment are also quite... established, those suggestions sound viable. We don't really need more factions - no matter how good they are -, existing mechanics of the game should be improved first.

My own... comment on all this:
Battles. Especially space battles should be reworked in my opinion. Picking a card and tossing some ships here and there then having absolutely no effect on the outcome on the battle is straight annoying. I understand that it's a 4x game, but giving more sense to "manual" space battles would be great. I haven't played Battlestar Galactica Deadlock yet, but according to videos something at least slightly similar to that would make the game really amazing (something exactly like that would be better - or even just something similar to Endless Legend). Lategame against AI gets super boring, I just click autoresolve and that's all. The whole space battle - which is obviously quite important in eXtermination - feels a burden and definitely not a fun thing. More player interaction is needed there, because it has potential (huge fleets clashing, different type of weapons with different strengths and weaknesses, etc.), but it's not exploited properly.
I don't feel like I can affect the battle, clicking and waiting for math to happen is... plain, boring, frustrating, etc. No skill involved, just statistics fighting eachother...

I know this battle rework would require tons of work, I still think it would definitely worth it in the end.

Mairon wrote:

Maybe you guys could focus on the replayability of the game itself. I am very much in love wtih the game and its universe, but it can quickly become quite repetitive once you ve crushed the AI a few times on Endless difficulty.

As for the new expansion i would suggest refraining from adding another layer of complexity, but rather rework some mechanics in order to enable new players the opportunit to really get into the game, rather than scratching the surface and than being intimidated by the sheer amount of information that is required to play the game.

I totally agree with that, you've yet to rework the last expansion because it's really a mess that no one want to play, and furthermore balance some things on the game because it's really needed.

And instead of realease botched expansion wouldn't be better to realease some little patch that had funny things to the game, like a special event quest for easter for instance ?

aerothgow wrote:

so you think that when i win battle after battler and get planet after planet from te AI it's ok for him to ask me all my gold and tech and other resourches for peace? or that everyone is playing behemots ? i haven't seen a carrier in ages. 

or that you can get billions with a few inflation tricks by selling ships ?

or that food is mostly useless ?

Like, it looks like rebalance of AI decisions making, decreasing benefits of behemots and adding new food related perk to Horatio, not reworking entire features.
I also think ES2 good in overal, but some features are too optional even if look like core ones.

Thanks for your support guys! I am very happy to see many people think alike with me and I am not the only one who sees the game still has many issues which should be adressed in favour of piling more stuff onto what is best described a poorly designed foundation.

KnightofPhoenix wrote:

I wasn't contesting the view that the game needs tweaking and fixes (which can coincide with the addition of new features), although I don't agree with your assessment of how much fixing is required.  I am contesting the view that the game mechanics need to be revamped.

We are not asking for a huge revamp to the whole economy system like Stellaris has done it. Its painfully clear you have 2 ressources in industry and science which are superiour to food and dust. The latter can be simply ignored by exploiting the marketplace, another system that should have been fixed long ago. We have already extensively talked about a food and growth rework in the discord, modders have had ideas tried reworking it themselves, although I am unsure on their progress. 

As IceGremlin and others have stated, this leads to many, many more problems. Suddenly when 2 ressources are superiour to 2 others, all your decision in Quests and events are already set in stone. The Horatio questline is a prime example. You have a choice between influence, food and industry. The optimal choice is to simply choose industry, every time. There is no situation in which any other choice would be even remotely viable. 

Yes, one could always argue about roleplaying and experiencing the entire story, so you choose other options. You are free to choose, but you shouldn't be punished with a worse outcome just because the game's ressources are unequal and since multiple expansions have never been fixed. 

Since you were not precicely stating what features you are talking about, I am interested on what you think are the major problems. Or do you see these issues as "this is how the game is played"? Because this sounds very ignorant to me. Just because you deem something less imporant doesn't mean it shouldn't get fixed. And as you can clearly see I am not alone with my opinion. Or maybe you are simply not as familiar with the in-depth of the game. I don't want to offend you, but to me such a bold statement can only mean that you do not yet understand the core issues this game has or are actively ignoring them. Please give some specific examples of the issues you want to be fixed and some examples on the issues you do not want to see fixed. 

Of course I am only talking about the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at a very specific case: "Developement Grants." I expect you are familiar with this. Do you think the issue with developement grants do not need to get revamped? Because the difference between getting them or not is a difference of 100% science output bonus or not to your empire early in the game. It can snowball so hard that your opponent won't be able to catch up to you in terms of science, just because you got lucky and found the corred minors which rolled developement grants. Another case: Thinkers and Tinkers I. This can easily go up to 100 flat industry bonus, but just a 20 industry bonus already skyrockets your production in the earlygame, especially on new colonies. Another contender for random traits/bonuses that you can pick up and can single handedly snowball into an easy win.

Just compare a game where you get acess to Jaedonix to a game where you don't get Jaedonix. These games play completely different and this gap between the luxury ressources still exist even after jaedonix has been changed already.  (From 4 industry/pop to a flat bonus). Another example where a problem was adressed with 1 simple number change, instead of getting to the root of the core problem: FIDSI being extremely unequal. 

Leaving Vodyani out of the picture, we thought about having an increasing food cost as your pop count increases. So for example the first pop is 300 food. The next one 310, 320 etc increasing by 10 each. That way you are incentivized to invest into more food output to keep your growth going. Or you could play around with the food consumption to achieve a similar growth curve. On the other hand, how about being able to grow multiple pops per turn if your food output exceeds 300? To lessen the problem of the pop resettling to circumvent this, one could add a dust cost associated with resettling and maybe a food cost?

On faster speeds, and every MP is played on fast, you also face the problem of manpower as I described already. Because manpower banked is not adjusted to game speed, excess food becomes worthless even faster. This also has to get adjusted asap. Manpower cap should probably get increased a little overall aswell. 

Food output from buildings has to be adjusted. With the new growth system food will be needed much more so I would expect players will use more than only 2 food buildings the entire game. 

Amplitude should around with the food -> industry conversion to make it available earlier but weaker. Right now the game ends to quickly, the food to industry conversion hardly matters since game can be over 60 turns into fast speed. 

For Dust, obviously inflation has to get a big rework and the marketplace aswell. The whole Dust thing has many many problems. First, you have so many useless luxury ressources because industry and science are simply better. The flat food bonus is nice, but nothing contests a 15% industry or science bonus on system lategame. If Amplitude cannot come up with ideas to make luxuries more similar like in Endless legends, the easiest way would simply to get rid of all the terrible luxuries alltogether. This would help with the RNG having a big impact on the game aswell. 

Having luxury ressources leads to you selling them, because what else is there to do. But the minimum sell price is so high that you can live off of a dust deficit and still get by. The minimum sell price has to get lowered. 

This might be a bold statement, but what if they simply got rid of inflation alltogether? It hurts dust producing factions the most and favours anyone who simply sells ressources. I doubt this was the intention of the design. The Lumeris ability to temporarily lower inflation is a simple bandaid to this problem. Again, it helps but it doesnt come close to fix the root of the problem.

Just take a look at Endless Legend really. The growth and dust system work perfectly fine (dust might be a little too powerful I admit) but its 100x better than what ES2 got. 

I don't quite remember who it was, but I did not forget that someone of the developers said that Marketplace rework will come in the future. It was around the time they were doing some of the faction rebalance. So I am expecting a fix for that soon.