Endless Space 2 Turns Three

Is there a way to make my hacks less traceable? Who knows because there sure isn't anything in the tooltips or online that I can find. As well, despite making cloaking a focus so I wouldn't get found, somehow the other empires just suddenly introduce themselves to me out of nowhere. No clue why.

I also didn't understand the hacking at first. It is not well-explained in the game itself and I don't recall ever seeing a manual. I found some videos on YouTube that helped quite a lot, though. Give this one a shot. It was very frustrating for me and seemed like black magic voodoo and I almost turned it off, too. Now that I know how it works (kind of) it has become a good tool in the toolbox for me.

Hacking is very deterministic. You know how long it will take to hack a target. Also, empty nodes, or nodes you own, don't trigger a trace. So you want some extra time as a buffer for traces. Instead of going directly from A to D, go from A, to B, to C, to D. Having a hack originate deep in your own empire can be very useful. It will take more time to complete, it's true, so make it count and be strategic about what you're hacking and why. You can track how far along a trace is going by looking at the red swirly lines coming back from the node that is running the trace.

As for empires randomly seeing your ships... I've found this happens most when I get a ship from an event. Such ships don't start cloaked - they really should. Also you need to keep your cloaking technology ahead of the detection technology of other empires, otherwise they can detect you. Eventually your cloaking will be useless but that's pretty late into the game. By then it probably doesn't really matter - but it should.

 l just wonder when the new patch would be released.

One of my recent Horatio games were quite exquisite, well, obviously it was since I was playing the most perfect being in the galaxy: Horatio

But I digress, at the very start of the game, of a large galaxy, I see 3 minor empires right by me, this is great news for me as Horatio! Well, to make a good story short, at just turn 80 I had already 7 different populations in my empire just waiting for splicing!

Another great moment for me was when I played ES1 with Harmony for the first time, I was floored, an empire that not only doesn't use dust, but actively destroys it? Thats a crazy unique idea, and even now it's my favourite empire in the ES universe. I always wonder how would it be in ES2 if Harmony was a major faction, considering the entire academy quest I wonder how Harmony would be viewed there...

Great! Happy birtgday!

In general, I love that you can play factions in a very different way. You mentioned the cravers being not hostile to you. This is the kind of thing that really excites me about the Endless Universe. In particular I like playing factions "wrong", meaning not the way they are inclined to be played. A peaceful Craver can be super powerful if you focus your efforts on internal growth and politics instead of conquest. Conversely, an aggressive Unfallen is super fun to play because not only can your guardians act as a negative impact on your enemy, but also you can expand a multitude faster with conquest, since it is totally easily possible to seize a system in one turn and thus entwine it, whereas entwining it with the very expensive vineships takes forever. Not only that, but since a system is immediately entwined upon conquest, bringing in new supplies to and from that system is super quick.

Personally, my favourite faction is the Vodyani, seconded by the Hissho (which were my ES1 favourite). I love the faction's coldness, being kind of driven by the endless relics to become that coldhearted, evil people that they are. They are probably the brainchild of the same guy who made the Broken Lords, my favourite EL faction. For some reason, religion in space appeals to me - the power you can use because you believe is something very interesting. For the Hissho, I love myself any kind of honour system since I think this is the best social system there is in the fictional and real world.

I also love the evolution of factions from ES1 to 2. Horatio in ES1 was an interesting idea, but in my opinion a not fully exploited concept. In ES2 the faction is super interesting and appealing to play with. The Riftborn with their totally unique mechanic of both planetary preference and population construction is something you'd not see in other 4X games because it will be classified as unbalanced. While the Riftborn are strong through exactly that feature, they are by no means not counterable. 

Excuse me, but, where's the patch? It's already July now....

koxsos wrote:

Me expecting the patch in the second half of June 2020 colorized. (Still 2 days to go though)

They wrotte on the Steam forum that it will take abit longer and should now come out this weak.

Me expecting the patch in the second half of June 2020 colorized. (Still 2 days to go though)

Great news

I really have loved ES, EL and ES2. Amazing games. Networking has also being erratic, but for EL I push through. All these games I regularly play with friens in mutiple countries across the globe. They are deepenly emersive. They feel like the Apple vs the Google (i.e. Stellaris). I was really hoping you would make another generation of Endless Legends and make it easier to create our species and stories.

Thank you for all you and the studio in giving so much fun and yes fustration

What i love in this game ? the art design is to die for, and the lore is so good, you can create a AAA game with your universe. My first play was with the empire, yes, i was on a purging spree :D

cromagnumpi wrote:

Just a couple of things that bug me:
- the Academy fleets sieging your systems/your own ships sieging the academy systems when not at war. Please fix this.

- Spear of Isyander fleet needs to be era appropriate. It seems like whoever gets that fleet, rolls their neighbours and there isn't anything anyone can do until late game to counter.

- The Umbral choir is not fun at all to play. EVERYONE can detect my hacks immediately and they always seem to be able to backtrace faster than I can hack. I'm playing the gar-danged hackmasters. Is there a way to make my hacks less traceable? Who knows because there sure isn't anything in the tooltips or online that I can find. As well, despite making cloaking a focus so I wouldn't get found, somehow the other empires just suddenly introduce themselves to me out of nowhere. No clue why.

For a game that I spend more time playing than any others, it's just a shame to me that the UC and Nekalim DLC's don't really feel to have the polish and balance of the first ones. Though I can at least have fun plaing as the Nekalim, and the Academy issues are forgiveable (but please make the spear fleets scaling power relative to how long the game has been going on), I just can't stand to play through as the UC. The mechanics to use them are frustrating, the hacking seems completely random and since it's the UC's entire method of empire building you can't simply ignore the hacking like you can with other empires. I generally have to just turn that DLC off which saddens me.

The Choir felt pretty strong for me. Once you understand how hacking works you can hack anyone with a setup. Penumbra is very cool imo. I agree on the Awakening points though.

Love this news, love the game - you fix bug, I`ll buy DLC.

Toast0007 wrote:

I love how different all the Factions play and i'm happy to hear, that some great issues will get fixed, i still hope, that there will be some more DLC factions in the future,(and that some balance changes will come) because im so in love with this game and would be happy to throw more money to you for additional content :)

Honestly what I just hope is that they can bring back a few of the oldschool factions like the Amoeba. They did with the Vaulters so that's cool but they were obviously always going to get some kind of expansion because they're kind of the uniting arc through the Endless universe. Or the Sowers. Or Automatons. Really I'd just like a cybernetic race with no gimmicks like being extradimensional beings or whatever. Or some cephalopodic race. I guess that the Riftborn are on some level kind of a compromise between the Harmony and Automatons at least conceptually, with added extradimensionality. Harmony could also be cool to bring back.

Honestly though I just really like how hard Amplitude goes when it comes to coming up with races that aren't all derivative schlock like most 4x games. I never got Stars in Shadow and dewishlisted it partly because I just can't get past the idiotic banality of their races. It's really hard to immerse myself or suspend disbelief when a not even transparently concealed anthro race is what's doing things like space dinosaurs. Even Endless Legend is like this and it's a fantasy game where being horrifically derivative is considered par for the course but does Amplitude come up with a bunch of dwarves and elves? Hell no they come up with things like this (or maybe their fans partly do) https://endless-legend.fandom.com/wiki/The_Cultists

I mean even their knights are not bog standard knights although come to think of it, truth be told they're basically like the WH40K faction dedicated to Tzeentch on some level. Some of it is identifiable, like https://endless-legend.fandom.com/wiki/Necrophages are *sort of* a stand in for a necromancy or undead faction, but I like how basically every single thing that this studio has ever done is creative and original, if not downright inspired.

Would I buy a new DLC for Endless Space 2 if it gave us yet another faction? Yes. Although I do hope that if it gets big enough they don't become terrible like Paradox with $300+ worth of DLC half of which you need to buy for basic features. If they ever make enough of it I'd hope they instead start packaging bundles of DLC together for their much older games in like 2025A.D., which is pretty much what they did for ES1. I have yet to see a genuinely lame faction in any one of their games.

Honestly just those little details like trying to increase science output by putting on a gameshow for the stupidest person in the system to ridicule and shame them into better research is one of those nice little touches that's always going to be memorable. It's always shown in such abstract ways in most 4x games where you never really get the feel for *what is actually happening* at the ground level as consequence for your decisions. Like just those little kind of things, even just a title like saying oh okay we'll just have a system lottery to help keep people placated when some major shit is going down to cause rebellions, and creating this fictitious idea they can become rich someday to buy into and defend the political system [spoiler]but they won't.[/spoiler]

So I really think this game is perhaps the best game that I've ever played and perhaps most importantly it actually largely got races right, which not even Master of Orion did (most 4x games don't as a result and frankly the anthro crap is a massive black stain on MoO that only gets overlooked because the rest was good). It's got hugely massive production values on top of really engaging gameplay, it's sleek, it works, it's fun, idk. This is just one of the top games I've been most excited about in the past ten years, so much so I even actually took the time to bother coming to official forums which I never do. Amplitude itself can hardly do any sin by me at this point, but the greats do often fall. I'm not even quite entirely sure why this studio is so good, but the composers definitely majorly add to it. So do the artists. Idk. I'm guessing maybe their staff is all just talented and works well together? So in the future I hope you guys can diplomatically iron out any internal issues should they ever arise.

No joke ES2 is like one of the only games I had actively been watching and hoping for that on top of it didn't let me down. I'm sorry for not going full price but well I was broke then otherwise this would be one of the sole games I wanted to buy at full price with the other exception being XCOM2, because these are some of the only games I've played in years that I was hyped for and that lived up to and exceeded my expectations.

I'm also glad that this studio is branching out and sort of what it looks like is producing their own kind of IP universe, because sadly Capitalism. I think there might be one game I didn't try yet, I know there was like two pixel type games and I only played the one briefly (neither was really my thing), and a VN, but I absolutely detest VNs. I hope that these guys can make us some city sims in the future, maybe a crpg because--and I don't say this often--I think that they probably have some pretty good writers. Hopefully the company is also confident enough to just sort of do their own thing at some point. Community input is great and all, but it gets at a certain point where imho everything should be a democracy except the art itself. Art is a dictatorship. I forget who said that. I guess it doesn't work for a company that has a team rather than one artist or writer working solo but whatever.

Best 4x I ever played. It remains a shiny beacon in my heart. I'll probably retain the same kind of sentimentality towards ES2 for countless years ahead [spoiler]unless the corona gets me[/spoiler] that I've had for things like Tides of Numenera, KOTOR, VTMB, and StarCraft among others. It's just a shame that 4x itself is a really niche kind of genre so I don't think enough people got exposed to how great this studio is. I still remember seeing these busted ass looking wikipedias when ES1 was just barely going into development and being skeptical but thinking hey it might be cool but wouldn't be surprised if crap. Even ES1 was a really great game btw. Still wish a few species became full on factions in ES2.

Hey are you guys ever gonna make an ES3? Oh man I should really squirrel some money away for things like this so I can preorder. I never preorder. But I would for this.

Tell us about a crazy story you experienced in the game.

Generate 130k science per turn in turn 150 and get scientific victory with vaulters ? Was a crazy game i didn't manage to replicate this situation twice. 

Tell us what you love about Endless Space 2, what makes it special to you.

Way more interresting to play than a civilization, however i love the game i don't like the last two extensions. I mean don't try to add that much gameplay everytime the game is just fine add more quest to make the story of each faction better, with, why not, some intermediate cinematics ?

Tell us about your favorite factions and characters.

Vaulters, because i love stargates and they're very convenient *smirk* Nah i love their story, unfortunate explorers that lost everything and try again from new planet.

I love how different all the Factions play and i'm happy to hear, that some great issues will get fixed, i still hope, that there will be some more DLC factions in the future,(and that some balance changes will come) because im so in love with this game and would be happy to throw more money to you for additional content :)

Oh my its been 3 years now, time is running   why are you running AAAAAAHHHH