rockmassif wrote:
Agreed, that's pretty much how I played ES the whole time.

I didn't really see any reason to get more than 1 Commander 90% of the time. 2 at most is all you need.

Others should be dealing with the star systems.

If you have 2 fleet commanders and the enemy brings 4 commander/pilots than your fleets gonna rapidly die. And they will die way faster than you can over hope to build them with that tiny 30% bonus. So hopefully you were able to use those boni long enough to have a significant larger fleet size ;-)

WhiteWeasel wrote:
Alternatively, they can keep their insane power, but only have it apply to a ship you assign them to command in the fleet. Also have it where if that specific ship is destroyed, the hero "flees in an escape pod" and has to be reassigned next turn. If the entire fleet he is in is wiped out, then the hero is injured. So while heroes are technically harder to get out of the picture in that system, their power is only limited to one ship and can be targeted.

I really like this idea and the idea of having commanders and pilots play into it in different ways. Also, pretty big on the idea of having the ships be unique and distinguishable from the rest of your fleet.



Personally, I felt they were a bit too strong in ES1 and I'd be in favor of anything that brings them more in line so their bonuses aren't completely overwhelming other game mechanics while giving them more character.

I think it really sounds like a good idea to have like the Pilot Heroes being put into a single ship and then controlling it, which would make it a lot more powerful, but just the single ship, while the Commander heroes would be put into the biggest ships of fleets and they wouldn't really affect the fleets capabilities in the major way they did in ES1, but they'd unlock like more flleet maneuvers and the ES2 equivalent of Battle Cards and stuff. Like you'd have a big tactical advantage in battles when you're fleet is commanded by an actual commander between you and the ships captains rather than you giving direct orders to the ships.

No idea how to balance governor heroes better though.

I want EL2 heroes to have the same level of influence / power as EL, and I certainly don't want EL2 to get rid of heroes or neuter them so bad they are non-factors



But in EL 1, all you needed were hero fleets - the way combat worked, with strategic choke points and the fact with right tech upgrades you could significantly expand the # of hero slots you could have, by mid game you basically had enough heroes where all your active combat fleets were led by heroes.



A few non-hero fleets might have been needed from time to time when the AI or multiple AI came at you via multiple war fronts, but usually with 4-5 heroes - especially pilot/commanders or pilot/adventurers - you could fight the whole war with your "true" 4-5 hero fleets locking down the entire armada of the combined AI against you.



So my suggestion would be to make combat such that either more active fleets are needed, or less # of heroes could be recruited relative to the # of active fleets you needed.



A hero led fleet should still be a major power vs any non-hero led fleet, but it would be nice in EL2 for heroes to be limited enough vs the total number of war fleets you need that you have to make smart, specific choices which war fleet you should assign hero to vs the EL1 reality where basically every contact point you had against the AI had 1 hero fleet.



Only way I can think to do the above is either change the strategic layer of combat such that in EL2 there are many more possible contact points, or war fronts, such that you have to use non hero fleets as much as hero led fleets. Or lower the # of heroes you can have.



In essence, dont gimp or boost hero power, but make use of non hero led fleets more part of the game than EL 1 did

I like Nasarog's idea of having real heroes that lead the fleets into combat - Rather than sticking most of them on various planets to act as governors.

In Endless Space I typically had only one Hero leading fleets, the rest being governors.



I'm by no means a number cruncher, but I always thought that a production-heavy system with a Hero upping prod by 30% or more is more interesting since you could crank out more combat fleets faster and end up saturating the enemy systems with complete combat-ready fleets, but that strategy probably works mostly because I tended to face AI enemies and ally with other human players...

Upping the industry by 30% is only more intresting against human players if you use ship spam strategies as this is the only thing which can compete in its overpoweredness with a lvl 25 Hero with his insane passives.

Frogsquadron wrote:
In Endless Space I typically had only one Hero leading fleets, the rest being governors.



I'm by no means a number cruncher, but I always thought that a production-heavy system with a Hero upping prod by 30% or more is more interesting since you could crank out more combat fleets faster and end up saturating the enemy systems with complete combat-ready fleets, but that strategy probably works mostly because I tended to face AI enemies and ally with other human players...

Agreed, that's pretty much how I played ES the whole time.

I didn't really see any reason to get more than 1 Commander 90% of the time. 2 at most is all you need.

Others should be dealing with the star systems.

hashinshin wrote:
So I wanted to make a thread for awhile, but could never really think of what the most important issue to me in ES1 was. After playing another game I've come to the conclusion that runaway powers of admirals and governors is probably the biggest problem in that game. Issues with heroes in ES1 include:



1. Rolling the right heroes giving you ludicrous advantages early game. Flat bonuses to either food or production (or both god forbid) allow your race to out expand other races to a silly degree. The difference between rolling up a good hero and a bad one is too much.



2. Having a powerful governor late game is both too easy to do (just sit him on developing worlds and eventually he becomes level 20 simply by watching stuff build), and way too powerful. It becomes imperative late game to have at least 2-3 level 20 governors so your planets get that 60%+ boost to industry. Heroes being powerful is great, heroes changing things up or making you play differently is great too. However, this aspect pretty much forced you to both luck your way in to multiple good governors, and use them in a specific way.



3. Admirals are just NUTS. A level 20 admiral can make your fleet literally impossible to even do damage to unless you yourself have a level 20 admiral. Heroes work much better in EL but are still a bit finicky. At least in EL you can feasibly beat a hero army without a hero, but in ES1 it's literally impossible. Heroes should be very powerful and perhaps should sit on a large capital ship, but they should't be able to let you go above your fleet limit (as they do in EL), and they should not have so many fleet wide buffs. A big problem is that you really only had 2 or 3 fleets that mattered, since non-hero fleets were absolutely powerless to impact a war.



Heroes made ES1 multiplayer very frustrating. While rolling bad heroes to start with was just an issue of restarting the game in single player (which was an issue still) but in multiplayer a player can just get trapped with a bad hero set and be screwed the whole game. Worse yet is when a player gets a high level hero a player without one is all but powerless to do anything to stop it. Pilgrims were notorious for this due to their higher level heroes. Pilgrims would often runaway with power and destroy the entire universe



Heroes should be much much much much more limited in power. The game should not be focusing on a bunch of superheroes running around controlling the universe. Especially in sci-fi space games there often aren't heroes, or their impact is severely limited. It just feels weird to me that we're in the space-future with giant dreadnoughts, and what really matters isn't that somebody has 2000 destroyers, but that one guy has 7 dreadnoughts with a single hero leading them. ESPECIALLY now that you have battle plans and all that, it'd just be weird that the most important feature in battles isn't your technology, how many guns you have, how big your ships are, how many ships you brought, how good your plans are... but how many levels one dude has.



At the very least look at their stacking bonuses and restrict that. Level 20 admirals stacking multiple fleet wide defensive auras which rendered you incapable of doing damage even with a level 10 or 15 admiral was a bit silly.

I find it interesting that you call the industry + food hero such a good thing, when most players seem to swear by an early fleet commander to play a very aggressive early game. As well your whole post makes no case against strong heros, but against having so many hero types in the game which are below the base-line of the good options. It not a question of balancing heros within the game, but balancing different heroes against each other. Which is indeed a problem, because some heros give you a large boost in your early game, while others are either never worth to pick up or sometimes only situationally useful. Neither of those should be in the starting pool of heroes for players because that unbalanced the game based on random.



Besides that, the levels ain't helping you against LR projectiles either and you gotta do something for those levels too. ;-)

Especially if you use developing planets as xp boost for heros, because you giving up all those extra resources you would get now for an advantage later. Your risk getting punished for that, but if your opponent does not punish you then you deserve your advantage. Sounds like a reasonable design to me.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
I agree tat the heroes should be somewhat weaker than in ES1, but they should still remain very powerful, potentially even game-changing. After all, they did use the word "space opera" to describe the tone of ES2, and a space opera needs characters larger than life. If they have truly powerful heroes, though, I hope they provide both interesting gameplay (like the specialization mentioned above), and lore tied properly into the game experience. Some dynamic development of the heroes might be interesting, as well: a chance to gain special traits after performing impressive feats.

Agreed.



Does some one remember the General trait system of Total War: Medieval I or also the watered down versions of the later Total Wars?



I realy loved the fact that your Generals devleloped besides their fighting and administration skill also personality traits.



For example a great warrior which is suddenly send to serve as a governor of a city after fighting half of his life time often starts drinking and gambling or even goes insane and dances nacked in the moonlight seeing elephants.

But sometimes if he was already a governor before he became a fearsome butcher during the war it can happen that he gained a trait that gave him many points at keeping the repression high when he finally returned to administrate a city again.



To cut a long story short

Some sort dynamic Hero development is always nice and would give the heroes alot of personality.

Well, again this is mostly idle talk, but I have the feeling that having more governors would mean you're ready for war earlier than your opponent (since you're cranking out your ships that much faster), and could make a dent into the enemy before they're at full strength.



Again, that's my thoughts on the subject and I could be very wrong.

Sovereign wrote:
Agreed.



Does some one remember the General trait system of Total War: Medieval I or also the watered down versions of the later Total Wars?



I realy loved the fact that your Generals devleloped besides their fighting and administration skill also personality traits.



For example a great warrior which is suddenly send to serve as a governor of a city after fighting half of his life time often starts drinking and gambling or even goes insane and dances nacked in the moonlight seeing elephants.

But sometimes if he was already a governor before he became a fearsome butcher during the war it can happen that he gained a trait that gave him many points at keeping the repression high when he finally returned to administrate a city again.



To cut a long story short

Some sort dynamic Hero development is always nice and would give the heroes alot of personality.

This could be really good indeed.



It would also be nice if heroes could die (but still have very long lifespans thanks to the Dust), so that you would regularly need to find and build new heroes (including by cloning them), and your heroes would not be overpowered and immortal god-like beings.

Or maybe introduce two kinds of heroes : the "normal" kind, who would live and die, and the "endless" kind, who would be very rare and would never stop to grow. I think that ES lacked some kind of intermediary "officer" and "governor" heroes (as opposed to "general" and "ruler" heroes).

Having heroes die would be a huge hassle though if for example you had a hero sit with your fleet which was, maybe because you're no warmonger, not really fightinh fights, with the hero therefore not really leveling up that much. NOw that hero dies, and you need to replace it with one with even fewer experience. Also, the games generally doesn't span long enough for heroes to die (natually, anyway), given their use of dust and advances in medical technology.



Also, what if heroes always could assume a role as both a governor and a fleet/ship commander? Like maybe skills would have an governor and a commander effect. That could make heroes more dynamic, and less RNG dependant, since all heroes would always have 1 governor trait and 1 commander trait, and both governor and commander skills/boosts. And it would make heroes a bit less OP; since you couldn't have a corporate administrator run your systems to the max or a pilot/commander take your fleet up to 11K.

Apocalypse wrote:
If you have 2 fleet commanders and the enemy brings 4 commander/pilots than your fleets gonna rapidly die. And they will die way faster than you can over hope to build them with that tiny 30% bonus. So hopefully you were able to use those boni long enough to have a significant larger fleet size ;-)

The enemy would have to get 4 sufficently leveled heroes to defeat the fleets first anyway, and the 2 or more system heroes would mean more overall FIDS for the first player, which would result in better and more ships to go with the 2 heroes.

Apocalypse wrote:
If you have 2 fleet commanders and the enemy brings 4 commander/pilots than your fleets gonna rapidly die. And they will die way faster than you can over hope to build them with that tiny 30% bonus. So hopefully you were able to use those boni long enough to have a significant larger fleet size ;-)

Actually, no. I've never experienced the thing you said. A single commander was always enough. Of course they brought more than one commander usually and I was able to beat them all with my single commander. Having the superior fleet helps.

Funneling all the experience onto the one Hero also definitely helped me keep the upper hand (and then increase that starting advantage to stay abreast of the competition), as opposed to having a few comparatively underleveled heroes.



Having Heroes die seems like a false solution, prone to be the source of a lot more upset than the other way around.

Frogsquadron wrote:
Funneling all the experience onto the one Hero also definitely helped me keep the upper hand (and then increase that starting advantage to stay abreast of the competition), as opposed to having a few comparatively underleveled heroes.



Having Heroes die seems like a false solution, prone to be the source of a lot more upset than the other way around.

Could we have the option to have them die? Like a starting game check box?



(lol, the number of beginning game option requests must be huge).

Believe me, I'm also a big fan of customization option for games... I'd spend entire minutes fiddling with them at the start of every ES game I was in.



I'll definitely add this to the list of suggestions made, but I can't guarantee it'll get much air time if any. It sounds like a pretty dramatic thing and could in practice be pretty difficult to implement.

So I wanted to make a thread for awhile, but could never really think of what the most important issue to me in ES1 was. After playing another game I've come to the conclusion that runaway powers of admirals and governors is probably the biggest problem in that game. Issues with heroes in ES1 include:



1. Rolling the right heroes giving you ludicrous advantages early game. Flat bonuses to either food or production (or both god forbid) allow your race to out expand other races to a silly degree. The difference between rolling up a good hero and a bad one is too much.



2. Having a powerful governor late game is both too easy to do (just sit him on developing worlds and eventually he becomes level 20 simply by watching stuff build), and way too powerful. It becomes imperative late game to have at least 2-3 level 20 governors so your planets get that 60%+ boost to industry. Heroes being powerful is great, heroes changing things up or making you play differently is great too. However, this aspect pretty much forced you to both luck your way in to multiple good governors, and use them in a specific way.



3. Admirals are just NUTS. A level 20 admiral can make your fleet literally impossible to even do damage to unless you yourself have a level 20 admiral. Heroes work much better in EL but are still a bit finicky. At least in EL you can feasibly beat a hero army without a hero, but in ES1 it's literally impossible. Heroes should be very powerful and perhaps should sit on a large capital ship, but they should't be able to let you go above your fleet limit (as they do in EL), and they should not have so many fleet wide buffs. A big problem is that you really only had 2 or 3 fleets that mattered, since non-hero fleets were absolutely powerless to impact a war.



Heroes made ES1 multiplayer very frustrating. While rolling bad heroes to start with was just an issue of restarting the game in single player (which was an issue still) but in multiplayer a player can just get trapped with a bad hero set and be screwed the whole game. Worse yet is when a player gets a high level hero a player without one is all but powerless to do anything to stop it. Pilgrims were notorious for this due to their higher level heroes. Pilgrims would often runaway with power and destroy the entire universe



Heroes should be much much much much more limited in power. The game should not be focusing on a bunch of superheroes running around controlling the universe. Especially in sci-fi space games there often aren't heroes, or their impact is severely limited. It just feels weird to me that we're in the space-future with giant dreadnoughts, and what really matters isn't that somebody has 2000 destroyers, but that one guy has 7 dreadnoughts with a single hero leading them. ESPECIALLY now that you have battle plans and all that, it'd just be weird that the most important feature in battles isn't your technology, how many guns you have, how big your ships are, how many ships you brought, how good your plans are... but how many levels one dude has.



At the very least look at their stacking bonuses and restrict that. Level 20 admirals stacking multiple fleet wide defensive auras which rendered you incapable of doing damage even with a level 10 or 15 admiral was a bit silly.

I agree tat the heroes should be somewhat weaker than in ES1, but they should still remain very powerful, potentially even game-changing. After all, they did use the word "space opera" to describe the tone of ES2, and a space opera needs characters larger than life. If they have truly powerful heroes, though, I hope they provide both interesting gameplay (like the specialization mentioned above), and lore tied properly into the game experience. Some dynamic development of the heroes might be interesting, as well: a chance to gain special traits after performing impressive feats.

Specializations sound interesting. I also like the idea of minor heroes with just a few legendary ones. Same goes for special hero ships that get buffs, not whole fleets. Anything to control the overpowered nature of heroes in ES sounds good to me really. It was kind of sad to watch nominally powerful fleets of ships get smashed to pieces so easily just because the other side had a hero along for the ride.

Yeah. I will say, usually I prefer levelling up EVERYTHING to become basically a god, but I wouldn't argue with specializations.

husker wrote:
Two things that could really help achieve this and would not require any major adjustments. 1) slow the rate of level advancement and 2) force the player to make choices about the hero development rather than the current method of making all development perks eventually obtainable. For instance once your hero is level 10 you must choose a specialization thereby cutting off certain other paths.

That's a pretty good idea.

Two things that could really help achieve this and would not require any major adjustments. 1) slow the rate of level advancement and 2) force the player to make choices about the hero development rather than the current method of making all development perks eventually obtainable. For instance once your hero is level 10 you must choose a specialization thereby cutting off certain other paths.

We must not forget that the way the battle will be handled will be totally changed: there will be more tactical option since we will be able to choose how the fleet will evolve in space (different formations, focusing a special part of the enemy fleet, surrounding, etc...).



So, I would find it really interesting if the heroes participate to the battle in his own ship, allowing the enemy to attack him and possibly making him k.o. for the rest of the battle if the ship is destroyed (cancelling his boosts). Of course it means the heroes will still boost the entire fleet (Less than ES1 still...) but if we can cancel it by using a good tactic, why not?



The different classes could have a great role here: the pilot would boost less his army but will be harder to focus whereas the commander would give huge boost to everyone but would have less bonus for his own ship.



I don't know what to think about the legendary heroes. I like the idea of a lot of "minor" heroes with lesser abilities. But I wouldn't know what to do with a single over powered hero. Why one? Is he your emperor and you get huge trouble if he dies (succession civil war, instability...)? Will he still be able to beat every fleet he encounter that would not have a legendary hero too? What will be the point of minor heroes then?

So, I would like to like this but it is still too dark for me to have an idea about it :/

WhiteWeasel wrote:
Alternatively, they can keep their insane power, but only have it apply to a ship you assign them to command in the fleet. Also have it where if that specific ship is destroyed, the hero "flees in an escape pod" and has to be reassigned next turn. If the entire fleet he is in is wiped out, then the hero is injured. So while heroes are technically harder to get out of the picture in that system, their power is only limited to one ship and can be targeted.

Would also add interesting tactics to Pilot and Commander classes. Give the pilot a special small CP ship for interesting dynamics, while the Commander would be assignable to any ship you wanted (Preferably a large one).



It would be cool to see them steal "Special" items from Endless Legend as well. It's cool when you get a special weapon that can only be used by a hero. Imagine that same thing, but with ship components instead. Would make using a special, small craft actually viable.

I liked the direction the studio went with heros in EL. +1 to all the points about how OPed ES1's heros were, and how crippling a bad initial hero set could be.



Also really liked how EL heros have their upgrade path visualized from the start instead of trying to have to remember what abilities you need to take to unlock the higher tier ones you want.

WhiteWeasel wrote:
While I agree that heroes should be influential enough to change the outcome of a battle, I do think they should be toned down. I mean a lvl 25 hero in ES can have insane passives of 100%+ defensive and offensive capabilities on your entire fleet and turn a battle that would have been a loss or tie, to a total curbstomp.



Alternatively, they can keep their insane power, but only have it apply to a ship you assign them to command in the fleet. Also have it where if that specific ship is destroyed, the hero "flees in an escape pod" and has to be reassigned next turn. If the entire fleet he is in is wiped out, then the hero is injured. So while heroes are technically harder to get out of the picture in that system, their power is only limited to one ship and can be targeted.

Interesting idea. I still like my minor heroes idea though.

WhiteWeasel wrote:


Alternatively, they can keep their insane power, but only have it apply to a ship you assign them to command in the fleet. Also have it where if that specific ship is destroyed, the hero "flees in an escape pod" and has to be reassigned next turn. If the entire fleet he is in is wiped out, then the hero is injured. So while heroes are technically harder to get out of the picture in that system, their power is only limited to one ship and can be targeted.

That sir I would sign.



Sounds like a lot of fun too.

Maybe you could give that ship even a name or it would have a different tint in cinematics.



I would like that. As when I play 4X its also a sort of RPG to me. And my RPG heart would love to have some famous and glorious ships amongst all of my replaceable fleets.

While I agree that heroes should be influential enough to change the outcome of a battle, I do think they should be toned down. I mean a lvl 25 hero in ES can have insane passives of 100%+ defensive and offensive capabilities on your entire fleet and turn a battle that would have been a loss or tie, to a total curbstomp.



Alternatively, they can keep their insane power, but only have it apply to a ship you assign them to command in the fleet. Also have it where if that specific ship is destroyed, the hero "flees in an escape pod" and has to be reassigned next turn. If the entire fleet he is in is wiped out, then the hero is injured. So while heroes are technically harder to get out of the picture in that system, their power is only limited to one ship and can be targeted.

I wouldn't want to have legendary heroes, and lesser heroes because i think it would cause the lesser heroes to be very generic and underplayed with too much emphasis on wanting and utilizing legendary heroes. As far as single copy of heroes, I do agree there shouldn't be of the same exact same guy, but this would really limit the hero pool size I would think.



I would like to see all heroes unique in their own ways, and have players level specialize those uniqueness to have a different experience each game even based on what heroes you get. I had been thinking since they announced ES2 that having a "propagandist" hero would be cool in the sense that you would see like a "rigged"/landslide victory for whichever party you wanted.

Here's what I've suggested in the past and still do now. There needs to be two classes of heroes. Legendary heroes and minor/local ones.



A legendary hero comes from a pool of heroes. They are like the heroes from ES, but better balanced. Not OP, but strong. There is only a single copy of these heroes and depending on which ones you land, your game can completely change.



Minor/Local heroes are ship commanders or governors that have done a great job and survived many encounters that develop their own skills like veteran units do in EL. There would be the ones you use to lead your fleets or governors or something.



What do yo guys/gals think?

I like the fact that a single hero can turn the tide of a battle. I hear where you are coming from about not making them over powered. To me though, I think you need heroes that you can slap on system to turn it around economically and build it up to a decent system as well as sending or reassigning a fleet hero to make push and break into enemy lines. I will have to kinda disagree with this because heroes are a big part of the game to me and I think they should have influence in the game.

I couldn't agree more: having a fleet with a hero at least level 15 makes it able to beat the exact same fleet without taking damage.



In the lore it is explained that they can manipulate the dust and use it to improve defence and offence of the ships. It seems logical since dust can create a giant ship from scratch and repair an entire fleet. But, in this case, building ships would be meaningless because dust is way more powerful than any cannon.

To solve it according the lore, your idea of a hero with his own admiral ship ("star wars : empire at war" style ) is, for me, really great because it doesn't decrease the power of the dust (only his ship would be overpowered). We just have to say that heroes have to be in direct contact to use the dust on a ship. That is for the "dust bonuses".



Beside, the bonuses can be explained by the fact that heroes are great strategist and would make smarter moves than their opponent. But now in ES2 we will be able to do those manoeuvres manually, so no more "tactical bonuses". Maybe it could count during automatic battles, I don't know.