Hello,



there is a lot written about learning from mistakes. I was wondering if these particular aspects have been taken into account:



1) The malus for invaded systems is huge, someone can topple you just by spamming ships to invade you - Did someone look at that? Maybe this should still apply to fully developed systems sure, but colonies that are still growing into a full one maybe something different can apply here? (This is grounds for discussion, point 2 is more important)



2) The attacker ALWAYS has the advantage. I am sorry but that´s the way it is. As soon as they start invading your system there is almost no way to stop them. Since even if you have a superior fleet to defend the system, they can just spam ships, and since they are warmongers they will always be making ships. If a single system is caught off-guard you can fight and hold them off for 20 turns, if that ´invade´ button was clicked by a military fleet at some stage, then 10 turns later the invasion fleet joins, you have no chance of gaining back control here.



The attacker gets huge advantages - and that is not factoring in the cut-off of resources, which is logical and fair. However when you have 3 full fleets fighting on your system that is being invaded, and not being able to do anything about it - that does need some looking into.



3) Bombers are broken. So are their supposed counters of fighters and pinpoint defenses.



Now all that being said I am very much looking forward to the new game mechanics.





Regards,

Sir Rogers

1+2) yes, spamming is really hard to get rid of, but this could be by design as putting more effort into war should be rewarded. But if correction is needed, what if your systems could have battle stations. These would be as strong as 90% of a fleet, and must be destroyed before the siege begins. Each system has a battle station which can be upgraded and custimized similarly to a fleet by building in your system. This would have no-little upkeep, and gives an edge to those with superior tech.

3) bombers were too strong, but the point defense and fighters made up for it in my opinion.

These are definitely points we are looking to address. Stay tuned for our next few game design documents which should let you peek into our philosophy for Endless Space 2.

Can you give us a rough time schedule for nexts points? That would be great!

I can't. Our game designers are working under a lot of time constraints and frequently have to refocus their attention on one thing or the other, and as such, committing to a date would just be setting you guys up for disappointment.

Frogsquadron wrote:
I can't. Our game designers are working under a lot of time constraints and frequently have to refocus their attention on one thing or the other, and as such, committing to a date would just be setting you guys up for disappointment.

Doesn't matter, looking forward to it all the same! =)

I feel like a reasonable solution to spamming ships to prevent them from killing your bombardment fleets would be to allow you to target a specific fleet, which would allow you to just target their bombardment fleet. This would mean that they'd have to have more mixed fleets with bombardment ships and defense ships in the same fleet, or perhaps ships with the capacity to do both, or you could just target their bombardment ships. As for spamming lots of smaller fleets with only a few ships per fleet in order to abuse the limited number of attacks you get, perhaps force small fleets to temporarily merge with other small fleets when you engage them.

emraldis wrote:
I feel like a reasonable solution to spamming ships to prevent them from killing your bombardment fleets would be to allow you to target a specific fleet, which would allow you to just target their bombardment fleet. This would mean that they'd have to have more mixed fleets with bombardment ships and defense ships in the same fleet, or perhaps ships with the capacity to do both, or you could just target their bombardment ships. As for spamming lots of smaller fleets with only a few ships per fleet in order to abuse the limited number of attacks you get, perhaps force small fleets to temporarily merge with other small fleets when you engage them.

Actually fleets already get merged to maxiumum command cap if they get attacked.

Being able to target outright invasion fleets would really destroy the point of having seperate invasion and combat fleets though. I feel like it would be better to instead have a cap on the number of fleets in enemy systems, so that there could only be like 2 at once(With reinforcements only being able to depart once there is only 1 fleet there) so that they could realisticaly be destroyed. That would also give a better advantage to the defender.

Overall the biggest thing I did not like in ES1 was the lack of "effective choices" in ship weapon design.



First of all, combat in ES1 is actually very complicated. There are a lot of variables, a lot of math to understand a ships true DPS. But that complexity did not actually add a lot of interesting choices, once you peered behind the complex veil you realized that the choices were generally no brainers or were similar enough that it did not matter.



Ultimately I would like to see a much simpler to understand system that offer concrete choices.

It was possible to create new ships that don´t need the resources which was not present in the blocked system. I think not every siege is like them of Troy but in reality everyone would blockade the sieged place very fast. It should give technology to help or you can chose which resources should prefered smuggled and stored.

So for ES2, Diplomatic pressure (which you'll learn about soonish, once we integrate VIP feedback!) and other features such as the ground battles should make it somewhat easier to play a defensive gameplay. However, keep in mind that we don't want to make offensive gameplay tedious either. Offensive strategies can be somewhat of a chore in the late game, so we're on board philosophically but erring on the side of caution.

Frogsquadron wrote:
So for ES2, Diplomatic pressure (which you'll learn about soonish, once we integrate VIP feedback!) and other features such as the ground battles should make it somewhat easier to play a defensive gameplay. However, keep in mind that we don't want to make offensive gameplay tedious either. Offensive strategies can be somewhat of a chore in the late game, so we're on board philosophically but erring on the side of caution.

Sometimes the best defense is a great offense. So, when making these late game decisions, an AI needs to be ready to defend itself as it goes for a victory conditions. A human played could certainly do that.

Being able to strategically target would go a large way to helping the issues. Being able to go in and try to destroy your opponent's anti-bomber capability, then follow up with the bombers, instead of trying to both bomb and destroy anti-bombers at the same time because everything is simultaneous, would be a huge step up in strategy.