Hi Amplitude, longtime ES player here. With ES 2 coming up, I wanted to make a recap of my experience with ES 1. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about the original game, as well as a few areas where I felt it could have been improved. I hope that sharing this will assist you as you develop ES2!



Things I really enjoyed:

- Exploration. It was really fun to explore the galaxy on each new map and to race to find the best planets and anomalies. I'd love to see even more planet types and anomaly possibilities in the sequel! It would be interesting to have other kinds of astronomical objects, like stars and black holes have a stronger interaction in the sequel. For example, being able to build improvements on stars (like a Dyson sphere) to extract FIDS directly from them.

It would also be interesting if you could do more with moons. After all, looking at our own solar system, moons may have just as much potential for habitation as planets! I think the decision to gradually unlock/expand the viable colonization targets through the exploration tech tree was a great decision and prevents the player from feeling overwhelmed. Star lanes are also a great feature, I think they're really useful tools for deciding where to colonize, where to explore next, and where to defend attacks.



- World building. ES 1 had interesting lore that was introduced gradually and didn't interrupt the flow of the game. I thought the races were for the most part really interesting lore-wise. I feel that ES 2 is already doing very well in this regard. The concept art so far has been amazing, and the artists are doing a great job of bringing ES 2 to life as it's own sci-fi setting with a unique/distinct feel compared to other sci-fi franchises.



- Playable races. One of the things I enjoy about ES 1 is the roster of playable races. The design generally does a good job of making each race feel like it rewards a distinct playstyle and play differently from the other races. The races also appeal to different levels of skill - races like the Amoeba, for example, helped new players by revealing the best systems for them to expand to early on, so they could have a strong early start. The races aren't perfectly balanced (some choices are clearly stronger than others) but I think this is interesting in it's own right as it adds dynamism and variety to each game. Sometimes you run into the stronger races as AI enemies and have a harder game, and you can also choose to play a powerful race if you want to make the game easier. Try to keep this feeling of variety in the sequel!



- Empire management is fun. I found it really satisfying to build up and specialize my systems for different tasks as the game progressed. However, because systems in ES 1 can eventually be transformed into anything you like, I sometimes found it difficult to decide what the best specialization for each system was. In the endgame, every system tended towards all-helium or all-methane in most cases. In ES 2, I think it would be helpful to provide more mechanics to suggest system specializations to the player, or to reward the player for having diverse planet types. For example, in ES 1, if I saw a system with a "+10 experience to ships" Moon Temple, then I knew that this might be a good system to specialize for production. ES 2 could use more of this.



I also thought it was always odd that the most habitable Class 1 planets were among the least productive/valuable planets in the endgame! I'd love to see a more viable role/specialization for each planet type.



- Earlygame gameplay. ES 1's earlygame is well-paced and fun as you're rushing to expand as quickly as possible. Your improvement decisions during this time feel meaningful and there's a good balance of micro/macro management and consideration for short term vs long term gains.



- The tech tree. I generally enjoy how the tech tree works in ES 1. I feel like there is a good balance between techs that reward you for "beelining" to them and incentive to diversify your research into cheaper techs. There are very few techs that feel useless. I do feel that some techs could be improved, or made more interesting though. There are a lot of techs that offer incremental improvements as opposed to opening up interesting new strategies/decisions for the player. The only techs that didn't feel very useful were the "influence area" economic techs. The increased spotting radius was rarely large enough to be useful, so I usually ignored these.





Things I felt could be improved:

- Hotkeys. As far as I know, ES 1 has very few keyboard hotkeys to make the game easier to control. Adding hotkeys to make system and ship management more efficient would help keep up the pace of the game and reduce the amount of tedium from managing your empire.



- Combat. Generally speaking, I found combat to be unintuitive and mechanically bland compared to other TBS games. It was difficult to understand how to make an effective ship design at first - I needed to look up guides online to see how to set up more effective fleets. In the sequel, I would try to make combat less abstract and make the relationship between the player's ship design/weapons setup decisions and the actual outcome of combat easier to understand. The player should have a better sense of how their decisions positively or negatively impacted the outcome of each battle.



- Lategame gameplay. In a lot of games, I would find that I had a commanding lead going into the endgame, and all I needed to do to win was just hit end turn a bunch of times. After eating one or two rival AI's, you can snowball your earlygame advantages so much that it is impossible for the rival AIs to catch up. This is a problem with 4X-style game design in general, not something unique to Endless Space. I would work on maintaining a more even challenge curve that keeps the AI genuinely threatening/challenging at all phases of the game, so that the player needs to constantly work to stay ahead. Perhaps this could involve adding new advantages to give smaller empires a way to catch up, making the remaining AIs unite against expansionist empires, adding technological disasters or powerful alien invaders to the endgame, etc.



- Lategame management. While ES 1's early game is brisk and well-paced once you understand it, this slows down as the game progresses. As you accumulate more systems, the amount of micromanagement becomes excessive and bogs down the pace of the game, especially on larger maps. Perhaps a more effective AI governor would be useful here (the one in ES 1 isn't especially effective).



- Diplomacy. While functional, I would occasionally be frustrated by the limitations of the diplomacy system and the limited interactions available.

As an example, it was really frustrating to invade an AI with an ally AI, only to discover that your ally has begun invading systems that you want with a fleet that can never conquer them (sitting in blockade for 999 turns). Only one invasion can occur at a time, so your own ally can effectively block you from getting the systems you want! Other times, your ally would abruptly quit a war in a situation where a runaway AI needs to be stopped. Even from the AI's perspective, quitting the war is essentially conceding the game in this position.



It would be helpful to have more nuanced diplomatic actions that allow you to ask for more specific things, like "please move away from this system" or "please invade that system". It would also be helpful to have a way to predict AI diplomacy actions to a greater extent (getting an idea of when they will quit or start wars). It would also be nice if the AI was more generally aware of the state of the game (who the strongest and weaker players are, who is likely to win soon).



- Achievements. Some of the achievements in ES 1 didn't make a lot of sense and/or were too "grindy". I think that achievements should reward you for accomplishing something challenging or doing something unique, rather than incentivizing you to play in a sub-optimal way. As an example of this, consider the achievements for killing Troops in ES 1. You can only get these achievements by allowing your systems to be invaded over and over! Essentially, the achievement asks you to intentionally put yourself in a losing position. Make sure the achievements are fun to work towards!



Hope that helps. Looking forward to ES 2!

About hotkeys, some obscure patch last year added some to the system production queue(Pressing ctrl to put something atop for example), but I agree that more hotkeys are always useful. Same with most other points, especially the systems one; managing more than a dozen systems can get a pain later on. Maybe there could be some half-automization, like setting a system to always exploit planets for food until it's full and then switch to whatever fits the planet most and switch back when max pop rises.



I disagree about achievments though that's the point of achievments hell for some people working towards all achievments is really fun and others might just kill 50 troops in all their games because everyone gets invaded sometimes unless playing against AI only. Besides, there's plenty of achievments like that already, and plenty of normal progress achievments.