I love endless space. I think it is a 7.5/10, but I wish it were higher. Unfortunately there are various issues throughout the game that together pull down the score. I'm hoping these can get fixed in Endless Space 2.

• Good Things (not everything, just what I want to emphasize in contrast to other games):
  
  
  • I love the warp grid. It creates lots of interesting possibilities instead of being able to wander around willy nilly at the beginning. Needs to become more optional later, though, to allow more tactical flexibility.
  • I like the idea of the combat system. The simplicity emphasizes strategy instead of tactics. See below for execution issues.
  • The sides are very varied. I wish they were more varied; I would like to see more sides that were as different as the Harmony are compared to the others.
    
    
  
  
  
• General Issues:
  
  
  • The color coding of technologies and improvements is handy, but the grouping is odd and unintuitive. Both Dust and Trade increasing improvements are indicated by yellow tags, Planetary Defenses and Ship construction improvements are both red, and food and population increases are both green. Then you have grey and pink, which are not readily explained in the game; you have to jump to the wiki to find out what they are. Everything should be much more clearly delineated at a glance, perhaps using sub icons (a shield for planet defense, a sword for ship improvements?).
  • There are multiple places where zooming out destroys your ability to actually use the screen. When zoomed out on the tech tree to anything but the closest zoom level, you can't see what the techs give you in game terms, only in flavor text, so you have to stay zoomed in almost all the time. When zoomed out on the galaxy, you lose all production information at too high of a zoom level, and at the lowest zoom instead of seeing a big territory overlay you lose all game information.
  • There is a general lack of summary screens, requiring excessive manual zooming in. When you want to set a planet's exploitation, or colonize, or mitigate the disadvantage, or perform moon surveys, or revive an artifact, you have to zoom in on the planet. You should be able to do all this from the system screen. For things that you gradually get the tech for, like moon surveys, you should be able to quickly set them automatically on large numbers of systems when the tech comes up, instead of having to slog through every single planet in every single system whenever you get these to manually queue them up 1 by one. Same thing with military tech: if you get something that is a straight upgrade (for example, moving from tier 1 to tier 2 on a weapon type) you should be asked if you want to just upgrade everything on any ship that uses the tech, and there should be an option to do this on anything you haven't done it on at all times afterward if you decide not to. Instead, you have to go through every ship class one by one anytime you get new tech, and often you may not realize you got something that could be upgraded (also you should just be able to leave the ship builder if you changed nothing, instead of still getting the warning confirmation).
  • Working on the empire screen is too hard to do because you can't tell relative locations of things. You keep having to go out to the starmap in order to, for example, tell if a planet is near or far from a battlefront in order to tell if it should be making ships. There needs to be some kind of basic minimap or something for this screen so you can remain aware of what planet is where.
  • Military heroes are pretty useless compared to economic heroes in general.
  • While I do like the warp grid at first, it also can become stifling. The tech to travel off the grid is not that good, and thus you end up still stuck to it because of efficiency.
  • Being stuck on the grid can create some annoying situations where you lose systems that you feel you should be able to get to more effectively than by running in a huge arc through 4 others, but yet even with the off-grid travel drive are still reached more quickly in this way. It's actually quite rare that this tech is practical. Making this more usable would allow for creative moves like flanking enemies and attacking rear lines.
  • You do not get any kind of warning to stop or change movement orders if a system changes hands. As such, you can lose your rally system and yet still have ships running into there and dying one at a time for a long time afterward. If the destination or any system on a route changes sides, you should at least be asked if you want to change what units going to or through that system should do.
  • Having ships become immobile in non-allied but non-hostile systems is dumb. They should be forced to go back to my nearest system, not stuck there until they are attacked and retreat.
  • The approval system is too unforgiving of war, making it hard to fight because of how quickly you go bankrupt while trying to keep systems from going on strike, especially at the early stages of the game.
  • Aside from the initial inability to colonize some worlds, there is very little variation based on your side concerning planet types. It would be better if the different races had different preferences that had more of an influence on gameplay.
  • When your empire gets large, huge swaths of it end up with nothing better to do than be on point production. More varied production options would help a lot.
    
    
  
  
  
• Production
  
  
  • The insertion of new buildings or ships into the queue does not follow a consistent order. Sometimes things go in in descending order and sometimes they go in in ascending order. Pick one or the other (I prefer descending, ie whatever I click on last is at the end). Give the ability to drag and drop fro the right hand list in order to put things in out of sequence. However conversions (infinite cost prod-> sci/dust/food) should always go at the end; I should never be able to put things in behind the conversions and wonder why they aren't getting built.
  • I should be able to save ship build sets, so I can tell it to build a certain fleet arrangement without having to do it manually all the time.
  • I should be able to set fleet automatic destinations both in the production screen and from the map, so I can have my forces automatically go to a forward staging area instead of having to move absolutely everything manually. Should be able to distinguish between combat, siege, and colony types (ie it sends the combat ships to one place, the siege ships to another place, and holds the colony ships). These should be intelligent enough to not send fleets to systems that are blockaded or no longer under my control; when that happens it pops up and asks me what I want to do.
  • The hanger system is just annoying; it is too easy to lose ships in there.
  • I should be able to do all production from the system level; I should never have to zoom in on planets if I don't want to.
  • It is too easy to trip the planet zoom when I meant to move population and viceversa.
  • The empire-wide view should show planet icons so you can see how many planets are colonized, what type they are, exploitation, etc. from the empire summary.
  • The empire summary should occupy the entire vertical space on the screen; on my systems it starts scrolling at only 3/4 of the screen height. I hope proper adjustments will be made for ES2 to utilize ALL of the screen.
    
    
  
  
  
• Research
  
  
  • Some of the branching and location of upgrades is nonsensical, ie how you have to research tundra colonization and nothing else before getting the 1st ship class, or how leaving a spy network behind so you can see what is going on at a captured planet is in the trade tree. Would benefit from more multidimensional branching.
  • It is often not clear where things are, ie the increase in military command point cap being in the trade and diplomacy tree.
  • Some type tags don't make sense, like collaborators being green instead of red.
  • You shouldn't be able to get things that need knowledge of a strategic resource before you have the resource, ie getting enhanced kinetic weapons without hexaferum. You really shouldn't be able upgrade ship designs before you have the strategic resource you need to use item.
    
    
  
  
  
• Military
  
  
  • There should be a default ship for each class, showing off the unique strengths of the new chassis.
  • There need to be summary screens when a combat begins. Right now, in order to tell what my enemy has and pick the best strategies, I need to mouse over each ship in his fleet 1 at a time. Also, if I have forgotten what is in my fleet, I have to do the same for my own ships. This makes it very annoying to decide what to do, especially if you get many combats in a row. It also leads to humans picking very homogenous builds so they know that they always need to optimize for one weapon, ie building all beam weapons ships so you don't have to remember what each fleet has.
  • There need to be more advantages and counters for weapons and types. Building entire empires on nothing but beam weapons should come with the risk of the enemy fielding countering technology and rendering your ships useless. Without this, there is no real difference between the weapon types and no reason to use different ones.
  • It is not clear at all in the ship design screen that there are multiple types, ie different ranges of weapons, different troop types, etc. It also doesn't make sense that all weapons default to long range instead of their respective optimals.
  • It needs to be much clearer what classes get bonuses on which things. Perhaps color things with bonuses green. Many people don't realize that different classes get weight discounts on certain items.
  • Ship appearance should change based on what is on them.
  • Manual mode is almost pointless right now except to waste time. It is very boring to watch and has almost no interaction. The only advantage is that you can change to retreat if things are going badly.
  • In almost all cases, battle is decided by fleet statistics. Going into manual mode will almost never allow you to take victory over a superior force because there just isn't enough there.
  • Supremacy victory is almost impossible to get to before expansion victory is tripped.
    
    
  
  
  
• Diplomacy
  
  
  • Diplomacy with AI is very weird. You often can be very friendly with a race, but they will refuse to ally or cooperate for no visible reason. Gets worse when trying to ally with multiple races, where some combinations will work but not others even though everyone is at the same level visibly with respect to all the parties involved.
  • Diplomacy in general is very unstable, with switches from alliance to war for no apparent reason.
  • Allied AI are often unhelpful. You will both be at war with the same people, but only you are actually doing combat. There need to be options to force allied AI to do something, and also options to distribute spoils ie I ask my ally to give me system X when they conquer it and I give them system Y, so we don't end up with patchwork territory at the end of fighting.
  • Diplomacy victory is almost impossible unless you turn off every other victory condition.
    
    
  
  
  
• AI
  
  
  • The AI will often try to move my ships through enemy systems or peaceful but not open border systems, because the route is shorter. The is especially bad since you can't see the route before the move is executed. I should have to intentionally tell it to move to an enemy or non-allied system for it to go there. This often results in lost ships because instead of reinforcing a system your 1 ship goes into an enemy system instead.
  • The AI management makes stupid choices, meaning you have to micromanage every single build in every single system all the time (see earlier comment on the zooming issues).
  • AI empires act stupidly by not colonizing systems sometimes. You end up with an AI side that has only 4 systems and 5+ uncolonized systems in the area or between the colonized systems that are unused and spawning pirates.
  • The enemy AI, at least to my knowledge, never goes off grid, and gets confused if you do. This is partially because it is rarely better go off grid than to just attack the nearest system (See general comments), but if it is made more practical the AI needs to use it too.
    
    
  
  
  
  
  

I'll comment on what I think about your points point by point with my replies marked in red.

• Good Things (not everything, just what I want to emphasize in contrast to other games):
  
  
  • I love the warp grid. It creates lots of interesting possibilities instead of being able to wander around willy nilly at the beginning. Needs to become more optional later, though, to allow more tactical flexibility.
  • I like the idea of the combat system. The simplicity emphasizes strategy instead of tactics. See below for execution issues.
  • The sides are very varied. I wish they were more varied; I would like to see more sides that were as different as the Harmony are compared to the others.
    
    
  
  
  
• General Issues:
  
  
  • The color coding of technologies and improvements is handy, but the grouping is odd and unintuitive. Both Dust and Trade increasing improvements are indicated by yellow tags, Planetary Defenses and Ship construction improvements are both red, and food and population increases are both green. Then you have grey and pink, which are not readily explained in the game; you have to jump to the wiki to find out what they are. Everything should be much more clearly delineated at a glance, perhaps using sub icons (a shield for planet defense, a sword for ship improvements?).I feel like the color tags are pretty self explanatory in context, but I guess better color coding/explanation never hurts
  • There are multiple places where zooming out destroys your ability to actually use the screen. When zoomed out on the tech tree to anything but the closest zoom level, you can't see what the techs give you in game terms, only in flavor text, so you have to stay zoomed in almost all the time. When zoomed out on the galaxy, you lose all production information at too high of a zoom level, and at the lowest zoom instead of seeing a big territory overlay you lose all game information.I mean I always manage to find a right level in the middle but there's probably really room for improvemtns.
  • There is a general lack of summary screens, requiring excessive manual zooming in. When you want to set a planet's exploitation, or colonize, or mitigate the disadvantage, or perform moon surveys, or revive an artifact, you have to zoom in on the planet. You should be able to do all this from the system screen. For things that you gradually get the tech for, like moon surveys, you should be able to quickly set them automatically on large numbers of systems when the tech comes up, instead of having to slog through every single planet in every single system whenever you get these to manually queue them up 1 by one. Same thing with military tech: if you get something that is a straight upgrade (for example, moving from tier 1 to tier 2 on a weapon type) you should be asked if you want to just upgrade everything on any ship that uses the tech, and there should be an option to do this on anything you haven't done it on at all times afterward if you decide not to. Instead, you have to go through every ship class one by one anytime you get new tech, and often you may not realize you got something that could be upgraded (also you should just be able to leave the ship builder if you changed nothing, instead of still getting the warning confirmation).There's a button to survey all your moons, same with anomaly reduction, though I think being able to do it from system view ratehr than planet wouldn't hurt, even though I don't see it as an issue myself.
  • Working on the empire screen is too hard to do because you can't tell relative locations of things. You keep having to go out to the starmap in order to, for example, tell if a planet is near or far from a battlefront in order to tell if it should be making ships. There needs to be some kind of basic minimap or something for this screen so you can remain aware of what planet is where.I mean I generally know where the front is and where not because systems are named that said there is definetly room for improvement here planet names and such can be confusing indeed
  • Military heroes are pretty useless compared to economic heroes in general.No they're not you're probably just using them wrong
  • While I do like the warp grid at first, it also can become stifling. The tech to travel off the grid is not that good, and thus you end up still stuck to it because of efficiency.I mean thats the point you eventually get to go around but it still takes longer. Just because you can off the grid doesn't mean it should become obsolete
  • Being stuck on the grid can create some annoying situations where you lose systems that you feel you should be able to get to more effectively than by running in a huge arc through 4 others, but yet even with the off-grid travel drive are still reached more quickly in this way. It's actually quite rare that this tech is practical. Making this more usable would allow for creative moves like flanking enemies and attacking rear lines.Warp Drive is useful for flanking and getting back from systems you're not allowed to be at that's why it's rarely faster
  • You do not get any kind of warning to stop or change movement orders if a system changes hands. As such, you can lose your rally system and yet still have ships running into there and dying one at a time for a long time afterward. If the destination or any system on a route changes sides, you should at least be asked if you want to change what units going to or through that system should do.I personally just manually send my ships around but if you do use rally points they better be behind the front where they shouldn't be taken otherwise you still get a notifaction for systems losts so you can change it
  • Having ships become immobile in non-allied but non-hostile systems is dumb. They should be forced to go back to my nearest system, not stuck there until they are attacked and retreat.As I said, off the grid warp is tehre to help. And open borders maybe. Though it can be annoying at times but you can just scrap that scout.
  • The approval system is too unforgiving of war, making it hard to fight because of how quickly you go bankrupt while trying to keep systems from going on strike, especially at the early stages of the game.Then don't take enemy systems or get more approval; there's plenty of rich sources
  • Aside from the initial inability to colonize some worlds, there is very little variation based on your side concerning planet types. It would be better if the different races had different preferences that had more of an influence on gameplay.Yeah it would actually be interesting if some factions had different approval mali and boni on different planets. Definetly a good idea.
  • When your empire gets large, huge swaths of it end up with nothing better to do than be on point production. More varied production options would help a lot. I don't really get what you mean. There's still ind2sci/dust if you don't know what to make though
    
    
  
  
  
• Production
  
  
  • The insertion of new buildings or ships into the queue does not follow a consistent order. Sometimes things go in in descending order and sometimes they go in in ascending order. Pick one or the other (I prefer descending, ie whatever I click on last is at the end). Give the ability to drag and drop fro the right hand list in order to put things in out of sequence. However conversions (infinite cost prod-> sci/dust/food) should always go at the end; I should never be able to put things in behind the conversions and wonder why they aren't getting built.That's a bug relating to alt tabbing, pressing alt should fix everything going to the front of the queue. And I wanna be able to set that mostly finished ship or building I don't need yet to behind the conversion because I don't want said ship/building be done yet. Also there's a bug I think that conversions don't work if you don't have something behind them
  • I should be able to save ship build sets, so I can tell it to build a certain fleet arrangement without having to do it manually all the time.I mean I never build enough fleets to need that but I also always have too few fleets so yeah that would be nice
  • I should be able to set fleet automatic destinations both in the production screen and from the map, so I can have my forces automatically go to a forward staging area instead of having to move absolutely everything manually. Should be able to distinguish between combat, siege, and colony types (ie it sends the combat ships to one place, the siege ships to another place, and holds the colony ships). These should be intelligent enough to not send fleets to systems that are blockaded or no longer under my control; when that happens it pops up and asks me what I want to do.Yeah having a rally point system for units like the one in say Victoria II would be nice.
  • The hanger system is just annoying; it is too easy to lose ships in there.It'd be even easier to lose ships if they'd go into fleets right away.
  • I should be able to do all production from the system level; I should never have to zoom in on planets if I don't want to.yeah I really don't see why you shouldn't do that though then you would see the fancy planets close up less often
  • It is too easy to trip the planet zoom when I meant to move population and viceversa.Have you tried clicking accurately?
  • The empire-wide view should show planet icons so you can see how many planets are colonized, what type they are, exploitation, etc. from the empire summary. That would be nice indeed
  • The empire summary should occupy the entire vertical space on the screen; on my systems it starts scrolling at only 3/4 of the screen height. I hope proper adjustments will be made for ES2 to utilize ALL of the screen.I don't get what you're getting it I think it does occupy the whole screen for me but yeah I don't get what you mean here
    
    
  
  
  
• Research
  
  
  • Some of the branching and location of upgrades is nonsensical, ie how you have to research tundra colonization and nothing else before getting the 1st ship class, or how leaving a spy network behind so you can see what is going on at a captured planet is in the trade tree. Would benefit from more multidimensional branching.I mean thats the point of a tech tree, you have to get 1 thing before you get the next one. And you're misunderstanding collaboratour networks.
  • It is often not clear where things are, ie the increase in military command point cap being in the trade and diplomacy tree.I mean the CP techs are pretty clearly marked in both trees imo
  • Some type tags don't make sense, like collaborators being green instead of red.Collaborators are in their unique hue of green because they're the only real Intel improvement. Also the improvement gives you more system sensor range and makes you see what enemy fleets in that system have exactly and not give you system vision after capture.
  • You shouldn't be able to get things that need knowledge of a strategic resource before you have the resource, ie getting enhanced kinetic weapons without hexaferum. You really shouldn't be able upgrade ship designs before you have the strategic resource you need to use item.Why that would just be a useless restrictions you already see if you dont have a res you need for a design so you can make an informed decision then and there rather than the game forcing you to wait
    
    
  
  
  
• Military
  
  
  • There should be a default ship for each class, showing off the unique strengths of the new chassis.Actually yeah that would be nice though the default chassis would probably be crap
  • There need to be summary screens when a combat begins. Right now, in order to tell what my enemy has and pick the best strategies, I need to mouse over each ship in his fleet 1 at a time. Also, if I have forgotten what is in my fleet, I have to do the same for my own ships. This makes it very annoying to decide what to do, especially if you get many combats in a row. It also leads to humans picking very homogenous builds so they know that they always need to optimize for one weapon, ie building all beam weapons ships so you don't have to remember what each fleet has.You should know what your own fleets have and enemy fleets aren't too different and you really don't need to know every enemy ship detail unless you want to really micromanage it in which case thats your choice
  • There need to be more advantages and counters for weapons and types. Building entire empires on nothing but beam weapons should come with the risk of the enemy fielding countering technology and rendering your ships useless. Without this, there is no real difference between the weapon types and no reason to use different ones.Thats already the case enemies could use only beam shields against your beam weapons and tehre are other differences like fire rate and salvo travel time
  • It is not clear at all in the ship design screen that there are multiple types, ie different ranges of weapons, different troop types, etc. It also doesn't make sense that all weapons default to long range instead of their respective optimals.It's pretty clearly shown that you can change it and Long Range is actually always the best so that makes sense actually
  • It needs to be much clearer what classes get bonuses on which things. Perhaps color things with bonuses green. Many people don't realize that different classes get weight discounts on certain items.But you see the bonuses when selecting the hull type!
  • Ship appearance should change based on what is on them.Yeah that would be nice I suppose I
  • Manual mode is almost pointless right now except to waste time. It is very boring to watch and has almost no interaction. The only advantage is that you can change to retreat if things are going badly.It looks really awesome, you can react and it looks really awesome and it's interesting to see whats actually going on in important battles rather than just get all the data
  • In almost all cases, battle is decided by fleet statistics. Going into manual mode will almost never allow you to take victory over a superior force because there just isn't enough there.Yeah but it still loooks awesome and I defeated superior fleets once or twice through overthinking the enemy in mind games and reacting to stuff in manual
  • Supremacy victory is almost impossible to get to before expansion victory is tripped.You can snipe capitals though and expansion may be disabled
    
    
  
  
  
• Diplomacy
  
  
  • Diplomacy with AI is very weird. You often can be very friendly with a race, but they will refuse to ally or cooperate for no visible reason. Gets worse when trying to ally with multiple races, where some combinations will work but not others even though everyone is at the same level visibly with respect to all the parties involved.Yeah better AI would be nice
  • Diplomacy in general is very unstable, with switches from alliance t

Replies to replies in green.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
I'll comment on what I think about your points point by point with my replies marked in red.

• Good Things (not everything, just what I want to emphasize in contrast to other games):
  
  
  • I love the warp grid. It creates lots of interesting possibilities instead of being able to wander around willy nilly at the beginning. Needs to become more optional later, though, to allow more tactical flexibility.
  • I like the idea of the combat system. The simplicity emphasizes strategy instead of tactics. See below for execution issues.
  • The sides are very varied. I wish they were more varied; I would like to see more sides that were as different as the Harmony are compared to the others.
    
    
  
  
  
• General Issues:
  
  
  • The color coding of technologies and improvements is handy, but the grouping is odd and unintuitive. Both Dust and Trade increasing improvements are indicated by yellow tags, Planetary Defenses and Ship construction improvements are both red, and food and population increases are both green. Then you have grey and pink, which are not readily explained in the game; you have to jump to the wiki to find out what they are. Everything should be much more clearly delineated at a glance, perhaps using sub icons (a shield for planet defense, a sword for ship improvements?).I feel like the color tags are pretty self explanatory in context, but I guess better color coding/explanation never hurts
  • There are multiple places where zooming out destroys your ability to actually use the screen. When zoomed out on the tech tree to anything but the closest zoom level, you can't see what the techs give you in game terms, only in flavor text, so you have to stay zoomed in almost all the time. When zoomed out on the galaxy, you lose all production information at too high of a zoom level, and at the lowest zoom instead of seeing a big territory overlay you lose all game information.I mean I always manage to find a right level in the middle but there's probably really room for improvemtns. The Point is that right now we have several levels that are of no use. All zoom levels should provide something or they don't need to be there.
  • There is a general lack of summary screens, requiring excessive manual zooming in. When you want to set a planet's exploitation, or colonize, or mitigate the disadvantage, or perform moon surveys, or revive an artifact, you have to zoom in on the planet. You should be able to do all this from the system screen. For things that you gradually get the tech for, like moon surveys, you should be able to quickly set them automatically on large numbers of systems when the tech comes up, instead of having to slog through every single planet in every single system whenever you get these to manually queue them up 1 by one. Same thing with military tech: if you get something that is a straight upgrade (for example, moving from tier 1 to tier 2 on a weapon type) you should be asked if you want to just upgrade everything on any ship that uses the tech, and there should be an option to do this on anything you haven't done it on at all times afterward if you decide not to. Instead, you have to go through every ship class one by one anytime you get new tech, and often you may not realize you got something that could be upgraded (also you should just be able to leave the ship builder if you changed nothing, instead of still getting the warning confirmation).There's a button to survey all your moons, same with anomaly reduction, though I think being able to do it from system view ratehr than planet wouldn't hurt, even though I don't see it as an issue myself. More time spent zooming in is more time wasted. Zooming in should be a choice, not a tedium.
  • Working on the empire screen is too hard to do because you can't tell relative locations of things. You keep having to go out to the starmap in order to, for example, tell if a planet is near or far from a battlefront in order to tell if it should be making ships. There needs to be some kind of basic minimap or something for this screen so you can remain aware of what planet is where.I mean I generally know where the front is and where not because systems are named that said there is definetly room for improvement here planet names and such can be confusing indeed
  • Military heroes are pretty useless compared to economic heroes in general.No they're not you're probably just using them wrong Then using them right needs to be more obvious.
  • While I do like the warp grid at first, it also can become stifling. The tech to travel off the grid is not that good, and thus you end up still stuck to it because of efficiency.I mean thats the point you eventually get to go around but it still takes longer. Just because you can off the grid doesn't mean it should become obsolete Not obsolete is one thing. Not viable is another.
  • Being stuck on the grid can create some annoying situations where you lose systems that you feel you should be able to get to more effectively than by running in a huge arc through 4 others, but yet even with the off-grid travel drive are still reached more quickly in this way. It's actually quite rare that this tech is practical. Making this more usable would allow for creative moves like flanking enemies and attacking rear lines.Warp Drive is useful for flanking and getting back from systems you're not allowed to be at that's why it's rarely faster Generally speaking it isn't, and that's the problem. It's virtually never better than going alon ghte lanes, even if going along the lanes means getting into more fights.
  • You do not get any kind of warning to stop or change movement orders if a system changes hands. As such, you can lose your rally system and yet still have ships running into there and dying one at a time for a long time afterward. If the destination or any system on a route changes sides, you should at least be asked if you want to change what units going to or through that system should do.I personally just manually send my ships around but if you do use rally points they better be behind the front where they shouldn't be taken otherwise you still get a notifaction for systems losts so you can change it The Front moves. By the time your unit gets built and moved, what was behind your front can be behind the enemies. And in ES1, you get no warning before your units start throwing themselves at the enemy one at a time due to this, nor is it easiy to figure out which system has the bad rally point or which units are still set to go to that point, so you end up having to through every single unit and every single system manually every time the front moves in order to deal with this.
  • Having ships become immobile in non-allied but non-hostile systems is dumb. They should be forced to go back to my nearest system, not stuck there until they are attacked and retreat.As I said, off the grid warp is tehre to help. And open borders maybe. Though it can be annoying at times but you can just scrap that scout. It's not an issue of on or off grid. Your ships WILL NOT MOVE if they end up in the situation. It makes no sense wither from a logical or gameplay perspective.
  • The approval system is too unforgiving of war, making it hard to fight because of how quickly you go bankrupt while trying to keep systems from going on strike, especially at the early stages of the game.Then don't take enemy systems or get more approval; there's plenty of rich sources Not always, especially for cravers who for some reason still have this issue even though they HAVE to expand.
  • Aside from the initial inability to colonize some worlds, there is very little variation based on your side concerning planet types. It would be better if the different races had different preferences that had more of an influence on gameplay.Yeah it would actually be interesting if some factions had different approval mali and boni on different planets. Definetly a good idea.
  • When your empire gets large, huge swaths of it end up with nothing better to do than be on point production. More varied production options would help a lot. I don't really get what you mean. There's still ind2sci/dust if you don't know what to make though First, that is what I meant. Second, that is boring.
    
    
  
  
  
• Production
  
  
  • The insertion of new buildings or ships into the queue does not follow a consistent order. Sometimes things go in in descending order and sometimes they go in in ascending order. Pick one or the other (I prefer descending, ie whatever I click on last is at the end). Give the ability to drag and drop fro the right hand list in order to put things in out of sequence. However conversions (infinite cost prod-> sci/dust/food) should always go at the end; I should never be able to put things in behind the conversions and wonder why they aren't getting built.That's a bug relating to alt tabbing, pressing alt should fix everything going to the front of the queue. And I wanna be able to set that mostly finished ship or building I don't need yet to behind the conversion because I don't want said ship/building be done yet. Also there's a bug I think that conversions don't work if you don't have something behind them
  • I should be able to save ship build sets, so I can tell it to build a certain fleet arrangement without having to do it manually all the time.I mean I never build enough fleets to need that but I also always have too few fleets so yeah that would be nice
  • I should be able to set fleet automatic destinations both in the production screen and from the map, so I can have my forces automatically go to a forward staging area instead of having to move absolutely everything manually. Should be able to distinguish between combat, siege, and colony types (ie it sends the combat ships to one place, the siege ships to another place, and holds the colony ships). These should be intelligent enough to not send fleets to systems that are blockaded or no longer under my control; when that happens it pops up and asks me what I want to do.Yeah having a rally point system for units like the one in say Victoria II would be nice.
  • The hanger system is just annoying; it is too easy to lose ships in there.It'd be even easier to lose ships if they'd go into fleets right away. The issue is that there is no good indication of ships in the hanger. So you could end up with whole fleets you don't realize exist because they are in hangers.
  • I should be able to do all production from the system level; I should never have to zoom in on planets if I don't want to.yeah I really don't see why you shouldn't do that though then you would see the fancy planets close up less often Zooming in takes time. The later in the game, the more time it takes, and the more annoyed you become at having to zoom into every single planet in every single system.
  • It is too easy to trip the planet zoom when I meant to move population and viceversa.Have you tried clicking accurately? Never had a problem before, so my response would be "have you tried not having such finicky click targets?"
  • The empire-wide view should show planet icons so you can see how many planets are colonized, what type they are, exploitation, etc. from the empire summary. That would be nice indeed
  • The empire summary should occupy the entire vertical space on the screen; on my systems it starts scrolling at only 3/4 of the screen height. I hope proper adjustments will be made for ES2 to utilize ALL of the screen.I don't get what you're getting it I think it does occupy the whole screen for me but yeah I don't get what you mean here I think this had to do with specific resolutions. It's a bug that happens at some screen sizes.
    
    
  
  
  
• Research
  
  
  • Some of the branching and location of upgrades is nonsensical, ie how you have to research tundra colonization and nothing else before getting the 1st ship class, or how leaving a spy network behind so you can see what is going on at a captured planet is in the trade tree. Would benefit from more multidimensional branching.I mean thats the point of a tech tree, you have to get 1 thing before you get the next one. And you're misunderstanding collaboratour networks. Prerequisites are one thing. Illogical prerequisites take you out of the game. Please tell me logically how colonizing tundra planets has anything to do with making a bigger starship.
  • It is often not clear where things are, ie the increase in military command point cap being in the trade and diplomacy tree.I mean the CP techs are pretty clearly marked in both trees imo Again, logic. Why are MILITARY ship caps controlled by actions in the trade and diplomacy tree? If you have a dedicated military tree, then everything military should be in it. It makes no sense for me to have to get the ability to have trade treaties in order to get a larger army.
  • Some type tags don't make sense, like collaborators being green instead of red.Collaborators are in their unique hue of green because they're the only real Intel improvement. Also the improvement gives you more system sensor range and makes you see what enemy fleets in that system have exactly and not give you system vision after capture.
  • You shouldn't be able to get things that need knowledge of a strategic resource before you have the resource, ie getting enhanced kinetic weapons without hexaferum. You really shouldn't be able upgrade ship designs before you have the strategic resource you need to use item.Why that would just be a useless restrictions you already see if you dont have a res you need for a design so you can make an informed decision then and there rather than the game forcing you to wait
    
    
  
  
  
• Military
  
  
  • There should be a default ship for each class, showing off the unique strengths of the new chassis.Actually yeah that would be nice though the default chassis would probably be crap
  • There need to be summary screens when a combat begins. Right now, in order to tell what my enemy has and pick the best strategies, I need to mouse over each ship in his fleet 1 at a time. Also, if I have forgotten what is in my fleet, I have to do the same for my own ships. This makes it very annoying to decide what to do, especially if you get many combats in a row. It also leads to humans picking very homogenous builds so they know that they always need to optimize for one weapon, ie building all beam weapons ships so you don't have to remember what each fleet has.You should know what your own fleets have and enemy fleets aren't too different and you really don't need to know every enemy ship detail unless you want to really micromanage it in which case thats your choice

Alright, because of the way quotes within quotes work I can't reply like this again so I'll just reply to your points I disagree with(Completly ignoring stuff about AI and interface because better AI and better interface are always important).



So about off-the-grid warp, if you're in a war, and you have a front, and fighting occurs there, maybe your fleets are stuck there because they can't move and risk leaving a system exposed, whatever, you can just send a ship, especially something like a specifically designed terror bombing ship but even a scout can do, into the enemies soft underbelly with warp. Maybe the enemy notices, maybe not, but whatever happens, he has to redirect ships there to defend there, otherwise their system will be blockeded, maybe even bombed, which of course they don't want.



About Hangars, ships are still displayed as ship icons next to the system if no fleet is there and if you do have a fleet there selecting it will show the content of the hangar under the fleet in the fleet box interface thingy in the left corner.



About research, you have to think about how research is based on each other. Like how the shields required to colonize lava planets also have applications for ships, maybe tundra colonization needs some kind of generator that works in cold that can be used as a basis for spacecraft technology. Same with trade, diplomacy and fleet sizes, a lot of technology there is about communication and coordination, just what you need to have bigger fleets.



And yeah, weapons are unbalanced in a way making long range always the best, and you have to put good Fleet heroes(Pilot, Commander, Adventurer kinda) on fleets that aren't crap and maybe kill a scout or pirate fleet or two with them to get hero leveling jumpstarted(Don't have to at all though)and then just take all the good combat skills as your fleet is getting better and better.

My Wishlist list



1. In construction window add sort by type/constraction cost.

2. Queue of construction is too narrow even at high resolution. So in large queue inconvenient to change list order. Make more raw (open/close window or resizable).

3. In system list make focus button to that system on galaxy map or from system itself.



Thanks.

Game Modes/additional victory conditions: Please implement some sort of team game modes! Like 2 Players VS 2 KI from scratch OR ingame! E.g. we could make a contract and have then a new team goal to reach. I would love to play this with some friends VS KI in a co-op style match.

I think this was missing in Endless Space AND Endless Legend, but unfortunately they won't implement this in those games at this point in time (See: http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/...l=1#post288430)

It would be awesome to have this implementation finally in Endless Space 2!!

Hi all!



I have to admit I didn't have time to read all the GDDs (frankly I don't know what GDD stands for), but I spotted this thread and having played some 200+ hours of ES1 I felt like I could contribute here as well. :)



Things I liked about ES1 that I'd like to see in ES2:



- The cinematic feeling and the whole concept and uniqueness of the Endless universe, also the "hand-drawn" art style, keep at it and you can't go wrong!



- Late game did not get boring as in many other 4x games, because there's the illusion of "a lot" happening around your empire through science and various upgrades, while you don't actually have to do much about it, except be smart in making the big decisions.



- The hero mechanic adds an extra spice, it's cool but not overly complex.



- SLICK UI. I mean seriously. When I played my first game, I had never before seen a 4X game that was as easy to get into as ES. This really adds a lot to the immersion factor. The "story" events, atmosphere, musics etc. made the entry into the game extra interesting. EL was a little more complicated although it was also good.



- The special things found in systems (endless improvements, auriga etc) were interesting but not too overpowered.



Things that were a bit of a let-down in ES1:



- AI enemy randomly has the ability to move first in a turn. Now I get that you want turns to happen simultaneously but then there should be some sort of a phasing that different functions in a turn happen at different times (science happens first, then building/upgrading systems, then movement etc...). Also, sometimes there's input lag so the enemy gets to do stuff first even if you spam the auto-move button for your ships like there's no tomorrow.



- Random RPS factor in space battles. I did like the board-gameish feeling though, but the randomness was a little bit much. The battle card mechanic should have been somehow different. For example that you would have to choose only a few cards from your selection for the battle at hand, but DURING the battle you could change the order in which the cards are issued. Perhaps you could take turns and the attacker would have to choose their card first, while both players would have only a few seconds to decide which card to play. Perhaps you wouldn't be able to pick the same card for all the three phases. Thus making it more viable to split your armament between the three choices instead of going all missiles.



- In cinematic mode there is more strategy due to the fact that you can change the cards (you know what the other player chose) but in the auto-fight there is none. You just guess. I never used manual mode because it just took too much time when you got some 20 fights per turn at hand. But this made the game so that you never want to engage in a battle, unless it is 99% certain that you will win the fight.



- The auto-fighting pretty much removes all micromanagement from battles, but in fact there is still way too much micromanagement in military operations. Yeah, I'm talking about late game. Trying to manage your hundreds of ships in your dozens of fleets which get renamed every time you move ships around into and out of hangars is really a late-game pain. Plus the drag-and-drop mechanic starts lagging a lot eventually. Please try to make late game fleet management in ES2 as easy and slick as you have made the rest of the Endless Space UI.



Other things I would like to see in ES2:



- Now I didn't read the GDD4 about battles in great detail, but to me it seems like space combat was going to be a lot more strategic and complex in ES2. I'm all for it, but if you do this, I would like to point out my opinion that the number of "units" (ships, fleets, whatever) that the player has to click around and deal with should be somehow reduced a lot compared to ES1. If there's a dozen complex combats going on per turn, it will all get old pretty quickly.



- If a small fleet (perhaps consisting of a single scout ship, or the odds are otherwise crazy) encounters a huge battle fleet of an opponent they are currently at war with, the smaller fleet could just be caught in an "event" instead of having to go through an actual combat. Events could include fleet destruction, diplomatic action or sneaking through enemy lines depending on the fleets or the heroes assigned. Scout ships could have some sort of "avoidance" or "diplomatic" skill/tech/gadget to make it possible to avoid negative consenquences or boost positive ones.



- Perhaps consider forgoing building "ships" one by one and instead building whole fleets consisting of custom ship schematics. It wouldn't be that different from how it is in ES1, except the units/fleets could be made easier to handle. Think Heroes of Might & Magic style unit management where you just have a number telling how many of the units you have instead of a separate icon for each ship. Then, in cinematic battles, you would see your whole huge army as actual separate ships. This could actually make the cinematic thingy more worthwhile. :P



- Last, I would like to see a simple editor for making your own governor AI. IMO the governor types in ES1 were too simple to use efficiently (not talking about heroes here, just the AI toggle). It doesn't have to be too detailed... but it would be great if we could somehow automate which improvements/ships/fleets should take priority over others when using the automatic option. Also it would be nice to be able to "override" the automation by for example holding a button while building something so the queue wouldn't get changed on the next turn. There could be a text indicating that the current construction is overriding governor priorities. Perhaps I'm thinking too complex here but IMO this would be very useful in longer/larger games.

GDD - Game Design Document. I'd recommend reading them.



It's hard to have a serious wishlist if you don't know what's coming in ES2.

Nasarog wrote:
GDD - Game Design Document. I'd recommend reading them.



It's hard to have a serious wishlist if you don't know what's coming in ES2.

Thanks for the clarification. :) I did read a bit but not in much detail. I suppose I'll have to do that at some point, but since the title was "wishlist based on issues from ES1" I figured it's not as relevant.

Gotta say, I'm with Sinnaj63 basically across the board. Many of the "faults" of Endless Space were intentional design choices. Hell, you thought the freeform movement was useless - I found it frustratingly overpowered (No point building up defenses if the enemy can simply zoom past in to weaker systems). I have faith that whatever Amplitude does this time around will be awesome, and if I personally don't like something, hopefully it can be modded to make it the way I want it.

Romeo wrote:
Gotta say, I'm with Sinnaj63 basically across the board. Many of the "faults" of Endless Space were intentional design choices. Hell, you thought the freeform movement was useless - I found it frustratingly overpowered (No point building up defenses if the enemy can simply zoom past in to weaker systems). I have faith that whatever Amplitude does this time around will be awesome, and if I personally don't like something, hopefully it can be modded to make it the way I want it.

Counting on mods is never a good plan. You never know whether the thing you are annoyed with will end up being moddable or not.

Void2258 wrote:
Counting on mods is never a good plan. You never know whether the thing you are annoyed with will end up being moddable or not.

Right, but expecting them to cater to the thousands of differing opinions on how each component should be is also never a good plan. They can go ahead and make their game - I want them to make their game. And I'll love it for what it is. But down the road, the things I want to change to better suit my own wants, I have that option. As I said, the freeform movement was one of the first things I removed from the game because I had the option to.

I don't know if this was addressed in the GDDs but I'm hoping for some way to either: auto resolve all pending battles in a turn, or avoid such need in the first place. Maybe it was just the way I played ES1 but many of my games ended with massive auto battle click-fests. I think one time I had nearly a hundred battles on one fleet in one system when I ran into a Harmony mega-stack, and then again on the next system in. I loved the game, but not so much the sore finger from all the clicking!

MidnightSun wrote:
I don't know if this was addressed in the GDDs but I'm hoping for some way to either: auto resolve all pending battles in a turn, or avoid such need in the first place. Maybe it was just the way I played ES1 but many of my games ended with massive auto battle click-fests. I think one time I had nearly a hundred battles on one fleet in one system when I ran into a Harmony mega-stack, and then again on the next system in. I loved the game, but not so much the sore finger from all the clicking!

Dear god yes. Most 4X games have that issue, and it boggles my mind that we haven't had a simple fix yet.