Slashman wrote:
I'm sorry but to be frank here, there was no battle of wits involved in ES 1. I used pretty much the same cards in every battle once I acquired them.



ES 2 looks like a similar approach with simply choosing your path as an additional option. Where exactly does the battle of wits fought Admiral style come in? And how will the AI address this type of gameplay that makes them interesting to fight against?

Agree Slash. I've thought about how I can articulate this and this is the best that I can come up with: Endless space did the right thing but went about it the wrong way. It sounds like Endless Space 2 is going the opposite and doing the wrong thing the right way.



While I would have preferred more control, I was ultimately fairly satisfied with the AMOUNT of control we had over battles in ES1 but I didn't care for how it was implemented. I liked the fact that, as the "admiral" we gave out general guidelines to our fleet and I liked how we could react and change plans mid battle if the first round went sour. What I didn't care for in ES1 was the card system...it was too abstract and gamey and I felt too disconnected from the actions of my ships. It didn't convey the sense that I was an admiral, it felt more like I was playing a mobile game on my iPad.



Fast forward to Endless space 2 and I REALLY like how it seems the abstractness of the card system is gone and we have these battle plays that actually define fleet movements and we control the distribution of ships into flotillas, etc. THAT feels like concrete decision making that an admiral would make that would define the overall actions of a fleet. What I don't like is that all of this decision making is made before hand and we can't react to it mid-battle. I'm all for a more hands off approach but not being able to react in some fashion mid-battle to a changing situation, even at a high level, is a step back from ES1 in my opinion, at least in this aspect of the battle system.

Delta_v wrote:
Agree Slash. I've thought about how I can articulate this and this is the best that I can come up with: Endless space did the right thing but went about it the wrong way. It sounds like Endless Space 2 is going the opposite and doing the wrong thing the right way.



While I would have preferred more control, I was ultimately fairly satisfied with the AMOUNT of control we had over battles in ES1 but I didn't care for how it was implemented. I liked the fact that, as the "admiral" we gave out general guidelines to our fleet and I liked how we could react and change plans mid battle if the first round went sour. What I didn't care for in ES1 was the card system...it was too abstract and gamey and I felt too disconnected from the actions of my ships. It didn't convey the sense that I was an admiral, it felt more like I was playing a mobile game on my iPad.



Fast forward to Endless space 2 and I REALLY like how it seems the abstractness of the card system is gone and we have these battle plays that actually define fleet movements and we control the distribution of ships into flotillas, etc. THAT feels like concrete decision making that an admiral would make that would define the overall actions of a fleet. What I don't like is that all of this decision making is made before hand and we can't react to it mid-battle. I'm all for a more hands off approach but not being able to react in some fashion mid-battle to a changing situation, even at a high level, is a step back from ES1 in my opinion, at least in this aspect of the battle system.

Couldnt agree more. The movement plays devs talk about sound interesting but picking a plan at start and praying for the best aint exactly admiral tactics. A BotF (Birth of the Federation) style would be nice where battles were cut into phases where you picked a movement on each phase and battle groups (flotillas) where moving together.

Also some targeting options would be a nice addittion

I believe the Devs said that the reason they weren't allowing any reactionary changes during the battle is that they wanted there to be no gameplay advantage to playing/watching the battle as opposed to skipping it. I personally love watching the battles play out and changing my tactics accordingly, but I can understand wanting to even out the playing field for those who don't like watching it (the heathens!).

Frogsquadron wrote:
there should be no difference between using the auto-battle compared to manual battle.

To me that's the most important feature in the new battle system. Sorry if my criticism seems a little harsh, but I think that you're going in the wrong direction by offering just an improved version of your battle system. The battle system in ES1 is one of the weak points. The card system is not a bad idea, but it's not super intuitive in the way that it's implemented. I now have about 20 hours of play in ES1 and I still have no idea about what cards I should play. The cards are still a distraction to me at this point and don't make the game deeper. To me, that's a serious flaw. Also, I know that you can change the fleet's position but I haven't done it once yet.



To most players, the cinematic battles will probably be something that they skip over after a few times. So it's a potentially costly feature that provides little benefit. I think that you should focus your energies on having a good AUTO battle mode which will be the one that is used 95%+ of the time.



I would redesign the cards, making them more intuitive, more colorful and reducing their occurence to large battles. This could be done by having them only usable by heros. Also, it would be cool if cards were something that you could use only once, making them more special.



But, my main point really is that the cinematic mode is a distraction and that you should focus your energies on AUTO battles.

Well, in my opinion, battles should let player to show his/her tactical ability. Card mechanic in first ES was quite original, but after some time it becames boring. If I had a possibility to make this game at my own, I would make the battle mechanics based on that from ,,Homeworld'', but in 2D. That would put more dynamic to fights.



But it's just my opinion.

To elaborate a bit more on battles...



I always wanted to play a game that would let me be the emperor and admiral, while keeping the captain aspect far away (meaning no telling individual ships where to go and which system to activate at what exact time). So far ES2 seems to have that well covered and I'm looking forward to it very much.



I would however like to have at least some minor influence after the battle starts - after all, the admiral has "some work" to do during the battle, too. But again, this influence should be kept on the admiral scale. The battle planning and execution as is described seems great, so why not just build on that concept? Make battles have stages. Perhaps the number of stages could depend on the scale of the battle - size of the smaller fleet; or simply keep it the same number of stages every time, should the battle even last to the last one. Anyway, what you do now before the battle could be done before each stage. Assess the situation and make the plan for the next stage. Frozen Synapse - like. BTW, I still love that game and to this day no other tactical game has surpassed it. After the rounds are spent, the battle is over for that turn.



But even if battles just remain as are described, I feel that my admiral side is satisfied as it needs not worry about the captain side of the battle.

Neosquirrel wrote:
To me that's the most important feature in the new battle system. Sorry if my criticism seems a little harsh, but I think that you're going in the wrong direction by offering just an improved version of your battle system. The battle system in ES1 is one of the weak points. The card system is not a bad idea, but it's not super intuitive in the way that it's implemented. I now have about 20 hours of play in ES1 and I still have no idea about what cards I should play. The cards are still a distraction to me at this point and don't make the game deeper. To me, that's a serious flaw. Also, I know that you can change the fleet's position but I haven't done it once yet.



To most players, the cinematic battles will probably be something that they skip over after a few times. So it's a potentially costly feature that provides little benefit. I think that you should focus your energies on having a good AUTO battle mode which will be the one that is used 95%+ of the time.



I would redesign the cards, making them more intuitive, more colorful and reducing their occurence to large battles. This could be done by having them only usable by heros. Also, it would be cool if cards were something that you could use only once, making them more special.



But, my main point really is that the cinematic mode is a distraction and that you should focus your energies on AUTO battles.

I totally disagree. I, and plenty of other players, use the cinematic battles often enough. Of course you're not gonna watch your 3 frigates attacking an enemy scout, not after the first 3 times anyway, but you are gonna watch important, interesting battles, both to see what happens and because it looks awesome(If you wanna call it a distraction, fine, but you know why it is a distraction? Because it's really damn awesome to watch! And that's really not bad at all!). Hell, even players who usually play without cinematic battles watch big ones because they're awesome to watch.

I'd argue that the cards are pretty intuitive already; their category plus their description plus what you actually see them doing made me get them easily(Although their specific effects are obscure still to even experienced players), though I'm not saying it couldn't be improved. What I think is the biggest issue is the way that hard counters work. Like you can if you manage to pull it off crush a superior fleet by happening to randomly choose a card to counter what your oppenent thought would counter yours. I think there should be less hard counter and such. Basically, the cards do need improvements; I don't really know how specifically either.



But, my main point really is that if you don't make cinematic battles more awesome I'll become Bundeskanzler and invade France.

What are we going to see in terms of planetary invasion? In ES1 we basically have nothing, we just lay siege and ships try to break the siege. Is this the same in ES2? Or do we get some ship vs planetary defense combat? Planetary lander dropping out of the skies, kinetic strikes against targets?

I agree with Romeo that implementing some sort of Morale mechanic could help to avoid those annoying "draws" where one fleet is almost completely wiped out.



I'll also state that I'm firmly in the camp of "control the battles as an admiral, not every tiny aspect of each ship in real time." I'm also strongly in favor of systems that ensure the difference between autobattles and manual battles remains very small. Stripe7 is spot on with his remark about game duration. I have suffered from that in many games, like the Total War games or some other 4x games.

Long time TBS player here since civ1, and I loved Endless Legend, it was one of the most refreshing takes on the genre I have seen. I hadn't heard of ES1 until after I played EL and I was looking forward to this strategy game figuring Amplitude would do a kick ass job considering the great quality of EL. But I have to say the lack of a tactical battle is a deal breaker. Battles like MOO2 or even better having it RTS like Star Trek Armada is a requirement. I have no interest in 'pretending' I am an admiral. When I play these kind of games I am GOD! and expect to be treated as such. I want a good TBS for the strategic empire management, and a good RTS for the battles. I haven't seen any games that have delivered both adequately, the closest are the very old MOO1&2 which I played to death. I have my fingers crossed for the new MOO game though and look forward to Endless Legend 2.

Possibility wrote:
I want a good TBS for the strategic empire management, and a good RTS for the battles

The reality of economics says you'd basically have to hire two almost complete dev teams for that, which doesn't seem feasible. And I don't think you will find full RTS battles in an Amplitude 4X game, since they have pretty much openly stated they are interested in creating an experience of being an emperor, which doesn't involve the nitty gritty of commanding each individual ship. They have also said they want to keep the results of auto-combat and manual combat as close as possible, which is basically impossible with full RTS battles.

I would also further add that if you do want that kind of gameplay, you should give Sins of a Solar Empire a try. The empire aspect isn't TBS, but you can manually toggle the speed of the game in singleplayer to make it like that. It's had a few expansions and quite a helping of mod support.



Just as an aside, I'm not sure any game will ever have the division you're looking for, because it would turn any multiplayer in to a gongshow for three or more players.

While I don't think Tactical RTS Combat would be the way to go anyway(For no small part because I'm pretty meh at tactical real-time games), I think even as an emperor you'd be commanding your armies sometimes. Think of Napoleon for example. Or some, if not most, Roman emperors.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
While I don't think Tactical RTS Combat would be the way to go anyway(For no small part because I'm pretty meh at tactical real-time games), I think even as an emperor you'd be commanding your armies sometimes. Think of Napoleon for example. Or some, if not most, Roman emperors.

That's fair, but even in those descriptions, both of those would be giving general orders prior to battle start, not small orders to individuals during the battle. Napoleon's navy wasn't sitting there waiting for individual instructions during their battles. They were similar to an American football team. They knew what the army/team was wanting, and they did their best to accomplish that. There's too much chaos for small stuff.

Romeo wrote:
That's fair, but even in those descriptions, both of those would be giving general orders prior to battle start, not small orders to individuals during the battle. Napoleon's navy wasn't sitting there waiting for individual instructions during their battles. They were similar to an American football team. They knew what the army/team was wanting, and they did their best to accomplish that. There's too much chaos for small stuff.

But both of those examples were before it was even technologically possible to command your side of a battle in such a way. In Endless Space, on the other hand, it is, or should be, anyway, given the level of instant intergalactical communication and coordination you have.

The whole pretending to be an emperor or president thing makes no sense, you have far more power than that. Since when has a US president ordered a million people to move to a new state (or migrate to a new planet), or ordered a company to build a new factory, or personally designed a new battle ship. Presidents cant do any of that stuff, not even congress, at best they create new policies or tax incentives or issue request for bids from the private industrial war machine to submit new designs. The president spends his day to day dealing with congress and political issues and trying to get re-elected, none of which you will find in this game or would even be enjoyable. Its quite obvious the player has the role of a god in which he can manipulate individual people, businesses, and entire fleets of war ships to do his exact biding with no repercussions from the Judiciary, Congress, the military, or the American people that would revolt and have civil war against the government if they tried to be so intrusive in their lives.



So if you are clearly some kind of human being controlling god for the whole strategic portion, why for the battles are you limited to being an admiral sitting back at the pentagon (not even on the battle field). There is a big difference from playing as an all powerful god, to a mere desk-jockey admiral, and that transition is jarring and ruins the game.

Possibility wrote:
The whole pretending to be an emperor or president thing makes no sense, you have far more power than that. Since when has a US president ordered a million people to move to a new state (or migrate to a new planet), or ordered a company to build a new factory, or personally designed a new battle ship. Presidents cant do any of that stuff, not even congress, at best they create new policies or tax incentives or issue request for bids from the private industrial war machine to submit new designs. The president spends his day to day dealing with congress and political issues and trying to get re-elected, none of which you will find in this game or would even be enjoyable. Its quite obvious the player has the role of a god in which he can manipulate individual people, businesses, and entire fleets of war ships to do his exact biding with no repercussions from the Judiciary, Congress, the military, or the American people that would revolt and have civil war against the government if they tried to be so intrusive in their lives.



So if you are clearly some kind of human being controlling god for the whole strategic portion, why for the battles are you limited to being an admiral sitting back at the pentagon (not even on the battle field). There is a big difference from playing as an all powerful god, to a mere desk-jockey admiral, and that transition is jarring and ruins the game.

I mean Hitler and Stalin could do such things, to have some historic examples, and many countries have more government involvement in everything than the US. You very clearly are the Emperor of Space Empire.

Possibility wrote:
The whole pretending to be an emperor or president thing makes no sense, you have far more power than that. Since when has a US president ordered a million people to move to a new state (or migrate to a new planet), or ordered a company to build a new factory, or personally designed a new battle ship. Presidents cant do any of that stuff, not even congress, at best they create new policies or tax incentives or issue request for bids from the private industrial war machine to submit new designs. The president spends his day to day dealing with congress and political issues and trying to get re-elected, none of which you will find in this game or would even be enjoyable. Its quite obvious the player has the role of a god in which he can manipulate individual people, businesses, and entire fleets of war ships to do his exact biding with no repercussions from the Judiciary, Congress, the military, or the American people that would revolt and have civil war against the government if they tried to be so intrusive in their lives.



So if you are clearly some kind of human being controlling god for the whole strategic portion, why for the battles are you limited to being an admiral sitting back at the pentagon (not even on the battle field). There is a big difference from playing as an all powerful god, to a mere desk-jockey admiral, and that transition is jarring and ruins the game.

You're using a very narrow world-view. Plenty of empires have had the ruling party dictating everything below them. Yes, in many western societies, work like that is simply contracted out, but that's not the only way of doing things.

The only thing I wish from the new battle system, would be the improvement of the invasion mechanics. Something innovative would be nice, for example a planetary defence system that would work in the same way as the fleet battle goes, but with mass drivers, missiles, military satellites and so on and so forth. Think how cool it would be if there was a cinematic of invading a planet and hails of missiles, beams and mass driver fire would come from the surface of the planet.



Otherwise the new system looks promising and shows potential.

Possibility wrote:
The whole pretending to be an emperor or president thing makes no sense, you have far more power than that. Since when has a US president ordered a million people to move to a new state (or migrate to a new planet), or ordered a company to build a new factory, or personally designed a new battle ship. Presidents cant do any of that stuff, not even congress, at best they create new policies or tax incentives or issue request for bids from the private industrial war machine to submit new designs. The president spends his day to day dealing with congress and political issues and trying to get re-elected, none of which you will find in this game or would even be enjoyable. Its quite obvious the player has the role of a god in which he can manipulate individual people, businesses, and entire fleets of war ships to do his exact biding with no repercussions from the Judiciary, Congress, the military, or the American people that would revolt and have civil war against the government if they tried to be so intrusive in their lives.



So if you are clearly some kind of human being controlling god for the whole strategic portion, why for the battles are you limited to being an admiral sitting back at the pentagon (not even on the battle field). There is a big difference from playing as an all powerful god, to a mere desk-jockey admiral, and that transition is jarring and ruins the game.

I'll add to Sinnaj's and Romeo's comments by saying that it is a mistake to equate your act of clicking a button with your empire's ruler simply giving an order. That it is so simple for you to decide to design a new ship or order he colonization of a new planet does not at all mean that it happens like this in universe: The new ship design you just made might just be the list of specifications your board of military advisers hands out to the competing manufacturers, the decision to colonize a new planet might be a long campaign of propaganda and incentives to makes you population want to move there themselves.

Those would be perfectly valid explanations for what happens, but for convenience they are left out and reduced to a single click.