Mithrill wrote:
So, the slots idea means that only part of ship place can be used for XY? If yes, I predict lots of happy players.

One question: will the placement of modules will have an impact for battle? For example, if I place lasers only at one side, the ship will have to manuver to use them?

Some are completely dedicated (IE, you have to put a weapon in this slot, or an engine in this slot) while others are open (Put whatever the hell you want here). At least, that's how I interpreted it.



I would hope that's what it means. Would be interesting if certain races only did front-facing weapons, or side-mounted only. Would make battle an even more interesting decision. "Do I rush forward with all my front-facing weapons going? Or hang back and ensure they can't get in beside me?"

KnightofPhoenix wrote:
Will there be a morale system in the game? It played quite a significant role in EL and it would be nice to have it again with more or less a similar impact.

Gosh I hope so. That would immediately end the "Draw" results that should not have been draws. On top of that, more gameplay elements to manage.

The battles will be a lot more interesting if I can issue strategic direction to my fleet as the battle unfolds.



It would be great if we could have contingency plans we can choose to enact during the battle.



I understand true tactical battles are not part of the endless space vision (I had hoped after Endless legend..) but the ability to issue a few commands to the fleet during the combat would make things very interesting.

So from what I understand, all of the tactical/strategic decisions are made before the battle starts. With the logic that as the leader of a civilization you wouldn't have time to micromanage every space battle, and overall gameplay for space battles will probably have a decent amount of inspiration from gratuitous space battles.



With that in mind, would it be possible to have heroes act as admirals and be able to react in combat to the enemy? For example, I can only imagine that under the current system if your fleet is getting flanked they'll keep flying on happy as can be ignoring the threat. So maybe, every battle phase a fleet with a hero could change battle plays if the current one is lacking, or if they're getting flanked. What they choose could depend on how many points you drop into offensive/defensive. It would make battles more organic, and realistic. I mean as I said, it doesn't make sense for a fleet to get flanked, or pummeled and just merrily carry along losing and not try to prevent it in some way.

Personally, I don't care about cinamatics at all.



Give me gameplay.

Totally disagree with that the battle cinematics were the best they'd be terrible if they were just spreadsheets you people who do auto all the time already dont get any disadvantage for that since nothing can be changed in battle anymore.

endless_win wrote:
Personally, I don't care about cinamatics at all.



Give me gameplay.

As an option? Sure! As a forced component? NOT A DAMN CHANCE.



As Sinnaj63 said, gameplay without any kind of graphics behind it kills immersion. I want to feel like I'm either playing a game, or pretending I'm a commander. I don't want to see that I'm just playing around with figures to make sure my figures beat the opponent's.

i think people might be prematurely judging the new system. if you played the original game your probably not expecting real time control of units in combat and not expecting tactics style game play.this is a new account i forgot my old account name and dont use the same email from 3 years ago lmao but i bought the gold edition and endless dungeon for the vaulters i should be able to log in with steam...



what the developers have put forward is a quality of life adjustment from the old system. the environment will affect combat possibly making some defense systems or weapons less effective so knowing where you will have a advantage against a enemy species is going to be important. more planning more need to know your enemy



while the formation system may seem stripped down i see it a bit like naval battles and general military strategy where you have a plan before the combat starts so people dont run around scattered. reinforcements being a part of it can add another layer of strategy and maybe give some wiggle room in lopsided cp fleets. so you enemy having more cp might not be the end of the world if you understand when your side will take the biggest hit and reinforce the turn after



it all seems to lean towards knowing your enemy which is needed in the original game. what you can get away with and what you cant. the arenas will probably be a bigger part of your fleets load out and may force some different builds and retrofitting if you want to be more warlike

This conversation about Emperors and Admirals and realism and immersion has gonne too far i think. ES its a game we can skip a bit of realism for the sake of gameplay. ES1 combat was bad and "ground combat" was worse. EL did an amazing job with the new combat and personally i believed that devs gonna use that new model in future games but its seems thats not the case. When i read about ES2 combat was really disappointed. It sounds really blant and soon everyone will be skipping it like ES1. Preparing before combat with ship design is a very poor choice. Its like saying that no matter what, if you didnt build the rock-beats scissors-beats papper ship, no matter what you lost/won. Maybe its a bit too early to judge combat since except the overview we dont have any other info on how combat works but personally i dont have high hopes for it

Honestly, I'd much rather have a hands-off battle system that gives me the option of a nice cinematic than a complex tactical battle with an auto-resolve function that can not adequately handle the system.



I have played games in which troops completely immune to the damage type the enemy was dealing died in droves when using auto-resolve.

I have played games in which long-range missile ships would decimate short-range ships seconds after the battle started, yet in auto-resolve they wouldn't even scratch them.

I have played games where an army of warriors with superior training, led by a much more experienced general, outnumbering the enemy 3 to 1, was completely crushed on flat, open terrain during auto-resolve, yet after pulling together the scattered survivors I destroyed the enemy force in a manual battle.



So I would much rather have "This is a simple battle system, but if you want there's a nice movie" than "This is a battle system so deep, if you don't play every battle, you're going to take ridiculous casualties and grind your war to a halt."

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Honestly, I'd much rather have a hands-off battle system that gives me the option of a nice cinematic than a complex tactical battle with an auto-resolve function that can not adequately handle the system.



I have played games in which troops completely immune to the damage type the enemy was dealing died in droves when using auto-resolve.

I have played games in which long-range missile ships would decimate short-range ships seconds after the battle started, yet in auto-resolve they wouldn't even scratch them.

I have played games where an army of warriors with superior training, led by a much more experienced general, outnumbering the enemy 3 to 1, was completely crushed on flat, open terrain during auto-resolve, yet after pulling together the scattered survivors I destroyed the enemy force in a manual battle.



So I would much rather have "This is a simple battle system, but if you want there's a nice movie" than "This is a battle system so deep, if you don't play every battle, you're going to take ridiculous casualties and grind your war to a halt."

This summarizes Age of Wonders III perfectly. I love AoW3, but you must play the battle out yourself, because the autoresolve seems to have no idea how to handle things.

My pie-in-the-sky dream is that:



devs discreetly but straightforwardly put on EULA that the game WILL upload telemetry data, period.



This data will be used to measure how people actually play the game and, according to how the game's landscape evolves, what do they decide.



It should be possible to use this data to give the AI hints of human decisions.



IMO The auto-battle vs. dive into battle should always be AI controlled. THe human would just make a few key decisions on specific points of the battle.



In the auto-resolution, the whole graphics rendering loop would be skipped, resulting in at least 100x faster battle resolution. Of course the human must preset its input for all battle stages, or leave the decision to the AI, since it woun't be able to intervene.



It shouldn't be oversimplified to a dice roll.

Nomas wrote:
This conversation about Emperors and Admirals and realism and immersion has gonne too far i think. ES its a game we can skip a bit of realism for the sake of gameplay. ES1 combat was bad and "ground combat" was worse. EL did an amazing job with the new combat and personally i believed that devs gonna use that new model in future games but its seems thats not the case. When i read about ES2 combat was really disappointed. It sounds really blant and soon everyone will be skipping it like ES1. Preparing before combat with ship design is a very poor choice. Its like saying that no matter what, if you didnt build the rock-beats scissors-beats papper ship, no matter what you lost/won. Maybe its a bit too early to judge combat since except the overview we dont have any other info on how combat works but personally i dont have high hopes for it

For a start Endless Space 2 is steering clear from rock-paper-scissors hard counters, and towards a system of soft counters. It is written explicitly in the GDD iirc.

Thing is, it there are fire arc, and pre-programmed moves, in addition of cards, while it's impossible to adjust anything during the battle, it'll be closer to rock paper scissors than to an actual space battle.

Romeo wrote:
This summarizes Age of Wonders III perfectly. I love AoW3, but you must play the battle out yourself, because the autoresolve seems to have no idea how to handle things.

When was the last time you played AoW 3? I haven't heard many complaints about the auto resolve from the folks who use PbM or play multiplayer. Recent versions seem to have improved it somewhat.



In any case, there are, indeed, games where the auto resolve is not the best solution and those games tend to have deeper battle systems. I've never understood why you would want to auto-resolve a battle past a certain size in any case, but AoW 3 is a game primarily about big TB battles.



I'm of the mindset that asks: Why go to the trouble of creating all those 3d art assets and modules, weapons and upgrades if the outcome of a battle is the same whether you auto-resolve or not? Why not just auto-resolve everything and have extremely basic upgrades and ship types? Don't make battles a major part of the game if you're going to half-do them. Front-loading everything just makes the whole system seem cheap to me no matter how many front-loading options you have.



At least in ES1 you could change a play in the middle of battle if you wanted and have a chance to turn things around. Removing any interaction in battle sure does make it easy for the developer (Stardock is the king of this in GalCiv already), but makes it a pretty cheap experience for the player who cares about battles.

I mostly agree Slash. I'd still like to see the finished product before I definitively say Yay or nay but some aspects of this trouble me. The main area of concern for me is the lack of ANY reactionary mid-battle input. I'm okay with no rts control and I think I'm okay with the battle play concept but the lack of input mid battle is concerning.

Slashman wrote:
When was the last time you played AoW 3? I haven't heard many complaints about the auto resolve from the folks who use PbM or play multiplayer. Recent versions seem to have improved it somewhat.



In any case, there are, indeed, games where the auto resolve is not the best solution and those games tend to have deeper battle systems. I've never understood why you would want to auto-resolve a battle past a certain size in any case, but AoW 3 is a game primarily about big TB battles.



I'm of the mindset that asks: Why go to the trouble of creating all those 3d art assets and modules, weapons and upgrades if the outcome of a battle is the same whether you auto-resolve or not? Why not just auto-resolve everything and have extremely basic upgrades and ship types? Don't make battles a major part of the game if you're going to half-do them. Front-loading everything just makes the whole system seem cheap to me no matter how many front-loading options you have.



At least in ES1 you could change a play in the middle of battle if you wanted and have a chance to turn things around. Removing any interaction in battle sure does make it easy for the developer (Stardock is the king of this in GalCiv already), but makes it a pretty cheap experience for the player who cares about battles.

Yesterday. =P



It's just far too random for its own good. I had one battle with "Spells may be used in auto-combat" enabled, and even then, my who army was killed, while four of my opponents' six died. Put it on to manual combat after a reload: Not only did I win, I suffered absolutely zero losses. The problem with something like AoW3 compared to Endless Space is complexity. A human can look at the dozens of options available to them and figure something out. They can be creative. They can intelligently combine separate tactics to make them better than the sum of their parts (Such as using Curse before Convert/Seduce). The AI simply isn't built for that.



To be fair, I've also had battles where by every count I definitely should've lost in auto-resolve somehow turn out to be a win thanks to the RNG aspect of it.

Romeo wrote:
Yesterday. =P



It's just far too random for its own good. I had one battle with "Spells may be used in auto-combat" enabled, and even then, my who army was killed, while four of my opponents' six died. Put it on to manual combat after a reload: Not only did I win, I suffered absolutely zero losses. The problem with something like AoW3 compared to Endless Space is complexity. A human can look at the dozens of options available to them and figure something out. They can be creative. They can intelligently combine separate tactics to make them better than the sum of their parts (Such as using Curse before Convert/Seduce). The AI simply isn't built for that.



To be fair, I've also had battles where by every count I definitely should've lost in auto-resolve somehow turn out to be a win thanks to the RNG aspect of it.

And that is my point. Why are you autoresolving battles that aren't a sure win? AoW is about battles to begin with.



So yeah...you should get unpredictable results or unfavorable results when you let a computer play your stuff.

The big reason I can think of for auto-resolving battles in AOW3, especially in MP, is to avoid all the exploits you can do in battle (like maxing exp, or mass conversions).

Seems good.

Wow. That seems really nice.