Hello, all!

I'm not entirely certain where this idea came from, but I feel there is a place in Endless Space 2 for it as part of a later expansion or patch.

I was thinking that it might actually behoove the game to have a quick battle mode (or some better name that I can't think of), a a matchmade naval clash between a player or a AI without the need of building up a fleet and moving across the strategy layer in a regular game. There are multiple reasons I think this idea is a good one.

1a) Some days, and I don't believe I'm the only one, I want to just skip to watching huge clashes of ships, but don't necessarily want to go through the build-up and the declaration of war, etc. This was true of Endless Space 1, and I believe the feeling will increase by at least threefold if Amplitude delivers on the promises of the GDDs and art style/graphics.

1b) Sometimes I REALLY want to see these clashes with high tier technology, in which case going through the base game really can't help me unless I'm willing to invest hours and hours for that one epic fight. A quick battle mode would likely satiate this desire much more quickly.

2a) What would enhance this idea even further is if players had the ability to save ship designs between games. Personally, I would love this because I LOVE designing ships, but it's difficult to know if I'm designing effectively or not. A quick battle mode would allow me to design and test ships without wasting valuable industry and/or dust in an actual game.

2b) This would especially be true in the case of designing larger ships like batteships and dreadnoughts, as the loss of one because of less experience in designing one can be devastating. A quick battle mode would allow one to learn good design philosophies more quickly and effectively.

The size and armaments of ships being deployed, aside from implementing the usual Command Points system to limit the number of ships, is to assign ships a "point" value set against a point value maximum for both fleets. We see similar systems in strategy games like Warhammer, etc. Though instead of having to envision arbitrary point values, the developers could possibly make it so that the point value is determined by the amount of dust required to "buy" a ship in the regular game.

My suggestion is not meant as any way to supplant the regular gameplay of Endless Space. Half the fun of the battles is the slow build-up and the short and long term triumphs and catastrophes, as well as how all the systems play into each other. This is more a suggestion for those days when I just want to blow things up without having to thing of finances and production schedules and manpower.

Cheers.

1) I think that is a valid idea, I would suggest a simple "duel" mode where players woud be given resources to allocate into ship designs/heroes/racial traits/actual number of ships and have them clash, this would go well especially with the support of the second suggestion, where an entire army template could be selected and it would help players poke and prod ideal fleet compositions. However, it would be min maxed pretty quickly and would really put strain on the new combat system logic to provide reasonable gameplay, which I never found incredibly rewarding in the original game as whenever I would watch a space fight it would be by mistake and I usually went for the alpha on turn one set ups.

2) +1 on the "portable ship design template" idea if you gonna make a ship with just beams every game, might aswell have it in the "templates" of course there is the issue with high variability of the ship tonnage stat, however that's the template user's problem not a design difficulty.

I could get behind this idea. I like to watch copious amounts of pew-pew more often than not.

If they do it though, I think they will need to put some kind of interactive element into the battle itself apart from just the deployment phase...

Really really wanting that HD remake of Sword of the Stars to come out yesterday!

koxsos wrote:

1) I think that is a valid idea, I would suggest a simple "duel" mode where players woud be given resources to allocate into ship designs/heroes/racial traits/actual number of ships and have them clash...

Duel, yes! That is totally the better term for my idea that I couldn't think of at the time.