Here's a thread I wasn't expecting to write on this forum

Yes, the title is contentious, but that's by design, Amplitude are renowned for being contentious and ripping up the rulebook when it comes to game design. Dungeon of the Endless is proof of that. Endless Legend continues to receive ongoing support to this day and is getting what might be one of the most interesting pieces of content yet, further demonstrating their ability to extend and improve what is already a stellar empire building 4X. Endless Space 2 has problems, this much is evident, but most of those are problems of degree, ones that are fixable by taking the concepts in development and going "one step further" (example : the political faction idea is inspired, but the fact it only really modifies laws and law bonuses makes it lack teeth, if it also affected base level governmental options and had a more profound effect, that would make it -really- innovative). Most of the bugbears that exist in ES2 at this point are of a similar nature, either areas where Amplitude haven't gone far enough, or matters of sanding away the rough edges.

There's one area however that can't just be fixed with a trip to the sanding belt. That's the space combat.

It's bad.

No, let me rephrase. Imagine if Frozen Synapse had a one night stand with a Michael Bay movie and then the pair found out that Jar Jar Binks were their father. The incestuous spawn would be the result of that profane coupling. Now, I'll let you take a moment to let that horrific image settle into your brain, and your nightmares, because believe me, that's the kind of thing you need to imagine very clearly to understand the horrific mess that is the combat model as it is.

Once you've stopped puking into the nearest receptacle, then the question becomes - what to do about it? Not all hope is lost, there is SOME promise in the formation system, but it needs to be drastically revised into a three phase system where you have a "long", "medium" and "short" maneuvering phase, and if you elect to become an active participant in the combat, then you get the ability to actively alter combat in meaningful ways (I'm not suggesting a return to the card combat of the first, but there needs to be some sort of targeting and formation options that allow you to cycle who is being shot at, and who you are shooting at, at the VERY least, along with the ability to activate ship/hero specials and the like). Being able to participate in combat should be interesting and meaningful, and should encourage the player to explore different loadouts and revise their tactics and strategies constantly, right now you're actually better off auto-resolving *everything* because watching the combat itself doesn't do anything save for wasting your time / allow you to take some screenshots. As for the Amplified Reality space bar nonsense in the combat area? No. Ditch it and replace it with a proper UI please, and then give us actual options to work with.

Right now what we have is a pure regression from ES1, and that's not an acceptable state of affairs. Amplitude has shown us it can do better, and it -should- do better. It's on us to ensure they -do- better.

The auto resolve is the exact same as watching the battle.

Watching a battle is more for fun then anything, that and watching how your ships fair against enemy weapons.

Which is broadly my point. ES (once it got the Disharmony DLC) and EL both had at least some level of a combat model, is ES2's combat thus being entirely reduced to a graphical sideshow? If so why bother with the graphical combat -at all-?

Because it's a space opera.

Becuse it looks really really cool.

And serves zero practical or strategic purpose to the game, in short, it's an appendix. An appendix that sucks up art assets, development time, and effort.

No, and I don't think you're considering this very clearly. Go and consider the implications, you might be happy with a junk combat model that means auto-resolve is the way to go under pretty much every circumstance, but you're effectively slicing off a significant chunk of the Player vs AI experience or the 1v1 in small scale galaxy experience. My point stands, your straw man does not.

All the higher tactics come from era 2 and on once the game starts splitting ships into fleets, which is what the system was designed for.

There's a big but to that, you're still better off specialising your fleets into a single range because having a sniper fleet at close engagement range is not optimal. If you're set up with torpedo boats, you want them all sat at distance. I imagine late game there's multilayer battle plans and the like but frankly the whole thing lacks a lot of granularity that even ES1 had in the ship design and fleet planning stage, let alone the combat orders stage.

Well that was a mouthful. While interestingly worded... you didn't exactly explain why it is bad. Just that it's bad. The visual aspect of the combat is that. Visual. And that is what the watch button is for. The graphical aspect is to be something to watch, not interact with. To feel an "epic battle" aspect. Which I personally feel needs to be improved on (Auto-camera has too many close in shots and jumps around too much). Combat is more or less decided on fleet composition, ship design and maneuvers.  Being a turn based game, this is perfectly fine as you have plenty of time to decide and plan your strategy. From my understanding there WILL be a battle manager so you can customize or rearrange your battle plans. How this functions exactly I am not sure however. I feel it is too early to just say "Scrap the idea and salvage what you can" instead of letting it actually develop.  It is too early to shun it so.

Hobbesian wrote:

And serves zero practical or strategic purpose to the game, in short, it's an appendix. An appendix that sucks up art assets, development time, and effort.

No, and I don't think you're considering this very clearly. Go and consider the implications, you might be happy with a junk combat model that means auto-resolve is the way to go under pretty much every circumstance, but you're effectively slicing off a significant chunk of the Player vs AI experience or the 1v1 in small scale galaxy experience. My point stands, your straw man does not.

I'm not really interested in turning another 4x game into a war game, so I honestly feel like a simplified system is better for the game.

I do not believe the current system will take up any additional art assets, development time and effort then has already been done.

Me disagreeing with your points is not a personal attack, and neither is it a sign that I did not read and understand the points you were making. My understanding of your points was not altered by my comprehension of what you wrote.

The game is not diminished by not having fully controllable tactical battles, it is only your opinion that the game is.

"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent."

Hobbesian wrote:

Which is broadly my point. ES (once it got the Disharmony DLC) and EL both had at least some level of a combat model, is ES2's combat thus being entirely reduced to a graphical sideshow? If so why bother with the graphical combat -at all-?

 My reply to your opinion was that:

Igncom1 wrote:

Because it's a space opera.

Becuse it looks really really cool.

Is not creating a new and easier argument to attack, nor was my purpose to try and tear down your argument and refute the entirety of it with a simple opinion.

I am sorry if you felt that way.

I do not believe that endless space 2 would be better served with a deep and complex eXterminate. So It is my opinion to disagree with your opinion.

That does not make your opinion anymore invalid then mine.

Okay, in case my rather graphical description was a bit much for you, I'll condense.

The current system regresses back from the improvements seen in Disharmony, and from the lessons learned in Endless Legend. What we have now is a system that is fundamentally worse than Endless Space 1 *pre DLC*, as it lacks formation cycling, targeting options, and the ability to directly influence combat in progress. In effect it's turned combat into a Michael Bay film. That's terrible from the perspective of comparisons to peer sci-fi 4X games (think Stardrive 2, which whilst inferior in a lot of ways, has drastically superior space combat) or even Stellaris (which manages to have superior political effects on an empire, allows for a greater level of ship customisation AND allows for realtime reinforcement of battles).

That's not an improvement, that's not learning from other games or even the previous games that Amplitude has made, that's taking the Amplified Reality gimmick, bolting it onto a non-interactive "movie" frame which is entirely redundant, and placing it in for the sake of making some nice trailer fodder when the game is released. That's not what people expect from an Amplitude game.

I disagree, but let me have my piece. Just a minute ago I made a post asking for clarification on tactics. I think all the space battles really need are tactics and admirals to make it feel right. They already appear to have basic tactics in the game. Expand upon that, and it'd be perfect. You're not playing as an admiral or captain in the game, but rather as a leader of the people. What's important to a leader is tactics, the people in charge, and the results of a battle. The results are already there. You get to watch the battle and see exactly what happened. One thing that should be in the game, if it isn't already, is a battle "recap" so that if you do skip a battle and it doesn't go the way you expected, you should be able to watch the footage. But yeah anyway, space battles should focus on initial maneuvers and the heroes involved in them. That's what I think on the subject. Other than these advances, I do not believe you should have any direct effect on the battle once it's already begun. Definitely make more detail in what can be done before the battle though. Make it realistic and complicated. 

The combat looks great, and I like not having to micromanage everything.

That said, a few more options at the planning stage would be nice... maybe with some more unlocks as research progresses.

The game is not diminished by not having fully controllable tactical battles, it is only your opinion that the game is.

"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent."

Hobbesian wrote:

Which is broadly my point. ES (once it got the Disharmony DLC) and EL both had at least some level of a combat model, is ES2's combat thus being entirely reduced to a graphical sideshow? If so why bother with the graphical combat -at all-?

 My reply to your opinion was that:

Igncom1 wrote:

Because it's a space opera.

Becuse it looks really really cool.

Is not creating a new and easier argument to attack, nor was my purpose to try and tear down your argument and refute the entirety of it with a simple opinion.

I am sorry if you felt that way.

I do not believe that endless space 2 would be better served with a deep and complex eXterminate. So It is my opinion to disagree with your opinion.

That does not make your opinion anymore invalid then mine.

Yes, this game is diminished, there's a similar thread over on the Steam forum where there's a much different set of opinions and people aren't exactly happy campers over there. Just because people are more positive about the game -here- doesn't mean it's all sunshine and flowers. There's not just -one- person who feels that way. As for your reductive response to my post, yes, it was a straw man, whether by accident or by design, but apology accepted.

I'm not asking for ES2 to have the greatest eXterminate ever designed, but I am asking it not to regress from ES1, and I don't think that's an unreasonable ask, I don't think in the eyes of many ES1 players that's an unreasonable ask either, in fact I'm moderately confident in the eyes of people who review this game (of which I am one) that's not an unreasonable ask. This game is supposed to represent an advancement on ES1 and yet in many places it doesn't advance "enough" at this stage, the bulk of those areas are easily fixable, the space combat however needs a much deeper examination before it's ready for prime time.

Hobbesian wrote:

Yes, this game is diminished, there's a similar thread over on the Steam forum where there's a much different set of opinions and people aren't exactly happy campers over there. Just because people are more positive about the game -here- doesn't mean it's all sunshine and flowers. There's not just -one- person who feels that way. As for your reductive response to my post, yes, it was a straw man, whether by accident or by design, but apology accepted.

I'm not asking for ES2 to have the greatest eXterminate ever designed, but I am asking it not to regress from ES1, and I don't think that's an unreasonable ask, I don't think in the eyes of many ES1 players that's an unreasonable ask either, in fact I'm moderately confident in the eyes of people who review this game (of which I am one) that's not an unreasonable ask. This game is supposed to represent an advancement on ES1 and yet in many places it doesn't advance "enough" at this stage, the bulk of those areas are easily fixable, the space combat however needs a much deeper examination before it's ready for prime time.

Simply having a bunch of people agree one way or the other does not make that opinion correct.

I am personally of the opinion that the disharmony expansion for ES1 made the game's warfare much worse then in vanilla ES.

It made the attempt to add complexity to the game to make the combat more deep. I feel however that it failed and added a bunch of mechanics that only added complexity for complexities sake.

Is the current system perfect? No, from what I have seen it does not look to be very deep as players build frames with long range guns and utterly annihilate each other. The game has a emphasis on having few and important ships (That level up) without allowing them to survive a losing battle.

In a game of civilisation 5, when two combat units fight one another they do not annihilate each other, but rather fight to two thirds of their HP and break of for a fight in the next turn. A battle doesn't decide a war unless the player faces overwhelming fire-power. If Civ fought battles like ES does then every single skirmish would end in one unit or another in being destroyed. In a game where building a fleet is expensive and costly.

As for the UI, yeah the game does not give any data on the events of a conflict, or on any battle. There is no way to analyse the events of a battle and see a firing round by firing round recount of every event that happened. A strategic view and display of every bit of information that a player might want. Data on the accuracy of a single weapon battery on a single ship within a large fleet on one of possibly many battles it may have fought during the turn.

Adding in stats like x3 hull weakness and artificial buffs like long-range kinetics that completely destroys the balance previously set of kinetic weapons being short ranged weapons is, in my opinion, a very poor way of making the system better.

Which once again comes around full circle to my point. There's no granularity, there's no complexity, there's no data to parse, there's no real opportunity to learn.

Everything which you had in the first game, and then expanded upon in Endless Legend, that's all out of the window now, instead we have much more limited designs with reduced specialisation options, tonnage and modules have been replaced with this module system that destroys true ship customisation and in effect now all we end up doing is simply smacking fleets against each other with maneuvers optimised for whatever range our guns happen to be best at.

That's -not good design- in any sense of the word. Good design offers players the ability to learn from their mistakes, and rewards them for playing thoughtfully. Good design makes each area of the game useful and interesting, right now the visual combat section is not useful -nor- interesting. There's no functional benefit to watching it, there's no strategic benefit to doing anything other than "simulate all" after you blap out whatever battle plan suits your fleet best.

Again, that is a flat regression from ES1, even before Disharmony, regardless of what you think of Disharmony's changes to the base game. Let alone comparing it to how EL allowed for much more interesting combat through the use of minor races and their own unique specialities.

Hobbesian wrote:

Okay, in case my rather graphical description was a bit much for you, I'll condense.

The current system regresses back from the improvements seen in Disharmony, and from the lessons learned in Endless Legend. What we have now is a system that is fundamentally worse than Endless Space 1 *pre DLC*, as it lacks formation cycling, targeting options, and the ability to directly influence combat in progress. In effect it's turned combat into a Michael Bay film. That's terrible from the perspective of comparisons to peer sci-fi 4X games (think Stardrive 2, which whilst inferior in a lot of ways, has drastically superior space combat) or even Stellaris (which manages to have superior political effects on an empire, allows for a greater level of ship customisation AND allows for realtime reinforcement of battles).

That's not an improvement, that's not learning from other games or even the previous games that Amplitude has made, that's taking the Amplified Reality gimmick, bolting it onto a non-interactive "movie" frame which is entirely redundant, and placing it in for the sake of making some nice trailer fodder when the game is released. That's not what people expect from an Amplitude game.

I just went back and read the GDD on battles and most of what you are complaining about is included in there, it just isn't available yet in the EA since this is the Alpha version.  I would strongly suggest you go read the GDD.  I really like some of the ideas they have in there like having different flotillas, the option of having reinforcement flotillas and deciding when they join the combat, etc.  There is also the discussion of the ship customization that is going to be available, how the node the battle is taking place in can have an effect, etc.

This combat system isn't finished. it is too early to decide that it should be scrapped. It is being compared to two systems that have been fully developed and tested.  We don't fully know what all we will control at the end of the day. What we do know is the combat system (Watching or Not) should give you the same outcome. This was intentional to not over burden the player Which I have to agree. The Visible combat is just a Visual. The system itself does not appear to be designed to have mid-battle input. As far as I can tell it's purely to watch a cool battle play out, and detail information on what works and what doesn't. (The overview camera will probably help this). It's just too early to decide and push such an aggressive action.

Hobbesian wrote:

There's a big but to that, you're still better off specialising your fleets into a single range because having a sniper fleet at close engagement range is not optimal. If you're set up with torpedo boats, you want them all sat at distance. I imagine late game there's multilayer battle plans and the like but frankly the whole thing lacks a lot of granularity that even ES1 had in the ship design and fleet planning stage, let alone the combat orders stage.

Having specialized fleets gives advantages when you completely counter the enemey, which you do right now because the AI is trash and we don't pvp.

If it's not a total stomp the team with pure ships might actually be stomped by a team with mixed arms that's laid out well with a good strat as the snipers are going to be fighting at ranges where they can't even fire.

The issue is right now the main portion that the combat is designed for multiple fleets, which is currently "late game" and only happens on harder difficulties (usually after stomping the AI).  Given there's at least 1 or more era's left, there's a lot of the combat left untested, especially given the AI does literally one strat.