I feel like a couple of techs should be moved from Tier 2 into Tier 1. In particular the ability to convert Industry to dust and to make Peace treaties. I find that a) you often have planets with nothing to build, and you don't want to build ships either because of their massive maintenance cost, and b) you often get into major wars before the option of peace is even on the table, which seems bizarre to me. In general, Tier 1 seems to last too long with too limited options, and I think moving a few mechanics from Tier 2 down would help a lot.

I've never been happy with diplomacy being linked to techs. The concept of a peace treaty is not something you should need to research. Default derivative swaps are something that doesn't occur normally; no being a war with people is something you damn well better have figured out among yourselves before you got to the space-faring stage.

Void2258 wrote:

I've never been happy with diplomacy being linked to techs. The concept of a peace treaty is not something you should need to research. Default derivative swaps are something that doesn't occur normally; no being a war with people is something you damn well better have figured out among yourselves before you got to the space-faring stage.

So very much this, I would be much more in favour of something that thematically makes sense such as "language translation" that unlocks pretty much every diplomacy option right off the bat, but with a fixed time requirement before you've translated an alien language into your own polysynthesis (e.g. a fixed 5 turn time delay before you can communicate with a newly discovered minor race, but after the first instance of meeting that minor race, all other instances are instant, and an 8 turn delay when meeting a new major race). Much more akin to the Stellaris model of thinking.

Personally I'm not quite in favour of the era system myself, the ES1 tree system always felt a much better fit for the sci-fi approach of ES, but perhaps if they relaxed the requirements to transition between eras (or allowed you to traverse between two eras at a time, so you can start with eras 1 AND a bit of era 2, and then you work to unlock the rest of era2 and era 3 over time and finally era 4 that would work better), but that's more my own personal preferences on the matter. Either than or Clarste's suggestion of broadening the Tier 1 tech base and adding in more Tier 2 options, or even reducing the whole thing to three "Wide" tiers so you have much more scope for specialisation (so 27 techs per era?).

I think multithread management is overrated.  In the early game you usually don't have the dust to buy things out, and you probably want a nice stockpile going into era 2 for ship retrofits, while the building it provides is extremely expensive for an early game tech.  If i grab it it's at the end of era 1.

As for tech shuffling, some thoughts:

1. I'm fine with diplomacy options being linked to tech, but it does need some work right now.  It's odd and confusing that wars start, can't end, and then just auto resolve in this truce that makes no sense.

2. I really don't think city developments should be locked behind an era 2 tech. It strikes me as a  mandatory tech to grab, since there's no way you'll do well without it, and it also means that luxury resources are worthless until you get it.  Either move it to era 1, or just redesign it so you start out with 1 development plan and then can get more later.

3. Trade being gated as it is is odd as well since it's supposed to be a major new feature, and yet I can't see most races getting it at this time (craver/vodyani being the warmongers it seems a waste).

4. In general I feel there's a lot of era 2 stuff that adds flavor and unique fun to the game, that really should just be era 1 so you can start doing it earlier.

Clarste wrote:

I feel like a couple of techs should be moved from Tier 2 into Tier 1. In particular the ability to convert Industry to dust and to make Peace treaties. I find that a) you often have planets with nothing to build, and you don't want to build ships either because of their massive maintenance cost, and b) you often get into major wars before the option of peace is even on the table, which seems bizarre to me. In general, Tier 1 seems to last too long with too limited options, and I think moving a few mechanics from Tier 2 down would help a lot.

Totally agree. It'a also weird that selling ships is apparently worth nothing as far as I can tell. 

Clarste wrote:

I feel like a couple of techs should be moved from Tier 2 into Tier 1. In particular the ability to convert Industry to dust and to make Peace treaties. I find that a) you often have planets with nothing to build, and you don't want to build ships either because of their massive maintenance cost, and b) you often get into major wars before the option of peace is even on the table, which seems bizarre to me. In general, Tier 1 seems to last too long with too limited options, and I think moving a few mechanics from Tier 2 down would help a lot.

This is how I feel as well. It seems like to takes a long time to get to some essential tier 2 technologies. They could also just lower the number of technologies it takes to reach Era 2

lo_fabre wrote:

Void2258 wrote:

I've never been happy with diplomacy being linked to techs. The concept of a peace treaty is not something you should need to research. Default derivative swaps are something that doesn't occur normally; no being a war with people is something you damn well better have figured out among yourselves before you got to the space-faring stage.

Agree. This should at max be an Era I tech, like the suggested "translation tech".

Also share what said about using luxuries.

Trade in Era II is not a problem for me now, as with 125 turns I think we can't get an idea of how will it fit in a 300 turn game.

One concern is about colonization techs. After more than 1 year without playing Es1, from what remember in Es1 at mid-game you can colonize all/most planet types. From what I seen now is about 4 types per era, which means 20 at Era V. With all that new planets (which for me is a good improvement) as it is now, it is probable that some planet's won't be colonizable until end-game, and maybe you can even win far before having tech to colonize them. As I'm not sure how it can affect gameplay, till now won't ask for any modification, but I think we should keep an eye on it, and maybe group some planet types in one tech (something like colonize set).

As soon as we can colonize all planet types we'll have a much greater perspective.

I'm finally in the routine of focussing on acquiring 4 systems total early, with nice luxury and strategic resource deposits, then slowly progressing to 5 when I'm confident I have enough governors and tech to handle the overcolonisation debuff.

Also, terribly sorry to the mods, I accidentally, reported your post for an infraction; I was excited at all the good posts & interaction in this thread and attempting to multi-task constructing posts while eating dinner is very unwise.

Back on-topic of planet types though, as long as the systems are varied enough with enough resource rich planets occasionally dotted around, I've no problem colonising a weak planet while building up the system and tech to fully occupy the system. However when we have gas giants and such which we can't do anything with currently, it's just a matter of waiting.

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With regards to selling ships though, It's pretty useful as once you're built up and finally research the tech that allows you to probe more curiosities, you can simply build lots of explorers on mass, probe the planets en masse then simply scrap those ships to avoid the Dust upkeep cost, so it actually works out cheaper to build multiple ships as opposed to one or two so you can probe in a fraction of the amount of turns.

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Diplomacy? I feel some great points have been made on basic diplomacy and how the entry-barrier could be lowered, as  a newly space-faring race it makes sense to be able to close borders from turn 0 and so on. It could also prevent awkward PvP with your friends where they simply throw colony ships at you within the first 20 turns while laughing at the situation as they start colonising within your corner of the galaxy.

I'm not really a fan of having diplomatic options locked up behind this many techs either. I don't want to have to choose between communicating with my neighbors and being able to defend myself properly from them because I'm going to go with the latter every time.  I think generally too many features are locked up in techs like dust buyouts and system development upgrades. 

I'm not really sure it's necessary to split up the era 2 ship types, the support ships are a much lower priority for me anyways, maybe I just haven't figured out how to use them yet though.

I think it would be kind of neat if different factions had access to different planet types in different eras according to their starting preference; it seems kind of silly Lumeris would have trouble colonizing an ocean planet, etc. I haven't really looked closely enough at how common planets are or how much they produce, so I don't know if this would be a balance issue or not.

Eji1700 wrote:

I think multithread management is overrated.  In the early game you usually don't have the dust to buy things out, and you probably want a nice stockpile going into era 2 for ship retrofits, while the building it provides is extremely expensive for an early game tech.  If i grab it it's at the end of era 1.

As for tech shuffling, some thoughts:

1. I'm fine with diplomacy options being linked to tech, but it does need some work right now.  It's odd and confusing that wars start, can't end, and then just auto resolve in this truce that makes no sense.

2. I really don't think city developments should be locked behind an era 2 tech. It strikes me as a  mandatory tech to grab, since there's no way you'll do well without it, and it also means that luxury resources are worthless until you get it.  Either move it to era 1, or just redesign it so you start out with 1 development plan and then can get more later.

3. Trade being gated as it is is odd as well since it's supposed to be a major new feature, and yet I can't see most races getting it at this time (craver/vodyani being the warmongers it seems a waste).

4. In general I feel there's a lot of era 2 stuff that adds flavor and unique fun to the game, that really should just be era 1 so you can start doing it earlier.

I've been playing exclusively Lumeris so far, and having all the Trade & Treaty techs in Era 2 really cripples my ability to be merchants until about Turn 70/80. Between that and how consistently I have war declared vs me, I'm having trouble testing out a peaceful trading match.

Off the bat, I'd say that trade & peace treaties with Major Factions should be in Era 1 under Xenobiology, and N-Way Fusion desperately needs another thing attached to it. (I imagine they'll add Stationary Defensive Platforms to it later or something similar, because +50 Manpower to ground bunkers isn't worth a tech.)

AdmiralAckbar wrote:

I'm not really a fan of having diplomatic options locked up behind this many techs either. I don't want to have to choose between communicating with my neighbors and being able to defend myself properly from them because I'm going to go with the latter every time.  I think generally too many features are locked up in techs like dust buyouts and system development upgrades. 

I'm not really sure it's necessary to split up the era 2 ship types, the support ships are a much lower priority for me anyways, maybe I just haven't figured out how to use them yet though.

I think it would be kind of neat if different factions had access to different planet types in different eras according to their starting preference; it seems kind of silly Lumeris would have trouble colonizing an ocean planet, etc. I haven't really looked closely enough at how common planets are or how much they produce, so I don't know if this would be a balance issue or not.

Playing the game on Hard and Serious, you'll definitely want the early-support ships without a doubt; also this further increases the value of the Titanium and Hyperium techs.

Honestly though, my biggest mind-boggle is how the player is never allowed to have Closed Borders? I'm playing a lot of 1v1s on Hard and Serious now to get a better look at the AI and so on, but after a truce from a war I win, the enemy still encroaches into my territory, yet I can't pass through theirs due to Closed Borders.

Closed Borders should definitely be a default technology / diplomatic option.

So let's get some context here and quote from the game documents;

Firstly, Diplomacy is one of the systems of Endless Space 2 that is getting the biggest set of changes from our previous games. There are a couple of large reasons that were the cause of these changes: 

• Diplomacy should be a mandatory system. Player should not be able to ignore it
• The Diplomatic system should limit the effectiveness of wars
• Players should have a real sense of teamplay through the diplomatic system
• Diplomacy should reinforce positive relations between empires, but it should also be possible to use this as an offense
• Diplomacy should be equally important to warfare 

These are all great goals and pillars to provide a game dynamic we can all grow to love, some of us are already on the way there; I just feel personally, as well as have observed from several comments in this thread that the entry-requirement could be a lot more sensible; so less of the playing against the game feeling and more about getting immersed and having the gameplay systems and mechanics reinforce that experience.

Also, I'm sure a lot of us are just excited and are definitely aware diplomacy is only supposed to be very basic right now, would just be nice to get closed borders from turn 0 to stop Hard and Serious Lumeris being an intergalactic mosquito.

Hopefully our first patch allows us to give better feedback and have more detailed discussion.

So here's my thinking on the whole diplomacy options - Tier 1 research "Xeno-translation"

Initially you have Close Borders, Declare War available (but not activated) as "Hostile / Coldwar" type actions. After all, you don't need to speak a language to inform a race that you're about to blow it out of the sky, pointing big scary guns at it ought to be signal enough in both cases (and in the case of declare war, firing a few of them should do the trick).

Xeno-Translation unlocks all the Neutral and above options, but with a caveat, you need to translate the language of races you come into contact with, with a flat 5 turn delay for the first instance of contact with a specific minor race (or 5 turns after research complete, whichever is longer), or a flat 8 turn delay for actual races, to represent the time it takes to transcribe a race into your own language. Since the time is mutual for larger races, this gives a few turns "buffer" to feel each other out, and potentially to slam the borders shut if there's a suspicion that said race is prone to hostilities. For the minor races, that five turn buffer also prevents someone popping up with a large quantity of dust and stealing a minor race out from someone who might be nearing completion with bribes/assimilation, giving them a chance to react and respond.

In effect it gives players a bit of lead time before they can actually put that research into effect, and gives players a chance to respond to emerging threats and powers around them. It also moves the big mess of diplomacy being a tier above where it should be into the right place, but without making it a bit too "important" to grab -this very instant-.