Hi guys, I originally posted this on the steam forums: http://steamcommunity.com/app/392110/discussions/0/348292787752243810/, same name on steam, FaytesEnd.


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Hi! Feel free to ignore this, it just my opinion. If you want to talk about a certain point, lets! Don't bother posting a huge list refuting every point because you LOVE the game. I like it too, but I feel it has some major flaws. If you want to make your own list, a new thread would make more sense.

So I played around 4 games, 1 to completion.
Two with the sophons - first game.. went bad. Second, got to turn 64 and game just stopped.
One with Vodyani  - got to turn 80~ish and just won. My god are they powerful....
One with Cravers - finished a game, but what a slog with forced truce, and no happiness

Pros:
- Combat, when the camera doesn't suck, looks nice

- Exploring anomalies is cool and gives me reason to build more explorer ships

- It seems like we get more starting resources on our home world so you 'need' to rush production building a lot less. In my last too games, I just built ships as the buildings weren't as good immediately.



Cons:
- Tech tree is confusing. I have EL and all its expansions, tech in that makes more sense. The era system sucks in ES, often I need to dip back into E1 to get some colonizer tech for some world I find... then I get double punished. I spend time researching the E1 tech, and then E2 techs are more expensive. Also, this is super high tech space.... why am I forced into eras?

- Combat is shallow. I played with the cravers and just spammed long range weapons, I didn't loose a fight hte whole game. I lost no kidding, 2 ships. I didn't even bother healing.

- Force truce wrecks the cravers. I thought they didn't know the meaning peace?

- I could not keep up happiness with growing as the cravers. I had literally no population on 80% of my systems. It was amazing....

- The senate system needs work. It's a neat concept, but it really makes me feel like less of a space emperor.

- Why can't I purge pops on my world. I"m the evil cravers.... Or when I played the vodyani, why couldn't I sacrifice alien pop for alms? My ships could do it... but I couldn't?

- Cravers - per pop deplete the world faster? This needs to be looked at. I had to play shuffle pops on a few worlds, just so I had NONE OF MY OWN RACE, since they suck. I get they devour, so put them on space stations and make the slaves do the work.... I basically did this by shuffling pops....

- Combat is shallow. Why can't missiles fire close range? Just make them less effective at it.

- Combat - can't tell my ships to stay at longest range as long as we can, using only long range weapons. How is this still not an option in these games? Oh look, I have all missiles, lets fly in a pattern where the other ship with all the close range guns, flies right up nex to me! Makes sense! lol

- Exploring, giving explorer ship probes, just makes me not use them for exploring. I end up building 2-3 and just slowly getting anomalies. I know I can build my own custom ships...

- Improvements feel pretty useless. In most cases I was better off building ships. A world might start with 40 industry and a tech gives you a whopping 1-2 more...

- Why can  you not idle collect dust or science early on? Why am I punished for finishing my build queue? This is another silly EL thing just slathered onto a space game. This is a massive space empire, let me do something uselfull when I finish the queue. Forcing me to buld ships is super bad, it tanked my economy early on..... I had to build and recycle shps for NO GAIN, just to stay in the green. Who thought of this... its not fun.

- Infulence, how do dead empires have influence? When does a captured systems influence become mine?

- Being given heros is a nice change, can we explore their skills before we pick? If you force me to take high level heroes, help me pay for them too!

- Heroes on systems level up. Fleet ones don't. ALL my system heroes were like lvl 8 at the end of the game, my fleet guy, as the cravers, in a fight like every 7 turns, was lvl 4.....

- Food. It gets crushed in negative happiness. I get unhappy people not growing, but starving to zero pop....

- Can I skip the cinematic view when I click on a new system. It was cool the first X times... now I just need to click a bunch a bunch of times to get to the view I need....

- Can we have a y/n toggle in combat to 'always' skip to the action? N seconds of ships jumping in... cool the first time or 2... but I really only want to watch it on huge battles with tons of ships. Too much boring busy work on small fleets, actualy ruins the immersion. Save the best for the right moments :)


I have a feeling the game will get good, but so far its underwhelming. So much so, I think I'll back to stellaris and EL for their next DLC. ES1 had its issues, cards sucked, heroes were supid powerful (But, so fun :)), ai fleet spam, still no clue how combat 'actually works', and the goofy and unclear tax system (I need money! ok, I"ll build this improvement, it gives +5 dust per turn... build it, LOOSE MONEY! .... again, who thought that was a good idea? at least explain it way better that its tied to closely to tax rate - or make some improvments that aren't or update the dang tooltip to what you get right now!.....).

What are your guy's thoughts?