Hello Amplitude im a long term Endless space multiplayer veteran (around 700 hours on steam mainly multiplayer only)

There was a time when we had a public group that played the first endless space on a daily basis for nearly a year. We totally loved to play endless space.

Sadlyt technical problems which we kinda accepted slowly killed the drive to play this game after a very long time. It was clear we where not the only one that had this issues. At the current state Endless space multiplayer is dead due to desync issues. Ther is nothing more frustrating then a 6h game session in which suddenly fleets disappear because somewhere in a early turn the game somehow messed up. Also very often it was not possible to reload the savegame and so a lot of time was wasted and everyone was frustrated. Issues like that where not unique, they where very common in the endless space multiplayer community and appeared in nearly every game we played after couple of hours of gameplay. The issues also was well known for amplitude but is still not solved.(Talked to Amplitude devs at gamescom)

Its sad to see trying to host a game and waiting 4 hours until a single person joining. Endless space 1 could still be a massively played multiplayer game if the old problem would be solved.

As a Unity programmer myself i know that Unitys netcode is kind of a mess but i also know there are solutions for that.(Often different language packs causes desync issues, for example in stellaris) What kind of worries me is stat the desync issues that killed ES1 was also in endless legend and are also in ES2. Endles legend introduced even a button that auto reloads the game in the lobby. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU SOLVE AN ISSUE! This was basically the reason why i never got into endless legend multiplayer because i dont want to experience the same frustration in another amplitude game. I even had the chance to talk to some of you guys on the gamescom in cologne two years ago and they told me that desync will be fixed in ES1 in a later version. Well its still not fixed.

But what worries me even more is that this issue seems to still be a problem in ES2 and Endless legend. I can understand that ES2 is early acess but it kinda feel that amplitude is not really knowing what they are doing since they never achieved to fix the problem in 3 fucking games. 

tl;dr As a huge fan of your games i hope that you fix desync for ES, EL and ES2. Otherwise i cannot recommend anyone buying this games anymore and i think multiplayer in ES2 will also be dying as it died in the first Endless space.

@SuperMarloWorld EL2? Do you mean EL or ES2? ES2 multiplayer is only out since 2 days so i guess you mean EL. This discussion should also focused mainly on ES desync issues. 

But anyways i want to answer your questions. Even though i would not consider myself an endless legend multiplayer players i have 200 hours in it. I also did not buy the latest DLCs simply because i was not happy with the desync issues and some balance decicions in the game. Last time i played EL was after the release of the latest DLCs i had desyncs in around 60% of all games and especially in long matches with more then 4 players. This mostly happens when a lot of players leave or join. The lobby reload workaround kinda fixed it but reappeared after more players left and others joined. But whats really annoying is the the loading screen times in huge maps. It really killing the experience in long matches when desync occur every 5turns because ppl are joining and you have to wait 5 minutes until the game reloads. But at least savegames got not corrupted which was the case in endles space 1. But still reloading from lobby was nececary in nearly every long EL game i played. The lobby fix is still only a work-around and no fix to the actuall desync problem. Its still worrying that this problem is existing in all 3 games. Programmers only get better by fixing issues that they have never fixed before and not by work-arounds. I also understand that this game is till in EA but like i said before 3 games and still the same unfixed issue is worringly. Aso i played other EA multiplayer games that had p2p multiplayer and where developed with unity as well.