Onionbreath wrote:

The only valid game design philosophy that exists is "Make it enjoyable." 

Yeah, games target is to have fun, but stating that "make it enjoyable" is the only valid design philosophy... You're mixing concepts.

4x is not just a war game, so there's are lots of features related to empire management, and empire interactions, some are more eye-candy, others are just numbers, the "fun" can be archieved in many ways, and the control you have over many features or the way you can handle incoming events is part of the joy.

Not sure of what you're aiming for with all that hard feelings, anyways, you should get out of EA and wait to release if you're really in that state.

If something truly defines gaming companies are their products, I'm man of facts, ATM they have Endless Legend as a reference, and damn, that game, at least for me, is incredible, quite polished in the mechanics and balance, lots of factions with lots of different play styles, and you have an incredible amount of strategic choices everywhere. You can focus on exploring, build tall, wide, science, go hard military, diplomacy, mix any of that, and get great results.

I've put high hopes on Amplitude, and I feel they wont disappoint me.

How many times does it need to be pointed out?

Step 1: AI declares force truce.
Step 2: Accept force truce.
Step 3: Click on diplomacy screen.
Step 4: Declare war again.

All on the same turn. Even the AI does this. You bypass the approval penalty entirely.

So much rage on these forums over FT, all for nothing.

I don't know whether the devs intend for FT to remain this way, but at the moment it only functions as an influence cost for reDoWing, and even that's true if and only if you don't have militarists as the leading party. If you do, force true literally does nothing other than providing the possibility of reprieve if your opponent accepts. Please learn the game mechanics before complaining about them. There is absolutely nothing stopping you steam rolling through an opponent without any hits to approval if that's what you desire, so long as you manage your influence/politics accordingly.

As for previous games, the current system is, IMO, better. Take Civ for example. You can declare war on someone, do nothing for X number of turns, they can do nothing for X number of turns, war then ends. A bit of war weariness at worst. The system in ES2 requires that some losses are actually incurred by at least one side before peace can occur. This feels a hell of a lot less gamey and arbitrary than in some other 4X iterations.

Pacific conversion is completely legit and has been used in plenty of other titles in one form or another. I'm glad they are rolling back the influence generation as it can get a little too much at higher levels, but cultural conversion has long been a staple of 4X games. It allows for 'peaceful aggression', creates another resource to manage, and naturally generates conflict between neighbours which escalates tension from the mid-end game. 

" It's simply a different game-design philosophy "

What philosophy is that?  The only valid game design philosophy that exists is "Make it enjoyable."  Everything else about a game: its design, mechanics, testing, balance, debugging--  all of that is ultimately to ensure an entertaining experience.  Anything that detracts from that isn't worth the time.

"I personally find it a decent compromise compared to Stellaris' 10 years of unbreakable peace"

At least with Stellaris, you can control the objectives of a war and renegotiate what you're willing to accept before ending it.  It's not perfect, but it provides the player(s) something to work with in exchange for peace.  Endless Space 2 just says "ok now suddenly we're forcing this truce.  You have no control in the conditions and no agency.  You either accept or you take a happiness penalty."  At best, it's an annoyance you overcome by accepting the nonsensical conditions forced upon you and then immediately paying influence to continue your war campaign right after; and you'll be doing that a hundred times over the course of the game.  Or at worst, it's a game-crushing features that stops your fun in its tracks.  

In both scenarios, it's utterly pointless in its implementation.  What is even the "problem" this is supposed to fix?  To stop a stronger faction from demolishing an opponent in all-out war?  Why?  Why would that be a problem?  In 20 years of 4X, that's a valid strategy of winning the game in almost all of them.  Some factions are even dependent on war to thrive (Cravers, Vodyani).  If the concern is over-expansion, we have a mechanic already in place to slow that down.  Just what is a ham-fisted forced truce supposed to fix, and if you took it out of the game, would the game really be that unbalanced and broken?  The first Endless Space never had that and it was just fine.  Endless Legend never had that (except for the Drakkin but it was only a feature of theirs specifically to give them an interesting advantage) and it was just fine.  Why is it necessary in this game?

As for influence conversion, while the idea seems interesting, the implementation for it is definitely awful.  I'm glad to hear the power of it has been scaled back, because at present, there's not an effective balance against someone whose whole strategy is influence expansion. Having to actually be at peace with another empire might at least be a good start and may give people additional reasons to rethink peace treaties with certain factions that may prove a threat to them.

"There probably won't be any more builds this close to release date, but to call this "not caring" is to be objectively insensitive to all the hard work and open communication the devs have committed since the beginning."

The OP was being hyperbolic, sure.  But at the same time, the way the development team has been going about this game raises more than a few red flags.  This game, a week away from release, is riddled with more bugs and imbalances than the original Endless Space and Endless Legend had by far, even by the beginning of their open-access testing cycles.  I'd dare say if it was released in its current condition, that it would receive poor reviews almost immediately.  I wouldn't say Amplitude "doesn't care", but they are rushing this product out the door without any beta testing and with so many game-breaking problems that it will be impossible for them to fix them all without having to do months of post-release patching.  And that will leave a very poor first impression.  You think this guy's post was rude?   Wait until two weeks from now.  

"Above all, you came into this early-access knowing the risks and potential shortfalls that early builds of the game might have"

Except you could be forgiven if you didn't.  Before Sega bought them, Amplitude's games were always very polished even during the early alpha stages.   I remembering buying into their early accesses because they actually ensured their games were air-tight before release, unlike the majority of Steam developers and big studios that slap "Early Access" on a title, promise the world and say "it'll all be fixed! Don't you trip, chocolate chip!", then release a shoddy product and fail to deliver upon their agreements.  But the way Endless Space 2 has been handled feels far too much like the later and less like the former.   I don't know if there's any correlation between that and Sega's buying of their company, and I'm not going to drum up conspiracy theories, but I find this rushing to get an unpolished product on the market highly atypical and more than a little concerning.  If it does get released as a buggy mess, and the inevitable cries for a refund start popping up, I sincerely hope you people don't think "Well, y'know... you should have known what you could be getting with these Early Access titles"is a valid argument in the developer's defense.  That won't hold up well against a litany of irate steam reviews and will just serve to spread more distrust.

"If you have an all-or-nothing approach to game features that are works-in-progress, then the iterative process of early-access is not for you. "

What does this even mean?  There are certain things one must hold as all-or-nothing.  For instance, the game has to be playable and its features can't hold it back in that regard.  That's an all-or-nothing that has to work by release.   And I bring that up, because we're 8 days from then, and people are still turning up to show massive performance issues in their games past 100 turns and frequently-corrupted save files.  If you can't finish a game you've started because it bugs out your save file or runs like a donkey mid-way, that's a massive issue.  I'd even call that unplayable as it's nigh impossible to reach a victory condition without having to start all over.  At the very least, that HAS to be fixed before release, and I certainly hope all those bug reports the development team have been collecting on the matter are being put to good use.  

But even assuming that is taken care of, there's still the massive faction imbalances, dysyncs, broken features, broken quests, and such that have to be addressed and many will flip their lids from that alone if they encounter these problems on release.  We all know some things will have to be tweaked post-release; that's just the nature of the beast. But statements like this makes me believe you don't quite understand just how bugged and imbalanced things are at present.  If even half of these issues go unaddressed, the team's in for a world of rage from buyers day 1.

"This isn't new either; Endless Legend went through the same process and became a well-polished game with expansions by the end."

And it had its own problems. There are still certain things in that game I don't like.  But it's playable and it's fun.  And when it was released, it was solid.  Endless Space 2 is FAR from meeting the same metric.  I sincerely hope for a miracle but my experience has told me it's going to get ugly soon.  

By the way, this is my first post so... hello everyone.  Sorry for beginning on such a contentious topic.