DISCLAIMER:

This is my opinion and you might disagree. I do not claim to be right about everything I say. And please apologize occasional typos, because English is not my native Language and I am not used to write a lot in it.

Endless Space 2 (ES2) is a great game and I enjoy it a lot. I love the race diversity, it is one of my favorite parts of the game. I adore the creativity in the design. While most races played mostly the same in ES1, and EL had the approach of either taking one fundamental mechanic away from a Faction while giving them an insane Advantage elsewhere to balance it out or making a Faction focus on a specific element of the Game to make it interesting. ES2 however seems to look at the individual 4x’es (especially Expand) that make up the genre to see how each race approaches them, which is great to see play out in action.

Problem is asymmetrical design can quickly spiral out of control when you have multiple factors interacting with one another, creating exponential scaling ruining balance and therefore playability. The problem can be divided into balance of Factions/Races and balance of win states. ES2’s execution of those is questionable at best and catastrophic at worst. I am going to examine the latter one first:

Balance of Win states:

EL had some of the best win states in all of 4x games. Especially the Wonder and Quest victories were creative new ideas I haven’t seen before.  In total EL had 9 ½ victory conditions:

Elimination, Supremacy, Expansion, Score, Economic, Diplomatic, Scientific, Quest, Wonder, (Allied)

Aside of the terrible Diplomatic victory, all of those were pretty balanced and achievable for most of the major Factions. Now lets look at ES2’s 6 ½ win states:

Score, Supremacy, Expansion, Science, Economic, Wonder, (Allied)

1. Supremacy. Is our base point since the balancing variables around it don’t really exist. Or course it gets harder on bigger maps and with more opponents, but aside from that its pretty straight forward, and a solid starting point.
2. Economic. The big, big problem right now. 95% of my games were either a) me accidently reaching the Economic victory, or b) me actively avoiding it, trying to reach a different win state. It is horrendous how easily you can reach it with decently upgraded systems not even remotely focusing on Dust production. Every single one of my multiplayer matches ended in Economic Victory. The point in time depends on your game settings but on normal speed I usually reach it around turn 160. I tried rushing it with three different races, resulting in me winning at around turn 130 (again normal game speed). This is a big problem, and it ruins all other win states.
3. Score. Score always felt weird to me as it decides who wins after a set amount of turns (again depending on your settings) based on a number of arbitrary factors. Nonetheless it is currently almost unachievable since in all my games of actively trying to get it I always achieved Economic or Scientific victory (or someone else did) by no later than turn 230 (normal speed), while score victory is triggered upon turn 300. All of this makes it sort of pointless. The only way you could possibly accept this one is as a sort of backup if somehow no one wins in any other way.
4. Science. In EL Science Victory was a commitment, The era 6 techs were around 10 times the cost of all others, meaning it would take you around 60 turns of commitment to achieve a win. In ES2 it is around 3-5 times as much as the other tier 5 technologies. If you have a good science output you can reach it casually in around 15-20 turns. Again way too easy.
5. Wonder. If you think about it, Wonder victory is really similar to the scientific victory from Civ 5. First you reach certain requirements in the techtree and then you build “the thing” to reach the victory condition. Again this one is way too easy too reach. Usually the only thing, holding you back are the strategic resources, as the tech is easy to obtain and 20k industry isn’t really much for a well developed system.
6. Expansion. While Science, Wonder and especially Economic victory are easy, Expansion is pretty much impossible without ruining your empire in the process. In a large galaxy you need to Colonize 45 Systems, which  would be ok if the maximum number of systems, before triggering disapproval wouldn’t be around 16 Systems at max. While it is possible to go up to around 30 systems in a Federation, building every Improvement, that generates happiness, you can even go up to around 35 In a Democracy with a lot of people. To reach 45 you would need to enter an alliance with basically everyone to abuse "High Serenity Program” System improvement, or to abuse either the militarists “Us or them Decree” or the religious “Saints & Sinners Bill”, who both have obvious downsides. Anyway I tried all of those methods without success. It always ended in my Empire either collapsing or achieving guess what? Economic “victory”.
7. Allied. While it isn’t really a classic victory condition, it still deserves to be talked about since it is literally broken. While I love the Idea of teaming up and I truly appreciate Amplitude including this from the start, entering an alliance breaks the game. Entering an alliance should make it harder for you to achieve a win state, since you have an insane amount of advantages, ranging from purely strategic ones to structures which only work when being in one. Problem is: ES2 makes certain things easier to reach (like Economic) leading to absurd situations where creating a three way alliance can result in instant economic victory.

The general problem in my honest opinion is that you simply achieve victory way too quickly. Resulting in People never playing the endgame.

Balance of Factions:

ES2 has 8 Factions that are moderately well balanced. I have seen way worse in other 4x Games. That said balance in ES2 isn’t perfect either. Tier Lists are always a controversial topic I usually try to avoid, but for the sake of argument. Mine would look something like this:

S (dominant):                     Vodyani, Horatio

A (balanced):                     Riftborn, United Empire, Craver

B (slightly undertuned):   Sophons, Lumeris, Unfallen

While all of these Factions still can and do win, people who know what they are doing can make it look like it’s not even a challenge by exploiting what is strong in the game.

• Vodyani. My first experience playing the Vodyani was similar to my experience playing the Broken Lords of EL. During your first 5-10 Games you are really confused and you give up questioning if the race even has any potential at all. But then you figure out what you have to do to overcome your factions weakness, just to be left with some really overpowered stuff. Let’s just look at the Faction’s Pros and Cons:
  • Cons:
    • Weak Early game (relatively late Expansion, slow growth)
    • No Terraforming or Specialization
    • Arks are open to attack in the Lategame
    • Religion is in a weird spot since Vodyani can’t really Profit from half the laws
  • Pros:
    • Colonize all planets at the same time
    • Great Population
    • No dependency on population slots
    • Strong fleet
    • No happiness penalty during conquest

All this would make them an all right Faction, slightly below the top tier ones. But there is a small thing that elevates the Vodyani from a decent faction to a godlike one: The hero skill “Infallible Authority”. In case you aren’t familiar with this one: if the Hero is a political leader it gives +1 FIDSI per population Globally … per Hero Level, you can have multiple of those if you have multiple Vodyani Heroes by the way. And as if it wasn’t good enough, it also gives +4 FIDSI per Population if the Hero is a Governor on system … per Hero Level. Lets Do some math: around Turn 120 it is realistic to have your Starting Hero (Vodyani/ Religious/ Guardian) as a Governor at ~lvl. 23 and a second one (Vodyani/ Militarist/ Guardian) at ~lvl. 17. This means you get +40 FIDSI per population passively globally. BUT in addition to that you get +92 (+132 FIDSI total) in one and +68 (+108 FIDSI total) in another system. Let’s just look at the second System: Let’s assume it has 4 Planets and is Ark level 2 (system Development level 2) and maxed out in population: this makes 108*4*5=2160 Food, Industry, Dust, Science and Influence in a single System before Planet stats, System Improvements or any other additional sources of income. 

You might say that this is all right, since you have trouble expanding and gaining population in the first place because Essence is sort of a hard to get resource. To which I say yes! … In theory. Because out of all the ways to get Essence, one is way too good: Converting Dust into Essence 4:1. As you already get insane amounts of Dust (even without a lot of system improvements) as shown above, you can build up population and arks really fast. This gets completely out of control: in one Game I managed to ramp up my Industry in my main system (4 Planets, Ark level 4) to 30.4k by turn 155. To just put that in perspective: tier 5 System Improvements like “Distributed Energy” cost 4480 Industry, the “Trade Clearing Bureau” costs 9360 Ind. And the “Obelisk of all Space-Time” required for the wonder victory costs 20k. 

Even without this hero ability, the meta is currently based a lot around having a lot of population, as most buildings, hero abilities and laws give FIDSI per population. The Vodyani’s ability to have guaranteed population slots and amazing people is really strong in this meta and makes them a really reliable pick.

• Horatio. Talking about the population meta, let’s talk about the faction whose playstyle revolves around having lots of his strong people. Horatio is the faction that benefited the most going from open Beta to the final Release. The switch to an ecologist start and the addition of terraforming, which is by the way one of the most powerful tools in the entire game, made him a lot stronger. The thing making them as strong as they are is the really strong, build in, food to industry conversion once they max out on population. Anyway Horatio are pretty straight forward once you wrap your head around them. You build everything that generates food or generates population slots, splice population as soon as you can and terraform Planets as soon as you can to max out on population. Due to the great Food to Industry conversion and your population’s amazing FIDSI output you are set to do whatever you want, and go for pretty much any victory condition. But Horatio would be in a fine spot if that insane conversion rate would be tuned down a bit.
• Riftborn. Riftborn are just good. Tons of industry a strong population, the arguably strongest fleet in the entire game, solid all around traits and the Singularities to round them off. They are on the verge of being a top tier if it wasn’t for their biggest weakness: reverse terraforming, since it feels and is really bad. Having good planet stats is always outweight by having more population slots because so much of your FIDSI scaling relies on having a lot of population, and your Riftborn population has indeed really solid stats. Even so it is a legitimate weakness in an otherwise strong faction. A shift in meta can raise them to a dangerously high power level though.
• United Empire. This is the faction I would more often than not recommend to new players. Solid fleet, great industry and the ability to generate lots and buy things out using Influence is amazing strategically as well as a quality of life. Having a lot of industry is great to have in this game because you can convert it into science or dust, if you need to. That said I feel like the United Empire has the perfect Power level for this game. They can go for most winstates  and are all around really flexible in their playstyle.
• Craver. Craver are in a weird space because you have to play them differently from any other race in the game. They will be hard to learn and even harder to master if the Cravers don’t fit your playstyle. Usually in 4x games you have you’re tier 1 Systems that generate tons of FIDSI, the ones you build your wonders and unique system improvements in. Your tier 2 Systems that generate moderate Amounts of Science, Dust, Influence and Manpower, as well as producing Fleets when needed. And your tier 3 Systems you take just to have a Strategic advantage. The thing is Cravers build up their systems quickly to a tier 2 but due to depletion points, they can’t stay up there forever. Efficiency goes down with time and you have to move on, colonizing new systems. The concept works well but in the current state of victory conditions you really struggle to finish out the game on larger Maps (as elaborated above), because Expansion and Supremacy are hard to get as it is and they even get harder on larger maps. Craver really struggle though with all other victory Conditions, well except the broken stage of the economic victory.
• Sophons. The Thing that divides the upper Faction from the following three (who aren’t in any particular order by the way) is that industry is the most useful stat out of FIDSI, since you use it to build structures that generate more FIDSI, you use it to produce army or to convert it into either dust, pushing other systems, or Science researching new things to build. All the upper factions have really good Industry values or just great FIDSI output in general This puts Sophons in the weird spot of a faction that can research lots of stuff, that they can’t properly build. Sophons can only really go for the incredibly easy to achieve Economic victory as well as the Science victory. Poor Sophons just struggle as soon as they have to interact with other players, since their fleet is mediocre without good tech, and due to their all around mediocre FIDSI output they can neither build a lot of it, nor go the diplomatic route because of low influence gain. As it is right now, they are not necessarily bad at what they do, just really one-sided.
• Lumeris. Lumeris are in a similar spot like the Sophons, possessing tons of dust but nothing to spend it on, due to low science output, they don’t have a lot of buildings to buy out Broken-lords-style and their sub par fleet struggles to win  them any engagements against the other races. Still Economic Victory is easy to achieve in the current stage of the game and Lumeris are quite competitive in that single win state. Sadly they are really missing any other options in their game plan. Expansion comes to mind as an alternative way to approach the game, problem is that it is practically impossible to reach, as explained above.
• Unfallen. The Unfallen should in theory be good but something is off about them. Similarly to the Horatio they have a lot of food but their food to industry conversion at max population feels a lot weaker than Horatio’s. In addition to that colonizing systems feels great but colonizing additional planets in an already existing one feels terrible, as it always takes a set amount of turns to colonize. These are up to 5 turns of idle time in which your system can’t produce anything. 5 turns per planet, 5 turns that by the way cannot be bought out. Also offensively used celestial vines (for pacific conversion) are strong in theory but terrible in an actual game because your opponent can simply declare war on you to end yo

It would seem that destroying ships doesn't level Heroes nearly so much as building them, for some strange reason. If Heroes got a bit more for tye former than the latter, fleet heroes would be in a much better place.

As for your faction points, I agree with many. Sophons are very reliant on Industry they don't have to gain benefits they only know of, in the hopes nobody looks at them until they can back up their bark with bite. Lumeris are great, but only for Economic victory. Other victories are generally out of their reach just like for everyone else.

However, Lumeris and Unfallen look to be getting a big indirect buff next patch, as the devs official mod released earlier changes the Pacifist mandate to a Forced Peace ability and shifts the Diplomacy discount law to the first slot, making it a lot cheaper and available from the start.  As Unfallen you can use this to preemptively force peace, preventing someone from disturbing your vine growth and forcibly making friend's with them; meanwhile cheap diplomacy and forced peace mean safe trade routes and very fast Minor Civilization relationship development for Lumeris, which in my experience can create a powerful feedback loop where you dump Dust into minor civs, and get more and more Dust, Science, Manpower, and sometimes other things in return.

MrJade wrote:

I think it's quite funny since 4XAlchemists rate Horatio as the weakest in terms of power. Personally, Horatio is bottom for me too.

Horatio make life difficult for me. If Immigration was a bit more  reliable and less opaque, and a whole slew of changes were made to Food  and System Growth to enable Tall empires, and early game Era 1 stuff  didn't care about your planet types instead of more later game stuff  caring, I'd feel better about them, since their theoretical Population  based gameplay is weird and underwhelming otherwise and their early game  is broken due to not having the "correct" planet type, which is always Fertile/Temperate right now. The punishment at Era 1 for not playing an Industrial empire should be the opportunity cost that I am not an Industrial empire, not that my industry gets further nerfed into the ground for my planet type. It's especially dumb cause in theory Hot planets are the planets of Industry, so Horatio should be great in slightly higher eras of Industry that are still early game.

I used to talk on game balance around reddit but now I came to this forum in hopes that I can reach the developers better.

I really like the effort you put into your post and I agree with what you said about victory conditions.

About some of the race balance I disagree strongly though. I am of the same opinion as the guys from 4XAlchemist in terms of race balance. Unfallen are obviously the most broken race at the moment, they are just the best at everything. They grow the fastest. They don't sacrifice food to colonize. They can make their home system an absolute powerhouse even with a bad start because every note you connect gives bonuses to the home system, where as with other factions its connected to which system reaches the node first with its influence bubble. Lategame you can turn all your planets into forest, specialize in food production, turn that food into industry which means an insane 7 industry per unfallen. Thats probably enough to mention.

The Lumeris are also a strong race. A lot of earlygame colonization power comes from not having baryonic shielding. Why is that you ask? Well you can discover nodes that are not connected to starlanes, or atleast not so you can see them. If you colonize them, they will not draw food from your colonies because without baryonic shielding, you can't travel across non-starlanes. 

So you just keep throwing out probes and colonize multiple systems at a time. 

Horatio are obviously the weakest faction. Their 25% ship production penalty is crushing. Not to mention their Ships have fewer slots than others. Yes they can specialize well but if you keep losing every fight because you have 25% less ships AND your ships are weaker, something is not right. 

Again I see someone who claims that you can splice population for "bonuses". I don't where you got that impression from or why you ignore simple math. I am going to write this down for you and hopefully make you realize why Horatio's gene splice in its current form is really bad. Your zvali start with 3 science per pop (disregarding approval for this one). As soon as you get 2 of them you can splice them, which means for 6 science you lose, you gain 2 science for each Horatio population. But you never think about the planet output. Lets say a planet outputs 25 fids in total per population. That means for sacrificing 2 pops you lose 50 fids. And your horatio gain 2 science each. Not quite worth the trade.

Yes Horatio makes this up by having strong food production and obviously in the end when your system is maxed out its better to have only Horatio, but in the meantime Unfallen would probably have built like 2 wonders because they have like double the population. 

Also I can't understand why the balance designers didn't keep population bonuses in mind. If you play United empire for example, you can switch to mezari (because its easier than UE of course, another balance complaint: the quest requiring you to have 4 industry laws for empire vs 3 for mezari means you have to go super deep into the left side tree to unlock 4 law slots)

and aquire a 10% boost to science production. It might have been 20% but I am not sure. Now you take 50 sophons in your empire. Guess what? Another population bonus that boosts science by 10%! And that 10% is a lot when you have like 20k science production. 

Now look at Horatio. Oh too bad you can't stack any of these bonuses because you only have Horatio and they produce lackluster amount of fids compare to a % bonus.

I think I am going to stop my rant here. I might sound a bit rude, but I care a lot about this game and want to make it better, yet some glaring issues start to frustrate me. 

I am looking forward to what you guys think about my Horatio comments. As far as I know this is how it goes, but if I made an error please tell me.