Pluvinage wrote:

Gameplay improvement is important. Every sequel should bring new features and expand the concept of 4X. I believe the main reason Heroes of Might and Magic is declining after Homm 5 is because they are afraid of expanding the game too much. Homm 6 and Homm 7 don´t bring too much in the table. I know Homm 4 isn´t popular among fans but at least it explored a new type of gameplay...

I agree. There is certainly a degree of copycatting in 4x games these days. My biggest annoyance is the "recreate MOO 2" craze. MOO 2 was a great game in its time and it is still available to play for those who want to, but not every space 4x needs to try to "perfect" the MOO formula. The genre can grow in different directions and do interesting things besides copy a 21 year old game.

I think ES 2 did a number of interesting new things that were notable including the trade system, the government system, the new colonization mechanics and potential outpost rivalry. I think the new set of asymetrical races are great and extremely imaginative (Riftborn, Unfallen, Lumeris). I look forward to what they add to the game in the future even if I do have my own gripes with some of the systems, they are mostly things that can be adjusted and patched and many are being worked on already.

Slashman wrote:

I have a few gripes with modern 4xs myself, but I'm not longing for decades-old games and gameplay. I want the genre to move forward and spread into different directions and focus on different areas. I want more and different NOT less.

Gameplay improvement is important. Every sequel should bring new features and expand the concept of 4X. I believe the main reason Heroes of Might and Magic is declining after Homm 5 is because they are afraid of expanding the game too much. Homm 6 and Homm 7 don´t bring too much in the table. I know Homm 4 isn´t popular among fans but at least it explored a new type of gameplay...

Slashman wrote:

Sometimes a simple sentence like "The game just isn't for me" will suffice.

It would not. Because that is simply not true.

Slashman wrote:

Sometimes a simple sentence like "The game just isn't for me" will suffice. That dozen or so paragraphs reads like an extended rant over not much of a big deal. The last paragraph is also pretty incoherent. 

Well, I thought it was an interesting read, even if I didn't agree with every point.  I can't speak for Amplitude, but when I make a thing, I'd much rather hear a specific criticism than "it just isn't for me."  I'm glad BmB made an effort to reflect and articulate his reaction.

If it wasn't interesting to you, you didn't have to read the whole thing.

Sometimes a simple sentence like "The game just isn't for me" will suffice. That dozen or so paragraphs reads like an extended rant over not much of a big deal. The last paragraph is also pretty incoherent. 

Independent factions are not unique to CIv games. And even if they were for some reason, I can't think of a compelling reason why they wouldn't be in other 4x games. They add variety and additional gameplay options. 

Happiness is essentially the same as morale and that has been around forever. Why anyone would think that the mood of a civilization would NOT be important in a 4x is baffling. 

All quests are pretty much a choice. You can even ignore faction quests if you want in order to concentrate on what you find important. 

I have a few gripes with modern 4xs myself, but I'm not longing for decades-old games and gameplay. I want the genre to move forward and spread into different directions and focus on different areas. I want more and different NOT less.

As for simultaneous turns and the battle system, I see them as necessary for dynamic multiplayer.

Although I wouldn´t mind playing EL battles by controling every unit movement and attack, like Heroes of Might and Magic. But that playstile would have to be optional because a lot of multiplayer games would drag because of this.

The quests depicts the internal conflicts of a faction, while the game itself reveals the external conflicts. Most of the time they don´t enter in conflict.

In the scenario you described, the Horatios can still be your best buds, the Sophons need your help, you want to avoid the Vodyani etc. All that while Emperor Zelevas is paranoid because someone in his empire tried to kill him. Was it his sister? Or maybe his bodyguard? That´s the internal story that only concerns your faction.

The only possible contradiction that may exist is when you play a faction in a very different way depicted in the quests... Pacifist cravers while the quest show then as vicious. However most quests give you some flexibility for different playstiles. United Empires quests can focus on industry, science or military. Sophons quests can focus on military. Unfallen can focus on ecologist etc.

I actually mostly enjoyed my time with it. The art, music, and writing are all fantastic, as expected. It's a very beautiful game. And the endless universe is more alive than ever. But in the end I decided against the game.

Why? After thinking about it and playing some other 4X games, including Endless Space 1, I basically came to the conclusion that while the game is immensely improved in many ways, none of my major gripes with the first game have been resolved. It is not improved in the ways that really matter.

First, there's the battle system. Of all the things in the first game that were fantastic, battles really, really, really were not one of them. Thanks to the improved graphics and new maneuvers, they are much more exciting to look at, but the auto camera still sucks a lot, and just doesn't show you what's going on. Important capital ships could easily explode offscreen without you noticing. They still drag on, and while watching an important pivotal battle like this is cool, watching every battle in the game is not cool. Autoresolving is a bone dry affair that gives you a number and a pat on the back. In some minor respects it's even been downgraded from ES1, such as the fixed-damage retreats and the very small pool of maneuvers you can use at one time.

This leads me into simultaneous turns, which are worse than ever. In ES and EL the AI would leave you a few seconds to take your actions and move their armies and fleets over time. But in ES2 they always take their actions instantly. So it is impossible to actually "attack" an AI fleet, it will always attack you first the second you enter the system. Since the battle system shows you an animation of who is attacking who, this feels cheap. The context of you making an attack is destroyed as the cutscene shows your fleet on the defensive every single time.

But even with that said, the very idea of simultaneous turns is daft, having to use your reaction time in the first place was stupid. I nearly uninstalled ES1 when an AI colonized a planet I wanted not because it had arrived a turn earlier, but because I didn't react fast enough. I lost the race because my reflexes were not good enough, in a turn based strategy game. One word: NO. This persists into ES2, with the same flimsy excuse of facilitating multiplayer. As if competing on reflexes against humans is any better.

Also relating to battles, It is clear to me that the game is still basically unbalanced. With some ship builds just being way better than others. I just read a thread about one flak ship completely destroying several carriers worth of missiles. Perfect balance is probably not going to happen with a ship designer because there's so much variation. But even with simple things like this being completely broken it seems like the game is just not in a really play-worthy state yet. This was a problem back then too. Certain ship builds would hard-counter others really bad because of rock paper scissors.

Rock paper scissors. Shields counter lasers, armor counters bullets, flak counters missiles. Pick the wrong type of weapon or armor? Tough luck. Your ship is worthless now. Three (now four) types of weapons, two types of defense and nothing else is just too lame for a game this expansive. And ES2 does nothing to improve on that situation either.

The diplomacy is somewhat less sterile with animated portraits (why didn't you animate them properly? that spine-skeletal stuff looks super awkward) and voice work, but the AI still basically lacks any personality. Right from the beginning civ leaders each had unique ways to behave, and the strong personalities of the alpha centauri factions really is one of the reasons that game still is one of the best 4X games despite it's other, numerous civ 2 era shortcomings. In ES2 the factions don't feel much different except cravers are more threatening now and then.

I appreciate that the AI plays to win instead of being passive, but In ES1 they would never trade systems for any reason except peace, so it was impossible to gain systems peacefully by any means even if they were recent colonies. Playing with humans I could negotiate such trades, but with the AI it was impossible. This meant a mad dash to colonize as much as possible before the AI, since once you reached an enemy border that was it, that was all you'd ever get. ES1 tried to make you not expand as fast as you could with expansion disapproval, encouraging you to research and build approval generating structures before expanding, and think more carefully about where to put your first colonies. But in practice, due to the above, not expanding as fast as you could meant you would just never compete on late-game resources if you didn't. So it was not an adequate limiter. Sulla of sulla fame has a long, tedious writeup of exactly why happiness mechanics are a flawed concept in limiting expansion: http://www.sullla.com/Civ5/bnwreview.html

As one of my first 4X games I simply appreciated a limiter of any kind, but as I later found it completely ineffectual I was disappointed to see it continue to return for later installments.

EL had this strange idea of regions with only one city as limiter on top of disapproval. Arbitrary but more effective.

ES2 has probably the best system yet in the outposts. Not only can you compete peacefully with the AI for systems with blockades, and the various growth options to try and reach full colony size first. These outpost systems also are a drain on on your economy while they grow so you cannot support an unlimited amount of them at the same time. For whatever reason this limiter still needs happiness mechanics. Having only played very little of it maybe it is after all the case that it is not as effective as it should be on it's own.

In some ways the game is even worse than ES1, like quests. Like ES1, the real depth of the game comes from the fluff. Unlike ES1, that fluff is presented in a much different way. As all-intrusive, inescapable quests that tell you how to play, how to feel, and what to do. And many seem to want to be a lame tutorial you're supposed to do every time you play, even if you already know what it wants you to do, are in the process of doing it, already did it five turns ago, and then have to do it again because it only counts new actions and not what you already did. Don't get me wrong, the writing is top notch and very immersive, provided you play completely passively until a quest tells you what to do. This is just fundamentally at odds with how 4X games are played. There's essentially two stories going on, the real story of the game, and your empire, and how it interacts with the other factions in the game. And then the story in the quest text which has nothing to do with the prior. That story is really good, but it's essentially a CYOA novel that pops up every dozen turns. And simply doesn't recognize that Horatio is my best bud, the cravers are knocking on my northeastern door, pirates are raiding my most recent outpost and that the sophons desperately want my help in the war with the vodyani even though it's really in my best interest to stay on the vodyani's good side. Simply doesn't recognize that I have a trade route to horatio just a few jumps away and the lost horatio probably would be really grateful to be reunited with their home instead of living on a tundra next to extradimensional time robots. And there is a political conflict of interest with immigrants from a nearby minor faction.

There are two stories, the gameplay story and the CYOA novel. They just can't coexist. Other 4x games have had success with scripted scenarios which are separate from the regular free play. And I'd love to play that scenario in endless, but as it stands the story just gets in the way of the regular state of play. Especially in multiplayer, if you've already done a 20-40~ hour story run and know what's going to happen you can probably rush through it, but if not you're either missing the story just to not waste time, or wasting time reading the novel while everyone else is trying to play. Or missing out on massive rewards and falling behind. Again it is simply a disruptive element that you cannot escape.

Even something really cool like the academy - which is now actually a place in the galaxy you can go - co-op quest, just takes no account of situation of the galaxy. There is no meaningful way to interact with the academy outside of the quest, so a potentially compelling gameplay element is reduced to this extraneous CYOA novel.

Having recently replayed ES1, Civ 5, and the recently free-on-humble Civ 3 I can't overstate how much I actually loathe this. Civ 5 had city states so now every 4X must have city states or minor factions or something like that. It had happiness so now every 4X has happiness. EL had quests so now every 4X must have quests for some reason. And it seems like the genre as a whole is just piling on features that are essentially disruptive to play, disruptive to the meat of the genre which is the interaction between the empires themselves. Comparing with the classics it seems like a kind of cancerous growth.

That is all.

Please stay on topic. Nothing less productive than dragging an important thread down the toilet like this.

We've done the tactical combat argument to death. It is the one thing that Amplitude seems adamant not to have. I would very much like a more interactive combat system but there will not be one in ES2. This was all discussed and hashed out when the first Game Design Documents were published. 

A bunch of us asked for more interaction or a simple tactical combat system but were shot down. That window has passed. I suspect that Amplitude simply may not have anyone on staff with the kind of experience to put such a system together right now. 

Improving the current combat system is likely the only place your suggestions will have weight at this point and there are several threads currently ongoing with that in mind.

AlmondBrown wrote:

"I actually mostly enjoyed my time with it. The art, music, and writing are all fantastic, as expected. It's a very beautiful game. And the endless universe is more alive than ever. But"

It was to much like another 4X game they played. OK. Cool! So how "do you make a 4X game not a 4X game" but maintain the 4X genre base? 

That is something I would want to READ in all honesty... Let US all get together and make the NEXT Gen of 4X and then let Paradox see if THAT vision is actually "codeable" and if it is WE will grant them Full rights to produce and Publish. :)

What should we call it?

"Infinite development time and resources!"

AlmondBrown wrote:

then let Paradox see if

I think you may be confused about a thing or two.

I don't mind combat with minimal interaction but the cutscene is way too long to be worth it. The quick resolve should also have something to look at. Just seeing the result screen is lame.

Slashman wrote:

We've done the tactical combat argument to death. It is the one thing that Amplitude seems adamant not to have. I would very much like a more interactive combat system but there will not be one in ES2. This was all discussed and hashed out when the first Game Design Documents were published. 

A bunch of us asked for more interaction or a simple tactical combat system but were shot down. That window has passed. I suspect that Amplitude simply may not have anyone on staff with the kind of experience to put such a system together right now. 

Improving the current combat system is likely the only place your suggestions will have weight at this point and there are several threads currently ongoing with that in mind.

I would love Amplitude to have a more open mind with this. They must realize that having that attitude is refusing to improve, especially with such an obvious (and serious) issue.

minurominerwin wrote:

Slashman wrote:

We've done the tactical combat argument to death. It is the one thing that Amplitude seems adamant not to have. I would very much like a more interactive combat system but there will not be one in ES2. This was all discussed and hashed out when the first Game Design Documents were published. 

A bunch of us asked for more interaction or a simple tactical combat system but were shot down. That window has passed. I suspect that Amplitude simply may not have anyone on staff with the kind of experience to put such a system together right now. 

Improving the current combat system is likely the only place your suggestions will have weight at this point and there are several threads currently ongoing with that in mind.

I would love Amplitude to have a more open mind with this. They must realize that having that attitude is refusing to improve, especially with such an obvious (and serious) issue.

How many people do you believe see it as an issue? Is the average user consistently asking for tactical combat? If this was the case, then I think we'd see something different. Amplitude's vision for the game does not include it. They would rather work on the current system. That is their decision to make. I'll offer suggestions within that framework because that is what we will be working with.

When we finally get the Sword of the Stars HD remake, I'll be expecting decent combat there, but pushing the issue here is going to accomplish nothing but getting yourself more frustrated. That was my point from the very beginning. Amplitude are not going to gut their core systems and redo them...at least not in the way the OP is expecting. They will listen to good feedback and make changes based on what they believe is the right direction to go.