One of the aspects of Endless Legend that I greatly appreciate is that games for me usually end with land regions still left unsettled, technologies unresearched, cities still developing, etc. In other words, there is "stuff" to think about even as the end-game begins to kick in. Sadly, I don't have a similar experience in ES2 where by the end of most games I have researched nearly every technology, every single mud-puddle world has somebody squatting on it and every one of those worlds has every single possible system improvement on it whether it's actually needed or not (couple that with the crazy inflation of resource gathering that leads to so much dust in the end-game that I couldn't spend it all if I wanted to). 

Without a little bit of "scarcity" there aren't any meaningful choices left outside of deciding whom to pick a fight with and I often feel like the fun part of the game is already over and now I'm just going through a lot of semi-tedious system management and hitting Next Turn - trying to run out the clock. I really enjoy the management of the early game when you are giving serious thought as to which improvement would help the most, which pops would be better moved to a different world/system, which laws are worth the cost, etc. When those "choices" no longer have any meaning (in the late game) other than nudging a fractional value a decimal point in one direction or another, it feels like a chore rather than an interesting decision. 

The snowball effect of your economy/science growing to the point where it becomes abstract is a downer. In a way, it "simulates" how the beauracracy of a stellar empire might bog down as I don't have the patience or desire to fuss with teeny, tiny values and factors by that time as the gains seem so tiny for the amount of micro-management invovled. Not to mention that I love the idea of technologies never discovered by certain factions, worlds too harsh to tame, regions of space too scary to visit, planetary specialization that feels organic, etc. I realize that I am partly describing how Stellaris works in the to some extent but I'd rather be playing ES2 with some Stellaris-isms baked in, I guess.

play rare resourses. i gaurentee you wont be building every building on every world

What is still needed is some kind of late-game crisis or threat to deal with of galactic proportions. Something that starts to tear into your "perfect" massive empire. We still don't have this kind of challenge and that's where the real issue is.

hibbidy_jibbidy wrote:

play rare resourses. i gaurentee you wont be building every building on every world

I'll try that next time! It won't solve most of my issues but it's a start, thanks.

Slashman wrote:

What is still needed is some kind of late-game crisis or threat to deal with of galactic proportions. Something that starts to tear into your "perfect" massive empire. We still don't have this kind of challenge and that's where the real issue is.

This is what I feel lacks as well. We had winter in Endless Legend that gradually that tore apart what you might've gotten. Not sure what you'd be able to do for Endless Space, but it could certainly use something similar.

Something that could be done is something tied to Dust, Lost and the Academy/Isyander. We do have a quest about them, but nothing that affects everyone overall. Not just Dust as an income, but also the way dust functions that would disrupt your empire in various ways, perhaps similar to winter, that just gets worse and worse as the Lost's influence are felt by the abundance of dust in the galaxy, it kinda becoming more "sentient".

Frogshackle wrote:

hibbidy_jibbidy wrote:

play rare resourses. i gaurentee you wont be building every building on every world

I'll try that next time! It won't solve most of my issues but it's a start, thanks.

I absolutely recommend that as well. Low resources and low anomalies. It makes you appreciate the smallest speck of dust. I haven't been playing anything else for a very long time now.

Fast settings might help, too.

Slashman wrote:

What is still needed is some kind of late-game crisis or threat to deal with of galactic proportions. Something that starts to tear into your "perfect" massive empire. We still don't have this kind of challenge and that's where the real issue is.

You got me thinking of Mass Effect Reaper invasion of some sort.

That or Isyander starts blowing up planets and you have to take him down

Frogsquadron wrote:

Fast settings might help, too.

Agreed!

Adding game-play tips to the settings would probably help tremendously. Currently, you have to play a lot of games to actually get a feel for the settings.

Putting more info into tooltips that give context to what it means in terms of how the game plays, how much you can do, etc, like you do for galaxy size (recommended for X players) would be helping a lot. 

Numinumi wrote:

Slashman wrote:

What is still needed is some kind of late-game crisis or threat to deal with of galactic proportions. Something that starts to tear into your "perfect" massive empire. We still don't have this kind of challenge and that's where the real issue is.

This is what I feel lacks as well. We had winter in Endless Legend that gradually that tore apart what you might've gotten. Not sure what you'd be able to do for Endless Space, but it could certainly use something similar.

Something that could be done is something tied to Dust, Lost and the Academy/Isyander. We do have a quest about them, but nothing that affects everyone overall. Not just Dust as an income, but also the way dust functions that would disrupt your empire in various ways, perhaps similar to winter, that just gets worse and worse as the Lost's influence are felt by the abundance of dust in the galaxy, it kinda becoming more "sentient".

Reading just this bit here gave me a wonderful idea which I'll put in the Game Design forum later. Thank you for that. I agree we need some sort of recurring disaster mechanic here and that might just work.

I think the Lost are the perfect kind of late game crisis, which have already been hyped.

Have it be a continuation of the Heretic questline (possibly ignoring which side won, or incorporating these choices and events into the final crisis).

Frogsquadron wrote:

Fast settings might help, too.

Or slow them down. Military choices are more significant on slower settings as they are more impactful. You can't just summon a fleet in a turn or two to defend yourself if your existing fleets are out of position. Losing ships goes from a pain, to fairly devastating in a protracted war. Plus building and research choices and order become more important, as any choice you make will be one you have to stick with for the next 10-20 turns. Even late game well developed empires and systems can take a long time to make anything. Moving heroes about to get the maximum out of their skills, using population movement and boosters to save a turn or two, all become fairly important as part of late game micromanagement (if you like that sort of thing).

As others have said, there are ways to make the game stupidly hard for yourself at all stages, if you're into it. Pirates on Endless, low anomalies, low system connectivity, Endless speed, etc, etc, will make all points of the game feel like an upward battle.

That said, having some big threat turn up at the end is 1) Hard to balance and 2) A bit cheap. The game I think did best job at racking things up towards an end game finale was the armageddon counter for Fall From Heaven 2 (a mod for Civ 4 - it's still amazing and I recommend giving it a whirl). It was a ticker that went up if certain actions (like razing cities) were performed throughout the game, and if it wasn't managed fairly early on by every player, then ever increasing threats/calamities would occur with the final one basically killing everyone in the game. It was horribly balanced, but it was something that was pervasive, was a factor in decisions throughout the game, and was at least partially under everyone's control, while gradually increasing the stakes. That, I think anyway, was a much smarter way of going about creating difficult endgame scenarios, rather than just having a turn window where suddenly everything goes bad. IF we were to have something similar in ES2, I'd much rather it be something that (which in a way is mirrored by the winter system in EL). Making it such that The Lost just turn up an wreck everything after the Academy quest discourages actually doing what is already a difficult quest, and is just kinda dull IMO.

I think there are plenty of settings that we can adjust to create our own preferred dificulty, DEV team really did a good job for this part.

I mostly did not join any alliances, so it's bit dificult not to let others win.

KnightofPhoenix wrote:

I think the Lost are the perfect kind of late game crisis, which have already been hyped.

Have it be a continuation of the Heretic questline (possibly ignoring which side won, or incorporating these choices and events into the final crisis).

Argeed.The end game needs some sort of optional big bad as most of the time you are just presssing end turn for the obvious win.Kinda boring most of the time.The harder difficulties are only a threat at the start as the poor ship design and mid game expansion mean they fall behind by end game.