Longtime fan of all things Endless, but took a little hiatus on Endless Space 2 at the end of last year in the spring while waiting on the new update to come through and hopefully address some issues that were getting in the way a little.  Often the patch notes will claim that certain issues have been addressed, but I know the only way to be truly sure that something was actually fixed is for players to check it out themselves.

Can anybody save me some time and shed a little light on whether the following items have been addressed in the past few patches?

• Pirates being way too strong in the early game / the AI players being unable to defend themselves against pirates.
• The AI refusing to ever build Large ships or strong fleets, only building weak groups of ships and being easily defeated militarily.
• Imbalance between Projectile/Energy weapons, and Long Range/All other flotilla ranges
• General combat balance, including Flak being OP at shooting down Missiles.
• Balance between Republic vs. all other government choices, and problem of always ending up as Militarist from building ships.
• UI listing inconsistent values for ship movment in Ship Builder, Galactic Map, Hangar, etc.
• General AI competence / effectiveness
• Games always being won or lost during the early/midgame, never making it to the "lategame" due to either me beating the AI earlier, or the AI beating me earlier

Thanks in advance, looking forward to hanging out with the Hissho again and seeing where this game will go!

UPDATE:

One other point I forgot to add to see if there has been any progress:

• Dust Inflation disincentivizing producing Dust, harming Dust-producing players more than non-Dust-producers, making selling resources the best method of gaining Dust.

Thanks for the info!  Glad to hear some of the things have been addressed now :)  And just to confirm, all the recent changes / fixes / rebalancing are applied even without the Supremacy DLC, right?  Hopefully the AI changes may extend the game a bit so I go past the first 1/3 of the turn limit without either winning by Supremacy, or being eliminated by the AI.

One other point I forgot to add to see if there has been any progress:

• Dust Inflation disincentivizing producing Dust, harming Dust-producing players more than non-Dust-producers, making selling resources the best method of gaining Dust.

Inflation is still an issue and goes directly against the supposed design intent of hurting Militarists, mostly hurting Pacifists instead.

Diplomacy wise the AI is still pretty bad, especially when it comes to truces where they overvalue strategic resources over their own systems. This means you can throw a bunch of resources in a truce deal for a war you're already winning and get several more systems than you would otherwise get out of a truce. The AI still doesn't seem capable of pursuing victory conditions either: I've never seen it build victory wonders, research Endless techs and it's still very bad at placing trade routes for maximum income so it can't pursue Economic victory either.

Also I'm not sure if it's a new bug, but to me it seems that with the current version the AI won't try to force a truce even when it's losing and at max war pressure.

SamWAR wrote:

As for victory types, economic seemed pretty much fine to me last patch, with the AI doing quite well in that regard, in Supremacy, however, the value needed is way higher. I didn't play enough games yet to see the real impact of the later victories changes but seems to me that it will be quite more rare for us to see an economic or especially science AI Victory now, although, ofc that's totally dependant on difficulty settings. I've never seen a wonder victory tho.

The AI does merely "fine" for Economic victory because they get FIDSI cheats on higher difficulties, and because it's a victory condition where they don't have to do anything but exist, as in it doesn't require any intelligent behavior. No specific techs to research, no specific improvements to build, no specific systems to conquer and so on. If you check the post-game stats screen you can always see that several AI may have high Dust income, but hilariously low trade route income. 

This is on Endless difficulty (right click > view image)

You can see similar behavior with science. I'm not 100% sure what's the difference between Science and Research, but I'm assuming the latter is the number of techs researched.  If I'm correct this means the AI is somehow wasting all its Science on something, definitely not pursuing any of the victory techs that's for sure. In general in nearly all my games (Endless difficulty of course) I seem to be in the first place in regard to research, even when I'm not playing any of the Science focused factions.

I actually love all the changes to make non-militaristic victories later so late-game techs have some time to shine before the game is over, so I think what we need is general AI improvements.

Xen0n wrote:

Thanks for all the insights!  Speaking of the late-game, do you happen to have any tips for reliably getting a game to last that long?

Regrettedly I don't. I'm not sure about Supremacy but I think Conquest victory thresholds should also be increased to make it in line with other non-militaristic victory types and longer games. The pics I posted were actually from a game I would've won earlier if I had just aimed for Conquest victory, but I wanted to test the new increased requirements for Wonder victory instead.

Slashman wrote:

Well how would you go about that exactly? I'm not talking obscure things I'm talking realistically how would you make an AI prioritise fighting if that isn't that only thing there is to do in the game. 

Same way they do it in many other 4X games? If there's a runaway player that's eating up other factions one by one, wouldn't it make sense for weaker AIs to band together in order to take the player down a notch? Realize that instead of squabbling amongst each other it would be much beneficial to target the faction that's about to outpace everyone else, switching their priorities to defense? Enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.

Though obviously this shouldn't be limited to just taking down the player. Ideally any high scoring / close to victory runaway faction be it player or AI controlled should receive the scorn of others. That's how it would realistically happen in an in-game PvP situation, that's how it would happen in a real life war situation and in my opinion that should apply to AI reasoning as well.

Problem is, from my experiences the AI's own alliances seem to be pretty random in who they invite and who they attack, and they can't intelligently plan, target and hinder powerful loner factions aiming for any sort of victory. As a result there's really nothing in the game acting as a stopgap against a runaway player victory: once you've taken out one or two immediate neighbors at the start of the game you've secured more infrastructure than any other AI and can easily pursue any sort of victory condition, not just militaristic ones, without fear of retaliation.

Ha! I have been suggesting that for eternity and they haven't done it yet. Turns out when there are other victory conditions the factions don't have that option. So while that works in AoW III it doesn't apply to Endless Space 2. They want all victory conditions to be applicable at all times.

So back to my original question...how are you going to achieve it.

Supremacy fixed A LOT of issues from the list, overall great update, AI got much better, I still beat it 100% of the time on Endless, but now it can be annoying atleast and I have to actually invest in military instead of peacefully building systems to victory or facerolling with my old ships without any retrofit. To me the major issues are abovementioned dust inflation, which made dust victory kind of frustrating to achieve, since you produce enormous amounts of dust and can only buy like one hunter ship or one system improvement per turn and even drone network starts to cost over 50k at some point. Scientific victory got nerfed similar way, now there is no point in going for it, it just takes too much time, you could rush Wonder victory MUCH faster even with lack of resources in your home constellation. Hell yea, even having 1 poor orichalcix and 1 quadrinix spots is enough to beat Wonder victory faster than Science one atm. Still expecting more challenge from Endless difficulty, yet to see AI actually heavily beat me. It can catch you by surprise now with those 13 fleets, all going for your single system, all perfectly geared against your modules, but you learn to adapt and delete them way too fast anyway.  Also, Supremacy brought a lot of bugs and exlploits, playing this patch is not too fun, since you know, some of your new favourite game abuses will be fixed eventually

Slashman wrote:

If all you do is warmonger how else do you expect the game to go? I assume you turn on every AI as an opponent and then war with them?  

...

 Ask him if he plays Horatio or other non war focused races and wins the same. Or at what difficulty he plays?

Yes, as I mentioned in my previously linked post:

Heh, while my last game was the first time I'd tried Cravers, the two games before that were actually with the Unfallen & Riftborn :)  Before that I'd also tried the United Empire, and will be trying Vaulters next, I think.  But so far, every victory has still been Supremacy, with one Conquest, because once I get close to turn 100, I'm so much stronger than all the AI factions, it's just faster to swoop in for the Home Systems than to sit back and wait for an Economic/Science/Wonder victory.  E.G. in my Unfallen game, I was in an alliance with half the galaxy and doing pretty great, when I realized that none of the other factions could dare challenge me at that point, I was 1st in all victory conditions anyway, it was just a choice of, "Do I sit here and click 'End Turn' another 50 times until Economic or Science victory pings, or just fly fleets over every Home System, declare war and invade to win in under 10 turns?  The other factions have no chance either way at that point." 

Here are my completed games so far, with United Empire, Unfallen, Riftborn, and Cravers.  Currently I'm at around turn ~75 in my Endless-difficulty Vaulters game, and I'm already 1st in every Victory condition and raw score, by a decent margin.  Additionally, in my current game I have created Custom-Faction versions of all the vanilla factions, with powerful trait combinations to make them OP and stronger, and play as a Vanilla-Faction against those for more challenge.  I've also tweaked my Galaxy settings as recommended in that previous thread, to make things more challenging as well.

In every case, regardless if I play the whole game pacifist, or turtling up, or building my economy, by around turn 80~90 I'm just so much stronger than all the other AI in every category, that there's no reason not to take a quick, easy Supremacy Victory instead of waiting another 50 turns for one of the peaceful Victory Conditions, since I already 100% know I'm going to win no matter what by that point.  Basically similar to what hera35 pointed out:

hera35 wrote:

... once you've taken out one or two immediate neighbors at the start of the game you've secured more infrastructure than any other AI and can easily pursue any sort of victory condition, not just militaristic ones, without fear of retaliation.

In that sense, my problem isn't with the conditions for any of the Victory Conditions; those are largely irrelevant to me.  My real problem is how to avoid becoming "the biggest and strongest empire" so quickly.  Once you're stronger than everybody else, you basically just get to choose whichever VIctory Condition you like and go win, nobody can stop you.

For example, in my current Vaulters game, I've tried to avoid war when possible, and am only at war with one faction who keeps declaring on me.  However, in another 10 turns or so, I will be so much stronger than everybody else that it won't matter whether I continue to play defensively, or rush for an Economic win, or attack everybody; I'm going to win no matter what.  Once I reach that point, I usually just opt for whichever Victory Condition will happen fastest (typically Supremacy or Conquest) so I can start my next game sooner.

SamWAR wrote:

In that sense, my problem isn't with the conditions for any of the Victory Conditions; those are largely irrelevant to me.  My real problem is how to avoid becoming "the biggest and strongest empire" so quickly.  Once you're stronger than everybody else, you basically just get to choose whichever VIctory Condition you like and go win, nobody can stop you.

My issue with that is that it seems like a pretty hollow complaint. Reaching that point of critical mass is true in every single 4x ever as long as you have time and the skill to reach it. It's not exclusive to ES2, it's absolutely true to the whole genre, from the original master of Orion to civ 6.

Oh, I absolutely agree that it's an inevitable result, and common to the genre.  I'm just saying that in my particualr case, I was hoping it didn't have to happen quite this fast.  For example, if in the next patch they change things around with many tweaks so that we all reached the point of critical mass by around turn 5 or turn 10, and games all ended by around turn 20, you could understand why most of us would be rather unhappy.  Or even if they just changed it enough to where every match was already decided and practically over before any player had enough time to unlock Medium ship hulls or Tier 3 of the Science tree.  The game doesn't need to last forever, but at least half way through the turn limit would be nice.

Right now, all my games end when I've gotten to about 1/3 of the turn limit, so there are big chunks of the gameplay and content that I've yet to see.  For example, I've never really been able to experience the Carrier class ships, or the techs in the 4th and 5th tiers of Science, or the Academy quests past the first 1 or 2.  I would just like to find a way to get closer to at least 2/3 of the turn limit, so I could experience some of those things that other players are apparently enjoying.

SamWAR wrote:

My issue with that is that it seems like a pretty hollow complaint. Reaching that point of critical mass is true in every single 4x ever as long as you have time and the skill to reach it. It's not exclusive to ES2, it's absolutely true to the whole genre, from the original master of Orion to civ 6.

"Everyone else creates games with bad AI" isn't really a good justification, and there's few games that have at least tried to fix these issues in different ways to provide a semblance of challenge even after the player becomes stronger than other factions. ES2 in its current state is also notably easier than any other 4X I've played even on highest difficulty, like Xen0n said reaching the critical mass in this game is very, very quick, and very permanent because the AI can't react appropriately.

Take Civ V for a simple example for what they did right: I wouldn't say the AI is stellar but there's some small gimmicks that try to spice things up and prevent the player from abusing AI stupidity, through various warmonger penalties that have no direct gameplay effect but greatly affect AI opinion of player and each other. If you move units near or inside AI's borders (with open borders treaty) they might ask you whether you're going to attack, to which you're forced to respond that "yes, prepare to die" which is followed by automatic war declaration or answering "our troops are merely passing through". 

The kicker is that if you try to abuse the latter response, lie and attack regardless the AI will tattle your actions to every other AI that the player can't be trusted, greatly lowering AI opinion of player and preventing him from abusing the same gimmick over and over again. GalCiv2 AI also realized when you were stacking troop transports near its planets, and if you played on lower difficulties you'd even get a condesending joke message stating "I know what you're doing but I can't do anything about it because you're playing on Easy mode". Civ V also has a more general warmonger penalty that stacks if you or other AI faction mindlessly keep conquering, and if you do it enough you can quite literally bring the entire world down upon you even on normal or slightly higher difficulties without even dabbling with massively resource cheating AIs.

These kind of things keep you on your toes through mid and maybe even late game, even when you're technically the strongest because you're dealing with multiple threats. Admittedly what Civ in my opinion didn't really fix was the AI's uninterest in hindering actual score leaders or those pursuing a non-militaristic victory, but you get my point and I think ES2 should improve both war and non-war related AI issues.