Yeah, if you are asking for Awakening patch - that's not gonna happen.

I've gotten to where I guess others have long before me and I actually turn off the Awakening expansion content. I play with everything else. Its unfortunate because I think the concept behind the Awakening expansion was solid; making Isyander an actual physical, interactable presence in the game AND a faction designed around strengths of supporting him. I love the idea of a faction that starts technologically way ahead, but has to overcome being kneecapped for further progress.

I only turn on Awakening if I want to fool around with the Nakalim now. That's a shame.

I am still unsure what people are doing that they are having so much trouble with the Academy and Spear of Isyander.

I could maybe see it as an issue in multiplayer but how is it an issue that you cannot deal with or that actively stops you from playing the game? I've been running several games lately and still yet to have problems with it.

It doesn't stop me from winning. In fact, I think it makes winning the game easier.

dustwhit wrote:

It doesn't stop me from winning. In fact, I think it makes winning the game easier.

Funny thing is I've done the exact opposite and ignored the academy altogether and my direct enemy had the Spear of Isyander and I still survived and beat him.

As I mentioned recently in a suggestion thread, for now I'd definitely like to see more switches in the Gameplay Options which allow you to disable certain aspects of the Academy without disabling Awakening altogether. (Similar to the Urkans checkbox in the Endless Legend game settings.) As far as a long-term solution is concerned, I am not sure. Nerfing the Spear of Isyander and making the Academy unable to colonize systems on its own would probably help, but I'm currently playing around with the Nakalim to see if that solution would break anything for that faction. However, I am not sure if Amplitude plans to do any sort of rebalancing anytime soon and never expected such changes to be part of the Dark Matter DLC.

Sublustris wrote:

Yeah, if you are asking for Awakening patch - that's not gonna happen.

Well, yeah.. Of course.. Just thought I'd ask in the most polite form possible. 

Stranger things have happened. 

SpikedWallMan wrote:

As I mentioned recently in a suggestion thread, for now I'd definitely like to see more switches in the Gameplay Options which allow you to disable certain aspects of the Academy without disabling Awakening altogether. (Similar to the Urkans checkbox in the Endless Legend game settings.) As far as a long-term solution is concerned, I am not sure. Nerfing the Spear of Isyander and making the Academy unable to colonize systems on its own would probably help, but I'm currently playing around with the Nakalim to see if that solution would break anything for that faction. However, I am not sure if Amplitude plans to do any sort of rebalancing anytime soon and never expected such changes to be part of the Dark Matter DLC.

Agreed. On everything you wrote above. 

Unfortunately I have to confirm what Sublustris said: There will not be any major work done on Awakening. There may some bugfixes along with the DLC, but not a major overhaul of Awakening's balance or systems.

Shrik3 wrote:

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Unfortunately I have to confirm what Sublustris said: There will not be any major work done on Awakening. There may some bugfixes along with the DLC, but not a major overhaul of Awakening's balance or systems.

Thanks for your honesty. I appreciate that it can't be a fun thing dissapointing people on here or wherever. As well as hearing their upset responses. 

I will say 2 things however, from a purely business perspective it doesn't make a huge amount of sense let alone a moral one. Strategy games do, due to their nature tend to include a lot of DLC when successful, so trust that at the very least the DLC isn't going to make your game worse is generally just accepted. 

Also the business decision to not focus any resources on simply being able to turn off aspects of a DLC (hardly creating the pyramids of Giza) which is rated "overwhelmingly negative" on Steam is again a strange choice of resource allocation, as much due to the fact that an inevitable GOTY edition will presumably include Awakening and it's problems so any new players to buy Endless Space 2 will be under the impression that the game is worse than it actually is. 

Thanks

This -- Including a checkbox in the opening settings to turn off the changes to the Academy, similar to how you can turn off the Urkans, shouldln't be that difficult and would result in a large amount of goodwill.

SpikedWallMan wrote:

Nerfing the Spear of Isyander and making the Academy unable to colonize systems on its own would probably help, but I'm currently playing around with the Nakalim to see if that solution would break anything for that faction.

Not sure if you ever tried to lower academy factions difficulty level in game options. My guess is, you didn't.

Tis unfortunate that there won't be any changes, but again 100% understandable. I just hope that the forever pending turn is fixed with this DLC. Because for me right now, the game is basically unplayable, because I can never finish any campaign I start.  

LeMecDePhalanx wrote:

Tis unfortunate that there won't be any changes, but again 100% understandable. I just hope that the forever pending turn is fixed with this DLC. Because for me right now, the game is basically unplayable, because I can never finish any campaign I start.  

As much as I hear about this bug, I've never experienced it.

dustwhit wrote:

LeMecDePhalanx wrote:

Tis unfortunate that there won't be any changes, but again 100% understandable. I just hope that the forever pending turn is fixed with this DLC. Because for me right now, the game is basically unplayable, because I can never finish any campaign I start.  

As much as I hear about this bug, I've never experienced it.

So far, every time I've heard someone mention this bug it turns out they missed dismissing a combat log which does prevent turn progression because it's classified as an important notification, but people get too used to auto-dismissal on end. Not really a bug, but a nuisance that could be rectified by popping important logs to the front on end and forcing players to acknowledge them.

Groo wrote:

SpikedWallMan wrote:

Nerfing the Spear of Isyander and making the Academy unable to colonize systems on its own would probably help, but I'm currently playing around with the Nakalim to see if that solution would break anything for that faction.

Not sure if you ever tried to lower academy factions difficulty level in game options. My guess is, you didn't.

Actually, I did.  They still expand at a rapid rate.  It's rather annoying (particularly early-game) when you are preparing to colonize a resource-rich system only to realize that you spawned close to the Academy and that they grabbed the system before you could get a colonization ship there.

FaeBriona wrote:

Shrik3 wrote:

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Unfortunately I have to confirm what Sublustris said: There will not be any major work done on Awakening. There may some bugfixes along with the DLC, but not a major overhaul of Awakening's balance or systems.

Thanks for your honesty. I appreciate that it can't be a fun thing dissapointing people on here or wherever. As well as hearing their upset responses. 

I will say 2 things however, from a purely business perspective it doesn't make a huge amount of sense let alone a moral one. Strategy games do, due to their nature tend to include a lot of DLC when successful, so trust that at the very least the DLC isn't going to make your game worse is generally just accepted. 

Also the business decision to not focus any resources on simply being able to turn off aspects of a DLC (hardly creating the pyramids of Giza) which is rated "overwhelmingly negative" on Steam is again a strange choice of resource allocation, as much due to the fact that an inevitable GOTY edition will presumably include Awakening and it's problems so any new players to buy Endless Space 2 will be under the impression that the game is worse than it actually is. 

Thanks

This -- Including a checkbox in the opening settings to turn off the changes to the Academy, similar to how you can turn off the Urkans, shouldln't be that difficult and would result in a large amount of goodwill.

Well, yes. I mean it wouldn't be that hard. And it would be worth it to just get us to shut up. One would imagine. 

Shrik3 wrote:

Well, yes. I mean it wouldn't be that hard. And it would be worth it to just get us to shut up. One would imagine. 

Except that it is likely to be harder than you think. Whenever an option is added to a game...especially one that changes parameters in a major way, that is a whole other game to test and verify that everything works and support thereafter. That's one of the reasons that many games don't have an option for everything and every parameter. Developers have to make a trade off of what is vitally important and what isn't.

That sort of effort is likely not going to happen for a DLC. Maybe when they actually get back to this game again after Humankind they will revisit things.

Shrik3 wrote:
Well, yes. I mean it wouldn't be that hard.

Classical Dunning–Kruger effect.

I wouldn't mind knowing when the content is available to play rather than guessing.

Sublustris wrote:

Shrik3 wrote:
Well, yes. I mean it wouldn't be that hard.

Classical Dunning–Kruger effect.

Sublustris is correct that it is hard to say how objectively easy/hard such a task would be without knowing anything about the inner-workings of the game. However, in Shrik3's defense, adding a feature which simply disables the Academy faction would probably be easier than planning/implementing/testing a rebalance. So I still support checkboxes which disable just the Academy features as a simpler stopgap solution while the devs sort out how to properly balance the Academy (assuming they ever decide to rebalance at all).

SpikedWallMan wrote: I could see this being a problem.  I haven't played Sophons against the Nakalim, but the fact that the Nakalim have so many techs unlocked initially seems like it would hamper Omniscience significantly.

It impacts them in a huge way.

Also see, Should Nakalim have that much impact on the Sophons?

Shrik3 wrote:

The nature of releasing a DLC without rebalancing it, when it really needs it while clearly working on several other projects has taken away a lot of my goodwill for Amplitude. Even if they were not the ones who made it one would assume that if a team were to spend several years making a game they would probably want the player base to be happy. Even if at this particular moment in time, understandably no one would expect it to happen. 

I think the goodwill is important going forward for their other games (Humankind). I haven't preordered Humankind for example - I'll let you guys work out all the kinks for me, thank you. Amplitude didn't do the work on the Awakening DLC though, right? I think that was farmed out to another third party studio iirc. I want my tell-all documentary!

SpikedWallMan wrote:
And then let's say that you decide to invade an Academy system and succeed.  You'll then have to pay dust to the Academy before you are allowed to bid on the Spear again.  So there's a bit of a difference between the Cravers and the Academy.

That's the thing, once you decide to oppose Academy, it shouldn't be that easy to get their favoritism back. I see no problem with that. What I meant is that Academy acts as another faction that denies you territory. I know that their implementation is lazy, to say the least, but that doesn't invalidates my initial argument that solution isn't as simple as adding flip switch.

dustwhit wrote:

It impacts them in a huge way.

Absolutely true, I think I've complained about it upon Awakening release too.

SpikedWallMan wrote:
And the absence of either of these features doesn't seem to affect the Nakalim at all.

Every temple built increases the chance that next tribute round will use Influence as resource. And you know who's best at producing influence.

Every system donated to Academy also increases your tribute, so even if it's not Influence, but Orichalcix, Nakalim would still have no problem gaining the role they want.

As for their colonization mechanic, while I'd like to see it toned down, I see that as area of denial design. Academy usually spawns close to galaxy center, where most best 4-5 planet systems are generated, so factions likely face dilemma of giving up on perspective to fight for those systems (and you don't do that early game any way, bad random happens though), or the need to take those systems away from Academy. This isn't a faction-specific dilemma.

It's upsetting that you won't fix Awakening. I was going to go ahead and purchase the DLC to see if it really was as bad as people say, and if you guys aren't going to even touch the game-breaking parts and steamrolling Nakalim faction then I think I will re-think purchasing Human Kind as well. If this is how you treat my favorite game of yours then I won't bother with your new game. If you ever decide to fix it then I will reconsider but until you do I will advocate for people not to purchase your Human Kind game and the post-modern propaganda that resides within.

IcedVenom wrote:

It's upsetting that you won't fix Awakening. I was going to go ahead and purchase the DLC to see if it really was as bad as people say, and if you guys aren't going to even touch the game-breaking parts and steamrolling Nakalim faction then I think I will re-think purchasing Human Kind as well. If this is how you treat my favorite game of yours then I won't bother with your new game. If you ever decide to fix it then I will reconsider but until you do I will advocate for people not to purchase your Human Kind game and the post-modern propaganda that resides within.

Post-Modern propaganda ???