Overall

• I like it, but I feel like it needs works (which is natural being Early Access).

Forced Truce

• Hate it. Honest advice would just be to scrap it, but since this seems to be a thing...
  • I would invert it. Rather than giving the opponent a Force Truce option, I would restrict the Declare War option.
  • When you Declare War, you have to identify targets and a set number of turns to conquer those targets.
    • You can declare them generally as systems or planets, but this will cost more.
    • They will cost more the further away from your home system they are.
    • The more turns you have to conquer them the more influence it will cost.
  • After a successful or unsuccessful campaign, you cannot Declare War for a period of time.
    • If you are successful, you will be recouped the influence you paid to Declare War and gain a happiness boost for a number of terms.
    • If you are unsuccessful, you will you lose that influence and take a happiness penalty.
  • Opponent can pay influence to decrease number of turns of Declare War.
  • Player can pay more influence to regain those turns.

System Management

• There's too little to do/control. Endless Space had taxes and you could convert industry to dust/science. Endless Legend had assigning population. Endless Space 2 has... nothing? Personally, I liked the fiddliness of the previous games. Any or all of these things could be re-implemented in Endless Space 2... or something new could be added, but I feel like *something* needs to be added.
• Seems a little bit off that both trade and system development are later tech, but there is an entire screen dedicated to it. I feel like trade could be a tier-1 technology at least.

Political System

• Was skeptical at first, but I am a big fan. Very interesting.
• Re: Cravers/Dictatorship, I would change happiness penalties/bonuses for government type. So a Dictatorship, would care less (and be penalized less) than a Republic if their population was unhappy.
• Not sure I noticed/cared about the political influence that is created when building or acting. I would like to see this made into something more tactile. Rather than just happening, how about creating Political Actions and Reactions. And rather than just happening, you have to spend influence (or dust or whatever) to either gain the benefits (Actions) or suppress them (Reactions). This will help you shape your political structure. Currently, it feels like something you just ignore and suddenly "oh, now I can have that party if I want it I guess."

Research

• Feels off. I think some re-balancing (or even re-pairing) of the technology is due.
• Unique improvements feel underwhelming. Very expensive early game and only a 1 time benefit in the late game. I would make them cheaper.
• Miss the more unique aspects of units from Endless Legend. I haven't tried/researched all of them yet, so could be wrong, but seemed like Endless Space. Would like to see some more unique and faction defining tecnology and ships (rather than just different models).

Combat

• Don't like the new system of "guarding" systems. Seems pointless and since you can't attack if they aren't at a systems, makes it a pain to fight someone. I would give guarding fleets a free round or two (scale depending on speed) of attacks if they run. This way, you are not locking fleets up like in ES1, but there is *some* value to actually guarding them.
• While I like this combat system compared to ES1, I hope there is a little bit more to it. Currently, it's a little too straight forward.
  • Example suggestion. Ad an assassination module that occupies a weapon slot, but doesn't add damage. However, on a decisive victory after an opponent uses a short range (or whatever it's called) strategy, the opponent loses an additional ship. You still need to win the fight, and the module doesn't help with that, but it can add a potentially strong effect.
• Manpower is interesting, but also slightly irritating. I would change the ship's Manpower into having Reserve/Deployment values. Reserve values being the total manpower for the ship, but Deployment being the maximum amount of manpower that you can deploy at one time for an invasion. When you infiltrate you can deploy additional troops. Manpower deployed pools together into a single conflict rather than separate ones. (or at least the player can choose).
  • Manpower seems like a invade one-system type deal, which imo is far too slow.

Quests

• Quests (some at least) seems a little to difficult to do. There's just not as much control you have over your Empire in ES2 compared to Endless Legend, and you have to go much further out of your way to complete them. I would tone them down a bit.

Heroes

• I might hate this suggestion later, but how about rather than assigning a hero as a governor, you just park him in the hangar. And he serves as the governor for the system so long as he is parked there. Then rather than just teleporting about, Heroes have to travel to wherever they want to the system or fleet they want to attach to.
  • In compensation for that, there will be no assigning cooldown (since there will be no assigning at all).
• The hero limit is kinda disappointing, but I do like that you get one at the start for free.

Factions

• Like them. Vodyani are great. Cravers are an old favorite. Sophons are not my favorite (would prefer Amoeba), but have cool mechanics. Lumaris give me a similar vibe (not favorite, but interesting mechanics). Excited to see the next batch.
• Custom factions could be minor factions (gain their basic population benefits, all generic technology and ship skins, and whatever else you put on them). Could also be a random custom faction.
• What I'd like to see in remaining factions.
  • True diplomatic faction. Not just a gains more diplomatic victory points than other races, but rather uses them as a tool in the game.
    • Faction trait creates threshold where if the deal is made favorable enough to the opponent, if they reject the deal they take a happiness penalty. Increases the value of Luxury Resources when traded (i.e. you set up a trade that is unfavorable to your opponent, and then throw in some Luxury Resources to cross the favorability threshold using the modified favorability, but if unmodified would be slightly more favorable to you.
  • Another War faction. Craver, Vodyani, and +1 seems like a good number of war factions.
    • Faction trait - Dust magic (think Ardent Mages).
  • Confederacy faction. A faction that isn't a single race, but rather is a plurality of races.
    • Faction trait would provide a bonuses per assimilated race depending on the race.
  • Terraforming faction. Not sure if this will be in later Eras, but would be interesting to have a faction built around the concept.
    • Faction trait replaces all colonize planetary types into terraform into a planetary type/terraform into chosen type. Where, the first terraform technology you research becomes your chosen type (think vaulers with strategic resources, but permanent). Each planetary type provides different benefits.

WAR

I like your Declare War idea.  Definitely seems much preferable to the current forced truce mechanic.  It also seems ripe for hooks into the politics system, where a military-controlled senate would require less inflence-peddling to go to war compared to a pacifist one.  You could also spend influence to extend a war but it would have quickly rising influence costs and have a strong pacifist-generating effect in your population as they get sick of fighting.

I'm surprised you think manpower is making combat too slow.  In my experience, I just took my death ball from system to system, laid seige for 2 turns and then took it over with no losses.  Then on to the next one.  Seemed very FAST to me.

I actually think guarding works rather well.  It prevents the opponent from running through a system so you can set up nice chokepoints and trap enemy fleets.  Having good probe/sensor coverage allows you to "catch" fleets on their way to your systems.

INFLUENCE

In general, I would like to see more sinks for influence (or less generation, or both).  I was sitting on 11k influence with nowhere to spend it on my last game.  Some of the heroes have huge influence boons which outstrip expensive and unique system upgrades.

POLITICS

Very cool system but could use a few balance passes I think.  Military seems to cover all the bases of gold and happiness and war.  I've heard religion is good too but haven't used it much yet.  I was excited when the industrialist party unlocked on my last game but after looking at the available laws, there was nothing there I would trade my military laws for.

I did have a problem/bug where I had a huge military majority that got completely FUBAR by two new parties opening up.  The next election, even though it was predicted that military would have a resounding victory, they didn't even make it in the top 3!  I couldn't find any logic to how I ended up with Science/Industry/Ecologist after the election.

Changing government types seems to take way too long.  At one point, changing to dictator would have caused SIXTY turns of anarchy.  That seems excessive...

Downer wrote:

• There's too little to do/control. Endless Space had taxes and you could convert industry to dust/science. Endless Legend had assigning population. Endless Space 2 has... nothing? Personally, I liked the fiddliness of the previous games. Any or all of these things could be re-implemented in Endless Space 2... or something new could be added, but I feel like *something* needs to be added.
• Seems a little bit off that both trade and system development are later tech, but there is an entire screen dedicated to it. I feel like trade could be a tier-1 technology at least.

Endless Space 2's fiddliness seems to be moving population around to different planets to best suit their specialties. Like, getting all your Sophons onto Cold planets to get more research etc. The problems are that a) the games don't go on long enough right now to have a good mix of planet types and population, and b) the option to move pops to different systems isn't implemented yet, which drastically reduces your options. I think we should wait on this at least until we see how moving pops between systems feels.

• What I'd like to see in remaining factions.
  • True diplomatic faction. Not just a gains more diplomatic victory points than other races, but rather uses them as a tool in the game.
    • Faction trait creates threshold where if the deal is made favorable enough to the opponent, if they reject the deal they take a happiness penalty. Increases the value of Luxury Resources when traded (i.e. you set up a trade that is unfavorable to your opponent, and then throw in some Luxury Resources to cross the favorability threshold using the modified favorability, but if unmodified would be slightly more favorable to you.
  • Another War faction. Craver, Vodyani, and +1 seems like a good number of war factions.
    • Faction trait - Dust magic (think Ardent Mages).
  • Confederacy faction. A faction that isn't a single race, but rather is a plurality of races.
    • Faction trait would provide a bonuses per assimilated race depending on the race.
  • Terraforming faction. Not sure if this will be in later Eras, but would be interesting to have a faction built around the concept.
    • Faction trait replaces all colonize planetary types into terraform into a planetary type/terraform into chosen type. Where, the first terraform technology you research becomes your chosen type (think vaulers with strategic resources, but permanent). Each planetary type provides different benefits.

Cronstintein wrote:

WAR

I like your Declare War idea.  Definitely seems much preferable to the current forced truce mechanic.  It also seems ripe for hooks into the politics system, where a military-controlled senate would require less inflence-peddling to go to war compared to a pacifist one.  You could also spend influence to extend a war but it would have quickly rising influence costs and have a strong pacifist-generating effect in your population as they get sick of fighting.

I'm surprised you think manpower is making combat too slow.  In my experience, I just took my death ball from system to system, laid seige for 2 turns and then took it over with no losses.  Then on to the next one.  Seemed very FAST to me.

I actually think guarding works rather well.  It prevents the opponent from running through a system so you can set up nice chokepoints and trap enemy fleets.  Having good probe/sensor coverage allows you to "catch" fleets on their way to your systems.

INFLUENCE

In general, I would like to see more sinks for influence (or less generation, or both).  I was sitting on 11k influence with nowhere to spend it on my last game.  Some of the heroes have huge influence boons which outstrip expensive and unique system upgrades.

POLITICS

Very cool system but could use a few balance passes I think.  Military seems to cover all the bases of gold and happiness and war.  I've heard religion is good too but haven't used it much yet.  I was excited when the industrialist party unlocked on my last game but after looking at the available laws, there was nothing there I would trade my military laws for.

I did have a problem/bug where I had a huge military majority that got completely FUBAR by two new parties opening up.  The next election, even though it was predicted that military would have a resounding victory, they didn't even make it in the top 3!  I couldn't find any logic to how I ended up with Science/Industry/Ecologist after the election.

Changing government types seems to take way too long.  At one point, changing to dictator would have caused SIXTY turns of anarchy.  That seems excessive...

War

Thanks. Yeah, there's a lot of numbers that would need to be worked out, but it makes the war not just a military act, but a political one as well, and opens up that whole field for player to interact under.

My experience has been that while sieging is fast (a turn or two), it usually depletes your manpower to the point that the fleet cannot take another system. To a degree that is simply my lack of understanding of what a given fleet is capable of and understanding exactly how manpower regenerates, but it feels off (and slow), I guess, because battles are very quick, and sieges are very quick, but manpower seems to relatively slow in comparison. In retrospect, it might be that everything needs to be slowed down, but it comes across as a bit disjointed.

Perhaps it's something that I just need to get better at (and also turn off the pop-ups).

Influence

Yeah, I feel like there is a big opportunity to do more with influence. From a design level, it feels like it's a resource that the game is pooling that the designers haven't quite figured out what to do with yet.

Politics

Yeah, I would be disappointed if the political system didn't get tweaked and revised. 

You know, thinking about it now, I almost feel like military politics should be a separate thing and not just one of the many parties. The reason is because the game is basically designed so that there will be a conflict, and thus every party will eventually need to have a military (or a means to address military conflicts) to some degree. 

Perhaps each party can have a "military support" trait that impacts the support for military laws, and the laws themselves would be unbound to a specific political party, and rather be tied to the overall military support of the empire. You could do this for every party, but that might needlessly complicate things.

Yeah, the polling in this game is shockingly worse than it is in real life. lol.

Clarste wrote:

Downer wrote:

• There's too little to do/control. Endless Space had taxes and you could convert industry to dust/science. Endless Legend had assigning population. Endless Space 2 has... nothing? Personally, I liked the fiddliness of the previous games. Any or all of these things could be re-implemented in Endless Space 2... or something new could be added, but I feel like *something* needs to be added.
• Seems a little bit off that both trade and system development are later tech, but there is an entire screen dedicated to it. I feel like trade could be a tier-1 technology at least.

Endless Space 2's fiddliness seems to be moving population around to different planets to best suit their specialties. Like, getting all your Sophons onto Cold planets to get more research etc. The problems are that a) the games don't go on long enough right now to have a good mix of planet types and population, and b) the option to move pops to different systems isn't implemented yet, which drastically reduces your options. I think we should wait on this at least until we see how moving pops between systems feels.

That could be the case. But even then, it would feel a little bit late for me. Previously, these were things that you could do (and should do) immediately and constantly. Moving population seems like a much later game activity. 

If this is the system, I would like to see it expanded more:

• Break up a population into small units, say a full population comprises 100 points (with an overpopulation maximum of 200) that is clustered into groups of 20.
• Each population population group is limited to a specific faction (major or minor). Population bonuses are defined by the majority faction, and if there is a tie then to the first faction to occupy that region.
• A planet is divided into regions (i.e. each of the population growth slots).
• Each region has separate modifiers/traits. I wouldn't make it too complicated. A region would be either Urban (Industry bonus) and Agrarian (Food bonus) and either be Developing (Dust Bonus) or Developed (Science bonus).  
• Players can assign population groups to the different regions, but a 100 population would be need to count as a region.
  • Region bonuses would contribute to the population count, but only for purposes of gaining Industry/Food/Dust/Science. So you might have 2 Dust Population, but only 1 Food Population.
• Food will grow the least populated (to the majority/oldest faction) region and most populated (to the minority/newest faction) region. 
• Population can grow beyond 100 points incurring approval penalties.
• After 150 points, a regional war breaks out and the planetary output is reduced in proportion to the region.
• At 200 points, the regional war turns into a world war and the planet does not output resources.
• Only populations of 100 points or more can be transported between planets and systems.

• What I'd like to see in remaining factions.
  • True diplomatic faction. Not just a gains more diplomatic victory points than other races, but rather uses them as a tool in the game.
    • Faction trait creates threshold where if the deal is made favorable enough to the opponent, if they reject the deal they take a happiness penalty. Increases the value of Luxury Resources when traded (i.e. you set up a trade that is unfavorable to your opponent, and then throw in some Luxury Resources to cross the favorability threshold using the modified favorability, but if unmodified would be slightly more favorable to you.
  • Another War faction. Craver, Vodyani, and +1 seems like a good number of war factions.
    • Faction trait - Dust magic (think Ardent Mages).
  • Confederacy faction. A faction that isn't a single race, but rather is a plurality of races.
    • Faction trait would provide a bonuses per assimilated race depending on the race.
  • Terraforming faction. Not sure if this will be in later Eras, but would be interesting to have a faction built around the concept.
    • Faction trait replaces all colonize planetary types into terraform into a planetary type/terraform into chosen type. Where, the first terraform technology you research becomes your chosen type (think vaulers with strategic resources, but permanent). Each planetary type provides different benefits.

Keep in mind that at least 6 of the factions will almost certainly correspond to the 6 political parties, meaning we're missing an Industrialist faction and an Ecologist faction. I would also imagine there being some kind of Influence faction that would focus more directly on politics and diplomacy. And top that off with the voter's choice faction which we already know a little about. In other words, there isn't necessarily all that much design space left, given what's already in the game.

That said, your suggestions do fit into that schema to some extent. An Industrialist faction could easily be warlike: think Industrial-Military Complex, and Terraforming definitely fits into the Ecologist mold. And both diplomacy and Confederacy fit into some kind of Influence faction.

Hmm... in that light I would actually put Terraforming as being Industrialist over Ecologists (improving the planet by changing it, rather than preserving the planet's natural state) and have the Confederacy as being the Ecologists (their plural nature suggesting that they leave each population to their own nature, and correspondingly leave each region to its own nature as well).