Hello,

For the different points you’re concerned with, let me clarify the current state and our vision about them:

Nerf battleship customization with a new slot system.

We want to make ship design more meaningful by implementing the slot system. In the public version you’re playing, we limited the available module based on the role of the ship, reducing a lot your options. 

The idea was to reinforce the synergy between the different hull, but it doesn’t work as intended. That’s why in the upcoming update, you’ll have more options (all weapons available for all hulls), but the slots will remain as they allow meaningful choices: you have to define the strength and weaknesses of your design and you can create combo of ship design. You can find Mysterarts answer here. 

In Endless Space, the tonnage system was interesting but led to micro optimization which mostly generate loss of time as you were looking for old module just to fill the bits of missing industry.

Nerf customizable races (Incoming! I betcha!).

Indeed! We didn’t release the customization yet, but I can tell you that you’ll have more options than in Endless Space 1, so I don’t really understand why you feel we nerfed this. Could you elaborate so we can consider a potential issue we might have missed? Thanks!

Nerfed space combat: less control, commands only at the start of the battle instead of three times during combat.

From what we have experienced with Endless Space 1, with the control given during the battle, players have requested that it is given at the beginning of the battle instead to avoid playing the entire battle and going through the cinematic.

For those who enjoy them, we made the decision to go for space opera like battles. Thus, we don’t want to distract player with decision making, but rather to sit down and enjoy. Or for the most curious players, using the scan view to get more info about what is going. Or for the ones that love to share their experience to record the battle and share it…

Less intuitive GUI, combined between ES1 and Endless Legend (no big complaints here).

We’re working on the UI as long as the production goes in order to make it the best possible. If you have any concrete feedback, do not hesitate to detail them so we can consider issues we might have missed!

Totally different techtree, which you cannot explore as free as you want.

As detailed here, we heard the community, and we agree with you: the technology will be revamped completely and be closer to what it was in Endless Space 1.

Throw away some races for new ones. Compare this with Street fighter sequels: every sequel added more characters, instead of throwing away old ones and replace them with new ones.

I can understand your frustration of missing previous race but we had to make a choice:

• Deliver the same set of Race for Endless Space 2 as we had in Endless Space 1
• Bring back some race from Endless Space 1 and add new ones.

Ideally I know you’d love, and actually us too, to have actually both, but in terms of production, it would require at least 1 more year of development and we cannot afford that. 

So we decided to go for the 2^nd options in order to keep the continuity but still be able to refresh the gameplay through new factions.

Cheers,

In Endless Space, the tonnage system was interesting but led to micro optimization which mostly generate loss of time as you were looking for old module just to fill the bits of missing industry.

Micro optimization is great. There is a term for what you are doing: dumbing things down. 

For some reason you assume that your player isn't intelligent enough, or not enjoying tweaking/tinkering/optimizing their ships. It's one of the CORE FEATURES OF ES1.

This is of course debatable, but this is how I see it.

Furthermore it's not just micro optimzation, but also ship design in general. The freedom to load out your ships in anyway kind way (also with certain rules and restrictions).

For some reason you decided to restrict this heavily. Copy the Endless Legends model, where the slot model made a lot more sense, since ur dealing with humanoids.

Maybe slots with no restrictions are fine.

Indeed! We didn’t release the customization yet, but I can tell you that you’ll have more options than in Endless Space 1, so I don’t really understand why you feel we nerfed this. Could you elaborate so we can consider a potential issue we might have missed? Thanks!

For a certain Endless Space 1 patch you announced that you would nerf faction customization by putting a hard limit on how many traits you could have. 

Instead of having as many traits as possible as long you stay under 76 points. 

Same story, dumbing things down. People complained and the nerf for ES1 wasn't implemented.

This nerf however was there in Endless Legends, where the hard limit on amount of traits was implemented. So you had a max amount of traits you could have.

It's not so strange to assume that you're going to do the same thing for ES2.

From what we have experienced with Endless Space 1, with the control given during the battle, players have requested that it is given at the beginning of the battle instead to avoid playing the entire battle and going through the cinematic.

For those who enjoy them, we made the decision to go for space opera like battles. Thus, we don’t want to distract player with decision making, but rather to sit down and enjoy.

Did you know that quite a part of your ES1 community plays the game online? With strangers, family or friends?

And do you know what we usually do during battle online? Auto-resolve. Becuz looking at the cinematics takes too much time and gets old after a while.

But you had Auto-resolve with some control with input for 3 phases.

I sometimes preferred to watch the cinematics , because they were pretty. 

But during cinematics I could change my commands  (which I could not during Auto-resolve). Such that I could retreat to safe some ships? Or increase fire power also to save my ships? Or do some evasive action or healing? If I was taking too much damage?

For some reason you even go with the ''Waterfall method'' way of thinking for space combat, by thinking first and then do/implement.

Instead of a more agile approach, thinking while doing, in order to deal with uncertainty, allowing change during your combat cycle.

You have completely removed this flexibility and choice during space battle.

Ideally you would have more phases just like Endless legends (ironically), that for every move (turn-based) you could change your inputs.

But I think that would go too far, just go for at least with the three phases or more phases even imo. Either keep the Endless space 1 control on space combat, or better increase them like in Endless legends or other games 4x games like Star Trek: Birth of the federation, where each phase was just a time interfval of 10 sec of combat.

About the other issues I don't have any more to say.

I actually don't care about the races, but a lot of other players do. 

I usually just make my own custom race, the removed races was just an example of how you just removed things people get attached to.

Conclusion

From your reply Meedoc I can see you are too detached from your own game. You don't really know the game ES1 as I do as a player, or as most of the concerned people here in the post and I think you never will.

Way too much arrogance, dealing with different stakeholders, your own Grand design opinion of how people should play the game.

But for the moneys, you should just carry on like you are right now. Go ahead ''balance the game for more meaningful choices'' by dumbing things down. 

It worked for the Civilization franchise, it's more popular than ever. I personnally liked Civ at best when Brian Reynolds was working as a lead designer, but who cares.

Take a look at yourself, enforcing your own vision on how people have to play the game, instead of having more of a sandbox game attitude towards the game (like there was in ES1).

A lot of indie companies start fresh, innovative and end up, detached, arrogant, bureaucritic, uninspiring. I just didn't think it would happen to Amplitude so soon.

Thx for the reply. I'm still very cynical you will still change things for the best, but it never hurts to try.

EndlessYouth wrote:

In Endless Space, the tonnage system was interesting but led to micro optimization which mostly generate loss of time as you were looking for old module just to fill the bits of missing industry.

Micro optimization is great. There is a term for what you are doing: dumbing things down. 

For some reason you assume that your player isn't intelligent enough, or not enjoying tweaking/tinkering/optimizing their ships. It's one of the CORE FEATURES OF ES1.

This is of course debatable, but this is how I see it.

Furthermore it's not just micro optimzation, but also ship design in general. The freedom to load out your ships in anyway kind way (also with certain rules and restrictions).

For some reason you decided to restrict this heavily. Copy the Endless Legends model, where the slot model made a lot more sense, since ur dealing with humanoids.

Maybe slots with no restrictions are fine.

Indeed! We didn’t release the customization yet, but I can tell you that you’ll have more options than in Endless Space 1, so I don’t really understand why you feel we nerfed this. Could you elaborate so we can consider a potential issue we might have missed? Thanks!

For a certain Endless Space 1 patch you announced that you would nerf faction customization by putting a hard limit on how many traits you could have. 

Instead of having as many traits as possible as long you stay under 76 points. 

Same story, dumbing things down. People complained and the nerf for ES1 wasn't implemented.

This nerf however was there in Endless Legends, where the hard limit on amount of traits was implemented. So you had a max amount of traits you could have.

It's not so strange to assume that you're going to do the same thing for ES2.

From what we have experienced with Endless Space 1, with the control given during the battle, players have requested that it is given at the beginning of the battle instead to avoid playing the entire battle and going through the cinematic.

For those who enjoy them, we made the decision to go for space opera like battles. Thus, we don’t want to distract player with decision making, but rather to sit down and enjoy.

Did you know that quite a part of your ES1 community plays the game online? With strangers, family or friends?

And do you know what we usually do during battle online? Auto-resolve. Becuz looking at the cinematics takes too much time and gets old after a while.

But you had Auto-resolve with some control with input for 3 phases.

I sometimes preferred to watch the cinematics , because they were pretty. 

But during cinematics I could change my commands  (which I could not during Auto-resolve). Such that I could retreat to safe some ships? Or increase fire power also to save my ships? Or do some evasive action or healing? If I was taking too much damage?

For some reason you even go with the ''Waterfall method'' way of thinking for space combat, by thinking first and then do/implement.

Instead of a more agile approach, thinking while doing, in order to deal with uncertainty, allowing change during your combat cycle.

You have completely removed this flexibility and choice during space battle.

Ideally you would have more phases just like Endless legends (ironically), that for every move (turn-based) you could change your inputs.

But I think that would go too far, just go for at least with the three phases or more phases even imo. Either keep the Endless space 1 control on space combat, or better increase them like in Endless legends or other games 4x games like Star Trek: Birth of the federation, where each phase was just a time interfval of 10 sec of combat.

About the other issues I don't have any more to say.

I actually don't care about the races, but a lot of other players do. 

I usually just make my own custom race, the removed races was just an example of how you just removed things people get attached to.

Conclusion

From your reply Meedoc I can see you are too detached from your own game. You don't really know the game ES1 as I do as a player, or as most of the concerned people here in the post and I think you never will.

Way too much arrogance, dealing with different stakeholders, your own Grand design opinion of how people should play the game.

But for the moneys, you should just carry on like you are right now. Go ahead ''balance the game for more meaningful choices'' by dumbing things down. 

It worked for the Civilization franchise, it's more popular than ever. I personnally liked Civ at best when Brian Reynolds was working as a lead designer, but who cares.

Take a look at yourself, enforcing your own vision on how people have to play the game, instead of having more of a sandbox game attitude towards the game (like there was in ES1).

A lot of indie companies start fresh, innovative and end up, detached, arrogant, bureaucritic, uninspiring. I just didn't think it would happen to Amplitude so soon.

Thx for the reply. I'm still very cynical you will still change things for the best, but it never hurts to try.

Could you dial it down a notch? Most of us, including you I hope, are interested in a constructive dialog with the devs to shape this game. Your post comes off as being presumptuous and berating at times which distracts from the actual points you are trying to make. 

And yet, my ship "designing" goes like this:

double-click kinetics until slots are full

double-click armor until slots are full

drag an engine in there.

done.

EVE online has slots per ship, and yet they have CPU/power restrictions that allow players to play with fitting for years, for Christ sake they have fan-made applications for fitting ships only.

Even ES1 had the fitting freedom we could play around, creating carriers or snipers out of the same hull.

Right now, you guys give us a box with prefab slots and tell us "let the monkey fill the slots in! of course something that doesn't go in there as we wanted, will not fit in there".

Man, even a monkey can fit the ship in ES2 now.

And it is demeaning to see you treat your playerbase to be that stupid.

This is your current ships designer, for 3 year olds:

I honestly understand it is too late for you to make any reasonable changes to that - this should have been taken care of by lead design 1 years ago before you coded that crap in, but really, thumbs down.

Asuzu wrote:

In EVE Online, you don't fit 5 ships / hour.

In EVE Online, you don't change what you can fit on a ship every 20 minutes or so.

Don't tell that's not true, I played this about 5 years.

I'm not sure that comparison between a 1 ship / player game and a 10+ ships / per player game is the best you can do.

Asuzu wrote:

And yet, my ship "designing" goes like this:

double-click kinetics until slots are full

double-click armor until slots are full

drag an engine in there.

done.

EVE online has slots per ship, and yet they have CPU/power restrictions that allow players to play with fitting for years, for Christ sake they have fan-made applications for fitting ships only.

Even ES1 had the fitting freedom we could play around, creating carriers or snipers out of the same hull.

Right now, you guys give us a box with prefab slots and tell us "let the monkey fill the slots in! of course something that doesn't go in there as we wanted, will not fit in there".

Man, even a monkey can fit the ship in ES2 now.

And it is demeaning to see you treat your playerbase to be that stupid.

This is your current ships designer, for 3 year olds:

I honestly understand it is too late for you to make any reasonable changes to that - this should have been taken care of by lead design 1 years ago before you coded that crap in, but really, thumbs down.

While I'd personally love to see a combo of both tonnage and slots (The tonnage system on its own was not a good system. Pick your poision, click until your mouse broke, and you're done), this is an idiotic metaphor, given that you still do have to make choices in the current system. There's hybrid slots, ranges to consider, and different support effects to consider.

Hobbesian wrote:

We already have - The Tech Tree and the Ship Designer, and we've compared them to ES1 and shown them to be clear regressions. EA is their chance to remove the Endless Legend spackle they've applied liberally in the absence of "better" solutions and start showing people they're more capable than Endless Legend. So far the general hint is they want to hang on to the Era System even if they're willing to finesse it, that is not going to end well.

Yep, agreed there.

As for the guy who posted what you're replying to: It doesn't have to stop being a game for it to be a regressive act for fans of the original. If first-person combat was thrown in to Endless Legend in place of turn-based combat, some people would think it was the coolest change ever, but the core fanbase would despise it. If you can't see why fans of Endless Space would be disappointed that they aren't getting more Endless Space, you have tunnel vision.

Hobbesian wrote:

Kweel_Nakashyn wrote:

In EVE Online, you don't fit 5 ships / hour.

In EVE Online, you don't change what you can fit on a ship every 20 minutes or so.

Don't tell that's not true, I played this about 5 years.

I'm not sure that comparison between a 1 ship / player game and a 10+ ships / per player game is the best you can do.

No, but you will spend a lot more time developing that -one- ship to fit your personal playstyle in EVE. That ship is essentially your avatar. However, there's a lot that could be learned from the ship fitting experience IN EVE that would translate into Endless Space. In all fairness ES1 was a lot closer to -that- experience than ES2.

I'm not sure about that.

Eve have 

- hi slots which contains weapons & utility modules (actives buffs, mining stuff, cloaks, etc).

- med slots which contains actives defense & debuffs

- low slots which contains structural defenses & passive buff

- rigs when I left the game ("low low slots" per say)

On top of that, that have 2 kind of "points" which you can buy modules with : CPU & powergrid.

ES1 have:

- Slots for weapons

- Other slots.

- 1 point system : weight

ES2 have:

- slots for weapons

- slots for utility

- slots for defense

- slots for weapons / utility

- slots for weapons / defense

- slots for utility / defense

- generic slots.

- say 1 fourth of the total numbers of modules for ES1. This is the main problem.

The problem of ES2 is more about the few EA's modules, the "+1 to stuff" 1-dimensionnal bonus modules and the poor number of ships roles.

So:

- the game could gain a lot if advanced modules gave say 2x the bonus of the base modules BUT would nerf 0.5x something different (if I were game designer there, I would say "whatever the module, titanium always nerf ship engines. whatever the module, hyperium alway nerf the ship defense.".
For exemple. In consequence, this way the ressource disposal on the map would make strategic goals, defended by strategic ships. And that would boost geostrategy, trading & exploration.

- the game could gain a lot if Era 5 modules were not "best everywhere" but "excellent in one area, poor in others". Each module should give more choice, but not totally disqualifying older stuff.

- the game could gain a lot if modules helped to define new ship roles. When designing a ship, your role choices are basically always mono-task.

The choice are : let's do (a) a ship for exploration or (b) quick police gunships glasscanons or (c) heavy assaultships. And that's it.

Colony ships are alway 1x colony modules + full engines + maaaaaaaybe one probe system so you can probe the best planet to settle in the target system.

=> I think the base system is very nice to use, because it's very quick to use so players in multi are not waiting for the others.

But that's if you had to make more choice than engines vs probes vs defense vs guns.

You could have meaningfull buff modules. You would have meaningfull logistic cargo ship (what for ? I don't know ? Trading ? So you would have to move stuff other than colony and escort this ? And maybe be stoled ?).

You could have bubles like in Eve to make more than 1 turn of system defense. Etc etc etc. You can have many things.

You would have spy ships maybe.

So now if you want to craft an all-around ship, that would mean real sacrifices to you.

There was not many shiproles in ES1 despite people get the illusion the system was smarter. It's an illusion, because there was actually maybe 5x the modules.
They just say "oh, there removed one limit which was the price of weight, how dumb is that". They removed that because it's slow, and slowplay alone is stupid in a war game. In multiplayer, you are not choosing your army composition online in recent Total War : you have loadouts (btw......).

They just put way more limits with the dedication of slots here but critics did not see that because the EA miss half the military stuff.
ES1 had many modules and it's wrong to think it was more complex before because of the weight. It wasn't. It was a Eve copycat, and it was not suited for a war game ergonomy. It was suited for a hero/avatar/whatever game.

I was one of those who just clicked "autofit" after playing a bit with it my first games.

In fact there was less roles than EA ES2 because exploration was not that important.

And even Eve use tools and loadouts now. So dumb.

In Eve, I do not remember SirMolle (BoB) or Darius (Goonswarm, before themitani) or Frederic (TCF. I was there.) giving fitting advices. Their job was to rule Empires, conquest land, use diplomacy and fortify their economy.

Not telling me whatever big guns I could put on my Tempest using Matari high slot tricks (don't look for me on killmails, I was a corp PR or something), or telling who have cheap blockaderunners & cloaks to sell I can get so I can avoid being ganked like a noob before DT, or telling me how to get implants to boost the speed of my inty.

They have no time for this, and it's not interesting to them. They were rulers. The stuff we do in ES.

Conclusion

From your reply Meedoc I can see you are too detached from your own game. You don't really know the game ES1 as I do as a player, or as most of the concerned people here in the post and I think you never will.

Way too much arrogance, dealing with different stakeholders, your own Grand design opinion of how people should play the game.

But for the moneys, you should just carry on like you are right now. Go ahead ''balance the game for more meaningful choices'' by dumbing things down. 

It worked for the Civilization franchise, it's more popular than ever. I personnally liked Civ at best when Brian Reynolds was working as a lead designer, but who cares.

Take a look at yourself, enforcing your own vision on how people have to play the game, instead of having more of a sandbox game attitude towards the game (like there was in ES1).

A lot of indie companies start fresh, innovative and end up, detached, arrogant, bureaucritic, uninspiring. I just didn't think it would happen to Amplitude so soon.

Thx for the reply. I'm still very cynical you will still change things for the best, but it never hurts to try.

Honestly i am astonished that you even get answer for this, it shows that the devs do care even for the most militant of their fans. And honestly that first line about arrogance, and beeing detached feels like something that applies to some of the voices in here. it fully applies to you though. Instead of discussion all you say is : ES1 WAS THE BEST. You dont want a new game you want ES1. Because you also dont give ideas about how ES2 could be a better ES1 all you say is how everything is bad and worse and the worst idea and no one will like it. Start getting Constructive and you might help shape this game into something better. For now you are doing nothing to help. 

(Edit: its borderline impressive to say I KNOW THE GAME BETTER THAN YOU, DEVELOPER" )

And honestly your opinions do diverge strongly from the bigger part of the fanbase or players in general. Saying that micro management to the max is the best is... well... cool if you like it son, but oh boy does it not make a game better. 

And it didnt even really work in ES1. Thats why i dont understand all that praise but it dumbed down to certain standardized best builds. Some weapons beeing just the better combination always. All you want is just an overxomplexification so you can feel better about beeing smarter than others in having figured out the best combination. 

YOU are the one enforcing a view about how to play the game upon the Devs it seems. And Even though others are with you in the idea that the game should be more like ES1 atleast the other post any constructive ideas. Every Single Post of yours so far was just an attack at the Devs and lots of insulting. 

I myself found Meedocs reply quite detailled and very objective. They are proposing ideas for the community to tweak or even throw away. But lets start beeing goddamn constructive and less destructive here. We all want a great Endless Space 2 and thats not happening if everyone just flings their dissapointment at the Devs and also shows their viewpoint as the only right one and those of the "playerbase" or "fanbase". Generalizing is a bad thing son. 

Asuzu wrote:

Let's just drink some tea and wait for the update 1, shall we?

Quoting for truth.

I think lots of good to very good stuff are waiting for us.

EA base game is, well, basic, but represent the huge core engine of the game which was a lot of work. This is to be polished.