+1

I was playing as the unfallen, Around turn 100 I had the notification that I'm getting close to an economic victory with 10 systems. I didn't focus on it at all, just built my Trade HQ-s and built every system development possible (but that's something I always do no matter what my goals are). 

Also, when I'm more aggressive and I focus a lot more on military (therefore I'm not able to build so many system developments) Unfallen AI get an economic victory 50% of the games. 

And I agree with the fact that Wonder victory is very hard to achieve. You need to get to the end of the left tree, research the quadrinix and Orichalchix tech, mine 50 of them and build 5 Obelisks. This is just too much. If you're not science-crazy then you won't get those final techs. In ES1, I'm always able to max out my tech tree fairly quickly.

Here was my brainstormed idea:

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space-2/ideas/993-economic-victory-condition

I also noticed that the amount of dust that is required to win does not increase with the number of players in an alliance.
I wrote something about it (HERE), and I really think this should be fixed as soon as possible.

hera35 wrote:

Pretty much all my default speed, default map size Endless difficulty games consistently end on turn 100-120 (meaning before the Academy endgame competitive quest even triggers) with any of the non-militaristic victory conditions, especially Economic. Trade routes start out rather slow, but once they get going you'll be easily hitting tens of thousands of Dust per turn (or in my last Lumeris game over 100k / turn) 

Just hit a turn 93 Economic Victory with the Lumeris on Endless/Standard Speed/Medium Galaxy with an average start, mostly due to trade routes. However, Wonder Victories aren't far behind with good factions. The ES2 economy in general has a solidly exponential development curve. 

I don't mind fast these games, but many of the ES2 features, especially quests, don't mesh well. And the AI is too slow.

Just wanna chime in, pretty much 3 Endless games so far ended with me purging the galaxy of heretics, while someone on the other end of galaxy just wins with economic.

I get warning on turns 80-90, Endless difficulty normal speed.

Needs serious rebalancing.

For now it stays turned off, screw that...

I have a few Ideas in the system related to this, though for some reason people keep upvoting the thread I used to advertise thek instead of the ideas themselves. It's actually very difficult to drum up upvotes rather than general support, makes me question whether the Ideas system is working in the long run.

Anyhow, a few of my Ideas have been Comparative Economic Victory's where you bave to exceed your next richest opponent by a certain amount, even after hitting the Victory amount; Economic Colonialism, so se can use Trade Agreements and forced subsidiary construction as Truce and Demand terms; rolling Privateers into Mercenaries tech and adding Mercenary upgrade empire improvements because they're not that good right now; invading with intent to raid rather than conquer; and Luxury Addiction, like how England became addicted to Tea, to justify continued luxury production beyond the initial investment.

If I could only have one of those, making the Economic victory comparative to your opponents after a certain threshold of wealth instead of the threshold of wealth on its own wpuld be ideal. Inflation also has to be greatly reduced so we can do something with the stuff in the meantime instead of paying truly absurd amounts of Dust for Mercenaries who were outclassed pretty much the turn they were unlocked.

I agree that the economic victory is far too easy right now. I think it would be interesting if you could actively sabotage the victory types of other empires by other means than simply attacking them. Trade routes should e.g. only generate a whole lot of dust, if you have another faction close that s trading with you (major or minor) that would give the option to create diplomatic embargos. Another idea concerning the trade routes would be, that you have to pay a certain amount of luxury recources for every dust freighter per turn and the other way arround (which would make more sense than the general increase coming with every freighter right now).

In my experience against the Endless AI so far,  the economic victory condition is the only credible chance that the AI has to win. If the yardstick is pushed back, I'd like to see a general buff to the effectiveness of at least the Endless AI. Compared to Endless Legend the difficulty here is just too low, and so will get boring quite quickly in single player.

On standard speed and settings I'm wining between T100 and T115 consistently. Except for one run-away Craver AI threatening an economic victory there has been very little late game threat (neither militaristic nor peaceful).

We are aware that the economic victory is currently too easy. As some have pointed out, it's partly linked to Trading Companies' exponential growth, and partly linked to a too low threshold. These are things we plan to work on and balance out :)

ilitarist wrote:

Second, gathering dust is not a choice, it's always beneficial. 

Particularly with inflation, this isn't completely true. If the economic victory were not so easy (and the lategame scaling so bonkers), there is a limited amount of stuff you can do with dust. Focusing quite so much on dust production has significant production/science/conquest opportunity costs.

I don't get why economic victory exist.

I get why you have introverted victory condition. Unlike a traditional strategy games you can sit quietly, play diplomacy, don't engage in wars and sneakily forging a victory hoping to be faster than some hegemony conquering the world. Right now the problem may be AI not actually going for Supremacy victory but this is beside the point.

The point is we already have a Wonder Victory for that. You get some tech, you buy/extract all the resources, you use your industry to build wonders. Economic victory is just about generating dust. First it's not nearly as engaging. Wonder victory requires you to optimize science, resource extraction and industry which is a more interesting task. Besides, you'll still probably need loads of dust to buy all of those resources, maybe trade some tech.

Second, gathering dust is not a choice, it's always beneficial. With wonder victory you need to research things you may not want and then spend time on several of your richest worlds to build wonders. This is the precious industry you don't spend on defense. Meanwhile with economic victory you spend some resources on dust buildings, yes, but those are useful even if you don't care about economic victory. You may spend this dust on anything and still be getting closer to economic victory. Wonder victory is a story of a besieged empire betting on the peaceful resolution instead of war; economic victory is easy to achieve whatever your playstyle is.

Third, as you all know, right now economy victory is broken. I just don't see a scenario when I'd reach any other type of victory before economy unless I specifically hurting myself by missing out on trade companies - which may be biggest offenders.

Fourth, there's very little you can do about economy victory. With wonder victory capturing just one system with obelisk may be a fatal blow against the contender; economy victory will have well established empire pumping out dust through trade companies which you can destroy but there are 5 of them plus the empire itself will produce dust - once someone is on this path he can only be slightly slowed, to stop the enemy you'll need to obliterate him.

Thus I give you all an official recommendation to turn off economic victory in game options. Some of those points can be said about science victory, but at least it's not as broken and doesn't have this exponential growth with trade companies.

100% agree with everything Tertium said. There's plenty of balance issues, but the ridiculous trade routes are easily the worst offender of them all. Pretty much all my default speed, default map size Endless difficulty games consistently end on turn 100-120 (meaning before the Academy endgame competitive quest even triggers) with any of the non-militaristic victory conditions, especially Economic. Trade routes start out rather slow, but once they get going you'll be easily hitting tens of thousands of Dust per turn (or in my last Lumeris game over 100k / turn) and ridiculous amount of luxury resources even without luxury resource freighter specialization, to the point you'll be hitting 999 cap every two turns.

Explosive mid-late game trade route income growth needs to be nuked hard and Wonder and Scientific victory conditions need to be made more difficult as well to ensure overall longer games and a larger time frame for using other endgame toys like planet destroyers, last tier luxury and strategic resources or pretty much every single last tech tier building.

Xeryx wrote:

I doubt it is that easy anymore

Until they fix endgame trade routes, the best option is to turn Economic victory condition off in the game settings.

Even then. I feel all the victories come really fast once you reach Era 5 techs.

I just finished my first playthrough on Endless difficulty after going faction by faction, each time increasing difficulty level. And here are some fun facts:

1. Most of the games ended up with economic victory. Often unwanted and uncontrolled. Any faction that builds trade compaines just as part of their all-round development ends up with tons of dust, despite only Lumeris are supposed to be that good at trading. It was often my way to go at the point when I took dominant position just to finish faster.
2. I haven't lost any game in this streak, each time playing new faction and higher difficulty. With like 1-2 times per game taking 1 turn back (usually just because being initially unsure on how it will play out). Modesty aside, I'm very good at TBS, but it should not be that easy. Part of the problem is economic victory. I think I wouldn't win Endless difficulty if not going straight for it. But again, rival factions were also headed that way. Even though that might've not be the plan. Other point is that only Endless difficulty actually ended up as a victory race. Other difficulty levels were won after 80 or so turns, it was all about securing victory since then. And economic victory often was just the quickest way to go, not the source of dominance. So my guess is that difficulty levels are unbalanced: having so many of them and failing to deliver a challenge is... well disappointing at least.
3. Game time is way off the scale. Normal game is supposed to last 200 turns, or somewhat shorter if you head for particular type of victory. However in my experience most of games were finished before turn 150. In my endless difficulty game first "close to victory" message appeared around turn 90. And I won at 121th turn. Again economic victory is a problem. But not only it. Dominant factions in that game (Cravers and Riftborn) were also headed towards it. However they were not using trading companies at all! That's kind of insane, but Cravers were set to win at ~135th turn, judging by the graph. Without trading. Main complaints here are that: victory often can be achieved at mid-game stage, without the need of advanced tech; difficulty levels are boosting AI instead of nerfing player, skewing the time scale of the game. I really think AI progress should be used as calibration tool: average AI should be finishing the game at that expected game time duration. On any difficulty level. It should be difficult for player to keep up the pace, not that AI just finishes earlier than you would in theory get to any high-tech. I remember well Endless Legend gameplay, where victory race usually started in the late game, and I really miss that here.
4. Trade compaines are broken. There are 4 vectors that affect the performance, making your dust scale exponentially. These are: number of trading companies, level of companies, number of transports and trade value of systems. All those things help scaling each other. My guess is that something should be removed from the equation, like the level of trading compaines. Or at least capped. Also transports now have growing costs, but in my opinion extra transport should apply diminishing returns. After all you don't have infinite number of goods to ferry. They could also have a maintenance cost, so that if you build too many of them your profits will start to decrease. That can make individual transport cost all the same, like in reality. This will allow Lumeris to build more of them just because they generate more luxuries, for example. Also trading companies tend to generate luxuries out of thin air. I was playing as Lumeris and had abundance of Bluecap Mold, and my 6 trading companies of 10+ level generated around 700 of it per turn. It seems absurd in any sense. Again this mechanics asks for diminishing returns where whatever you do you are getting close to 2x production but never actually reach that.
5. Currently market is not connected to economic victory. What?! Any operations on the market don't contribute to your dust score. That doesn't feel right at all. I really expect market trading and manipulation to be part of economic victory. Contributing probably as much as 1/3 to it. On par with population/improvements dust generation and trading companies. Also if we look from this angle it might seem better to make economic victory to be the total accumulated dust, rather than generated. This way applying military pressure would actually make you spend some and will impede your progress.
6. Side effect of my 700/turn bluecaps, that i mentioned above, was that I broke the market. I filled it up to it's limit of 5000 bluecaps and continued selling. Also I hit low limit on price, but it was still muliplied by inflation. And that allowed me to generate something like 80k dust per turn for selling those bluecaps.
7. Trading companies are not supporting your specialization. I'd expect Sophons to use them for getting more science, Lumeris for getting more dust, and rest for covering holes in dust/science/luxury production.
8. Strategic resources seem to be kind of unbalanced. First thing is that level 4 improvements and modules mostly require antimatter and adamantine. Which you can obtain mostly by mining it yourself. As exploration quantities are abysmal, quest/achievement bonuses are not reliable, AI won't easily part with it via diplomatic means... all of that is kind of expected. However what is not expected is that it won't be available on market. Titanium and hyperium are available as pass-through techs. I.e. you study them and start mining before you actually start using them. And that works like a charm. But rest of stategics become available when you already need them. You got to 4th tech level and want to surprize your rivals with fancy new tech? Forget it, you have to study two other 4lvl techs before you can even start getting reasonable quantities of adamantine and antimatter. And because this is the case for all players, those resources very rarely appear on the market, being in constant demand. Not even mentioning top tier resources. So far I've never built any quad/ori weapon. Game usually ends around the point when you just started mining those resources. It feels like reducing tech level for mining high-tech resources by 1 could help improve market situation and make those late-game techs more viable. Ofcourse situation can improve a bit when economic victory TM becomes less of a problem. 

I doubt it is that easy anymore

Title says it all, every game I've played since the inclusion of all Victory types has ended in an economic victory on or before turn 75 (on Fast.) In my opinion, this is a huge problem that should either be fixed by:

A) increasing the Dust required to win Economic 

or

 B) decrease the amount of Dust earned/turn generated by planet types or buildings

Has anyone else noticed that this particular victory type is far too easy to attain? Feel free to share your ideas and concerns below!

-Grizz

Yesterday I earned my first victory in ES2. It was economic victory. According to steam global statistics most players get economic victory - 6,6%. Science victory -3,1%. Conquest victory - 2,3%. Wonder victory - 1,9%. Supremacy victory - 1,5%. Score victory - 0,8%. Victory through elimination - 0,6%. I agree that some victories should be harder to get than the others but economic one is just way too easy.

Victories need some balance, I think that will happen sooner or later. I also turn it off, is ridiculous in current state.

I've had to turn it off when I'm not playing Lumeris. Funny one is as UE or Riftborn, with the Ind base law, I would win eco before the victory wonders could be built.