I love Endless Space 2.

Its a great and very enjoyable game but I dont feel its quality has approached "masterpeice" levels. I know its an undefinable ideal but It can still be used to convey the feeling the game has not lived to its full potential yet.

Here is what I think needs to happen in critical game areas to make the game truly top notch.

Things I feel strongy about in ascending order of importance:

1) combat - it is interesting but something is still off. 

The twitchy instantaneous refitting upon seeing the enemy, card system and how its impacted by the tech tree, and exploration are missing something. They need a bit of juggling around and refining and maybe changing a thing or two to really create a feeling of control impactfullness and harmony in how these systems work together.

Its hard to pin point the issues as they all need to be thought off together as part of a hollistic design that will tweak all these areas to make them all come together better.

2) heroes are another important issue.

First their ships are weird and feel like there was somthing more planned for them but was cut. Something needs to change. Perhaps allow to upgrade them to bigger ships or remove them and allow heroes to simply join fleets or take command of whatever ship you choose. I dont know.

Another issue is the hero skills trees which are just too damn passive. The passive skills need balance touches but some, in each tree need to be removed in favor of more "active" and game changing skills that change how the hero is and his actual gameplay. 

Some hero skills need to be extreme in that if chosen they truly alter how you play.

3) land battles.

Same as with space combat only less important since it obviously was not intended to be a major part of the game. I dont know how it should be improved but it needs a bit more of something besides simply upgrading your military types in the military menu. Its a bit too simplistic IMO.

4) Pirates and unique systems with no planets(black holes etc..).

Pirates are clunky ATM in how they interact with the AI and the amount of power and involvment the player has in their actions. Something is missing or is badly tuned.

Unique systems feel like they need an option by the player to somehow use them before his experience envelopes them. Perhaps allow players ot build a structure on them that then carries resources by civilian ships into the nearby planet? I dont have a clue but atm if you have one far away from habitable systems it just feels like a missed zone that you can do nothing with and feels strange.

5) Alliances and government types.

As has been written already in many other threads Alliances are too strong and require too little to be formed. They need something extra so they are not simply a "choose if you wanna win alone or have a shared victory".

Government types need a bit more depth. I dont know what exactly but they dont feel like they tie into the gameplay enough and have enough levers for the player to use them to customize how his empire works further.

With respect to combat and heroes, I would say more.

The combat has, in my opinion, three fundamental problems:
1-The way of presenting information is very unintuitive. No matter how hard I try, I can not understand why one fleet wins another. I can IMAGINE that it is because certain ships have better modules, for example, but I do not know for sure. The only thing I see in the interface are numbers and statistics, but I do not know what to do to influence them.
I believe that the combat should use a less opaque mechanics, and express through texts the important events of the fray (why the missiles have failed, why the fighters have not been destroyed, etc).
2-His aesthetic appearance is very poor. I mean, the fighting is like this: ship 1 shoots for a minute. Ship 2 explodes. End.
The trajectory and actions of the ships are very bland. The automatic camera does not know which ship to focus on. Some effects are very discreet and do not stand out over nebulae and stars (which are sometimes very psychedelic and bright).
3-The battle card system does not bring fun to the battles. Instead, it encourages the game to look like a calculator. The design of the battle cards could be quite original in many ways, but instead, simply add more numbers and percentages to the game.

The heroes has, in my opinion, other two big problems:

1-The biggest problem with the heroes is his skill tree. As with battle cards, the skill tree turns the hero's management into a series of cold math operations, in a dense interface with several unintuitive icons that make you spend more time than you should. The tree could be much simpler, with fewer but more versatile skills.

2-Why are there heroes in this game? Think objectively, please. What function do they fulfill? In heroes of mith and magic, the heroes were the only ones who could lead armies, and they found objects and lived adventures and quests.
In this game the heroes are just one more layer of unnecessary complexity. They do not favor immersion because in your game, his absence is hardly noticeable. Nothing special happens to them, they do not do anything too particular, and it does not matter if they are called Jimmy or Weasel. They are like silent slaves.

Nor do they make the game necessarily more fun, because its management is dense and purely mathematical.

The heroes are only there because the Endless universe demands it.
How can we solve this? Making the heroes have a utility beyond giving a boost to our fleet/system. Maybe the heroes could be diplomats for the minor factions, spies, explorers in special nodes that discovers cool things... if they had some original function that gave meaning to their existence, they would be much more fun to play.

The hero mechanic is no different than in Endless Legend, they're there to provide powerful bonus production to cities/systems production or provide army/fleet buffs. This hasn't changed. They are also needed for the Academy final quest.  And with the espionage mechanic coming next expansion, if its anything like Endless Legends, then heroes will have another purpose only they can achieve soon.

 But what really made heroes in Endless Legend stand out more was unique loot only for heroes, legendary weapons only they could use, special accessories for them that you get only by completing quests. These heroes exclusive upgrades made exploring ruins and doing quests much more rewarding since these items made your hero truly a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield or really gave your cities a big boost.

 Endless Space 2 is missing this as of right now they can only use the same modules as everyone else, so they feel like another ship in the fleet instead of a powerful asset. Losing a hero in battle with legendary equipment was painful, losing a hero in ES2 is about as painful as losing an explorer ship late game.

Combat is 50/50 with me, once again I love looking at it since it's so cinematic but I wish it was tactical like EL combat but in space, but that would require an extreme overhaul and rebalancing of modules 

Lightjolly wrote:

The hero mechanic is no different than in Endless Legend, they're there to provide powerful bonus production to cities/systems production or provide army/fleet buffs. This hasn't changed. They are also needed for the Academy final quest.  And with the espionage mechanic coming next expansion, if its anything like Endless Legends, then heroes will have another purpose only they can achieve soon.

 But what really made heroes in Endless Legend stand out more was unique loot only for heroes, legendary weapons only they could use, special accessories for them that you get only by completing quests. These heroes exclusive upgrades made exploring ruins and doing quests much more rewarding since these items made your hero truly a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield or really gave your cities a big boost.

 Endless Space 2 is missing this as of right now they can only use the same modules as everyone else, so they feel like another ship in the fleet instead of a powerful asset. Losing a hero in battle with legendary equipment was painful, losing a hero in ES2 is about as painful as losing an explorer ship late game.

Combat is 50/50 with me, once again I love looking at it since it's so cinematic but I wish it was tactical like EL combat but in space, but that would require an extreme overhaul and rebalancing of modules 

I agree with you, heroes need more unique things as u said.

But, manual battles in EL were a pain, especially in multplayers games.... waiting 5/10 min each battles to complete, meh!

Bisous

I definately do not think the battle system needs to be redone.

Not only do I not think its necessary but its a waste of time to demand the devs do it as well.

They have setup a very nice system. 

Lets not forget that in most of the games that have these tactical battles, I mean even where the battles are great fun like in the total war games, most of the time players will just resort to autoresolving most of them.

ES2's battle system is a great compromise where you autoresolve each battle but you can still influence the outcome through tactics and strategy. Its a great solution to the above problem but in ES2 it just needs a bit of tweaking to make it truly amazing.

There is no need to fall into nostalgia traps, demanding some older systems that were appropriate to their time and game but are not suitable or needed in ES2. ES2 has its own systems and instead of trying to undermine them IMO we need to help the devs make them deeper, more impactful and allow them to attain their own unique character that is completely and naturally immersed in the specific overall design of ES2.

Slashman wrote:
But I have to ask, is there some evidence that most people just autoresolve battles in Total War games and other games that have tactical combat?

It's hard to gather evidence for this!

But a quick delve into my Total War Campaigns shows I mostly auto-resolve, by quite a high margin. This is understandable: most battles are too trivial to waste my time fighting, and many battles are mentally draining to fight. Battles where you get an even match between two armies that would be interesting to fight manually are the high point of the game (hence the investment by CA that you note), but they are not super-common!

Several of the later iterations of the Total War game have mechanics in place to deliberately make such battles more common.

nicoG2G wrote:

Lightjolly wrote:

The hero mechanic is no different than in Endless Legend, they're there to provide powerful bonus production to cities/systems production or provide army/fleet buffs. This hasn't changed. They are also needed for the Academy final quest.  And with the espionage mechanic coming next expansion, if its anything like Endless Legends, then heroes will have another purpose only they can achieve soon.

 But what really made heroes in Endless Legend stand out more was unique loot only for heroes, legendary weapons only they could use, special accessories for them that you get only by completing quests. These heroes exclusive upgrades made exploring ruins and doing quests much more rewarding since these items made your hero truly a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield or really gave your cities a big boost.

 Endless Space 2 is missing this as of right now they can only use the same modules as everyone else, so they feel like another ship in the fleet instead of a powerful asset. Losing a hero in battle with legendary equipment was painful, losing a hero in ES2 is about as painful as losing an explorer ship late game.

Combat is 50/50 with me, once again I love looking at it since it's so cinematic but I wish it was tactical like EL combat but in space, but that would require an extreme overhaul and rebalancing of modules 

I agree with you, heroes need more unique things as u said.

But, manual battles in EL were a pain, especially in multplayers games.... waiting 5/10 min each battles to complete, meh!

Bisous

People skip battles with the current battle system in multiplayer, so it's not like anybody is even going to notice.

But from a single player perspective, which is far more popular,  it would give the game a much more hands-on tactical depth. But, of course, I'd rather the devs focus on other elements of the game than overhaul the combat, it's far too embedded now. All they can do is tweak it, to give us a bit more control