I had some ideas for improvements to ES2’s UI and the amount of information given to the player, as well as a couple of tweaks that could give some more variety between games. There’s quite a few suggestions here, but I hope they’ll be considered!

Usability Improvements

1. There needs to be some extra UI descriptions explaining when a minor civilization is permanently bound to a major faction, but not assimilated. For example, Vodyani can “brainwash” a minor civilization so no other faction can be its suzerain, yet when a player interacts with that minor civilization there is no indication to them that they’ll never be able to assimilate it. The game just says that the Vodyani are the suzerain, and no amount of praising the minor civ can change this. There’s no clear explanation as to why they can’t be assimilated with a quest either.

(Also - I can’t remember - can some of the other factions permanently bind minor civilizations to them in a similar manner? I recently played a game where a Craver AI was permanently suzerain to a minor civ and I couldn’t dislodge it. Another minor civ was bound to the Vodyani, and when the Vodyani were destroyed the Unfallen became their suzerain and I couldn’t dislodge them.

2. AI players asking for tribute needs to be a bit clearer. It’s understandable enough when the Cravers say “Give us Dust. Now.” and then get angry at you on a later turn if you don’t, but sometimes I’m told that an AI is annoyed at me for ignoring their tribute request, and I don’t recall ever being asked…

3. Maybe some list of the permanent faction-wide effects you can unlock from quests and deeds would be useful. Perhaps adding them onto the list of faction traits on the Empire Screen (which already has minor civ traits added on) would be a bit much, but it would nice to be able to have a location where you can see what bonuses are unlocked.

4. On the Quests Screen there is a column on the left that lists all the temporarily active events affecting your empire. This needs a better way to scroll through it. There is no scroll bar on the side, and hovering over it and scrolling with the mouse wheel often ends up with it getting stuck scrolling through the descriptions of individual items.

5. Also on the Quests Screen, when looking at completed quests, I swear they’re listed from left to right in a fairly random order. Surely they should be listed in the order they were completed?

6. For the Vodyani, it would be useful to have a way to look at what improvements an individual ark has built inside it, without the ark having to be tethered to a system. You can only look at the list of built improvements when the ark is acting as a colonized system, and I feel this limits incentive to move the arks elsewhere. (I haven’t played the Vodyani in a long time, so maybe this has been changed and I’m unaware.)

7. Vaulters can only colonize with the Argosy, right? They can’t build Settler ships? Then why, when choosing an empire when setting up a game, does it say the Vaulters have a “Barrel-Class” ship with the role of colonizing? (This perhaps is more of a “bug”, but it’s too small to start a Bug Report thread about.)

Gameplay Variety

1. The first Academy quest that comes up in a game (“Rumour of an Academy”) always asks you to explore Atmospheric curiosities. This always leads to me not exploring any Atmospheric curiosities at the beginning of a game before this quest has popped up. I think it would be a good idea that it’s a random anomaly type (e.g. Signal, Ruins, etc.) required for this quest in each game. That would mean you couldn’t “bank anomalies” for exploring once the quest pops up, as you wouldn’t know what you’ll be needing to explore. As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing in the quest’s description that would prevent this lore-wise.

2. Why is Esseb Veltaros (the Endless Day character) a Technologists Hero? Their lore is unclear, but shouldn’t they be an Endless faction Hero? There’s only one Endless Hero in the game at the moment (the “Stellar Prisoner”), so it would be good to have another one!

3. What causes the different competitive quests to occur? For me the Photobomber quest comes up in every game I play, but the “Stellar Prisoner” one rarely does. It would be nice to have this mixed up a little.

4. I would love it if there was a way to avoid having duplicate Heroes. There are so many Heroes available in ES2, yet looking at all the ones present in a particular game will reveal duplicates. When given the selection of a new Hero, is there always at least one that is the same faction as the empire doing the choosing? That would explain why we quickly get duplicates…

Usability Improvements 

2. I think there is a bug that causes the AI not to send a treaty where they ask for tribute, so this will be fixed soon.

3. I agree. It'd be nice to have a list of them. 

Gameplay Variety 

2. There are more Endless heroes in the game. You're not going to run into them when recruiting heroes the traditional way. 

 I'm not an expert on the lore so I can't give you a definite answer as to why Esseb isn't a Virtual, but I think it's on purpose. There are similar beings in other Endless games, and their lore is mysterious. They are at least similar to haunts (which are ancient, partially sentient Virtuals), so I think it's likely that they were Virtuals at some point.

3. I too see the some quests pop up all the time, while other are extremely rare. It'd be nice to see the rare quests more often indeed.

I also put down some thoughts:

Feedback Word File https://ufile.io/iyyto

I think you might be misunderstanding me (as I wasn't clear enough). I'm not talking about the diplomacy mechanic where if another empire has amassed a large amount of diplomatic pressure over another they forcibly demand resources and technologies and so forth. I'm talking about the messages AI players randomly send (and have existed before the above mechanic was introduced in the Galactic Statecraft Update) which are just flavour text.

For example, the Vodyani will say something like: "The Church is costly. It is only right you contribute." And then they'll be annoyed later because you didn't engage in diplomacy with them and give them Dust. Like I said, I think it just needs to be a bit clearer that this is a proper diplomatic demand with consequences, and not just flavour text.

Nah mate I was talking just about that. There was a bug (it's now fixed) that caused the unclear behaviour. Now the AI will send you an angry message, followed by a deal that has you sending dust to them. Accept, and the AI will be temporarily happy. Decline/ignore, and the AI will get angry. 

You can find an Endless hero early on in the Craver questline. Now that I think about it there might be only two Endless heroes in ES2, my apologies for making it sound like there a lot.

Just a quick update for anyone reading this, that Dust Diplomacy Bug is still present and not fixed. The diplomatic message never turns up, or there is no "Give us dust now" message at all - only to check Diplomacy a few turns in and realize someone is mad at you for not giving them a tribute they never asked for.

It was working in my last 2 games (past 3 days and present), AI was always first announce that I should be giving them dust, and few seconds later a 2nd diplo message from them with the amount of dust to pay (which I always refuse).

Yeah I don't see the point in even giving them what they demand; the AI will eventually just go to war with you anyway and even IF you should find it your heart to decide to give an AI some type of resources to further diplomatic relations, it never seems to make a tangible difference anyway.  Effectively it's just the game trying to trick you into throwing away resources instead of having to send its fleet to take them.  They're still your enemy one way or another.  Some factions are just more blatant about it.

Daynen wrote:

Yeah I don't see the point in even giving them what they demand; the AI will eventually just go to war with you anyway and even IF you should find it your heart to decide to give an AI some type of resources to further diplomatic relations, it never seems to make a tangible difference anyway.  Effectively it's just the game trying to trick you into throwing away resources instead of having to send its fleet to take them.  They're still your enemy one way or another.  Some factions are just more blatant about it.

It delays them from waging war on you for ~10 turns until the next demand. That demand usually happens when the faction has an agressive nature but you don't have borders close to each other. 

mamarider wrote:

Daynen wrote:

Yeah I don't see the point in even giving them what they demand; the AI will eventually just go to war with you anyway and even IF you should find it your heart to decide to give an AI some type of resources to further diplomatic relations, it never seems to make a tangible difference anyway.  Effectively it's just the game trying to trick you into throwing away resources instead of having to send its fleet to take them.  They're still your enemy one way or another.  Some factions are just more blatant about it.

It delays them from waging war on you for ~10 turns until the next demand. That demand usually happens when the faction has an agressive nature but you don't have borders close to each other. 

More like it just accelerates their development, making their war machine even worse when they DO declare on you.  It's often a dust demand, meaning they want to war now, but don't have the dust to pay for their fleets long enough to finish you.  Better that they're provoked into it now, when they're not quite as prepared and you're aware of their intentions than on some random turn later when they're fully ready to roll you long enough to end the game.  Ninety nine times out of a hundred it's a Craver anyway.

Hello,

These are some good suggestions, a good part of them is already logged in our accessibility backlog, and we hope to be able to tackle them in the future!