Set teams option

Retionale is sound, this needs to be implemented prior to your team ladder ideas.

However,

• it slightly undermines the alliance tech, although it technically becomes a must for trading techs afterwards
• first point suggest you need to get an option to disable tech trade
• enforces pacifist heavy meta (I mean lumeris could use a big buff, but maybe one of two only suitable picks is too far)
• Victory (non supremacy) conditions are currently scaling with alliance size, so common practice is for player to just leave alliance to win early (cause it's mostly only about clicking end turn couple more times anyway)

I second this idea. It would be great to be able to set up a game such that individual players can be assigned to fixed teams at the very beginning.  These teams would be immutable and would last until the end of the  game. Similar games such as Civilization have had this feature for a long time.

I always play "co-op" with my partner, and the lack of such an option is disappointing to us. We end up working around it by promising not to attack each other and seeking to enter an Alliance as quickly as possible and then never leave it. We also try to ensure that our starting positions are close to each other, recreating a game if necessary. It would be great if this was part of the game itself instead of having to "hack" around it.

More importantly, this "hack" creates an imbalance with the AIs, which are not teamed. I guess one way to compensate for that to increase the difficulty level, but still.

to add to the idea map settings should also allow starting near other team members. 

Not needed but cool addon to this: Let players control a fleet together and view battle together in team mode and allow them to combine fleets as well. 

Thanks for liking the idea! I had a 2v2 game today and it was a lot of fun. Having a set team option and start playing as a team from the start would be even better and I really think this make this great strategy game even more full of new tactics and synergies between team members. 

Here is a 2v2 matchup with video from this week. It would have been even much more fun if vision / techs where shared from the beginning. 

I really want such feature in Endless Legend too. 

Thanks guys for supporting this. Yeah this would be neat in Endless Legend as well I agree. But poor devs lets focus on ES2 for now :)

This feature is critical, it's literally the only way I play turn based strategy games. It's far to easy to steam roll the AI without it.

We basically dropped ES2 as it lacked this feature.

RE tech trading - as mentioned a few options:

• Disable
• Enable with techs (as usual - but this means one player will race for this while the other does the heavy lifting combat wise early on, bit OTT micro)
• Disable with shared pool of research - say each players research value is the mean value of both players
• Enable with techs but limit number of trades - either increase diplo cost (in which case half of every alliance will be empire) or an inverse logarthymic scale based on number of turns as the game slows down i.e. 1 per 10 turns, then 1 per 5 turns, all the way to 1 per turn (again adding a bit of micro but with reminders could be quite nice "alliance tech trade available")

Starting placement also needs consideration. In Civ IV it was quite hilarious to have to surivive on one continent alone until the techs were discovered to connect the alliance, so I think flexible options would really allow for some good gameplay stories.

Another thing would be quick re-roll of starts. I don't mind playign challenging starts but when there are two people committed - it's no fun it one person has to play a long game from a disadvantaged start. In this respect ES2 suffers from the same issue as ES1, but to a less extent!