I love the game reminds me of the civilizations games but in space.



If anyone would like to some game play i have some of me and my roommate playing some.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm8tHKURdwk

I agree. This game has drawn me in like no other space game ever has. I have GAl Civ 2 with all expansions but have only played it for a few 10s of hours. I could never get into it. ES has certainly kept me going here. If the difficulty levels were balanced better it would be my new go-to game.

Right now it sits on the Steam shelf until I can bring myself to play again. I just re-installed it on my new laptop so I think I'll give it a shot in a day or two.

That's funny, because I feel the same way. I love a lot of what GalCiv2 brought to the genre, and I wish the ES would scavenge some of that, or at least open the game up some more for us to attempt that level of gameplay. But otherwise, ES is my #1 non ps3 game. It doesn't hurt that my mac can't run anything else, but we won't tell that to anyone.

Nasarog wrote:
It doesn't hurt that my mac can't run anything else,

when I was looking for a new laptop, I actually only considered ones that could play my favorite game, Civ V.



Interestingly, Endless space seems to have lower requirements than Civ V. endless space will run at the highest settings on my laptop but Civ V will only run smoothly on med-high.

New comp arriving in 6-7 days. It will be able to handle civ 5.

Agree too, and it's very good achievement and choice because it's the only I can remember that could feel so close to Civ series and still be very different. My feeling is the game was close to be able to generate a much better flow of players coming from Civ and appealed by endless Space and generating a good feedback.



In my opinion they missed the target on one point, newbies welcoming. Even the hardest Civ, perhaps the first, had an approach welcoming newbies to the series. And if in my opinion Endless Space has an immediate appeal right like Civ, a bit too many points was screwed up from a newbie point of view:



The interface is great but for a newbie there's too many traps, for example:

- Buttons nobody identify instinctively that it's a button,

- tabs at unconventional places or too unconventional look so nobody identify them instinctively,

- tooltips is a great way to provide information but players aren't used to this but more to get it with right click and optional constant reminder to use tooltips should be shown in bottom of screen,

- There's many tooltips everywhere but the game has no visual conduct line to pinpoint what has a tooltips or what hasn't.

- few important command requires a constant reminder, I can quote research screen, in that screen in bottom a tips should be constantly show to remind shift-click shortcut.



The game already provides many ingame information but there's still too many missing, not even in manual, to be a game welcoming newbies. Ok perhaps the game hadn't the budget but it's still a missing shoot because they target potentially players (civ fans) and don't ensure they won't be discouraged and even could end as bad words mouthes after a quick try of the game. Some example:

- The classes snapshots, not only it constantly generated many information bugs not cool at all for a newbie, but also it looks a lot too amateurish and that hurts a newbie.

- In game encyclopedia: Ok a link to a wiki is an indie approach, an in game encyclodepia could cost too much, but a great in game encyclopedia is an excellent tool to capture newbies, if I remember well even Civ 1 had one.

- Links with the encyclopedia, great links between the game and a great encyclopedia is another excellent tool to capture newbies. Possibly the tooltips approach could make this problem difficult, but it's still a problem that would worth have a solution.



Help the newbie to play and win his first game. The topic is complicated and between exaggerate Steamlining and exaggerate Hardcorism. Also there's nothing worse than a game with a default difficulty too easy not forcing the player to discover more in detail the game. But for newbies it's most probably a very important point when it's about discovering a new series like this one. So some points:

- Tutorial well embedded with the first game of the player. Most newbies will just skip the current tutorial, it's bad but this won't change ever. The problem is without any Tutorial the game is difficult to enter in it, players will then apply approaches they used in games they feel similar and it generates unhappy newbies angry about the game difficulty.

- Tutorial with hand guiding suggestions to lead the player to a probable win in his first game. The topic is very difficult because I don't think a good strategy with a faction is that good with another faction. Also providing many strategy hints is a sort of spoiler.



The game is overall cute and cool looking, good stuff for newbies. But I still don't have understand why Ships/fleet in global map aren't a little bigger and not with that awful color grid hiding all. Perhaps a flags or just a colored border would be better than the grid.



For Disharmony the new features haven't been merged into the interface, this can only generate big troubles to newbies, for example:

- No way to know new invading level of a fleet.

- No way to knew the collateral damages of a fleet (population/building)

- No way to know new defense level of a system attacked with quick invade.

- No way to know the fleet plane space combat power or defense power.

- No way to know what bomb modules is installed in a fleet and how many (if the blueprint is obsolete you can't even know for a ship).

- In fleet overview, the blueprint picture to right is missing all new information coming from Disharmony.

- More

Nook wrote:




In my opinion they missed the target on one point, newbies welcoming. Even the hardest Civ, perhaps the first, had an approach welcoming newbies to the series. And if in my opinion Endless Space has an immediate appeal right like Civ, a bit too many points was screwed up from a newbie point of view:

I completely agree. As a newbie, I found the game overly difficult. This is made worse with the names of the technologies. In Civ, you can imagine what pottery does (something to do with food) but with ES, although the names are cool, it's difficult to infer what researching it may get you. I have no problem with neat sci-fi names for the technologies but I would like the option to toggle the names to a more descriptive and familiar. The other option is to have a detailed tool tip that displays over each technology that will display when you hover over it.

I watched a bunch of let's play vids to get an idea, and then I stumbled through for a couple of games. I'm better now.

universecreep wrote:
I completely agree. As a newbie, I found the game overly difficult. This is made worse with the names of the technologies. In Civ, you can imagine what pottery does (something to do with food) but with ES, although the names are cool, it's difficult to infer what researching it may get you. I have no problem with neat sci-fi names for the technologies but I would like the option to toggle the names to a more descriptive and familiar. The other option is to have a detailed tool tip that displays over each technology that will display when you hover over it.

Dont forget to zoom in on the tech tree for full info

DMT wrote:
Dont forget to zoom in on the tech tree for full info

And to put the cursor over each parts of the detail panel of each research point, to get research lore, and description for each tech brought by the research.