That may be a nice addition, to have a bugtracker seperate from the forums. Or at least someone organizing the dev responses.



Here's a developer response about the hero bug: http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?791-SOLVED-No-heroes

And this is why I love the community here, players, devs et all! Thank you, Slowhands, and thank ThorTillas for me as well.

At $23, Endless Space is a great value even now. Yeah you're paying for an alpha (a very good one), but you're also getting a finished game in a few months.

halflotus wrote:
At $23, Endless Space is a great value even now. Yeah you're paying for an alpha (a very good one), but you're also getting a finished game in a few months.

I've spent 4 hrs on it so far, and I'm afraid I'm not that impressed at the moment. Major, major gripes so far:



1) Pirates ~ totally ignore the rules, and can appear in systems that are both your colonies and that are flanked by protected systems. i.e. pirate fleets can appear "behind your lines", in systems with a single colonised planet (mine). MAGIC. Whilst I understand that the later tech levels allow warp drives and so on, this is on turn 50 odd, and they're significantly weaker than me: and there's no way they could have got there without being spotted / coming through other owned systems of mine. Given that there's a single planet, I'm not sure where a fleet that's equal in strength to my largest fleet just appeared from.



2) By doing so, the pirates managed to take a system ~ a 1 population colony tundra world (i.e. I had been filling in the empty systems behind my front lines). It took 2 turns to get a fleet > larger than that that appeared to the world. In that time, the pirates were able to a) take the colony, b) increase the # of ships in their fleet and c) were able to re-spec their weapons load outs, and were able to eat my fleet alive. In comparison, building a >higher tech ship x1 in my major production gal takes 4 turns at this point.



3) I consider pirate fleets that can appear by magic, conquer systems & then use non-existant production facilities to be cheating / not fun. Fine if they're high tech so legitimately have some kind of mechanic to ignore space-lanes (they weren't); fine if they have production bases / systems of their own (they don't so far) so they are containable; fine if they legitimately conquer systems (instant spawn > 1 turn to defeat a new world = lame).





I'm going to give it a few more hours, but ~ between the ZZzzz tech tree that is pointless / boring (note to devs: if the first two techs in a tree, which are instantly easy to get (2 turns each from your starting position) allow colonising two different world types... guess what? It's the same thing as allowing the player to colonise them from the start, 4 turns is filler, not a design choice) to the lack of features (Repairing ships? Orbital defenses?) to questionable strategy (So... I can see these resources I can't use from the start? And they seemingly ignore planet types / are totally random? That's.... odd).





Yeah. Not setting my world on fire at the moment: there's major flaws all over this.





/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11113-discussion-will-the-ai-cheat



Will the AI cheat ?

-> Short answer : no.

In fact, the AIs will not gathered any information that a player cannot get and it will not be able to do actions that the player cannot perform.

But, depending on difficulty level, it will get some “Bonus” or “Malus” to his “Food/Industry/Science/Money” production.

The AIs have some difficulty to “always” make the right decisions in terms of system improvements or ship design creation. By giving them some production bonus, we allow them to make some little mistakes from time to time.



I just caught the AI cheating ~ or rather, I caught the game spawning Pirates from thin air. The latter is a worse sin than the former, by the way.





Game #1: Abandoned, pirates are able to spawn in inhabited systems.

You know, you could have trolled away without paying the $25. If that much money is so important to you, maybe you should have thought twice before purchasing software in an alpha state.

The game is in an alpha state and the developers have stated that they are aware of the ai problems and are working on fixing it, as well as the pirates.

d10sfan wrote:
The game is in an alpha state and the developers have stated that they are aware of the ai problems and are working on fixing it, as well as the pirates.

I'm aware what an alpha is ~ however, I've been unable to find a change log / state of progress thread. So, I've no idea if the devs are aware of AI / pirate issues at all. For all I know, this is the first time pirates have ninja-spawned.



Because...

MoonMonster wrote:
You know, you could have trolled away without paying the $25. If that much money is so important to you, maybe you should have thought twice before purchasing software in an alpha state.

Fools like this can't see the difference between a report on the game essentially breaking itself and "trolling". It is not trolling to point out that in my very first game, I catch the Pirate AI basically a) breaking the 4th wall and b) cheating so badly that it takes systems / changes the game. Hint: this is not what minor / pirate / mcGuffin factions are for, they're to pace the player's expansion / ability to ignore military growth somewhat against the other AI factions.



If you knew anything about games, you'd know this instead of flailing around shouting "troll".









Oh, fyi: $25 = £15, you're aiming for $35 (/$40 at full price). And, if you've not already realised: my interest in the price point is nothing to do with my own economic status, but everything to do with how successful this game might be. Hint: Torchlight / Legend of Grimrock = doing it right.







p.s.





Might as well ask: is the bug where repeated restarts (for a decent starting position / system) break the automatic addition of the three advisors? Because, yep, that just happened to me.

There have been threads about sometimes the three heroes don't appear. If you look around the forums, you will see the developers responding to bug reports.

d10sfan wrote:
There have been threads about sometimes the three heroes don't appear. If you look around the forums, you will see the developers responding to bug reports.

Without someone organising said threads into something useful, that's useless. And yes, I've read 10+ pages of the forums, including the bug one and including the FAQ one which people also post bugs in.... hint: most devs have software that they can add bugs / issues to a tracker list. Since we're paying for the alpha, and have these wonderful G2G points, it might be an idea to allow paying customers access to a forum that showed this list.



You know, so you could check it off the list n all.





Oh, and it's not only the first three: on turn 45, when the next one was supposed to spawn, nothing did.





Game #2: Abandoned due to Advisers refusing to spawn. There goes another 2 hrs, really decent start there as well ~ turn 48, 9 systems colonized with multiple planets on each, 4 resources [soontobe8] with a monopoly. Oh well.





Note to other players ~ if your three advisers don't spawn, looks like none of them do. Nice to know.

4x_Fan wrote:
... I strongly suspect the AI currently simply cheats].

Here is some info from the dev that coded it; the AI doesn't know how to cheat and that is why balancing it is a challenge.



/#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11113-discussion-will-the-ai-cheat

4x_Fan wrote:
But, given the amount of work that went into getting GalCiv's AI "right", I'm a little dubious that they'll be able to write a functional base by summer, esp. if it's not currently working. I can hope.

I wouldn't worry and if they can't make it I'm not that impatient to wait for couple months more. + If you know something about AI coding maybe you can lend them a hand, not only the mouth a?

L22 wrote:
I wouldn't worry and if they can't make it I'm not that impatient to wait for couple months more. + If you know something about AI coding maybe you can lend them a hand, not only the mouth a?

A mouth would be helpful if there was positiviness,helpfullness and understanding.The knowledge would be good,but it is a plus.

4x_Fan wrote:
I've spent 4 hrs on it so far, and I'm afraid I'm not that impressed at the moment.

Well there's a real surprise !!!!

I don't understnad the constant talk of overpowered pirates, i can easily defeat them with only 1 or 2 defender ships

If you're such a fan of the genre I don't see why you are so unwilling to support it. You seem to think because Amplitude aren't an AAA studio that they don't need to eat... Instead of asking what they can do for you if you're such a large fan of the genre maybe you should be asking what you can do to help support them in their endeavor to build a unique TBS 4x space opera.



I've already got 10 hours out of the alpha. That means because I bought the Emperor edition I have so far paid less than $3 an hour to be entertained by this game and it's not even out of alpha yet... I've paid larger sums of money for a single meal which I've polished off in under 10 minutes.



I have pretty much every single notable and un-notable 4x space opera made in the last 15 years and Endless Space in alpha is already better than most of them. Galactic Civilizations II might have had a good diplomatic model but lets be honest here... The combat was a bland and unsatisfying numbers game with no notable graphical representation [somethingthatevenMasterofOrionIImanagedtoachieveallthewaybackin1996].

TheLastRonin wrote:
If you're such a fan of the genre I don't see why you are so unwilling to support it. You seem to think because Amplitude aren't an AAA studio that they don't need to eat... Instead of asking what they can do for you if you're such a large fan of the genre maybe you should be asking what you can do to help support them in their endeavor to build a unique TBS 4x space opera.



I've already got 10 hours out of the alpha. That means because I bought the Emperor edition I have so far paid less than $3 an hour to be entertained by this game and it's not even out of alpha yet... I've paid larger sums of money for a single meal which I've polished off in under 10 minutes.



I have pretty much every single notable and un-notable 4x space opera made in the last 15 years and Endless Space in alpha is already better than most of them. Galactic Civilizations II might have had a good diplomatic model but lets be honest here... The combat was a bland and unsatisfying numbers game with no notable graphical representation [somethingthatevenMasterofOrionIImanagedtoachieveallthewaybackin1996].

This answer was pure satisfactory.

I happen to love the game, and think that the price point is an absolute steal (I probably wouldn't have tried it if it was much more expensive). Sure, no game is perfect, but true 4x fans realize that quality space-themed games are few and far between in this genre. I want to help improve this game, and we also have to remember that MANY 4x games are pretty terrible until post-release expansions. Remember SoaSE 1st release? Terrible AI, frustrating crashes, annoying pathfinding bugs. It was fun, but not perfect. Civ 5? Many people still hate that one, although I think the new expansion will help it. GalCiv2? Terrible until Dread Lords IMHO. Shogun 2? Unplayable as a good strategy game without Darthmod.



I'm sorry you don't like the game, but hey, we all have our personal preferences and I understand not everyone will like the direction they took. If it was possible I'd gladly buy the key from you and gift it to one of my friends through Steam!

The deal is a nice average cost if not lower then it should be for what you get. I live in Australia and a game like this once full released would cost over $50 or more as a game like Call of Duty here cost over $100 on release. So I am happy with the price they have and I'm sure once fully released the game will have a lot of content to give you hours of game play and fun.



I do hope there is going to be full supported modding of the game and also DLCs and expansions in the future

Thank you for more answers.





http://endless-space.amplitude-studios.com/Progress



~ This lists the coding as 90% complete. As far as I can see [e.g.]http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?682-Diplomacy-phantom-trade-bug&p=7589#post7589] Diplomacy is currently still not working.



I've some experience with 4x's, and AI / diplomacy is kinda the 'Holy Grail' of them. Not many people can code the AI to be useful / a challenge without simply resorting to production / number cheats [which:fromfeedbacksuchashttp://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?905-Impossible-AI-fleet-sizesIstronglysuspecttheAIcurrentlysimplycheats]. As stated: I've purchased the game.





But, given the amount of work that went into getting GalCiv's AI "right", I'm a little dubious that they'll be able to write a functional base by summer, esp. if it's not currently working. I can hope.

4x_Fan wrote:
1) Price point. £22.99 / 26.99 is extremely expensive for a non-AAA title. Torchlight II is £14.99 for reference. I understand that the team behind Amplitude studios has industry experience, but I'd suggest that the Torchlight team have a whole lot more. Why is this game so expensive for a studio's first title? Does this price point only include the game?

Let's be honest here. Torchlight is cheap because it has to compete with other quality titles in the same genre. Not only that, but the userbase of that genre is generally much larger than the 4X Turn-Based Strategy genre. What AAA titles is Endless Space competing against that might alter their price point? Please, I'm interested.



EDIT: I went ahead and checked out Steam, and in the US, Torchlight II is $19.99. That's 3 dollars cheaper than Endless Space: Admiral Edition. Maybe Endless Space is simply not scaling their pricing based on regions.