Played a hell of a lot now, mostly multiplayer with friends. Massively positive about the game but here is some of the issues I have.



1) Winning is too invisible. Score is not enough to indicate how close enemies are to victory and it makes most wins feel cheap. I end up telling my opponents I have nearly won because winning can often mean turtleing back and just waiting for economic/wonder victory. It would be nice to have the option to have some visibility of opponents progress towards victory, I like the idea of the tug of war this might create and alliances made and broken.



2) The comparison of Research victory Vs Wonder victory is silly. Even playing Sophons I would never attempt to get research victory unless I was making things harder for myself. I think other win conditions should be scaled back to the Research victory in difficulty. It is never a problem to have 5 systems to knock out enough industry to create the wonders that late in the game. I have done a research victory with Sophons and cannot believe how long it took in comparison.



3) Administrators are waaaaaay too important. If I don't get one in my first 3 heroes I know I have been dealt a bad hand. Flat +25 food/industry and even the happiness is just so powerful. It gets new systems and newly conquered systems a crazy amount of turns of advantage before they are pumping out massive FIDS. Without an administrator I reckon this will set you back at the very least 15 turns on each new system. 15 turns of max FIDS on each system is a hell of a lot. Not to mention all the extra FIDS you had because of quicker progression. Need I show a graph showing how such a quicker progression on a system can make a massive total difference?



4) As soon as ships get past kinetics, combat is over in round 1 for 95% of battles, this is player vs player where ship design is comparable. This makes kinetics close to useless, it seems it's beams or missiles or some balance of both.



5) Related again to the way battles work out, I would like to see a more linear fall off of damage. Right now it feels like battle are decided and the winner comes out with more or less full hp. I don't like it, it can lead to silly things like 1 fleet taking out 12 fleets and hardly taking a dent.



6) Now I can't be 100% on this but heroes in a fleet are god like. My opponent Craver player had an invulnerable fleet with level 20 hero. I would put ships that exactly counter his fleet with a level 10 hero, with more strength (fist symbol) total and he would kill me in round 1 with no scratch. I am not entirely sure if this was all the hero or partly the next point:



7) The command cap 2 ships are just way better than the command point 4 ships. Play testing would indicate that command cap 2 ship fleets destroy command cap 4 fleets. So what is the point of Command cap 4 ships? Bang for buck in command points they seem a downgrade from previous tech. If they could load up heavy tonnage fleet wide buffs so taking 1 in a fleet was worthwhile it would make sense.





I'll leave all the AI issues out as they look like they have their own thread and some work has gone in for the final version.

I have also not spoken about features I would like to see.

1) Actually it's not. If you hover over each of the icons at the top left of the screen you'll get an indicator if another empire is nearing a particular victory (it will always list your own %, others are hidden until they tick over 50% or so).



2) Already noted, particularly by yours truly. I believe there will be a rather significant production cost to go along with these angling in towards "have the five planets for at least 10 turns" with some kind of red flag flown for everyone else as to which planets these are so they can attempt to move in and stop it.



3) See your own point #6. Also, yes, it's been noted that Corporate heroes are not as good as Administrators.



4) You mean "get past missiles." Kinetics are last. And yes, it's been noted dozens and dozens of times.



5) There's an ongoing discussion over the cost/benefit of various defense modules currently.



6) Military Power (the fist symbol) isn't a proper comparison between fleets. I've built fleets that can take on bigger fleets with two to three times as much MP and win without losses. The heroes help, sure, but it's not everything.



7) Also noted. A lot. Destroyers are all around the best unit due to the fact that CP cost scales linearly with base HP and tonnage, but usefulness does not. I've conquered whole galaxies with corvettes.

Draco18s wrote:
4) You mean "get past missiles." Kinetics are last. And yes, it's been noted dozens and dozens of times.

I've found that beams are at least as effective as missiles taking things apart before kinetics. This mostly comes down to the fact that a given ship's missiles can only target one other ship, whereas a beam ship can target up to four and do at least 50% more damage at a given tier if all the shots hit.

I agree many of these points have been discussed, but most of them have not been resolved.



For admin heroes, our challenge is to propose improvements to the other classes, to make them more interesting:

/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/9149-the-25-industry-hero-bonus-is-too-good.



For small CP ship superiority, I have been having a *lot* of good results with BS and DN fleets, because the high end repair and engines have less percent overhead. Compare 4x destroyer to 1x DN. You get some benefit due to -25% weapon tonnage in the destroyer. But the destroyer fleet spends 240 tons on engines while the DN only spends 60. I don't think the numbers have been crunched on this all the way, but I am no longer a believer in the destroyer swarm.



OTOH, I *am* a strong believer in beam superiority. Something definitely needs to be done about this. Beam offense and kinetic defense come in the same tech, and no matter what, the AI hardly ever builds beam defense.

Renamed the title to convert it to a discussion.

davea wrote:


For small CP ship superiority, I have been having a *lot* of good results with BS and DN fleets, because the high end repair and engines have less percent overhead. Compare 4x destroyer to 1x DN. You get some benefit due to -25% weapon tonnage in the destroyer. But the destroyer fleet spends 240 tons on engines while the DN only spends 60. I don't think the numbers have been crunched on this all the way, but I am no longer a believer in the destroyer swarm.

Eh, why are you putting engines on your destroyers? They should only have two things - the support module that increases minimum and maximum damage by 40%, and lasers. Do that, and the dreadnought's "advantage" evaporates.



Thing is, though, by the time you've researched dreadnoughts the game's already been decided by the destroyer swarm. You could put a bunch of grannies into space on wheelchairs and win by that point in the game. The only real advantage a dreadnought fleet has over a destroyer fleet is that the destroyer fleet will take losses more often than the dreadnought fleet because the individual ships have fewer HP. This reduces the amount of effort a player has to put in to reinforcing fleets, so it's nice if you're at the point in the game where you've basically won, and you're just mopping up.



But if you actually want to play optimally and win as fast as possible, you'd go with destroyers with beams and the one damage-increasing support module.



That brings me to another point, how come the best damage-boosting support module is automatically unlocked at the start of the game for everyone? Seems a bit silly to research the higher level ones when they don't seem nearly as good.

Gort wrote:
That brings me to another point, how come the best damage-boosting support module is automatically unlocked at the start of the game for everyone? Seems a bit silly to research the higher level ones when they don't seem nearly as good.

Because all those other modules do other, less useful, things.

(i.e. they don't boost damage)

Gort wrote:
Eh, why are you putting engines on your destroyers?

Flocking. tencharlimit

Draco18s wrote:
4) You mean "get past missiles." Kinetics are last. And yes, it's been noted dozens and dozens of times.

No sorry by get past kinetics, I just meant once you have researched in to other weapon techs. At the start of the game you can just use kinetics.

Nosferatiel wrote:
Renamed the title to convert it to a discussion.

Thank you.



I don't use engines in ships, there seems little incentive to. If they made it so faster ships reduced enemy accuracy or something I might be tempted.



@Gort when you talk about already won and mopping up you are talking about playing against the AI I imagine. Even if they improve the AI so it is as competent as a player when we play player Vs player we barely use Command Point 4 ships at all. Even when we each get to that tech level it isn't worth it.



What I am going to try and test next is if ships purely stocked with weapons outkill ships that have weapons and counters, I haven't checked that yet.

Haree78 wrote:
I don't use engines in ships, there seems little incentive to.

http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?3672-Bug-92-Fleet-Movement



My DN fleets have a movement around 40, which enables me to get them into fights faster. If I do that with destroyer fleets, they can go even faster, but they can carry much fewer weapons so they seem less effective.

What I am going to try and test next is if ships purely stocked with weapons outkill ships that have weapons and counters, I haven't checked that yet.

Um ... I recommend that you wait until the 1.0 release Wednesday before spending much time on weapon balance.

Actually, I've made a fleet that was able to counter a full hissho fleet destroyer weapon that had some bushido. I've not tested it much, but that worked in that occasion. Also, I was higher tech than the hissho player, and my fleet was more costly and powerful (in MP) than his, but were able to destroy 2 before dieing. I played as Amoeba and their bonus for ships without weapons is was made me think about it.

During a battle, you only aim at the smaller ships at first, even if it's strange. I used that, and made some corvette shields, and one cruiser full of weapon (that was a 7CP : 1 Cruiser and 5 Corvettes). I put the corvette full of health modules, and one repair, so that they were like 1000Hp (btw, the best health module is the titanium one, even compared to higher one). That worked fine, and that bought lme some turns before dieing.

As said, I'm still not sure if it's industry and science efficient.

PanH wrote:
During a battle, you only aim at the smaller ships at first, even if it's strange.

That I believe is untrue given the current combat model. If anything it seems that attacks are distributed evenly over every ship. Although its hard to tell with the rapid camera angles it may also be the case that attacks are distributed on a per CP basis which would strike a nice balance.



Working on this theory right now I'm running a fleet composition that most people would consider backwards. I have a fleet of 9 battleships with roughly 50/50 weapon/defence split with equal investment in each of the three categories. The round the fleet out I've built and 'aegis' style DN for each fleet to fill up the 22 CP limit. This ship runs exclusively defences with all the support modules; engines, sensors, repairs, and the fleet wide defensive support module.



While that seems like a complete waste of space and overkill on the defences it does seem to make the DN entirely unkillable thus making it a good addition to fleet with a hero present, the fleet cant be wiped out so the hero cant be injured. Plus I'm playing as the Hissho and thus far not a single fleet has survived combat courtesy of my passives and the bushido stack. From an economy stand point its great because once you have enough guns to kill everything you don't need any more. The rest can be placed into defences to keep you ships from dying and thus replaced.



Oddly enough however, and the reason I propose the idea that attacks are distributed on a CP basis rather then per ship, I almost always lose one BS in the first fight but after that round I'm yet to lose a single one. You would think with less ships in the fleet each ship would be taking more damage but it seems to be that with one less ship the DN has a big enough share of the CP with in the fleet to draw away sufficient fire. Now that's only napkin maths and the explanation could be much different. In fact it could just be dumb luck but right now my fleets are performing 'better' after losing a single ship.



The other reason I like the larger ship is for the reason Davea put forward, % wise each of the support modules is far more effective in terms of tonnage. The individual +% weapon support module takes up the same size on a DN as a Destroyer and with the DN being 4x the tonnage you can buff far more weapons off a single support module. Obviously the destroyers -20% tonnage on weapons goes a ways to closing that gap but I would think the destroyer gets edged out in the end.



Of course if you start stacking fleet wide bonuses with engines the smaller ships come out in front because the bonuses are per ship with the module not per CP. Also it would be interesting to see the numbers on a fleet stacking the +% fleet damage module. The advantage would of course go to the smaller ships there but I'd like to see a comparison of the raw damage numbers of a fleet running with 1CP ships and that module compared to larger ships with the individual +damage module and a comparable weapons load out. Because its % based each weapon added would obviously make the returns from the module more valuable. There's a lot of min/max number crunching to be done there and seen as the only two numbers the UI gives us is raw MP and CP we'd need to understand the combat model thoroughly and spend some time working it out.