defekt wrote:
Germany alone lost over 600 U-boats and the US lost well over 800 ships of varying classifications during the WW2 years.

Really? Where are you pulling these numbers from?



If I'm wrong I'll admit to it, but I would like to see some evidence to these claims.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
Firstly, it's possible that the phase engines need to be even more complex the bigger the ships. That would explain why you need to research larger ships.

Secondly, it could also be that the phase engines are related to other ship systems, i.e. life support or artificial gravity (most likely the latter) so you still couldn't mass-produce engine-less fleets.

Ofc, it's also possible they run only on 1957 Dom Pérignon, which would also explain why they would be extremely rare. The point is it's not very likely, or not what you'd expect. Most of all, it does absolutely nothing to help the "funfactor" of the game, quite the opposite in fact.

jowanna wrote:
If i had a propulsion technology available that could speed me across the galaxy, but was so complex to build that my entire civilization could only muster a handful of them, and if i had enemies to fight and colonies to defend; I would NOT build cruisers and destroyers and the likes. I would build super carriers that can house thousands of fighters, bombers, corvettes. I would build mobile factory fortresses, that could be warped in and form a beach head right off the bat. And back on the home-front, I would just build entire fleet, minus the phase engine... who cares if they can't leave the system? They can melt anything that shows up... that's all the security i want/need.

Firstly, it's possible that the phase engines need to be even more complex the bigger the ships. That would explain why you need to research larger ships.

Secondly, it could also be that the phase engines are related to other ship systems, i.e. life support or artificial gravity (most likely the latter) so you still couldn't mass-produce engine-less fleets.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
I was arguing his point that the ships in the game have technology as simple as modern pistols; I still agree that it should be possible to manage more ships.

If i had a propulsion technology available that could speed me across the galaxy, but was so complex to build that my entire civilization could only muster a handful of them, and if i had enemies to fight and colonies to defend; I would NOT build cruisers and destroyers and the likes. I would build super carriers that can house thousands of fighters, bombers, corvettes. I would build mobile factory fortresses, that could be warped in and form a beach head right off the bat. And back on the home-front, I would just build entire fleet, minus the phase engine... who cares if they can't leave the system? They can melt anything that shows up... that's all the security i want/need.



The point is... it just doesn't make sense that engagements would have such a small scale, even when empires are involved.

ørret wrote:
If thats the case they should have increased the production costs of ships a lot. This would depict the complexity of building such tech. But thats no explanation why more than 5 ships cant fly around together.

I was arguing his point that the ships in the game have technology as simple as modern pistols; I still agree that it should be possible to manage more ships.

ørret wrote:
Your rigth! Of course you need a good machine to really enjoy advanced game graphics. But as developer you have the possiblilty to optimize which is the reason why some games with really good graphics run surprinsingly good even on weaker machines and some games with lets say moderade graphics do lag like hell. Of course such tweaking and optimizations consume a lot of time and you need specialists to do the more complex ones but this is something you have to be aware of when you develop a modern game. Just cutting this corner by adding an artificial fleet constraint is in my opinion a real poor solution

As far as I can tell, the game is already rather optimized. Although, I always think of the recent Aliens vs. Predator game when I judge optimization, so maybe I'm a bit biased.

ørret wrote:
Both if at least one AI is involved . Since every ES game takes at least 8 hours of playtime, multiplayer is not the first choice of playing (it never was in 4x games) ..hard enough to get one or two players that have the time to stick with such a long lasting game so we usually added AI players in multiplayer too.

I haven't played a lot of multiplayer, but I would kind of assume there was no way for one person to have 2000 fleets and the other person have one overpowered fleet unless the game had been going for 36 hours. Although, that seems like more of an issue with the whole "Can Only Attack Once Per Turn" argument. I think an attack should cost one movement point, but oh well.

Fenrakk101 wrote:


Arguably, you can't assume it's that easy; for all we know, the phase engines are as difficult to build as nuclear power plants or something similar.

If thats the case they should have increased the production costs of ships a lot. This would depict the complexity of building such tech. But thats no explanation why more than 5 ships cant fly around together.

Fenrakk101 wrote:


I don't think you can call it "development effort." It's not like any game can run on any computer with enough development effort. But I do think it would have helped the game's replayability for many people to at least include an option to adjust fleet sizes.

Your rigth! Of course you need a good machine to really enjoy advanced game graphics. But as developer you have the possiblilty to optimize which is the reason why some games with really good graphics run surprinsingly good even on weaker machines and some games with lets say moderade graphics do lag like hell. Of course such tweaking and optimizations consume a lot of time and you need specialists to do the more complex ones but this is something you have to be aware of when you develop a modern game. Just cutting this corner by adding an artificial fleet constraint is in my opinion a real poor solution

Fenrakk101 wrote:


Was this in single player or multiplayer?

Both if at least one AI is involved . Since every ES game takes at least 8 hours of playtime, multiplayer is not the first choice of playing (it never was in 4x games) ..hard enough to get one or two players that have the time to stick with such a long lasting game so we usually added AI players in multiplayer too.

jowanna wrote:
Easier to understand, but it's also "arcadeish" (if that's even a word...). In essence, it focuses your attention on the fact that it's a game, and kind of pulls you out of your fantasy world. Like i said it's all about the fantasy, and the fantasy is simply the holistic sum of it's parts. My point is entirely about the experience during the game. It's not about technical aspects or balance, or whatever... just about how true the game stays to the fantasy it kicks you into.

I don't think the cards system is that bad, unless you think too much into it and overanalyze it. There's really no better way to present the information, and so the card system allows you to quickly and easily decide battle actions. I believe I said before that I don't really see it as a card game, just try not to overthink it and you can overlook the arcadey feel of it.

jowanna wrote:
Well, we're all a little spoiled by Hollywood aren't we? It's true enough that you don't need 100's of ships to make a fleet, or an interesting battle. A few dozen would do just fine, or even less in certain situations. But if your best show of force consists of less than ten ships, it's kind of... underwhelming.



Besides, to a civilization capable of colonizing and terraforming entire planets, not to mention, harnessing anti-matter as a power source, and sporting personal shields... Fielding a space frigate would be about as hard as fabricating a pistol is to us. And how many of those do we have? 5 for every human being?!

Arguably, you can't assume it's that easy; for all we know, the phase engines are as difficult to build as nuclear power plants or something similar.

ørret wrote:
I think you hit the spot. The fleet CP limit has absolutely no gameplay advantage not even one. It is a completely stupid artificial constraint with only one purpose: "Reduce development effort".

Bigger Fleets would lead to bigger battles. More ships and effects must be rendered, you have to spend more time in the graphical fleet representations because ships have to be ordered in formations (you cant just let 100 ships fly in a line) and so on.

But reducing development effort with such a stupid constraint at the cost of gameplay is something really dissapointing.

I don't think you can call it "development effort." It's not like any game can run on any computer with enough development effort. But I do think it would have helped the game's replayability for many people to at least include an option to adjust fleet sizes.

ørret wrote:
Just imagine the situation where 2000 ships are guarding a planet and a fleet of 10 Ships attack. Now all 2000 ships will happily build up a waiting queue of also 10 ships figthing 1 vs 1 battles against the invaders and..guess what are defeated one by one until every one of the 2000 defending ships is gone and the 10 attackers (which are now even more experienced due to 2000 destroyed enemy ships) are invading the planet.

This is so extremely laughable but also so very sad because it happened in ES in every game i have played.

Was this in single player or multiplayer?

Fenrakk101 wrote:
It was just a thought. I imagine the devs themselves did a lot of playtesting when the game was in development, and it's possible they experimented with greater CP limits and decided the current system was most appropriate. Just food for thought.

Although I think the battle cam and rendering systems are the more likely cause.

I think you hit the spot. The fleet CP limit has absolutely no gameplay advantage not even one. It is a completely stupid artificial constraint with only one purpose: "Reduce development effort".

Bigger Fleets would lead to bigger battles. More ships and effects must be rendered, you have to spend more time in the graphical fleet representations because ships have to be ordered in formations (you cant just let 100 ships fly in a line) and so on.

But reducing development effort with such a stupid constraint at the cost of gameplay is something really dissapointing.



Just imagine the situation where 2000 ships are guarding a planet and a fleet of 10 Ships attack. Now all 2000 ships will happily build up a waiting queue of also 10 ships figthing 1 vs 1 battles against the invaders and..guess what are defeated one by one until every one of the 2000 defending ships is gone and the 10 attackers (which are now even more experienced due to 2000 destroyed enemy ships) are invading the planet.

This is so extremely laughable but also so very sad because it happened in ES in every game i have played.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
...Where do you see real-time decisions? The battles themselves are more or less turn-based. You can pick three cards at the start and not touch them again.

I see your point. I was thinking too much along the lines of countering one card with another, but you don't actually do that because you pick them in advance.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
If you don't think of it as cards, you can possibly start to see the way it's set up (engrish but whatever). In theory, it makes perfect sense that you can tell your fleet to overclock their weapons or to engage nano-repairs. Displaying this as a card game instead of some other system just makes it easier to understand.

Easier to understand, but it's also "arcadeish" (if that's even a word...). In essence, it focuses your attention on the fact that it's a game, and kind of pulls you out of your fantasy world. Like i said it's all about the fantasy, and the fantasy is simply the holistic sum of it's parts. My point is entirely about the experience during the game. It's not about technical aspects or balance, or whatever... just about how true the game stays to the fantasy it kicks you into.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
Not as many frigates and submarines as you may think. I'm not exactly a military buff (I leave that for my father) but we didn't have hundreds of submarines or anything.

Well, we're all a little spoiled by Hollywood aren't we? It's true enough that you don't need 100's of ships to make a fleet, or an interesting battle. A few dozen would do just fine, or even less in certain situations. But if your best show of force consists of less than ten ships, it's kind of... underwhelming.



Besides, to a civilization capable of colonizing and terraforming entire planets, not to mention, harnessing anti-matter as a power source, and sporting personal shields... Fielding a space frigate would be about as hard as fabricating a pistol is to us. And how many of those do we have? 5 for every human being?!

defekt wrote:
It can't be that because it doesn't take a long time to manage a fleet. It takes a long time to manage fleets but that's because they're all so tiny and there are shedloads of them.

It was just a thought. I imagine the devs themselves did a lot of playtesting when the game was in development, and it's possible they experimented with greater CP limits and decided the current system was most appropriate. Just food for thought.

Although I think the battle cam and rendering systems are the more likely cause.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
I think the reasoning is that it can already take a lot of time to manage fleets, and they worked out that smaller fleets were more manageable.

It can't be that because it doesn't take a long time to manage a fleet. It takes a long time to manage fleets but that's because they're all so tiny and there are shedloads of them.

You could also easily mod the CP size of ships down as well.

I think the reasoning is that it can already take a lot of time to manage fleets, and they worked out that smaller fleets were more manageable.



I do think they went too low, though. It might have to do with the battle system's rendering and the length of battles, but really, I think it would be good if fleets were 2-3 times larger. Or maybe have a slider in the game options to adjust the fleet sizes (like Sins had). The current system works, but I think it would do the game good if it were possible to have 10-12 CP from the start (and the techs that increase the cap would scale as well; and so would the Cravers' faction trait).

I wasn't questioning "your" number of subs (the US couldn't make subs with that sort of range that didn't rely on resupply surface fleets; the Germans could and did reach the US coast with subs c/o the type XIV Milchkuh resupply submarines), I was backing up the point made elsewhere that tiny fleet sizes in ES don't line up along side the real world analogy that someone else came up with. It wasn't all that unusual to have CTFs (carrier task forces) with ten or so capital ships and several dozen screens. In the early to mid stages of the war the British had huge fleets buzzing around the med and the English channel, and a bit later on the US and the Japs had vast surface fleets.



Don't think for a minute that battle fleets were just a couple of ships here and there scattered all across the Pacific - capital ships were (are) valuable assets that took years to replace (unlike in ES - big ships are cheap as chips) so when they sailed in anger they took with them as much support as was possible.



ES fleet sizes are not analogous to real world fleet sizes in any imaginable way. In fact, if anything, with the ships in ES being so cheap and so easy to build fleet size limits should be nearly limitless; I can think of no good in-game reason why such cheap assets would need to be limited to such tiny fleet sizes.

defekt wrote:
Look it up for yourself. Naval history books are a good start, maybe even the odd Google. (Take anything Wikipedia says with a pinch of salt but for well documented stats such as these it's generally at least ballpark.)

Would you say this site is credible?

http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org9-4.htm

If so, I was still accurate in my statement that we didn't have hundreds of submarines - just a little over a hundred. The scale of the navy is still not as grand as he seemed to be implying (we only have a hundred or two hundred, at most, of any given type of ship, not several hundred or even thousands). You also have to keep in mind that these hundred-or-so ships had an entire globe to cover, so it's not like there were fleets of 100 destroyers just cruising along.

Look it up for yourself. Naval history books are a good start, maybe even the odd Google. (Take anything Wikipedia says with a pinch of salt but for well documented stats such as these it's generally at least ballpark.)

Hello,



I really enjoyed playing endless space. I especially liked the explore, expand and exploit bit; managing my colonies, improving them, researching new technology, figuring out what improvements work best with which systems. It's a simple, yet challenging design, and very easy to grasp. I liked the combat a lot less however. I guess the object was to again maintain simplicity, balance and oversight, but really... and this is probably just my opinion, but when playing a 4x game you want to get to a point where you have some sense of imperialism and military prowess. It's very difficult to achieve that sensation when your fleets are limited to just a few ships in any given battle. I mean, seriously, even the current armies of the world have more epic battlefields than any battle i've ever had in endless space. It's kind of anti-climax, especially for such an advanced civilization as you'd expect to find in space faring species.



Personally, my imagination doesn't really stretch far enough as to consider each vessel as representing many, and that's not a lack of imagination (or the will to use it) on my part, but more a lack of inspiration on the games part. I have no problem playing cardboard games or card-games which use similar strategic elements as the battles in endless space, but the fact of the matter is that it's just plain illogical to have 4 ships fighting for an empire spanning many different star systems. And however trivial it may seem, this is simply the basis of what determines the degree of immersion in a fantasy; Everything must follow the common trend of interconnecting agreements that form the basic tenants upon which this fantasy is based (in this case, that you are running an interstellar civilization bent on expansion and progress). Anything and everything that actively detract from that fantasy may be enough to break it entirely.



It's something I've tried to impress upon many different game-developers over the years (more often than not; simply in vain): You are not just developing a game, with rules, and challenges, meant to be overcome in an entertaining way. You are also, and foremost, creating a fantasy world in which the player will become immersed (or not). Even the slightest conflicting element in the fantasy is enough to reduce the entire experience to a mere distraction.



There's nothing wrong with games that focus on presenting entertaining distractions (i played tetris for hours when i was a kid), but when you design a game that has you building up to the climax for hours and hours, then you are aiming for something entirely different.



With that in mind, I'd like to make a point about what i consider to be some very odd design choices in endless space. More specifically relating to the combat system. It' s really one of the major aspects of the 4x strategy game, and in endless space i feel like it's an afterthought... "oh i don't really know how to do this whole combat thing, so hey you know, let's just make it into sort of a card game and rely on the player to fill in the blanks... as it were". Well... it doesn't really work that way, does it?



Don't get me wrong, I like the combat system for what it is. If it was a stand alone game (like gratuitous space battles), the combat system would certainly be worthy of some praise (and it is), but the point is that it just does not really fit in with the rest of the game. Still, it was fun while it lasted, but it's game-breaking enough (for me) to conclude my findings on endless space and continue my adventures in a fantasy world other than endless space.



So thanks, and hopefully i didn't just "whine" but also provide some insights.

Fenrakk101 wrote:
Not as many frigates and submarines as you may think. I'm not exactly a military buff (I leave that for my father) but we didn't have hundreds of submarines or anything.

Germany alone lost over 600 U-boats and the US lost well over 800 ships of varying classifications during the WW2 years.

jowanna wrote:
Well let's see; you make decisions in real time during combat. I'm pretty sure that makes it real time combat... unless i'm missing something?

...Where do you see real-time decisions? The battles themselves are more or less turn-based. You can pick three cards at the start and not touch them again. You don't have any actual influence over the ships.

jowanna wrote:
Right, it's a card game... I was looking for something more along the lines of... well, the rest of the game. I actually like card games myself. I used to play ST and MTG, still do play the latter in fact. I also like more traditional card games, like poker. That doesn't mean that i necessarily like them while I'm playing a 4x game. There's tons you can do with combat in a 4x space game. Making it a card game is an odd choice IMHO.

If you don't think of it as cards, you can possibly start to see the way it's set up (engrish but whatever). In theory, it makes perfect sense that you can tell your fleet to overclock their weapons or to engage nano-repairs. Displaying this as a card game instead of some other system just makes it easier to understand.

jowanna wrote:
I didn't say that, i just said that it didn't fit in with the rest of the game, and that it was a simplistic choice for a combat system. I'm sure it's "challenging" in it's own right.

The presentation may not fit in with the rest of the game, but in practice the effects it has do fit in.

jowanna wrote:
Well sure but, how many fighter/bombers were created? How many destroyers and frigates? How many submarines? How many tanks, jeeps, APC's, SPG's and mobile guns were created? And how much combat damage did all of the afore mentioned actually do as opposed to those 20 something battleships? How much of the war was "fought" by "small" guns, as opposed to big ones?



You see, a few columns of tanks is pretty impressive, just like a few formations of frigates are pretty impressive. A lot more impressive than say one single battleship. So the point is, quantity does matter. It's all about creating a fantasy, and 5 ships just doesn't do it... no matter how huge they might be.

Not as many frigates and submarines as you may think. I'm not exactly a military buff (I leave that for my father) but we didn't have hundreds of submarines or anything.

Arqane wrote:
Well, the perspective isn't as far off as some of you might think. Take for example, the old American battleship. There were, as far as I can tell, only 27 that took part in WW2 (that includes 2 sunk at Pearl Harbor). There were 21 B-2 Stealth Bombers made. So for the "big guns" defending an empire, you really don't see that many. Granted we are talking about a multi-planetary empire, and not simply a country that spends 3x what the rest of the world does combined for their military. But it's still a matter of scale. Their "big guns" would probably only number up to about 100 as well, even though they would likely be bigger than you could fit on a planet.

If it were the fact that ships are so very expensive, big and hard to produce that even an interplanetary empire could not afford too many of them i would accept this as an explainable and consistent constraint. This would correlate with the WW2 scenario you have described. But in the game it is not that ships are so valuable...no quite the contrary! You can spit out completly outfittet Dreadnougths within one turn at each damm system!

The only thing that prevents you from building up "real" fleets is not a logical explainable limitation...no your ultra advanced, mega intelligent empire just doesnt know how to let more than 5 ships flying around together because...i dont know...the commanders are all terribly drunk and they fear to collide themselves to death until excessiv research revealed methods to reduce alcohol impact on the navigation capabilities of ship captains?