i suppose they could do something similar to civ and just have faster time scales

In my cast multiplayer experience, assuming everyone doesnt quit and a winner actually emerges, there are 2 outcomes, and 3 ways to get there. Assume competitive players who desire to win, for assuming anything else leads to any random result.



1) Someone techs out for a wonder victory. Unlikely to happen in smaller games, but feasible in large games with many players. I have seen this once or twice only, so it is especially rare, and requires a greater than majority of docile players.



2) Supremacy/Domination. You have killed everyone or taken enough systems to become the winner. This is definitely going to require military power either way.

2a) Early aggressive rushing. Making swarms of tiny ships and overwhelming the opposition.

2b) Late offensive. Teching up, and making swarms of Dreads to overwhelm the opposition.



There is no difference between attacking with tiny ships or big ships, the strategy is the same. 1) gain production and/or tech advantage and then 2) swarm, overwhelm, and conquer opponents through numbers, power, and strategy.



The issue of time lies not in the progression of tech, but the slowness of actions within each turn. Moving each ship, manualing several battles, etc etc. Some want to take hours and days, others wish to win as soon as possible. There is no greater strategy in a longer game, if anything I would argue it shows lack of strategy. If certain game improvements were made then turn speeds could improve immensely, and those later games are more likely to be seen as less people will quit because they have other things to tend to. The games wont end up shorter in turn time necessarily, but it will definitely speed up the real time required. Would it not be better when a game that required an entire day to complete, now only requires 12 hours? You could double your grand war game memories, could you not?

Kyu wrote:
In my cast multiplayer experience, assuming everyone doesnt quit and a winner actually emerges, there are 2 outcomes, and 3 ways to get there. Assume competitive players who desire to win, for assuming anything else leads to any random result.



1) Someone techs out for a wonder victory. Unlikely to happen in smaller games, but feasible in large games with many players. I have seen this once or twice only, so it is especially rare, and requires a greater than majority of docile players.



2) Supremacy/Domination. You have killed everyone or taken enough systems to become the winner. This is definitely going to require military power either way.

2a) Early aggressive rushing. Making swarms of tiny ships and overwhelming the opposition.

2b) Late offensive. Teching up, and making swarms of Dreads to overwhelm the opposition.



There is no difference between attacking with tiny ships or big ships, the strategy is the same. 1) gain production and/or tech advantage and then 2) swarm, overwhelm, and conquer opponents through numbers, power, and strategy.



The issue of time lies not in the progression of tech, but the slowness of actions within each turn. Moving each ship, manualing several battles, etc etc. Some want to take hours and days, others wish to win as soon as possible. There is no greater strategy in a longer game, if anything I would argue it shows lack of strategy. If certain game improvements were made then turn speeds could improve immensely, and those later games are more likely to be seen as less people will quit because they have other things to tend to. The games wont end up shorter in turn time necessarily, but it will definitely speed up the real time required. Would it not be better when a game that required an entire day to complete, now only requires 12 hours? You could double your grand war game memories, could you not?

Doesn't everyone opening a game get the option to choose only a few/one criteria that enables players to win? So you should be able to know what you're getting into.



Personally I found it very refreshing that you don't have to react as quickly as possible in this game for a change. And I don't want to end up playing some sort of starcraft.



But then again, I have only played the SP.

Snerch wrote:
Doesn't everyone opening a game get the option to choose only a few/one criteria that enables players to win? So you should be able to know what you're getting into.



Personally I found it very refreshing that you don't have to react as quickly as possible in this game for a change. And I don't want to end up playing some sort of starcraft.



But then again, I have only played the SP.

Its not about reacting as quickly as possible to speed up turns. That will never happen, you can't really force people to play faster.



But what WOULD increase turn speed without needing to increase reaction speed are things like:

An game option to remove manual combat but still select cards. - so select cards on the screen with combat occuring rather than select manual or auto

Hotkeys

Easier selections for planet buildings - drop down menu from each planet to select exploits/moon/terraforming, clicking into another planet adds alot of extra time.

Better construction queues - eg being able to queue up exploit/terraforming for a currently uncolonised planet. (Queue colonisation first).Another eg. When stuff is added to the queue, it goes on top of ind-> gold/sci if thats on the bottom.

Construction overview screen - another screen showing the construction queue of each system.

Locking MP combat into auto while allowing you to select what cards are played would be fantastic.

While some of this I'm sure has been said earlier (with 14 pages it's tough to read everything), here are the biggest things that I would like to see added or changed:



1) Huge ++ to the following from the OP list:

More different weapons types, more hybrids and new types. (In particular, add different effects to different weapons and armor so that it isn't just a linear progression of improvement. Swapping out one tech for another should ideally be a decision, not a routine.)

Space stations to defend systems

Planet defenses that damages sieging fleets

Huge Ships



2) More diversity in the galaxy such as unusual events, artifacts, locations etc. Greater differences between the star systems. It's okay if a bunch are useless and a few are outrageous, that would add to the sense of exploration for me.



3) Make resources more narrowly focused and spread them out. I pay no attention to resources right now because they're absolutely everywhere. If they were more uncommon and specific to a section of gameplay they'd matter more (ie. antimatter enabled science buildings, titanium requirements for certain weapons tech, another for fantastic armor or dust, etc.) It's similar with luxury resources. They're good to have, but they're just kind of there. There's no strategy to plan around them.



4) Personally, I don't care about the ground battles that much. System defenses are really needed, but in general once you've won in space you've won the system. After all, whatever the mechanics, if you've won in space you can just keep sending troops in until you take the planet. I've never seen ground battles in a space 4X done in a way that doesn't feel to me like wasting time. I care about the space battles, if I want to fight on the planet I'll play Starcraft or Civ. Just my opinion though.



5) A storyline of some sort would be great, but I don't miss it immensely. I think of it like M o O2 v. Civ. In M o O2 (sorry for the spacing, smilies got auto-added) the Antarans added great flavor to the game, but they weren't a make or break, just like in Civ the mods that add a story are fun but I still love playing without them.



6) Make it more clear where players are regarding victory conditions. It sucks to be happily on your way to galactic dominion just to have someone spring a surprise economic win out of nowhere. Doing this through in-game mechanics would be more fun than just a graph, but either way it's necessary.



7) Make trade more complex and interactive. The systems I've enjoyed most in the past involve players actively setting up trade routes through building and sending out ships. These routes can be blockaded or broken and grow in value as time goes on.



8) Tech tree choices would be fun, either having certain technologies preclude others or having to select which bonus you get from a given technology.



Overall, the consistent theme I think in my suggestions is diversifying each game. Right now I enjoy it, but I feel like each game plays out more or less exactly like the last. There's immense potential, but this is the biggest thing that would keep my interest for an expansion is changing things sufficiently so that I don't necessarily know what I'm going to get each time.



Thanks for the great work!

One other idea that occurs to me would be to expand upon the current, card based system for combat. I think that it's a good idea, but in its current incarnation it feels too limited. Since you only get three cards to play against a rapidly ticking clock, and considering that by midgame few of my battles ever make it past the second stage, the system tends to have relatively little impact. When I do manual battles I just load up three cards at the outset then sit back and watch. While I'm not sure about the technical and balance challenges involved, what about the following options:



- Make the cards played more frequently with a pausable battle. If I had, say, ten short phases of battle to play my cards in I would feel much more like an active participant in the fight. I would always be either making a decision or responding to the enemy's last one. It would also allow greater flexibility with cards. You could respond to ones just played or set up a chain of effects with cards you intend to play next, etc. It would also allow you to rely on them to a greater degree. Right now I only get three cards, usually only use two and never know if either or both of them will get cancelled out. I can't go into battle relying on cards for anything under that system, but with a more flexible one I could take a small fleet into battle and count on tactics and repairs to carry the day. This would, also, require that you be able to pause the battle to make decisions.



- More powerful, diverse or flexible cards. Right now I feel like the cards have relatively little impact. The fleets I expect to win almost always win, the fleets I expect to lose almost always lose. One fix might be to increase the power or diversity of cards. This would particularly tie in with my suggestion above re: more phases per battle, since balancing a powerful card seems easier if it will only control 10% of the battle rather than 33%. On a granular level, some ideas could include: One-time effect cards. Most of the cards seem to be general effect right now "increases damage by x%," etc. More cards like "deals x damage across enemy ships," "removes x ships from this round," etc. (like engineering does, heals 20%) might be fun. They're more concrete to get your head around rather than the abstract issues of greater or lesser percentages and you can see the effects right away for planning your next steps. Weapon, armor or ship-specific cards that play off of a specific tech if you have it in your fleet. For example, an otherwise weak weapon might become valuable all over again if you can use it in new ways down the road.



I think, overall, what I'm trying to get at here is that many of the cards feel more like managing a spreadsheet than playing a game. While at its heart that is, in fact, what a 4X game is, it's the set dressing that makes it fun. You can take two options, one that says it does +25% damage with -15% accuracy to enemy weapons and another that has some flavor text that ends with "and the black hole gun does 557 points of damage across the entire enemy fleet and throws off the next 300 points of damage" or something. They might mathematically end up doing exactly the same thing, but the second option is just more fun than the other, especially if it comes with a cool graphic.



- See your decisions in action. This might be a particular graphical hurdle, but it would be a lot more fun if I could see my ships respond to my commands. Admittedly I bring this up because the combat is, in fact, beautiful to watch, but it gets pretty repetitive after a while. I would re-engage if I was watching my ships respond to my commands and watching the enemy ships do the same. I wouldn't know what to expect, and I would be getting new information as the scene played out in front of me.

I'd like weapons and defenses to be less rock/paper/scissors, and more a preferred tactical choice. The rock/paper/scissors element would still be there due to how weapons work, but the idea is that you aren't instantly crushed if someone chooses paper to your rock.



For example, armour could cause flat reductions in the damage caused by enemy weapons. Quite likely this would be percentage based so you can never be totally immune and you'll still lose if you let enemies swarm you. Going all armour would be the pure tank option, which would work well if you have chosen faction bonuses and other systems that increase ship HP. If you don't have the HP, however, armour will only go so far. A Destroyer can pack on all the armour possible, but that doesn't mean that the 20% damage left over from those missiles isn't enough to blow it to pieces regardless. Armour is certainly one of the most powerful defensive options available, but the drawbacks are endurance and Command Points; you will be unavoidably hurt in every single engagement and to get the most out of armour, it has to be very heavy on the biggest ships. You can be clawed down by sheer attrition from either an opponent who just has the resources to spare, or has simply decided to make use of hordes of small ships that'll peck you to death.



Shields would be equivalent to a second HP bar, and you'll take no damage whatsoever until enemy weapons bring them down. Shields are a good general option with no particular weaknesses. They're not overly efficient insofar as enemy weapons will always do full damage against them, but they would regenerate each combat round (to a degree to be determined I would suppose). Yes, they are rather bland and boring, but they're also reliable and dependable in any situation.



Point defense would work against all weapons. It is a dedicated secondary weapons array that exists only to acquire, target, and engage anything detected as a threat. This system provides a certain number of shots (add more to increase that) that have a certain percent chance (use a better system for higher chance) to shoot down one incoming projectile. Obviously, point defense would continue to be the best solution against missile salvoes, which often have far fewer projectiles which can potentially be intercepted in any of three rounds. It would be middling against beam weapons, which compared to missiles fire every round, and worst against ballistics which rely on spewing out large amounts of projectiles.



Now, you can also see weapons still have their own considerations. Ballistics are great against point defense, but aren't useless against other defenses. Beams are the weapon counterpart to shields, being a reliable generalist option that is not rendered useless against any defensive system, but neither is there anything they are great at. Missiles suck big time against point defense, will do terrible things to shields with their massive HP damage, and are in the same 'reduced by a percentage' boat as everything else against armour.



End result is that you can gain some advantage with certain weapons or defenses, but you're not rendered laughable. At the moment you can defend against everything and proceed to get blown away by an enemy loaded out in favour of one type of weapon, or defend against one thing and play an intensely boring macro economy game where both sides keep flinging reaction built fleets of perfect counters at each other until mere industrial inferiority causes one side to keel over and die. It also encourages a few weapons mixtures for preference; ballistics to help your missiles break through point defense by laying down too much to intercept. Beams mixed with ballistics so the accuracy of the former at long range can complement the greater damage of the less accurate ballistics when fighting gets close. Or just continue going all-out with one weapons system....you can still try to launch more missiles than the enemy can intercept, and when they hit, there's nothing but bare hull.



EDIT: Obviously missiles seem to be the best counter to shields, which I didn't think about initially. But which I'm fine with for the purposes of illustrating how I think weapons and defenses should interact. In this case, your concern is the sheer mechanics of how a defense or weapon works, and not whatever rock/paper/scissors route you've been crowbarred into. Missiles are colossal burst damage weapons...heavy HP damage in one go, basically. A shield operates as more HP instead of performing some other mitigating effect. The shields aren't worse against missiles because the mighty powers that be have decreed that you are paper and they are scissor....it's just due to how they operate. When it comes down to it, you still get the full benefit out of your shields. The missiles don't do any extra damage, they just do three phases worth of damage in one go, and that will overwhelm your shields which prefer to tank spread out damage and then regenerate it.



Again, you should never be instantly defeated because you haven't heavily stacked against the one weapon the enemy are coming at you with. You may be at a disadvantage, certainly, but that's when the tactical card game actually means something. You can work to cover your disadvantage, because it's only a disadvantage, instead of sigh and choose something random (or a maximum damage card to go down with) because it doesn't matter, the enemy are going to smear you anyway because your defense is literally meaningless.

I like the point, SaintD. In theory the R/P/S system is about players putting together balanced fleets that duke it out with all systems fighting at once. In practice, however, it makes much more sense to just go crazy on one weapon and one armor in an effort to match your opponent's build strategy.



Personally I like your idea a lot about having armor, shields and point defense work in fundamentally different ways. You could even achieve the R/P/S balance just by statistical jiggering. They have their given effect, plus they each block x% of damage from their chosen weapon. Ie. shields add a second life bar, plus absorb the first 40% of beam weapon damage, etc. If nothing else, though, I think the one fix would be to just add an general damage block to each defense. If armor blocks, for example, the first 10 points of kinetic damage, make it also block the first 4 points of beam and missile. That one is an easy enough statistical change and would help immensely. (Although I still prefer your idea.)

Never been a fan of planet destroying have to admit.

I like it, myself. For the most part it's not that useful, but when you're going for a conquest victory in any 4x game there definitely comes a time when (for me at least) new cities/planets are more of a hassle than a benefit. I need to take them away from the other guy, but I don't really want to have to deal with them myself, and assigning a governor is just a quick route to an expensive system. That's when my trigger finger gets itchy...

I love ES's battle system, and would welcome additions. Provided they didn't fundamentally change the way battles play out. For instance, no tactical battles. Keep the combat viewer, with the awesome cinematic music! I love being the ultimate ruler of my race, watching my ship captains do their thing.

Atlantis_Risen wrote:
I love ES's battle system, and would welcome additions. Provided they didn't fundamentally change the way battles play out. For instance, no tactical battles. Keep the combat viewer, with the awesome cinematic music! I love being the ultimate ruler of my race, watching my ship captains do their thing.

While I support the idea of not changing the system too much, I absolutely don't see the point in not giving more opportunities for tactics! Tactics is what make battles interesting, otherwise you just send in your fleet and see who is winning. That's really broing. No challange at all.

Deeper and more complex battles that last longer (meaning completing all stages and not just nuke with missiles/beams end before phase 2 ) but yeah keep the current system. I was skeptical about the combat system when i first saw it but now i love it. It just needs a few boosts and will be perfect.

Good idea this expansion!!! The ground battle could be like the battles in MOO 2

spartaco89 wrote:
Good idea this expansion!!! The ground battle could be like the battles in MOO 2

You mean where the troops run at each other shooting?



And where a single battle can take an entire planet?



That seems a little silly to me, I would personally prefer an extension to the way the current invasion system works, allowing for variables to affect the invasion, allowing players to rush the invasion by making a 'push' with the potential to have the opposite effect and of course to have a strategic map and in system indicator of the conflict, the numbers of variable and statistics of the conflict.

Igncom1 wrote:
You mean where the troops run at each other shooting?



And where a single battle can take an entire planet?



That seems a little silly to me, I would personally prefer an extension to the way the current invasion system works, allowing for variables to affect the invasion, allowing players to rush the invasion by making a 'push' with the potential to have the opposite effect and of course to have a strategic map and in system indicator of the conflict, the numbers of variable and statistics of the conflict.

Second that! Some improvements on that would be fun, as I suggested in my post earlier in this thread: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11347-expansion-pack

I haven't taken the time to read through this entire thread, but from the major suggestions listed on the front page, I dont' think this has been suggested... though it kind of adds to the concept of more weapons and upgrades in such.



Having played Endless Space since the weeks it came out and absolutely loving it, the one problem I have with the space battles when it comes to the visualization definitely has to do with the repetiveness of it. No matter what, I think the style is awesome and its a great new inovative way to do battles, but some variety would be awesome! So I think three ways to do this would be...



First, different formations (maybe a way to choose your formation upon entering the system, battle card style?) it gets really boring watching a fleet enter a system in the same way battle after battle, so allowing for different methods of entering a system while adding a second strategic bit with the battle cards would be nice. It would add variety to the space battles, and make them much cooler to watch since it would be different every time (your opponents having defensive formations as well). proposals for these would be...

-hide in asteroid field (if an asteroid field is in system, the defending fleet could hide in the asteroid field to take the attackers unaware)

-come from opposite side of planet (a common technique in science fiction universes, hiding portions of fleet on the other side of a moon or planet)

-splitting the fleet (in an effort to trap who you are attacking, or defending against)

-Various fleet formations (wedge, spread, tight knit, etc)

-position of ships themselves (I think this is really important, I've had plenty of battles where some of my weakest armored ships will get stuck up front and blasted into oblivion when they should have been behind my tanks)

I'm sure there are plenty of other options too.



Secondly, and this builds off of my above concept, would be the idea of having the ability within the ship customization screen to actually choose where weapons are on the ship (and having those weapons actually appear on the ships themselves, though I'm not sure how hard that is logistically) The relevance of this would be that if fleet formations and strategies were implemented, it would be relevant to where you placed various weapons placements. If certain ships only had one missile launcher, it would be quite important where it was placed, because if it was on port when the enemies were on the other side, it wouldn't be able to fire at them.



Furthermore, you could decide where to place armor and shields and flak guns, whether defending the front or the sides or whatever.



Third and finally, building on both the above concepts would be the idea that specific parts of ships could become damaged. In the midst of battle, your ship takes a direct hit to the engines. The rest of the ship is fine, but that ship won't be able to leave the system until it receives repairs! The obvious systems with their own hit points would be engines, shields and armor, weapons, and various support systems. If this concept was implemented with the above concepts as well (and a few of the other proposed systems I saw, such as star fighters and boarding enemy vessels) I could see quite the cinematic experience being played out, while simultaneously adding depth and strategy to the space battlefield.



And if I totally just posted an idea that has already been mentioned in this 15 page post, I hope I've done that concept justice and given it a second vote!

trinest wrote:
All those things in the OP sound pretty cool. I wouldn't mind the UI cleaned up a bit, and maybe controller support for us a comfy couch players.

Is this a joke? You want to play a great, complex, PC strategy game with a gamepad?? If you can play a strategy game with a gamepad, then that game is too simplistic (civRev).

I'd like to see a few changes\improvements such as:





Space Battles & Ships:

• If you're staying with the card system for space battles make the timer for the stages a bit longer. I'm always scrambling to pick a card and most of the time I pick the wrong one.
• Boarding ships can capture enemy ships and keep them to use them for privateering under a fake flag (the flag of the original owner) (But having them upgradable)
• An engineering ship that can refit your ships without having to be at one of your planets. (But the engineering ship must be uploaded with the schematics of the new refit.)
• More ship classes
  
  

Ground Battles & Invasion:

• An invasion system like Master of Orion 3 has. (Adding tech to upgrade your armies.)
  
  

theRob wrote:
Besides the improvements for the current space battle, the planetary invasions should get an update.

As some have mentioned it, this could be achived by ground assault/battle.

In order to make the invasion a bit more challenging you could use diffrent invasion tactics like

• Siege
• Offensive Attack with your ground troops
• biological Warfare
• or even by supporting a planetary rebellion.
[/QUOTE]

Technologies:

• Having technologies that can only be unlocked by certain artifacts (If your artifact is stolen then you lose the tech.)
• More different weapons types
  
  

UI & Planetary Improvements:

• Destroying entire star systems (Will turn into an asteroid belt and after a certain amount of turns will be able to be colonized.)
• Construction queue sorting options (Having a tab Science, Industry, Dust, Food, Approval, etc...)
• Adding hot keys I can't stress enough how badly you NEED to add hot keys.
• Space stations to defend systems
• Planet defenses that damages sieging fleets
• Razing planets / Systems
• Have an options to turn off the tilt in the System View screen
• Adding Colored Anomalies /#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/16338-released-colored-anomalies
  
  

Misc:

• New faction and traits (focusing on new battle techniques?)
• Finding artifacts on moons or planets (Once studied could be equipped on ships or heroes or add new technologies.)
• Story mode
• Adding audio to the diplomatic screen for instance adding talking to the system. Example: Each race would have there own language (until you research a universal translation)
• A bigger galaxy
  
  

Belhoriann wrote:
But I'm surprised that there is nothing related to the galaxy in the list. I mean, most of the criticisms on the game were about how the galaxy seems dead and empty. So I would suggest to work hard on that too, if it's not on your improve list already. For example, please consider to add :



- Random events, black holes, novas, relics on planets and moons (already in the list, so ok), derelict star ships/bases, minor races...



Ha, and trade needs some love too !

vaendryl wrote:

• If I unlock a new building I want an easy way to select multiple systems and queue that building on ALL of them.
• I want a button modifier, like shift, that will send my instruction to the top of the list, instead of the bottom
• I'd like to see conversion to dust or science to be the default action on an empty queue, not something that can indefinitely block all items after it
• I'd like the ability to hide improvements that I never build so they don't clog up my list making it hard to find the things I do like to build.
  
  

I don't trust the AI governer in the least, even now.... so I really really would like to see these things happen sooner rather than later.

Ok so maybe more then "a few"