I was hoping for more of a Total War kind of game. I love turn based strategy map games, but I don't want my combat to be that way. Great developers understand that games have to be more than one type. You see games offer RTS, FPS, and RPG, like Mass Effect. This game only seems to offer turn base everything. What would have been better was make combat like Nexus and Star Wars Empire at War. Being able to move around 3D and move with your ships as they fight would be a really cool 4x game. Even making an invasion force battle in space first and then have to fight a land battle like a Total War series game would be off the chain. It might even be nice to see some Space Stations in the future.



I'm also not a fan of space travel lanes. They look ugly as sin in games and especially in space games. In space, you want to see beautiful nebulas, gasses and other effects that our video cards can take advantage of. I want to be able to zoom and rotate around ships and fleets on my map. If you want to create space lanes, it could have been done like Shogun 2. Select the army/fleet and move your mouse to the destination you want to go. Then there's a travel lane that follows you from where ever your mouse is and to the unit. The amount of turns it takes to travel is illustrated by a travel lane changing colors. It doesn't have to be a straight line too and from. If there are gasses or wormholes in the way, it could easily be detoured. I would make space as much explorable as possible IMO. Making travel very linear is lame. You could do so much like set up ambushes in asteroids and be caught doing battle in radiation clouds (similar to how snow or rain effect ground battles). So much more can be offered to 4x games.



Shogun 2 Movement



This is the best picture I could find without loading up the game myself. The picture doesn't show the travel lanes changing colors to illustrate the number of turns it takes to reach the units destination, but it does show a possible solution to removing those ugly travel lanes in a campaign map. This is something most space exploration games get wrong here and it times to do away with such ugly crutches. Stop trying to recreate old games like MOO, SOAE, and SOTS. Developers need to innovate better games than those, not just the same game with a little better looking graphics and windows.

Well i expected that also the first time when i bought the game but this is not so easy as it maybe sounds...sadly the Game Legends of Pegasus who tryed this was the biggest fail in game history.



also there are other problems to how to manage a multiplayer party and so on...even total war only supports multiplayer games with only 2 people!...no idea this will be improved with Rome 2 : Total war.



and btw...despite this fact i learned to love this game more then anything else.

Bad213Boy wrote:
This is something most space exploration games get wrong here and it times to do away with such ugly crutches. Stop trying to recreate old games like MOO, SOAE, and SOTS. Developers need to innovate better games than those, not just the same game with a little better looking graphics and windows.

What's SOAE? But I think the devs were trying to hit a nostalgia factor with this game (btw, in SoTS, the only races with space lanes were Humans and Zuul. And it isn't that old xD) In MOO, there weren't exactly space lanes... but I do understand. The problem is that MOO2 is the main comparison for space games, and if they don't match they usually get bad reviews. And the fact that these games are really hard to make.

I actually have to say I like it the way it is. Imho most Space RTS have highly unpleasing battle systems, most of the times it's just Age of empires with Catapults on a black underground. Sometimes you have special actions but generally It's nothing like what I'd imagine a RTS space battle should look like. As you hinted combat in ES mainly is just auto-resolve with a fancy cinematic, but honestly I'd rather have that than a bad RTS battle. I do not need another Total war game, I already have quite a lot and when I want to play a decent round of Space battles I just Play a naval battle in TW, that's closer to it than what I get in most space RTS. Furthermore I actually play ES (singleplayer) to relax. I can look at pretty Stars and Huge Space ships gravely gliding past and bombarding eachother with exoctic particles. - good show. The Music also supports this, I've got plenty of games where I actually have to tell my little peons what to do every splitsecond.



Lanes just make the game a whole lot easier, they are not pretty and rather odd when you think of it but they remove a lot of ungamey hassle. I agree that they are sorta lame, but they have their merits.

adding some RTS elements would make the game different entirely, since the tech tree and such is not really conducive of that either. to improve the space battle dynamic, i think more than rock paper scissors is necessary. for example, gratuitous space battles has limited number of hulls with special bonuses, like ES, but there is much greater variety of weapons, armors, shields, etc. a good element would be having system anomalies which affect certain weapon systems or defenses...maybe some systems make shields inoperative or other elements make kinetic weapons have worse accuracy, etc.



the combat isn't very fun as it stands...it's basically who has the biggest beams and best heroes...and if you can't compete then you make glass cannon destroyer missile boats.

stasik28 wrote:
What's SOAE?

SoaSE and not "SOAE" is the acronym for "Sins of a Solar Empire" another great space strategy game (but it's not turn based, it is real time)

Sovereign wrote:
Well i expected that also the first time when i bought the game but this is not so easy as it maybe sounds...sadly the Game Legends of Pegasus who tryed this was the biggest fail in game history.



also there are other problems to how to manage a multiplayer party and so on...even total war only supports multiplayer games with only 2 people!...no idea this will be improved with Rome 2 : Total war.



and btw...despite this fact i learned to love this game more then anything else.

Indeed, the devs don't want to change the card based battles. In the end of the day, you will love the card based space battles, besides they are very original. And yeah, I feel sorry for the Legends of Pegasus devs. That game had some good potential, but well... it didn't work.

HumanSpacer wrote:
Indeed, the devs don't want to change the card based battles. In the end of the day, you will love the card based space battles, besides they are very original. And yeah, I feel sorry for the Legends of Pegasus devs. That game had some good potential, but well... it didn't work.

Didn't they just run out of money and had to ship a game with a ton of errors, bugs, unpolished etc? They ain't uprooting card-based battles but they want to improve combat with the next expansion so... I'm all for that.



Away from spacer.



Changing a combat system and travel system entirely would take TIME and if its deep rooted in the game... pretty much constructing the game from scratch again; however your points raised are valid, I wouldn't mind to see a free-flowing galaxy map but I don't really have a problem with ES's travel system anyway; other than the fact I would like to have a highly connected game setting where every system is clearly marked and visible but not explored, with wormholes acting as warp-gates to speed up travel from one side to the other side of the galaxy. However, let ES do its thing.

HumanSpacer wrote:
SoaSE and not "SOAE" is the acronym for "Sins of a Solar Empire" another great space strategy game (but it's not turn based, it is real time)

One's person's great is another's total pile of excrement that he uninstalled and wishes he never laid eyes on. POS don't even begin to describe it.

Essentially what you are asking for though is a completely different game rather than what has been developed. I could not see them changing the entire game to then still call it Endless Space. It would be no less than perhaps a sequel to the game rather than tweaking the game if it was to be done in the future. This would be like saying Civilization (Any of them but lets say...5) should be completely modified to be an RTS. But if it was to be done, it would no longer be Civilization 5 but perhaps a 6th in the series with a complete change of gameplay.

Quite honestly, I would have preferred it way more if the space combat would have been really turn-based and thus we could have had hotseat.