I love endless space. I think it is a 7.5/10, but I wish it were higher. Unfortunately there are various issues throughout the game that together pull down the score. I'm hoping these can get fixed in patches or in a sequel.

• Good Things (not everything, just what I want to emphasize in contrast to other games):
  
  
  • I love the warp grid. It creates lots of interesting possibilities instead of being able to wander around willy nilly.
  • I like the idea of the combat system. The simplicity emphasizes strategy instead of tactics. See below for execution issues.
  • The sides are very varied. I wish they were more varied; I would like to see more sides that were as different as the Harmony are compared to the others.
    
    
  
  
  
• General Issues:
  
  
  • The color coding of technologies and improvements is handy, but the grouping is odd and unintuitive. Both Dust and Trade increasing improvements are indicated by yellow tags, Planetary Defenses and Ship construction improvements are both red, and food and population increases are both green. Then you have grey and pink, which are not readily explained in the game; you have to jump to the wiki to find out what they are. Everything should be much more clearly delineated at a glance, perhaps using sub icons (a shield for planet defense, a sword for ship improvements?).
  • There are multiple places where zooming out destroys your ability to actually use the screen. When zoomed out on the tech tree to anything but the highest zoom level, you can't see what the techs give you in game terms, only in flavor text, so you have to stay zoomed in almost all the time. When zoomed out on the galaxy, you lose all production information at too high of a zoom level, and at the lowest zoom instead of seeing a big territory overlay you lose all game information.
  • There is a general lack of summary screens, requiring excessive manual zooming in. When you want to set a planet's exploitation, or colonize, or mitigate the disadvantage, or perform moon surveys, or revive an artifact, you have to zoom in on the planet. You should be able to do all this from the system screen. For things that you gradually get the tech for, like moon surveys, you should be able to quickly set them automatically on large numbers of systems when the tech comes up, instead of having to slog through every single planet in every single system whenever you get these to manually queue them up 1 by one. Same thing with military tech: if you get something that is a straight upgrade (for example, moving from tier 1 to tier 2 on a weapon type) you should be asked if you want to just upgrade everything on any ship that uses the tech, and there should be an option to do this on anything you haven't done it on at all times afterward if you decide not to. Instead, you have to go through every ship class one by one anytime you get new tech, and often you may not realize you got something that could be upgraded (also you should just be able to leave the ship builder if you changed nothing, instead of still getting the warning confirmation).
  • Military heroes are pretty useless compared to economic heroes in general.
  • Having ships become immobile in non-allied but non-hostile systems is dumb. They should be forced to go back to my nearest system, not stuck there until they are attacked and retreat.
  • The approval system is too unforgiving of war, making it hard to fight because of how quickly you go bankrupt while trying to keep systems from going on strike, especially at the early stages of the game.
    
    
  
  
  
• Production
  
  
  • The insertion of new buildings or ships into the queue does not follow a consistent order. Sometimes things go in in descending order and sometimes they go in in ascending order. Pick one or the other (I prefer descending, ie whatever I click on last is at the end). Give the ability to drag and drop fro the right hand list in order to put things in out of sequence. However conversions (infinite cost prod-> sci/dust/food) should always go at the end; I should never be able to put things in behind the conversions and wonder why they aren't getting built.
  • I should be able to save ship build sets, so I can tell it to build a certain fleet arrangement without having to do it manually all the time.
  • I should be able to set fleet automatic destinations both in the production screen and from the map, so I can have my forces automatically go to a forward staging area instead of having to move absolutely everything manually. Should be able to distinguish between combat, siege, and colony types (ie it sends the combat ships to one place, the siege ships to another place, and holds the colony ships). These should be intelligent enough to not send fleets to systems that are blockaded or no longer under my control; when that happens it pops up and asks me what I want to do.
  • The hanger system is just annoying; it is too easy to lose ships in there.
  • I should be able to do all production from the system level; I should never have to zoom in on planets if I don't want to.
  • It is too easy to trip the planet zoom when I meant to move population and viceversa.
  • The empire-wide view should show planet icons so you can see how many planets are colonized, what type they are, exploitation, etc. from the empire summary.
  • The empire summary should occupy the entire vertical space on the screen; on my systems it starts scrolling at only 3/4 of the screen height.
    
    
  
  
  
• Research
  
  
  • Some of the branching and location of upgrades is nonsensical, ie how you have to research tundra colonization before getting the 1st ship class and nothing else, or how leaving a spy network behind so you can see what is going on at a captured planet in in the trade tree. Would benefit from more multidimensional branching.
  • It is often not clear where things are, ie the increase in military command point cap being in the trade and diplomacy tree.
  • Some type tags don't make sense, like collaborators being green instead of red.
  • You shouldn't be able to get things that need knowledge of a strategic resource before you have the resource, ie getting enhanced kinetic weapons without hexaferum. You really shouldn't be able upgrade ship designs before you have the strategic resource you need to use item.
    
    
  
  
  
• Military
  
  
  • There should be a default ship for each class, showing off the unique strengths of the new chassis.
  • There need to be summary screens when a combat begins. Right now, in order to tell what my enemy has and pick the best strategies, I need to mouse over each ship in his fleet 1 at a time. Also, if I have forgotten what is in my fleet, I have to do the same for my own ships. This makes it very annoying to decide what to do, especially if you get many combats in a row. It also leads to humans picking very homogenous builds so they know that they always need to optimize for one weapon, ie building all beam weapons ships so you don't have to remember what each fleet has.
  • It is not clear at all in the ship design screen that there are multiple types, ie different ranges of weapons, different troop types, etc. It also doesn't make sense that all weapons default to long range instead of their respective optimals.
  • It needs to be much clearer what classes get bonuses on which things. Perhaps color things with bonuses green. Many people don't realize that different classes get weight discounts on certain items.
  • Ship appearance should change based on what is on them.
  • Manual mode is almost pointless right now except to waste time. It is very boring to watch and has almost no interaction. The only advantage is that you can change to retreat if things are going badly.
  • Supremacy victory is almost impossible to get to before expansion victory is tripped.
    
    
  
  
  
• Diplomacy
  
  
  • Diplomacy with AI is very weird. You often can be very friendly with a race, but they will refuse to ally or cooperate for no visible reason. Gets worse when trying to ally with multiple races, where some combinations will work but not others even though everyone is at the same level visibly with respect to all the parties involved.
  • Allied AI are often unhelpful. You will both be at war with the same people, but only you are actually doing combat. There need to be options to force allied AI to do something, and also options to distribute spoils ie I ask my ally to give me system X when they conquer it and I give them system Y, so we don't end up with patchwork territory at the end of fighting.
  • Diplomacy victory is almost impossible unless you turn off every other victory condition.
    
    
  
  
  
• AI
  
  
  • The AI will often try to move my ships through enemy systems or peaceful but not open border systems, because the route is shorter. The is especially bad since you can't see the route before the move is executed. I should have to intentionally tell it to move to an enemy or non-allied system for it to go there. This often results in lost ships because instead of reinforcing a system your 1 ship goes into an enemy system instead
  • AI empires act stupidly in terms of not colonizing systems some times. You end up with an AI side that has only 4 systems and 5+ uncolonized systems in the area or between the colonized systems that are unused and spawning pirates.
    
    
  
  
  
  
  

void, some of your concerns are already addressed. I'm not going to address all your points, but I'll share these with you:

There is a (small) moon survey button on your Empire screen that will put moon survey builds on all planets with a moon. Look in the upper right-hand corner under System Actions.

You can set up rally points (at least in Disharmony--not sure about vanilla) on the main map by using the left-ctrl button. Admittedly, it does not differentiate between types of ships.

If you alt-tab out of the game and then re-enter, it will start putting your builds at the top of the list. Saving and restarting will fix this. If you want to put a build at the top, you can do this by using the alt key. Ctrl-alt will put something at the top of your build lists for ALL your systems. This works great, for example, when you research Planetary Institute improvement.

I have tried using left-ctrl and all it does is makes ships go straight to a system, leaving the warp grid, even if it is a longer route. I don't know if there is some extra setting I am supposed to do, but in any case it should be a part of the GUI, not a keyboard shortcut you have to just know about.



I still can't find this moon survey button you mentioned. If it's that small that I can't find it after looking for it explicitly, it's useless. And even if it is there this doesn't address exploitation, mitigation, and wonders requiring you to zoom on the each and every planet.



Game behavior should not change if you alt+tab out of the game. Especially for a turn based game where jumping in and out is practically encouraged.

Void2258 wrote:
I have tried using left-ctrl and all it does is makes ships go straight to a system, leaving the warp grid, even if it is a longer route. I don't know if there is some extra setting I am supposed to do, but in any case it should be a part of the GUI, not a keyboard shortcut you have to just know about.



I still can't find this moon survey button you mentioned. If it's that small that I can't find it after looking for it explicitly, it's useless. And even if it is there this doesn't address exploitation, mitigation, and wonders requiring you to zoom on the each and every planet.



Game behavior should not change if you alt+tab out of the game. Especially for a turn based game where jumping in and out is practically encouraged.

Left-ctrl-left-click on a system--that will bring up a distinctive graphic--and then left-ctrl-left-click on the destination system. Ctrl-right-click with a fleet selected sounds like the behavior you're describing.



I can't describe the location of the moon survey button any better, so I guess you're out of luck. I discovered this button without knowing it even existed a long time ago. There is also a button to build an anomaly reduction technology on all your planets that you have the technology for, and a couple of other buttons that do stuff.



The alt-tab behavior is unfortunate, but it's been explained as unavoidable due to the engine used to create the game.



Anyway, this is my last post in this thread. Maybe it will help someone if not yourself.