Two weeks ago my pc crashed to death. As the processor was the cause for that, it took me around two weeks to get a working system. During that time, I had nothing else than an old laptop. Best thing to do with it was playing good old moo2 - if you are interested, you can buy it through gog.com btw. When playing moo2, it became obvious to me that the whole game was much better thought through than any other game in the genre that I know. One aspect that was way better in moo2 than in Endless Space are the leaders. In moo2, leaders are categorized in two groups: colony and fleet leaders. What made moo2 leaders way better than those in ES, is, that all the leaders were entirely different. They had certain properties from the beginning on that gave a rather unique bonus and advanced with time automatically. These features were things like giving money or murdering spies or being famous to attract other leaders. Also, some of them came with techs. And although some had a considerable boost to industry or farming, they were not crucial for colonial growth, at least not to that extend. In ES, on the other side, all of the leaders of the same type are pretty much the same. They have slightly different starting attributes, but they are of few importance. All leaders are promoted by the same scheme and once you are done with the industry promotions, you have a leader that gives you a boost of 40% or so. Even more, population growth and production is rather slow in ES (players playing on fast game speed, please don't comment on this) making the leaders an important part of colonial development. Now, I don't fell fun about something an AI could deal with fairly on it's own: sending the leaders from system to system. I mean, it would not be hard to program the AI to find the weakest system, send the leader to there, then wait 10 or 15 turns and then start again. Really, that's stupid work I don't want to deal with, that would frustrate me. Now, as I don't do this because it is too stupid, I suffer a significant disadvantage when I play. Another downside of this leader approach is that if a player chooses to boost his races attidues towards leaders when customizing it, he has a 100% save win. As the leaders are that important, players of this type would surely leave the game when they don't get an admin from the beginning of the game on. So they surely have their attributes working while other players always have the limited risk that their traits won't work due to how the game comes out. Considering how expensive the leader-related traits are, few would accept to have them lost for nothing because they don't get any admin.

All in all, I'd prefer it if I'd had a switch to disable leaders totally at least till they are fixed. Instead, the food production and industry should be bossted by around 15% to rebalance the colonial growth.

Another aspect of the superiour leaders of moo2 was, that they instantly left (if you didn't hire them) and occured. That made the leader-aspect of the game more dynamic.

Having said this, I have to state that I critize the introduction of more and more heroes that hardly provide anything new other than their image.

I voted "Please don't do so".



So far in ES I'm happy with what the devs have done with the heros... I'm sure they have other things in mind for them, but as of this time, imho, they work well. Fortunately, this is not moo2.

Of course, you are free to vote just the way you want, but still, I have to say that I don't understand your vote. I am talking about a switch, so anyone could still have the game he wants, so you wouldn't have any disadvantage compared to the current situation. So I don't see why you are so ruthless towards other players by wanting the devs not to introduce the switch.



BTW: I also don't see why you seem to have a bad opinion about moo2. It was better thought through than any other game in the genre. Of course, AI could have been better, but that's not a reason to call moo2 bad all-in-all.

brother_of_zolsk82 wrote:


BTW: I also don't see why you seem to have a bad opinion about moo2. It was better thought through than any other game in the genre. Of course, AI could have been better, but that's not a reason to call moo2 bad all-in-all.

I have nothing against moo2... I just like to see games doing things differently... if they were all the same, there would be no point to them. So I like to see the ES devs try new things...

Adding to Quasars statement of having something else in mind for them, if I remember correctly, heroes will have more of a role (especially combat wise) in the expansion. Having a switch to turn them off will make some of the stuff they are implementing less exploitable (counter wise, not balance wise)