Hello, im a long time 4x fan, and just gotta say; I love you guys for making this game and letting me play in its alpha!



Im hoping the "format" for this is right.





DISCLAIMER: Im afraid that many of the points here may have been discussed allready, alas my search-fu could not locate the discussions.

Note that most if not all of my 70ish hours of expirience in endless space was played on slow speed setting.

Im an immense galaxy 20h+ game type of player.





1) Slow speed is not slow enough, huge jump in tech from turn 40 -> 70 & research vs build time



With pirates on and with early production youre stuck on improving your home planet and one expansion, but surprisingly enough even on this speed setting you can research the first 5-7 really fast.

Nonbaryonic colliders after that and you're set to reseach ships that will make the pirates a moot point. And all the rest of the early techs in a short order resulting in way more stuff to build than turns to do so.



If tech cost scales with galaxy size it does not do so enough in my opinion.



Suggestion: Rework tech costs or early research production there is too much research going on.



Next you make first contact, your fleet freshly pumped from the countles pirates they popped who had no hope of victory. (Well im just gonna up the dificulty level) However playing on hard revealed a bit of a flaw in my opinion;





2) No reprecussions on conquer leads to snowballing too fast



Free population, free buildtime from improvements (allso in my case mostly better improvements too, because I tend to focus on the top tree) free everything and because all players are still bound by strings; your new land is

easily defendable.



Now you got two empires worth of stuff and no penalties for the 2 times amount of your population of aliens you presumably enslaved.



The few turns worth of negative bonuses from unhappines amount to nearly nothing in my expirience.

(Allso is it just me or does trade with peace work a bit lackluster compared to this, I cannot for the life of me to get any serious boost out of it? Doing it wrong? )



Suggestion: I think this makes you too powerful too fast if it succeeds, there should be some form of penalty more severe to atleast make the agressor pause in between conquering races.





3) Defeces in the same branch/tech as weapons



This is more of a personal preference but since the defences work in a "all or nothing" fashion, could they, perhaps have distict tech branches from the weapon systems. Especially on slow speed it would make the

choice of wich defences and weapons to reseach have more ranging reprecussions.



As it is, say im usin beam/flak and enemy is using missile/deflect, if the enemy swaps to defend agaisnt my beam attacks, I allready have the kinetic tech from the flacks that I researched to swap out immediately.



Im allso affraid this will make PvP matches a dustmatch to see who has the cash to adapt the longest.



Suggestion: Distinct branches for defences in the military tree like shields.





4) The little cruiser that could



Xp gain is too steep for battles hard/nigh imphossible to lose. I had a early reconnassaince cruiser that found a mint constellation with a crapton of pirates, fleets of 3,6 and 9, literally dozens. But since

pirates only attack 60-something kinetic and 120 missile they couldnt dent the cruiser, wich got 10 levels in the process bumping it from 900ish HP to 6290 HP!



Neeless to say it was quite powerful after.



Suggestion: Set minimum presentage of power enemy has to have untill xp is awarded.





5) Research on slow speed and how AI handles it; poor sophon defeated by pirates on hard



Game was huge 8-arm galaxy, slow speed with many constellations and 7 AI set on hard.

When first venturing out my own constellation in the first neighbouring constellation I encountered something of an odd site, grey influence; alot of it.



I found that pirates had taken 2 out of the 3 systems the poor sophon AI had, including there home system. Alltogether 5 planets ripe for the taking.



This got me wondering tho, i hope the AI understands/will understand that the "rules of the game" are different in slow games. (Thinking the sophon wanted to research some nonmilitary tech for too long and had

nothing to throw at the pirates, as there systems sertainly werent half bad.)



Suggestion: If not allready then make AI adaptive to the rules changing.





6) AI; why you hate shields so?



Its nice to see the AI try and counter my attack prefereces, but it only seems to do it with deflection and flak only. (And a bit randomly at that.)



Maybe I just havent played enough games or I was the only one in the galaxy using beams, still found it odd that after 3 games played thru I'we newer seen the AI put more than 10-15% of total defences on a ship

to shield. IE; 300 kin attack 240 deflect and 30 shield... 30!



Tho the AI itself seemed to prefer kinetic and missiles in my matches so perhaps I really was the only one with beams all the time.



Suggestion: Make AI more sensisitive to what weapons are used against it.

If you want your suggestions added it's often easier to put them into separate threads. Let me give a few thoughts:

1. That's a personal opinion I don't share. I'd change the suggestion to making an option to increase/decrease research speed.



2. Again not really sure about this one, it drags out fights unnecessary long as you have to tend to the assimilated systems and you can't really continue the fight without hurting yourself, which might be cool for some people but I wouldn't like it. So if included preferably as an option.



3. I totally agree on this, or at least make it symmetrical that every defense goes with the corresponding offense. But having them in different branches is fine as well. This has been mentioned already somewhere but I don't know where.



4. Didn't encounter this issue yet, but with your description, I agree.



5. Didn't encounter anything like this either, but if that's the case I agree.



6. Didn't notice any accumulation of AI strategy to my strategy so far, so yeah I think that could be improved.

The game is pretty easy right now, but the AI is being worked on. Development like this is pretty difficult.





I will just say that I completely disagree with your third point. By combining certain defenses and certain weapons into combined techs, it makes for a more interesting grouping of implications. Beam counters guns and guns counter missiles, but only because tech combinations make this the case. The reality of the matter is much more complicated. By combining techs into groups, the decisions becomes more complicated and more interesting than 'always just research the counter to my enemy'.