Over the last two days I won some Endless Space on Impossible against 1, 4 and 8 AI opponents aswell a couple of MP games. Here are some observations I made.





1.) The Tax System is broken

You basically want to put all your planets on Industry early on. That will allow you to expand like crazy. Around the time of first contact (around turn 30) you'll hit a slump in your economy wich can be fixed by simply putting all planets on dust-mode. This is the only economical challenge currently existing in Endless Space.



In my eyes the core problem stems from the Tax System and the Conversion Structures. Converting Industry to Dust allows you to put the Tax Slider down, wich in turn will give you additional Dust, Food, Industry and Science. There is no real trade-off, Dust rules supreme.



What should be done is differentating the effects of tax rate on the four ressources. Food and Science should be unaffected or only marginally affected by tax tate. That way, if you over-expand and miss out on food producing structures, your economy will fail. Conversly, if you expand while covering your food supply, you will miss out on science buildings wich will give you a technological disadvantage once you meet your advisaries.

This system allows for different playstyles. A very expansive empire can't top the science charts and will struggle keeping it's citizens fed, a science based nation won't be able to expand much or will have bad industry, because they are occupied with building the science buildings.



Of course there are probably many ideas that are more plausible than mine, but the basic idea is that the tax system should faciliate choices & consequences: EITHER you expand and will lack in industry/science OR you build up your industry but then won't be able to expand as fast. Either way, the current system needs to be reworked.



2.) All Ship Types but the Destroyer Hull are useless

There is not much to say here. The destroyer allows you to stack the most ower: per fleet (full tech with 22/22 fleets around 40k ower: per fleet) than any other shiptype. And you can produce them in one turn. The other ships bonuses like extra defence and extra support slots are pointless. Some considerable amount of work is needed to flesh out the ship types and their modules, diversify them and make them equally viable.



3.) Military races are superior

Now, this is probably the hardest of the bunch to tackle. This game is very much combat oriented. Military races are inherently more powerful than the rest, because they can easily dictate their game on the other races. Coupled with the broken tax system there is no reason not to chose a military race, unless you like losing.

This problem is tied to the pilgrim race on the other side of the spectrum: They are basically the anti-militants and having the worst ships of all races, they are nothing more than a toy to play with.

Quite frankly, I have no idea to remedy this. Fixing this requires some deep and long thinking about the core game mechanics.



4.) Minor issues

a.) Build Template/Permabuild

There needs to be a button to allow a system to permanently build it's current build queue. Furthermore, user defined build templates would be ace. (I hate clicking the destroyer button 22 times)

b.) Choose your combatants!

Right now fleet battles are processed along the order the fleets appear in the UI. This is especially egregious if you have a fleet of ROC's with assault modules as they will be eaten alive and then you get to stare at the enemy planet for the next 10 turn with your destroyer fleets. (Protip: put one assault mod on your destroyers)

The player should be able to decide wich fleets face each other. This may also open the door for some additional battletactic-cards or something else.

c.) Permanent ship designs

Why can't we save ship designs? We should be able save ship designs.



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I'll be adding more as I remember it/stumble on it.





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Here are some guidelines for discussion.



I) How do you think different playstyles can be represented within the game? Is fixing the Tax System enough? Should there be additional dynamics besides the Tax Slider the player can work with/has to work with?



II) Do you have any suggestions for ship traits/modules etc? How should the current navy be differentiated? Are there any hulls missing?



III) What do you think about the combat oriented nature of the game? How can this be remedied?

Evade...why can't fleets evade? Space is big enough.