First of all, let me say this:



Considering that you guys tired to cram elements of Civilizations, Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire and Master of Orion series into one game I have to say: You guys did a great job. I would have viewed it as impossible but you guys came within 90% of pulling it off and that is no small feat. This is masterful game design to be sure.



I especially like your hero system. To be frank this is what sets your game apart from the others in my mind. I would expand upon this.



First issue though is your space combat system. Not specifically the fighting itself, but how many fleets can fight at a time. You guys decided to take the fleet logistics system from Galactic Civilizations 2 and stick it in Endless Space. I know this is a game and all but if I drop 12 ships in 3 fleets into a system, each inferior to the 1 fleet of 5 ships my enemy but overall outgunning him 2 to 1 in the same system I would expect that I could use all 3 fleets at once against his 1.



This fleet logistics system was a rather bad feature in Galactic Civilizations 2 because it forced you to use the smallest number of the most powerful ships all the time and it makes for rather dry strategy. It also means that the person with the highest tech will win all fights regardless of how many ships are against him in the system total because he out-guns each group in a 1v1 battle. Being able to win through sheer numbers is very important when you are behind in tech.



I am going to suggest 2 alternatives:



1. Use the fleet max as more of a command efficiency system. If you are under the max then your ships will gain 100% from those cards used in the fight, if you are over that then the ships will not get 100% of the bonus from the combat cards.



2. Create a fleet hierarchy system. So it could be like this:

Your logistics max is 12. You have 3 wings of 6 anti-fighter corvettes each, 4 wings of 4 missile frigates each, 3 wings of 2 heavy cruisers each, 4 wings of 1 battleship and 2 escort frigates (support/screen) and 2 wings of 1 carrier and 2 escort frigates (support/screen).



So that is 16 wings total. 16 heroes will be required to command each of those wings. In addition there will need to be a 17th hero to command the entire "fleet" made up of those 16 wings. So each wing gets the bonuses of it's specific hero as well as the over-all bonus of the 17th hero who commands the entire fleet.



The hero in charge of the wing, as well as the over all commander, will affect how a specific wing fights. Some heroes will probably be better at commanding smaller vessels and some heroes will be better at commanding larger vessels and some would be good at commanding large formations.



The second of those alternatives is more interesting to my mind and the complexity is certainly ok for a 4x game.



This hero concept that you put in this game is very interesting. I would like to expand upon it a bit further though.



First of all you're empire's government. Having a hero to govern a star system is really nice but I would go further than that. Obviously the player is the head of the government but he could also have a cabinet who's attributes and abilities affect the entire empire. Using United States positions that could be: Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, etc.



The biggest issue I have is that fleet logistics. This is a major annoyance that takes away from the depth of the game because you cannot have large, diverse fleets and are forced to build the specific type of ship that makes the best use of those command slots and only that ship. I would like it very much if this aspect of the game was changed. I don't see a need to remove it, just change how it works.



Anyways, Discuss/Troll

Now that I have had my say in terms of how it compares to others of the genre... Unlimited fleet points were done better in MOO 2, which is to say as many ships at a time as you want, but it comes as a severe economic cost.



Artificially limiting it in terms of a hard CP per fleet is an ugly hack to make it balance, but really it should be the limit of what you can soak as an economic cost (assuming you can soak that... if not you lose.)

Why would fleet size make any difference?



The economic cost of a fleet is kind of irrelevant because each ship has an upkeep cost already. As for how to keep the fleet size from getting too big, lots of things have proven better than a hard CP cap:



Hearts of Iron 2:

Stacking penalty - that is if there are too many beyond a cap (say 30 ships) in a fight then there is a severe penalty.

Command max - each general or admiral could only command a certain amount of units, based on rank. If there are more units in the fight than his command limit those units fight at 10-20% efficiency. Things like HQ's could increase a general's command limit.



Sins of a solar empire:

No penalties.



Other things that could be tried are additional raw empire caps:

Supplies - each ship can only carry enough food, spare parts etc and will need resupply.

Ammo - a ship only carries so much ammunition and will need to resupply.

Supply bases - can be a lot of things.



Even local caps:

Supply bases + supply radius - I kind of like this idea. Its like how the Doomsday expansion to HOI2 does it in a way.



The idea is to add a few structures to a system. A small supply base can only serve a fleet of say, 8 command points. A medium something like 20 and a large something like 50. Anything beyond that could lose hp or be prevented from fighting or lots of other things. And also you can take on something like 10-20 turn's supply into a fleet to attack another system. And/Or you can have the system send supply ships to a system you are trying to siege. Perhaps Privateers could be hired to attack such convoys (thereby adding a whole convoy tech to the system).



There are lots of options, even beyond what I have listed, and any of them would be better than the current system that was taken from Galactic Civilizations 2. The developers did a great job overall but now is a good time to fine-tune the game.



The developers are really on to something here. As I said it was a masterful job. Endless space has a very good chance of second only to the Civilizations series and that is a nice market share. Now is a very good time to cure some of the flaws that were inherited from other games.

I just want to add that I think how the fleet system currently functions needs to be scrapped. My main problem is that the multiplayer metagame becomes exorbitantly unfun when you reach the part of the game where all planets are colonized and well developed, and you start building ships to throw at eachother. Imagine this, you have about 20k fids each turn and about 3k of those fids are Industry. So you build 3k worth of ships every turn. Lets say your opponent does the same. Every turn you are selecting from your 18 or so systems, clicking the hangar icon, creating the ship, sending it to the front lines, making your fleets, and then engaging in 9-10 battles each turn, where you have to further click and choose 3 cards per battle. It is insanely time consuming, incredibly boring, strips any strategy out of combat since you become mentally exhausted, and needs to be revamped.



I understand and appreciate trying to incentivize some kind of strategy where people use multiple fleets to try to achieve multiple objectives on the map, but this does not achieve that goal. Given how planet conquering works, you want to stack a lot of your ships on one planet that you are trying to invade.



I came to this game after having extensive experience in the Civ 4 and Civ 5 competitive multiplayer community, and my prediction for what the metagame will converge too will be gigantic stacks of ships travelling around, performing extremely long sets of battles each turn, gaining very little ground in terms of conquered planets due to deadlocking as a consequence of both players dedicating all industry to ships.





I do know how to fix this problem, and I can elaborate if anyone wants.

@Earthstrike



The problem you describe I feel is just the description of what a 4X game is.



You say it becomes boring once you get to a point in the game when you are throwing fleets at each other, then don't? Win via other means then trying to conquer the crap out of each other.



The micromanagement problems you have lined out are a part of what the genre is, automating it would destroy the game.



With your experience in Civ4, surly you can see how throwing huge stacks at each other is exactly the same here?

@triplitz88

Hearts of iron series is dear to my heart, I think the stacking penalty would be a good addition for this game as you can essentially put as many blobs as you want in one system.



Im a little shocked at the idea you would need a hero to command a fleet when you mentioned needing 18 heroes... That would require a complete redesign of the game essentially and making it more like HOI or the Total war series where generals for a blob are the norm, not the exception like they are now.



@earthstrike

I understand what youre saying and you have a good point. It just reminded me that the HUD should be updated to allow 1) ship rally points when they finish construction automatically 2) allowing for ships to be set on infinite production like producing science



@igncom1



I think hes saying that even though throwing stacks ala civ4 might be what people are used to, its not the ideal. Hence why civ5 totally did away with that system to try something new with the hexes

What if you could build a comm ship that would boost your cp in a fleet?

I don't see why though?



Fleet sizes are good enough as it is.

Throwing stacks is common but its not as endemic as it is in some games, and in ES throwing stacks is a really quick way to lose an MP game.

I must say am really fond of the current fleet design. You are limited in your choices by CP, and there is a cap on it - which is great, you can't make 1k ships all in 1 fleet (as in 1.000 ships not 1k MP fleet) and just auto destroy anything in your path. Each fleet has a solid value no matter how good your industry is and how fast you can replace it, because traveling is a big aspect of ES. You move faster within your own territory, but warp movement or movement outside of your borders is slow - which is good.



Civ 5 has a different approach (as you can't stack units anymore, terrain plays a big factor) as each unit is made to be good at one thing, and specifically target a specific unit type. Here with all the customization of fleets (composition and individual ship layout) you achieve same. There is no limit on how many fleets you can have (apart from your dust reserves / economy to support them) and I like it that battles are fleet vs fleet (tho would be nice if you could choose which fleet to attack when there are stacked ones) instead of 5 fleets vs 2 fleets. It puts a bigger accent on quality and composition than on sheer numbers.

Personally I'd love to see fewer ships with more meaning to each than the throwaway blobs we have today. "Meaning" = you have fewer ships to work with over all as an empire, not in a fleet cp cap wise, so be more careful with them.

I like the current CP system. Its simple and intuitive. I can think of few ideas to accommodate larger fleet that shouldn't introduce any major code change.



CP research give a bigger increment than its right now.

Make hero level increase CP.

Allow other fleets in the same system function as a supporting role. For example, giving attack or defense bonus to the fleet in the actual fight.

Limit the number of active ships that the empire base on economy or production so we don't end up with the large fleet issue in the first place.

palion wrote:
I like the current CP system. Its simple and intuitive. I can think of few ideas to accommodate larger fleet that shouldn't introduce any major code change.



CP research give a bigger increment than its right now.

Make hero level increase CP.

Allow other fleets in the same system function as a supporting role. For example, giving attack or defense bonus to the fleet in the actual fight.

Limit the number of active ships that the empire base on economy or production so we don't end up with the large fleet issue in the first place.

What would be the point of this? It would just stretch out the arms race for maxing MP in a fleet by a couple ships. It would be way more fun if a way could be devised to adjust FIDS and gameplay in a way that lets you have the same theoretical MP and ship cap to work with, but its harder to fill that CP with ships. As part of the coming combat revamp it would be nice to see individual ships overall have more value rather than just be interchangeable parts.

Maybe the new fleet system you are suggesting is a bit to advanced, but i like the:



"1. Use the fleet max as more of a command efficiency system. If you are under the max then your ships will gain 100% from those cards used in the fight, if you are over that then the ships will not get 100% of the bonus from the combat cards."



combined with that the ships will not have full bonus from hero if they are more than hero can support.

Making some hero's effective with smaller faster ships and fleets to just maybe block planets or ambush, etc.

While others are more like giant fleet commanders that will grand more overall bonus to all ships and gain from being big

Composite suggestion, moved to the archives.