I hope you all had a nice weekend and are waiting eagerly to find out more about our second free Add-On. Before I start with our third focus on the ambience improvements and new features, let me announce that "Echoes of the Endless" will be available to everyone on Steam, for free, on Wednesday November 28th (in the evening, probably).
Narrative Diplomacy
How it works
Each faction should have a narrative answer regarding their lore or alignment. Their answers will depend on the content of the deal, their attitude toward the player and the score of the deal.
Explanation by Jeff, our writer
"Because Endless Space is not an RPG, the game design didn't include much in the way of conversation options. What we are trying to do with the diplomatic communications in this add-on, however, is to give some of the flavor of the different factions as if it was part of a larger RPG-like conversation. The result of that is that any contact can have a number of different responses, depending on how the relations between the factions are going and what is being offered or requested.
The content of the conversations was written, therefore, to try to present the personality of the faction, the current state of the relationship between the players (human or AI), and the diplomatic proposal under discussion. It was a learning experience; I first made the mistake of having all the Cravers' replies some sort of variant on, "If you keep annoying us, we'll eat you first." However, Laurent and Maxence pointed out to me that the Craver traits could be chosen for a custom faction, and that faction had to have a full range of diplomatic responses. So I actually created Craver diplomacy, which is pretty much an oxymoron...
I should apologize to the translators, because in some cases I relied on sentence structure and speech style to bring out the characteristics of the different factions. I know that kind of thing is difficult to replicate in another language, so your efforts are appreciated!"
New GUI Features
- New planned move icon: execute all planned moves of your fleets
- New sentry mode: order a fleet to remain idle until an enemy is in that fleet's detection range
- Auto-cycle: review all fleets without order
Stay tuned for more info!
