Endless Space
Some of you might have noticed me playing a lot of this recently. There are two reasons for that: 1) I was on my laptop and there's not a lot it will run any more, and 2) it's as moreish as morphine covered pork scratchings. The title's a misnomer which ever way you look at it though; space in this game is most definitely finite, but it actually refers to the name of an ancient race of aliens who left loads of tech lying about, as ancient spacefaring races do. They're not endless either though, because they're all dead.
The game's a 4x space thing of which we've seen before in the likes of Sins of a Solar Empire, AI Wars, Space Empires, and so on. The genius of this one, which for me makes it stand out, is its accessibility. The UI is great, giving you every option you need only a click or two away for the most part. Ship design takes a little getting the hang of, but it's actually very simple once you sit and look at it. The tech trees let you zoom in to see details of what each tech unlocks. The AI is pretty passive but builds at a hefty speed, so while I've never won a game yet I never feel (or more accurately know) I'm doing too badly until someone else wins. Makes a nice change from getting gang-invaded by huge fleets like I do in every other game. Which brings me to the contentious point. Curious as to why I had niggling memories of this getting lukewarm reviews I dug out a PCG from around November. They praised most of the things I liked, but slated the combat system. It's odd, I'll give them that. Your fleets are limited by command points, and they're pretty stingy. No vast armadas here, maybe half a dozen ships per fleet. You fight by picking 'cards' (or orders as I prefer to think of them, since videogames have no requirement for bits of card) for each of the three phases of the engagement; long, medium and melee range. Each weapon type works optimally at a certain range, most cards will benefit a certain range or weapon more than others, but crucially, each card will also counter a certain other card type. This makes the engagement a perpetual circle of rock-paper-scissors and trying to second guess and double bluff your opponent. Do you use weapon overclock to increase your kinetic damage at melee range? He'll expect that so he might counter with defensive shields which will negate your bonus and give him extra defence. So do you use sabotage instead, which will give you the edge by reducing his defences, but knowing that if he goes for weapon overclock like you were originally going to he'll do a lot of damage? You make your choices and take your chances. The problem PCG had was that the control you have in-battle is limited to switching cards out before the phase starts. Other than that you're just watching it unfold in pretty streams of lasers and missiles. Personally I like that, because I hate micromanaging combat and I'm shit at it. Others may hate it though.
The best TL;DR summary I can make is that it is to space 4x what Civ V was to the Civ series. It's smooth and user friendly, without losing complexity, but some will feel like it's dumbed down.
Endless Space
Moderator: Forum Moderators
-
FatherJack
- Site Owner
- Posts: 9597
- Joined: May 16th, 2005, 15:31
- Location: Coventry, UK
- Contact:
Re: Endless Space
I've had it since early beta but the combat did disappoint me. It has some of the best-looking ships I've ever seen in a game, particularly the Horatio ones, but the time when you get to see them in their full glory is in the RPS-guessing-game you describe with usually only a handful of vessels.
I've only played very small-scale maps, which have universally resulted in swift, crushing defeats for me as I desperately over-expand and rush the colonisation tech tree to increase my building/tech capacity before encountering hostile races which cruise through my assets, leaving me with isolated pockets under heavy siege. I should experiment more with much larger, but more sparsely-populated maps to give me a chance to establish my own identity by progressing further into the other tech trees before encountering combat. Endless Space is indeed quite the misnomer when you're treading on other faction's toes before you've even established a basic economy.
I've only played very small-scale maps, which have universally resulted in swift, crushing defeats for me as I desperately over-expand and rush the colonisation tech tree to increase my building/tech capacity before encountering hostile races which cruise through my assets, leaving me with isolated pockets under heavy siege. I should experiment more with much larger, but more sparsely-populated maps to give me a chance to establish my own identity by progressing further into the other tech trees before encountering combat. Endless Space is indeed quite the misnomer when you're treading on other faction's toes before you've even established a basic economy.
-
buzzmong
- Weighted Storage Cube
- Posts: 7167
- Joined: February 26th, 2007, 17:26
- Location: Middle England, nearish Cov
Re: Endless Space
I spent a good six or so hours with this game yesterday after I got it in this year's Steam Sale.
Sort of wish I hadn't bought it.
On a technical and aesthetic side the game is really good, but the game mechanics are quite boring and the biggest issue is that all the nicities only offer you the illusion of choice rather than actual choices.
Planet Management/Expansion is simply an exercise of settling in a system, building it up and colonising every other planet in that system. You'll end up repairing the ecosystem of a few planets along the way to remove negative effects, and you might terrorform the odd planet, but there' no choice at all really.
You just simply have to make sure each and every possible planet/asteroid belt has a colony on it in order to get the most from the system. There's no real types of settlements either (ie, something which focuses on an item that's not one of the four resources), so all the colony management falls a bit flat.
There's also no way I've seen of managing how happy each planet's (or even system's) populations are as Tax is set globally not per system, you can't choose where to import luxury goods, nor is there any production you can choose to bolster it. All you can do is build "improvements" aka Civilisations city improvements.
There's no economy between planets in a system either. It's always a high level view. So there's no notion of things like one planet drowning in food and another starving. Nor can devote a System to industrial production and a different one to food production to balance each other out.
It's all very shallow.
Combat is very boring.
There's an illusion of choice you're given by being given hull designs and then choosing what equipment goes on it, but due to the way combat works, you soon figure out that missile launchers and maybe a few beam weapons are the only way to go. This renders the third weapons, kinetics, pointless.
This is caused by the fixed design of combat. You always start at long range where missiles are the best, close to medium range for beams, then go to "melee" for kinetics. The problem is that there's no variation in starting position, or any control over what the ships do. They *always* go long-medium-short unless you retreat.
This is made worse by the fact that ships are binary. They're either alive and putting out full damage, or dead and putting out no damage.
Both of those things, ranges and the binary damage of ships, means that there's no variation and that missile glass cannons with no armour but a fair bit of flak are basically the only sensible ship design, simply because they let you destroy enemy ships in the long range phase of combat more easily (as missiles are best there), resulting in less incoming damage when you move into the medium range and finish them off. I'd say so far that 70% of combats haven't progressed to the middle stage.
You could build a heavily armoured ship which focuses on kinetic weapons, but it'll most likely be killed in the first or second rounds before it gets into it's proper zone.
Then we come to the points system. Ships are rated by some value of ship capabilities, not entirely unsensible, but with the lack of range control and the fact a ship is either alive or dead, it just becomes and exercise in tweaking your ships and fleet composition to ensure you have the bigger number of points when it comes to fights. There's no tactics at all.
This isn't due to me having some expectation of Homeworld style combat either, I want it abstracted out a bit so I'm not micromanging each ship, but this is just far too limited in scope.
Summary
The game mechanics are extremely shallow and too simplistic. There's no real choices both on the management front or the combat front.
Combat suffers from being rigidly fixed to a set of events, and it really could have done with a lot more freedom and perhaps even some sort of damage model for the ships to ensure your choices about how you designed your ships aren't dictated by the fixed structure of combat.
Civilisation in space it ain't.
4.5/10.
Sort of wish I hadn't bought it.
On a technical and aesthetic side the game is really good, but the game mechanics are quite boring and the biggest issue is that all the nicities only offer you the illusion of choice rather than actual choices.
Planet Management/Expansion is simply an exercise of settling in a system, building it up and colonising every other planet in that system. You'll end up repairing the ecosystem of a few planets along the way to remove negative effects, and you might terrorform the odd planet, but there' no choice at all really.
You just simply have to make sure each and every possible planet/asteroid belt has a colony on it in order to get the most from the system. There's no real types of settlements either (ie, something which focuses on an item that's not one of the four resources), so all the colony management falls a bit flat.
There's also no way I've seen of managing how happy each planet's (or even system's) populations are as Tax is set globally not per system, you can't choose where to import luxury goods, nor is there any production you can choose to bolster it. All you can do is build "improvements" aka Civilisations city improvements.
There's no economy between planets in a system either. It's always a high level view. So there's no notion of things like one planet drowning in food and another starving. Nor can devote a System to industrial production and a different one to food production to balance each other out.
It's all very shallow.
Combat is very boring.
There's an illusion of choice you're given by being given hull designs and then choosing what equipment goes on it, but due to the way combat works, you soon figure out that missile launchers and maybe a few beam weapons are the only way to go. This renders the third weapons, kinetics, pointless.
This is caused by the fixed design of combat. You always start at long range where missiles are the best, close to medium range for beams, then go to "melee" for kinetics. The problem is that there's no variation in starting position, or any control over what the ships do. They *always* go long-medium-short unless you retreat.
This is made worse by the fact that ships are binary. They're either alive and putting out full damage, or dead and putting out no damage.
Both of those things, ranges and the binary damage of ships, means that there's no variation and that missile glass cannons with no armour but a fair bit of flak are basically the only sensible ship design, simply because they let you destroy enemy ships in the long range phase of combat more easily (as missiles are best there), resulting in less incoming damage when you move into the medium range and finish them off. I'd say so far that 70% of combats haven't progressed to the middle stage.
You could build a heavily armoured ship which focuses on kinetic weapons, but it'll most likely be killed in the first or second rounds before it gets into it's proper zone.
Then we come to the points system. Ships are rated by some value of ship capabilities, not entirely unsensible, but with the lack of range control and the fact a ship is either alive or dead, it just becomes and exercise in tweaking your ships and fleet composition to ensure you have the bigger number of points when it comes to fights. There's no tactics at all.
This isn't due to me having some expectation of Homeworld style combat either, I want it abstracted out a bit so I'm not micromanging each ship, but this is just far too limited in scope.
Summary
The game mechanics are extremely shallow and too simplistic. There's no real choices both on the management front or the combat front.
Combat suffers from being rigidly fixed to a set of events, and it really could have done with a lot more freedom and perhaps even some sort of damage model for the ships to ensure your choices about how you designed your ships aren't dictated by the fixed structure of combat.
Civilisation in space it ain't.
4.5/10.
Re: Endless Space
I don't agree with you, Buzz. Combat is certainly not a focus of Endless Space, and if you want a galactic conquest game with tactical depth then you're in for a disappointment, but there is a kind of metagame to the tech race, the rock-paper-scissors of making sure you're producing ships which exploit the enemy's weakness. As for the strategic game, it doesn't have the micromanagement and fiddling of a German economy game, but there's more to it than just churning out colonies. The fact that you commented on happiness would indicate that you've found out first hand how colonising shitty planets can be counterproductive because it makes the overall happiness of your empire lower. The depth of the game is in the macro, not the micro, the overall strategies. Of course if you're looking for Anno Space then it isn't the game for you, but writing it off as a bad game because it wasn't what you wanted it unfair. Out of interest, did you win a game?
-
buzzmong
- Weighted Storage Cube
- Posts: 7167
- Joined: February 26th, 2007, 17:26
- Location: Middle England, nearish Cov
Re: Endless Space
I'm not writing it off because it isn't what I wanted, I was fully aware it was a Civ style space game and not a tactical space combat game with empire building like a Total War game.
I'm actually quite enjoying it for what it is, certainly have enjoyed the expansion of my empire and the crushing of enemies, but what it is doesn't add up to much in my eyes, and I am seriously slating it for offering up illusions of choices rather than actual choices in far too many places.
Things like your ship races meta game I've toyed with, but every single attempt to really try and use it, thanks to how combat is structured and the fact ships are either alive or dead, meant that using missiles is the only proper strategy unless you want to spend your time rebuilding destroyed fleets.
I can see the potential with just a few modifcations to a couple of the game systems that would improve it quite a bit, which is probably what's annoying me more.
I'm actually quite enjoying it for what it is, certainly have enjoyed the expansion of my empire and the crushing of enemies, but what it is doesn't add up to much in my eyes, and I am seriously slating it for offering up illusions of choices rather than actual choices in far too many places.
Things like your ship races meta game I've toyed with, but every single attempt to really try and use it, thanks to how combat is structured and the fact ships are either alive or dead, meant that using missiles is the only proper strategy unless you want to spend your time rebuilding destroyed fleets.
I can see the potential with just a few modifcations to a couple of the game systems that would improve it quite a bit, which is probably what's annoying me more.
Re: Endless Space
I've heard the 'missiles is the only tactic' argument before, and it's wrong. Later in the game it just doesn't work. Enemy ships pack too much flak, and beam weapons can hit you twice before your missiles even hit. Again, did you win the game? I assume you've only played one game after six hours. I'm finding it hard to quantify the 'illusion of choice' thing too. I don't see as it's any different from Civ or Warlock - the upgrades you build add money, food, research, productivity, or some combination of the above. You have to weigh up the cost of them vs the usefulness. Then there's the oddball ones which extend your influence or have military uses. Oh, and the trade ones. I certainly don't build all of them in all systems, some are just a waste of money in the wrong place. Maybe I've just swallowed the illusion, but it seems like a reasonable amount of choice to me.
It does have its problems. Kinetic weapons are only really useful to spring a surprise, because they're not generally effective enough for the enemy to expect it outside of early game. Food is so rarely an issue that I tend to avoid getting bonuses to it just to try to avoid overpopulation from mid-game onwards. You can just pile colonies in and brute horse your economy, and later improvements will give you enough happiness bonus (and cash so you can lower tax) that you can just absorb the empire size penalty. And of course combat is pretty much based on second guessing rather than any real tactical consideration. Research tends to be just hitting everything in the non-military trees until you get to a point where you decide which victory condition to go for. But the systems run smoothly, everything makes sense, and that's what I like about it. You can spend your time plotting and building rather than fretting about the details in order to keep your complex machine of an empire from breaking down.
But of course I can't horse you to like it. Regardless of how we interpret the game, there are aspects of it that I like and that you don't, and our weighting of those aspects define our enjoyment of it. Maybe a few more games could reveal more enjoyable mechanics for you, or maybe I'm just easily pleased when presented with a pretty map and cinematic battles. But I still think you're being unfair in your accusations.
It does have its problems. Kinetic weapons are only really useful to spring a surprise, because they're not generally effective enough for the enemy to expect it outside of early game. Food is so rarely an issue that I tend to avoid getting bonuses to it just to try to avoid overpopulation from mid-game onwards. You can just pile colonies in and brute horse your economy, and later improvements will give you enough happiness bonus (and cash so you can lower tax) that you can just absorb the empire size penalty. And of course combat is pretty much based on second guessing rather than any real tactical consideration. Research tends to be just hitting everything in the non-military trees until you get to a point where you decide which victory condition to go for. But the systems run smoothly, everything makes sense, and that's what I like about it. You can spend your time plotting and building rather than fretting about the details in order to keep your complex machine of an empire from breaking down.
But of course I can't horse you to like it. Regardless of how we interpret the game, there are aspects of it that I like and that you don't, and our weighting of those aspects define our enjoyment of it. Maybe a few more games could reveal more enjoyable mechanics for you, or maybe I'm just easily pleased when presented with a pretty map and cinematic battles. But I still think you're being unfair in your accusations.
Re: Endless Space
One of the things in this i noticed neither of you seemed to mention was how different the races are, unlike in Civ where they are essentially re-skins with some different troops and minor perks the races is Endless space actually need to be played in different styles that fit the background descriptions of them which to me adds a lot of flavor and re-playability to the game
Last edited by shot2bits on July 14th, 2013, 16:06, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Endless Space
I forget about the racial traits. There's loads of them, and every race has about a dozen, good and bad. I tend to just play to the style of the race (I usually random it) and let the details take care of themselves.
-
buzzmong
- Weighted Storage Cube
- Posts: 7167
- Joined: February 26th, 2007, 17:26
- Location: Middle England, nearish Cov
Re: Endless Space
Here's the kickers, I DO like it. I really do.Dog Pants wrote:But of course I can't horse you to like it.
I just think that it's a bit too shallow on the areas I think matter, and that a little bit more depth and a slight bit more complexity would have made it 100% awesomesauce.