Endless Space

[Cyborg]

Is it still shallow rock paper scissors combat?

[keith.lamothe]

Is it still shallow rock paper scissors combat?

It's still rock-paper-scissors in the GalCiv2, and compared to SotS or Moo2 (or even Moo1) it is much shallower, but I think it's much better than GalCiv2's combat due to the fact that each side picks an action for each of the three phases.  The existence of the three phases (missiles more effective at long range, beams at mid-range, kinetics at short-range) also adds more flavor.

Combat is definitely the part I most earnestly wish was different (Moo2 is the most fun I've had with a 4X combat model I've, though it definitely had problems of its own, and if I'd had more time to figure out what was going on in SotS1's model it might have dethroned it), but I think that they picked a target they could hit, and then hit it.  It's better than going for full-out tactical fleet combat and messing it up.

But the lack of truly tactical combat does diminish my enjoyment and the probable replay value, so I hope if they do an expansion/sequel they aim a bit higher in that category.  But I can understand the desire to avoid having to write a set of rules and an AI that will not die horribly to all kinds of unexpected human tactical tricks.  Less fun for the humans, but more fun than steamrolling the AI in all situations because you know how to exploit its programming.

Of course, the AI designing its ships still feels pretty placeholder: that Amoeba player would not stop throwing ships exclusively armed with kinetics and defended against missiles (with an occasional offensive missile and defense-against-kinetic) even though for 100 turns of war or so I threw only ships armed with beams and defended against kinetics.  And it made no effort to counter my pattern of picking the "increase deflector efficiency" (defense against kinetics) action for the first phase _every single battle_.  So it actually got kind of rare that I lost a ship even in nominally equal matches.  But that's just a matter of them getting the ship design AI done.  I ran afoul of some pirates at some point that had apparently chosen beam weapons as their design-focus and they ripped me a new one while I scrambled to get stuff with, you know, actual shields out there.

All that said, the rest of the game is much better done, from what I've seen: if combat were the high point, it wouldn't be good overall.

[Cyborg]

I may just wait for the demo. It looks so shiny, but without the depth I just can't justify it.

[keith.lamothe]

I may just wait for the demo. It looks so shiny, but without the depth I just can't justify it.

It's a fun game.  I've seen/played a lot of "trying to be a good 4X space game"'s over the past... too many years and I think this is the closest to that mythical day of MOO/MOO2 that I've seen.  GalCiv/GalCiv2 were the next closest (tied with SotS1 to some extent, though I never really properly got into the latter), and Endless Space is definitely a much better _game_ (much smoother, much better idea what's going on, much "tighter" evaluate-act-feedback loops, etc) than those were.  It definitely has some strong beta-isms left, though, so waiting may be a good idea.

[eRe4s3r]

well I think this game is gonna get a lot better still if they find fixes to the 4 main problems I see

1) Font sizes, ok, I said the GUI is very purty.. it is. But for some people the font is too small (And that I can understand)

2) Invasions/Blockades .. now this entire system is pretty daft, blockades can currently be spammed by just aiming at planets with direct flight and there is *NO WAY* for anyone to prevent that, short of having ships everywhere.

3) The defense/attack calculations seem to be off by a barn. 500fp should not get negated by 250df. And I think armor should be change to give a sort of (example for Kinetic)

10 Beam
50 Kinetic
5   Missile

spread in protection. Because other wise there are too many one trick pony designs around. Particularly the AI is gonna fall for that tactic EVERY single time. "hole in the wall" problem

which brings us to to
4) Instant all-time-everywhere retrofit breaks the game, no need to go into detail about that ;P

[Mánagarmr]

Retrofits were really difficult in Space Empires. Not only did you have to have some form of constructor in the square (either a Space yard or ship based repair station) but you had to wait for the ship to be rebuilt with the new parts. Now, if it was just an engine upgrade, this could be quick, but any bigger overhauls and you were in for a few turns of retrofitting. It was also occasionally hideously expensive (albeit not the sum of building a new ship).

[keith.lamothe]

1) Font sizes, ok, I said the GUI is very purty.. it is. But for some people the font is too small (And that I can understand)

Yea, I like the GUI a lot, though overall the game really chugs even on my pretty high-power (except for the GPU, which is probably it) desktop so I don't get the smoothness you talked about.  Font size seems fine to me, even on a 1770x1000 window (so really the text size it would be at my monitor's full 1900x1080 or whatever it is), but there's always folks who generally need/like bigger text.

2) Invasions/Blockades .. now this entire system is pretty daft, blockades can currently be spammed by just aiming at planets with direct flight and there is *NO WAY* for anyone to prevent that, short of having ships everywhere.

That system does need changing.  On offense it's pretty annoying too: I think I had one system under "invasion" for like 50 turns, and the firepower I had in orbit (including a dedicated invasion dreadnought) could have done the job in 4-5 turns.  But on any turn where an enemy fleet entered the system it didn't do any invasion rolls, and my enemy was spamming me with generally 2 fleets per turn (I dunno where they got enough industrial capacity and/or dust for that).  I would wipe them out every time, but they'd just keep coming.  Eventually I gave up on leaving their constellation alone and sent a couple battle fleets through the wormholes to cut off their main source of reinforcement and the planet I was invading fell the next turn (albeit with another reinforcement fleet coming through direct flight, but not in time).

I think the solution to that is fairly simple:
When an enemy fleet enters the system, if any of your fleets is on interception mode (all mine were, except the one with the invasion dreadnought) and hasn't already "acted" that turn (it seems each fleet can only initiate one combat per turn), it automatically attacks the enemy fleet that just entered.  If the enemy fleet does not survive that combat, it does not count for blockading or invasion-stalling purposes.

On the enemy-blockading-you-by-direct-flight-spam I think it would probably just be a matter of causing influence area to slow down enemy direct flight.  Warp Jamming or whatever.  That way you would still have to deal with the tactic but with a combination of:
- Having influential star systems
- Having tech that increases influence/system-sensor-range
- Having firetruck fleets to kill the little stuff they're sending (if they're spamming you all over the place with full fleets then that's not really cheese, that's just sledgehammer); combined with the other rule I mentioned where if you intercept and kill them on the turn they "land" there's no impact on blockade/invasion.

I think it would be manageable.

3) The defense/attack calculations seem to be off by a barn.

Oh yea, balancing has a long way to go.  That's why it's fun for me right now but if the balance stayed like this I wouldn't keep playing all that long.

But I have to say that building fleets where half the tonnage is the anti-kinetic deflectors, and fighting fleets that are entirely kinetic-based offensively, and playing the "+40% deflector efficiency" card in the first phase... seeing the enemy's initial deluge of bullets fly at your fleet and curve off in sheets towards nothing in particular... that's quality comedy right there

4) Instant all-time-everywhere retrofit breaks the game, no need to go into detail about that ;P

Actually I think it's one of the better retrofit systems I've seen:
- You have to be in one of your systems.
- Obviously, you have to have researched whatever modules you put into the new design, so switching which part(s) of the "rock paper scissors" the ship is using offensively/defensively requires you to have put in the normal amount of research effort.
- You have to pay a fairly large amount of dust.
- Retrofitting consumes any remaining movement points on that fleet, so they can't go flying off immediately.
- You don't have to wait for the retrofit or tie up planetary resources/queues, which makes the resource of "existing hulls" way more attractive than simply building everything from scratch all the time.

I really liked how when a deep-space fleet was aging it felt like a huge difference if I got them relieved in time to bring them home for upgrades or if they fought one fight too many and got outclassed and gutted/destroyed.  Building the ships from scratch took a fair bit more time.  Most other space 4X games I've played with retrofit I've either not bothered because it took so much time to work through the UI and so much game-time/resources, or I've struggled through it anyway due to attachment to individual ships.

Actually, my only complaint with this retrofit system is that in general it seems to cost too much dust, because it seems that it's always some % of the original design's build-cost rather than in any way based on the actual difference in modules.  I'd much prefer if the cost was calculated by:
- total up the build-cost of all the modules in the old design that are not in the new design, subtract 50% of that from the retrofit cost (so it's negative now)
- total up the build-cost of all the modules in the new design that are not in the old design, add 125% (or 150%, or 200%, whatever, something like the how-much-dust-to-buy-planet-construction-outright calculation is done) of that to the retrofit cost.
- if retrofit cost is less than zero, set to zero
- add a small base amount based on the hull type to the retrofit cost to keep people from getting "freebies" by selective downgrades balancing out a few upgrades


Anyway, short on time.  ES definitely needs a lot more work, but hopefully they're earnest in the "ongoing work" aspect of what beta means

[eRe4s3r]

In the end game (turn 200+) you have more dust than you ever will need. I actually retrofitted a single fleet from kinetic to shields when I saw the pirates with beams and won that combat round, next round enemy fleet with kinetics i retrofitted again and won that (next) combat round again. Also changing weapons from missile to beam and back ;P

No way can that be intended. It makes rich empires way too powerful, actually, it might even make them impossible to defeat.

[keith.lamothe]

In the end game (turn 200+) you have more dust than you ever will need. I actually retrofitted a single fleet from kinetic to shields when I saw the pirates with beams and won that combat round, next round enemy fleet with kinetics i retrofitted again and won that (next) combat round again. Also changing weapons from missile to beam and back ;P

No way can that be intended. It makes rich empires way too powerful, actually, it might even make them impossible to defeat.

If you have that much dust, and you've done high-level research on all 3 attack types and all 3 defense types, isn't victory just around the corner through one means or another?

I mean, yea, having some kind of "this fleet has some massive penalty to combat for 1 turn because it was just rebuilt" thing would help there if two empires are at that same level and defense is so much easier than offense because of it, but in general it seems like a "yea, you've won, congratulations" situation if you have that kind of resources available.

[eRe4s3r]

Someone just needs to tell the pirates that, though you do have a point ;p But then, I think the game should penalize direct travel much more, because skipping over space-lanes means literally that there are no frontiers which is realistic, but bad for gameplay.

[BobTheJanitor]

Someone just needs to tell the pirates that, though you do have a point ;p But then, I think the game should penalize direct travel much more, because skipping over space-lanes means literally that there are no frontiers which is realistic, but bad for gameplay.

The direct travel is awfully slow, though, until you get the highest tier movement techs. And again, by that point you're probably just around the corner from winning the game. All these apparently overpowered things should be balanced by the fact that when you get them, your enemies should have access to equally powerful tricks to counter you.

I also really hate the blockade system right now, in that it's just an automatic thing that happens when you park a ship at another empire's planet, or vice versa. It should be something you choose to do as a deliberate aggressive action. Not just, 'oh I parked my scout here and somehow it's blocking all interstellar trade within 100,000,000 miles herp derp!' I don't like being forced to either deal with that or take a relations hit for blowing up enemy scouts that won't just go away.

[keith.lamothe]

I also really hate the blockade system right now, in that it's just an automatic thing that happens when you park a ship at another empire's planet, or vice versa. It should be something you choose to do as a deliberate aggressive action. Not just, 'oh I parked my scout here and somehow it's blocking all interstellar trade within 100,000,000 miles herp derp!' I don't like being forced to either deal with that or take a relations hit for blowing up enemy scouts that won't just go away.

Can the enemy scouts even enter your territory if you're not at war?  In my experience I cannot pick a destination that's within (or even kinda-close-to-the-edge-of) an enemy's influence area.  Or are you talking about systems you gained control of in the last 30 turns (and thus are not getting its influence added to yours)?  Or is this an AI you have open-borders with (or whatever agreement lets them pick a star in your influence as a destination) and its scouts are still triggering the blockade effect on your stars?

[BobTheJanitor]

It would be when at cold war status, the default, and yeah just on outposts not full fledged colonies.

Edit: Though if they're parked there when it flips to colony, they can stay and keep annoying you.

[keith.lamothe]

It would be when at cold war status, the default, and yeah just on outposts not full fledged colonies.

Yea, that sounds intentional: during cold war the outposts are fair game for capture, let alone blockade.  Though pushing that far tends to lead to heating of the cold war.

Edit: Though if they're parked there when it flips to colony, they can stay and keep annoying you.

Yea, I learned that the hard way.  It would be nice if accepting "peace" caused an automatic departure from your influence area of any remaining of their ships, or at least some way to say "remove all fleets from my influence area before I do it for you" and have that either have zero diplo penalty or at least way less than actually initiating combat (if you even can, at that stage).

[BobTheJanitor]

Yea, that sounds intentional: during cold war the outposts are fair game for capture, let alone blockade.  Though pushing that far tends to lead to heating of the cold war.

I get that, but I'd rather have it be an intentional action, instead of an automatic thing. Right now if I'm just exploring, every planet I land on gets forcefully blockaded, and other empires do the same to by planets. It seems like choosing to block all trade to a star system is a very aggressive act and that it should be something that you choose to do and not something that happens automatically because you are in the neighborhood. And it should carry with it the normal weight of an act of aggression, leading to worse relations and so on. Right now blockading is perfectly fine, but blowing up the ship causing the blockade reduces your relations with the AI. Derp.