Endless Space

[keith.lamothe]

I get that, but I'd rather have it be an intentional action, instead of an automatic thing.

Agreed, a "be a total jerk" toggle alongside the "intercept" toggle would be one solution

[BobTheJanitor]

I would try to give them feedback but their forums appear to be a standard internet cesspool of madness where any constructive feedback is met by legions of madmen screaming their mantra, 'it's fine, learn to play!'

For all that they tout this as having community involvement in the game's development and advertising it as 'games2gether' it seems like they're light years behind what Arcen does to get their community involved in the game design process. All they seem to do is allow people to vote on which color a ship should be, and so on. And then you end up with all the dumb people voting that a hero should be named after a lame portal reference. Ugh.

[keith.lamothe]

I haven't seen much of their forums, but in general their community interaction seems better than average.  Comparing other companies to us on that point is not generally going to be favorable to them.  A pretty large combination of factors (many beyond our control, let alone ability to take credit for) has made the Arcen community possible.

Surely someone has asked them for "let us toggle whether a fleet will blockade" button?  Or something of equal functionality and equal or lesser effort?

There have been many times while playing ES where I really wished I'd had the source so I could just fix a few things   But that's beta for you.

[eRe4s3r]

I would try to give them feedback but their forums appear to be a standard internet cesspool of madness where any constructive feedback is met by legions of madmen screaming their mantra, 'it's fine, learn to play!'

For all that they tout this as having community involvement in the game's development and advertising it as 'games2gether' it seems like they're light years behind what Arcen does to get their community involved in the game design process. All they seem to do is allow people to vote on which color a ship should be, and so on. And then you end up with all the dumb people voting that a hero should be named after a lame portal reference. Ugh.

Perfect demonstration why games designed by a committee are always going to be bad I just hope the developers notice this and counter-act is (as you can see, they don't put many issues for vote for a reason ,p)

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, when it comes to the game itself I can't see a point-value-based vote system working (whether it's "everyone gets one point" or based on how much you paid or how many good bug-reports/suggestions you've given in the past or whatever).  Input is necsessary, and must be weighed with appropriate care by the Design Dictator and associated deputies, but leaving any actual meaningful design decisions up to a binding collective voting process... I shudder   And even with ES I'm confident that if somehow they did find themselves in a situation where they'd left a meaningful decision up to a vote and discovered it was really bad, they wouldn't let it be binding on them.  The flames could get kinda hot, though.

But if it's just "what color should the broadside gun ports on the United Empire battleship be?", well, that's not as harmful to farm out decision-wise.  If they start picking MLP color schemes it could lead to saturation nuclear bombardment, but nothing much worse than that.

[BobTheJanitor]

Thus far it has been simple things of that nature. And the options are predefined, so you get the red color scheme, the black, and the yellow, or what have you. They show concept art mockups of each and people vote for their favorite. You get something like 100 votes for signing up for their forums, 500 for pre-purchasing the standard edition and 1000 for the 'emperor' edition. Kind of a silly excess of zeroes there if you ask me, but no one did. They also let forum members write up the little back story blurbs that go on the heroes, and then pick a few and let people vote for the best. Which is how we ended up with a hero named 'Galdos AI'. Thanks Portal nerds. Shudder.

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, you can get portal references without committee   If the Hybrids talked more, you'd see it.

[BobTheJanitor]

Oh, you can get portal references without committee   If the Hybrids talked more, you'd see it.

Well there's clever references and then there's dumb blatant references. I am not a fan of the 'barely scrambled character name' as reference. It's just so ham-handed and clumsy. I guess I should be glad there were no references to falsified baked goods.

[zebramatt]

OK, two things:

1. If anything, a shallower game experience attracts me more to Endless Space, given my current games-to-free-time ratio. I'm taking this one under advisement, for sure.

2. The other night I actually had a dream that they made a brand new Elite game which, somehow (don't ask me how), played like a dream on Xbox 360. Man, I wish that were true (and possible). I woke up longing to have another go on a game which doesn't even exist!

[zespri]

So Endless space is now released. Did it get any better?

[eRe4s3r]

It didn't get any less shallow.. no. In fact, the changelog from 0.52 to 1.0 must be the shorted in the history of beta to release changelogs. But they say they will continue development.. we'll see

[Cyborg]

And it is that shallow gameplay which reduces the value to about five dollars for me.

[BobTheJanitor]

I haven't tried it since the official release. I actually took some time off starting a while back so as not to burn out on it before it came out. From what I'm hearing though, it's not quite as polished as one would hope. But it's little things, like enemy ships being named MEDIUM_TEMPLATE_03 and so on. Nothing game breaking, but it's sort of jarring for a game that was so polished in alpha.

I'm still a little annoyed at some changes they made to add penalties to expansion. The larger your empire gets, the more of a happiness penalty all of your planets get, which just strikes me as a very ham-fisted balancing mechanic. Why do people on Rigel IV care if there are colonies on Zipzap VII? It's light years away, the two systems have nothing to do with one another. I get that they want to make it harder to play a fast expansion strategy, but there should be some more interesting ways to do it. Make new colonies more of a resource drain for their first few years, then a balancing bonus for a few years after that so that fast expansion cripples your empire but slow expansion remains productive, or something. Then at least you have interesting options. Right now it's just a binary question of whether you have researched the appropriate happiness bonus techs and spammed them all over the place or not.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll get around to playing this again sometime soon. My latest distraction has been Crusader Kings 2, so I need to go and imprison my scheming cousin now.

[Mánagarmr]

So this "Admiral Edition"...what is it really? I don't understand what half of the stuff you get with it is supposed to mean.

[BobTheJanitor]

So this "Admiral Edition"...what is it really? I don't understand what half of the stuff you get with it is supposed to mean.

Mainly extra voting clout on their site, I believe. They post features for voting frequently and the highest voted determines what they work on next, although supposedly the other ones will still get into the game even after losing the vote, just that they will be lower priority. With the higher priced version, you get 1000 votes instead of 500 votes. You get 100 votes just for signing up for their forums (although those votes aren't added to the votes you get for buying the game). Why they couldn't just use 1, 5, and 10 I don't know. It would make the vote totals a lot easier to read, that's for sure. One of the current things being voted on looks like this:
1594900 Points  715400 Points  1610300 Points
Yes, they don't even have the decency to use commas. Look at that at a glance and it's hard to tell which is winning, how close the vote is, or anything. Anyway, I rant for no reason. That's what the points do.