Discuss games in the Endless universe. Endless Space 2 has recieved a community patcb that squashed bugs, improved AI, and nerfed the Nakalim.https://community.amplitude-studios.com/amplitude-studios/endless-space-2/blogs/1022-community-update-out-now
>>2314155Are the games really endless?
They're too boring for me
>>2314187As endless as your attention span>>2314206The games or the Nakalim?
Been enjoying EL2 so far, though there are definitely a few kinks that need sorting out.Necrophage seem quite strong (no surprise, really), once you get past the initial phase of keeping your larvae alive long enough to advance.Tahuks seem to be pretty susceptible to getting screwed over in battles by tree-heavy terrain, with 3/4 of their units being ranged and therefore losing 30% damage on basically every attack. I haven't played them far enough to get into the higher tiers of units like wrathbearers, but it really seems like you'd need to go mostly infantry in order to not have your units gimped by terrain or by enemies moving past your front line.Tier 1 strategic resources seem absurdly rare compared to T2 or even T3, an issue that is compounded by the world market constantly being out of titanium. I'm also not sure how I feel about one strategic resource being the "military upgrade" resource, while the other is the "settlement improvement" resource. Seems like you could easily get screwed out of not being able to upgrade settlements or units if you miss one or the other.And while I think the hero friend/companion system is interesting, getting events where your necrophage hero bumbles through getting an anniversary gift for their ametrine (rock golem) lover just feels absurd.
They all suck.
>>2314295>getting events where your necrophage hero bumbles through getting an anniversary gift for their ametrine (rock golem) loverwelcome to freakshit becoming normalized, enjoy your stay
space niggers, what a fucking embarrassment
>>2314155Still haven't bought the awakening DLC. Which race should I play next? I'm still missing samurai birds, hacking farts, shapes dudes, teleporting vikings and that's it I think.
the first endless space was amazing. I hated the dlc though. Everything after that was really meh.
>>2314542That's probably my biggest complaint with the endless games. The base is usually a very solid game with interesting, asymmetric factions. And then the DLCs add extra factions that just do not seem to mesh well mechanically. I'm mostly speaking from experience of EL1, where you had things like the forsaken, who introduced espionage as a mechanic. Everyone could do espionage with that DLC, but if you weren't playing forsaken you would be lucky to get 1/3 the efficiency with it. Or the morgawr, who introduced naval combat. Everyone could get a basic navy ship, but the morgawr were all in on navy, and you had no real chance of competing with them on the oceans.
Wtf how do I beat the necrophages? They swallowed up all the other factions except for one. Playing on impossible difficulty. They are going to win a scientific victory soonAm I supposed to expand more with the Kapaku? I know one mistake I did was not expanding next to strategic resources earlier because I thought the Volcanic Leecher was a tile improvement that needed to be on the resource instead of a city wide improvement. I also didn't realize the volcanic terrain generator was 7 tiles large.Probably unhappiness from expanding would be offset by luxury goods gained from expanding.
Does Endless Legend 2 still have the same fucking tech/research tree for every faction?
>>2314854Barring some faction-specific techs, yes. I'm not really sure how different you could make the tech tree while still keeping every faction on the same FIDSI resource list.
>>2315024Warhammer 40k Gladius did it well enough.
turn-based slop is insanely boring
>>2315130Chessfags BTFO
Awakening dlc got fixed. If you bought the game because of sseth then I'd advise you to listen.The Nakalim hunt for artifacts. They cannot produce science on their own without artifacts. These artifacts can be assigned to temples, heroes, or the civ itself. Everything about the Academy has been fixed. Options have been added to tweak the Academy ai. It means you could make him a single system entity who protects said system with a powerful fleet. He doesn't forget about the donors, as donating to him will grant you favor. Favor can be used for a civ specific buff (nakalim relics, hissho keii per turn). You can also request a fleet, a system they own, or protection from a player led crusade. Definitely the space pols. It's fun to raid other players under the guise of a pirate mark. Find pirates lairs, ally with pirates so you get an additional teleporter, mark a system, disguise your fleet as a pirate fleet, and raid to your hearts content.
>>2314155oh boy an Endless Sky thread??oh wait
>endless space>its not actually endlessi dont care if its name of faction, its a dumb name
Been playing the fuck out of ES2 recently. I finally learned how 2 play cravers and now they are easily my favorite faction.
>coolest faction aesthetic by far>shittiest faction in gameplay by far
>>2318816Took me a while to get how to play them. Get into a parasitic mindset and steal as much as you can.
>>2314771Retard. Anyone could rule the oceans.
>>2318816Properly managing Ark blueprints is annoying, but other than that they're really fun to play (and comically strong, but that's another matter)
>>2319627>(and comically strong, but that's another matter)explain, because their faction quest gives terrible rewards and their gimmicks, while unique, don't seem that impressive as a whole.
>>2319924Incredible early game if you get a a minor civ to leech (don't assimilate, just leech it) and mapgen works such that even on low minor civ counts, you're very likely to start with a minor civ nearby.Arks are almost as good as carriers and you get them right out of the gate.Even if your early game gets stalled, they also scale really well because their pops are super efficient and the way essence generation scales you can start shitting out an ark every 2 turnsArks are uninvadable because you can switch all the modules to manpower, which cheats the system whereby manpower resupply is blocked during sieges since the ark is technically a ship (seriously, someone can come in with an invasion force that outmans you 5 to 1 and you'll outlast him without supporting the colony)Incredibly flexible to win cons because you can switch ark modules on the fly to force industry, science, dust, whatever you want.Arks negate usual defenders advantage: normally a defender has advantage because they can retrofit ships to counter due to being near a planet, but the invader cannot because they are away from home. Vodyani can simply have an ark dock a shit system for 1 turn right outside where they're invading and they can now retrofit their invasion fleets to counter any attempt to counter.They can rapidly hit and invade anywhere vulnerable because arks have tons of support modules, meaning you retrofit to all engines, fly over and hit the area in one turn without the opponent being able to scout.Starting religious gov and easy ability to keep it (mil actions contribute to religious support) means you can invade and fuck with anyone, but if they want to respond THEY have to spend the influence to declare war.continued in next post
>>2320088>continuedVodyani heroes are the absolute best in the game with only sophon heroes coming close (40% energy weapon boost, 0.5 FIDS per hero level per pop on every system as a senate skill). Vodyani is guaranteed at least 2 vod heroes regardless of the galactic market situation.Your ability to expand is absurd because you build the ark rather than a system, meaning you can instantly drop a developed ark onto any high industry system you find and have it full output instantly. You can develop your weaker arks comfortably in areas that are harder to access.The faction quest being weak actually plays in your favour because all your strong points are accessible without jumping through inefficient tasks to get them. While others are still dicking around with their quest, you've already won a supremacy or conquest victory.Even if people block those, you're one of the best dust producers if you decide to pivot to economy victory (lumeris wishes it could produce dust like vodyani on full All Must Tithe modules)
>>2320088>>2320089Those are some decent points but I don't think it adds up to make them overwhelmingly strong. They get kneecapped so hard by not having a close minor faction to leech in the early game.
>>2320569Only really happens if you have chaotic mapgen toggled on
>play trees>force peace on everyone>bribe them into trade contracts>200k dust per turn>win within a couple turnsmaybe the trees aren't so bad after all
>>2320716You're making me want to play trees again but I already did that and still have unplayed races. Surprisingly for me the shapes dudes turned out to be a drag. I have all these lava planets colonized but the output remains underwhelming and I constantly have to spend it to make more dudes.
>>2318816>>shittiest faction in gameplay by farweren't they the best pre-dlc faction?
>>2320716>>2322994trees are perfect for highlighting the player/AI divid: force peace is an iwin button against AI, but nearly useless against players. You depend so heavily on peace (bonus approval, bonus ship damage, bonus sci/dust once you research mantle) so a human will simply declare war to prevent your bonuses.>>2322994Getting good output from riftborn requires a little tedious busywork. You want to use a shit system to constantly make bots and then ship them to your real systems. After a certain point on your real systems it's no longer worth making pops there due to increasing costs. Since you're constantly moving pops away from the baby factory worlds, the cost stays low.This also means you want to colonize a lot of systems since you're going to have these dedicated botfarms in addition to your real production planets. Fortunately Riftborn are great at colonizing a ton of planets early on because the colonies don't need to drain food from existing systems like it would for other factions. Also, the bonus approval on sterile worlds makes it very easy to cancel out approval penalties for overcolonizing. You want to make a ton of colonizers early and grab a lot of systems quickly. While you can grab worlds quickly, it does become harder to support/protect them later because your ships are naturally slower than every other faction, so you want to do it early while militaries are weak.It's ultimately kinda tedious constantly shipping the bots around to build up your worlds, but you'll have insane production this way.
>>2323097Don't you have ways to prevent real players to go to war with you? It does cost influence after all.
Why are the AI so strong specifically on riftborn at higher difficulties? Pretty consistently they will have wiped out 2 factions on their own even if I never run into them.
>>2323115If they want to declare war and have the influence, they can. It costs more to declare war from a state of peace or alliance compared to if you were at cold war. Unfallen generates influence faster than most factions early on (think it's only nakalim who can generate more outside of someone getting lucky with a unique planet that gives bonus influence), and starting turn 2 you'll have the law that reduces the cost of diplomatic actions beginning to stack up, so you can get your peace agreements going. The issue is that you can always declare war on someone from peace, but once you're at war you can't force peace anymore. It doesn't matter how much influence you generate at that point as the other guy just needs to generate enough for that one war declaration.There IS a condition of forced truce in war, but it requires a certain amount of time to pass and one faction has to be absolutely kicking the shit out of the other for it to be possible. Doesn't matter who's dominating who, just requires one side to be dominating and then either can force the truce. Force truce can be blocked with sufficient influence, but it's extremely expensive. As long as you don't fight the unfallen directly you can just sit at war with them and they have no way out of it.>>2323218I don't know if this is still the case cause I haven't played the version with the patched AI yet, but the way it worked before was AI attempts to rapidly take colonies with no regard for anything else until it hits the colonization limit, and then it sits on those territories and doesn't expand. For most factions this kinda sucks because it forces your single home system to provide food to all of those colonies, so your population takes forever to start growing and your output gets crippled. Riftborn don't use food to grow their population, and they don't use food for their colonies either. This makes the usual AI pattern accidently match exactly what you want to be doing with riftborn naturally.
Is it possible to win a game as UC without ever being discovered?
>>2326208Yeah, econ/wonder/science wins are all easy to do without revealing yourselfSupremacy is also doable depending on your definition of discovered. You only need to get one sanctuary on a homeworld for it to be considered occupied, but doing that without invasion requires at least 3 hacks, during which they'll probably start purging sleepers. You haven't technically been discovered (no faction diplomacy screen will have shown you to the other empire) but it's pretty obvious that it's UC setting up a sanctuary when your capital system gets repeatedly hacked like that
Is Endless Space 2 Definitive Edition worth it?
>start cravers save>send out ships>quest fleet spawns on the complete opposite side of my explorer+hero fleet>always spawns right on top of my colonizer forcing it to retreat>kill quest fleet>the exact same turn pirates spawn on the god tier system I was trying to settleI'm the unluckiest nigger when it comes to playing cravers man.
