4X IN SPESS

Makes me want to stab myself in the eyes. Does the gameplay make up for it?

But is there enough content?

I'd say it did a better job at aping off Orion than nu-Orion, and if it makes you feel any better it also makes me want to stab you in the eye.

Do you honestly not know the fun to be had with shit like Star Control, Reunion, Startopia or Sword of the Stars?

Spreadsheet simulator aka Aurora 4x

Probably not. At least not vanilla and not of patch 1.4. I heard mods add a tons of stuff, as per usual Paracuck's fans willingness to fix the dev's lack of efforts, but well, they're mods. I'd hold out for the new DLC at least before trying it again.

Only if you count having all races (and women) as leaders as SWEDEN YES politics. But like previous user said, you can enslave or exterminate alien species depending on your governmental politics. You can also limit or deny their migration, breeding and voting rights.
As for the content, there definitely is not enough. It's a bare bones concept at the moment. There are no proper diplomacy or trading systems and absolutely no espionage in the game. Space combat is just fleet blobs moving towards each other and shooting. Planetary invasions are just dropping troops on planets and you can't defend against a larger force (planets can only hold N defending armies, but there is no limit how many can invade).
The AI can also be braindead as hell. After you destroy their main fleet, they might keep sending single ships to attack your starports. Also as your empire grows, you need to create sectors and have the AI govern them. Too bad they can't do that and will not construct buildings on planets. And to top it all off, you can't do it manually either after you assign a sector. Did they honestly not even beta test this stuff?

tl;dr Not enough content. Don't buy.

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Master of orion 2. Same as it has been for the last 2 decades.

the most recent good space 4x that is multiplayer was Endless Space 1, and Endless Space 2 is shaping up to be pretty neat with the more unique faction stuff they did with Endless Legend.

GalCiv3 and Stellaris are shit.

Distant Worlds is the only space gsg 4x worth playing if you're not autistic enough for Aurora and don't care about multiplayer.

Aurora is the only game. Nothing else even matters or compares.

I'l just post things nobody posted.

Is it any good yet/have potential?

Can't we just make this a 4x general? Why limit discussion to only space 4x? Any good mods for age of wonders 3?

Have you played SE IV (deluxe)? How does it compare?

not that I know of, but I didn't like AoW3 enough to really care about mods.

Final Frontier mod for Civ 4.

Same here. I wish it feel so much like civilization.
Well are there good mods for age of wonders 2?

No idea. the only fantasy 4x I like currently is Endless Legend, and before that Fall From Heaven 2 mod for Civ4. If Legend had AoW's combat it would be perfect to me cause I don't like everything else about AoW. To be fair though, I think Legend's combat does the job and is pretty enjoyable once you learn ctrl-clicking.

Epic Battles mod and Empire Building Mod with Triumphant Heroes. It results into very slow paced marathon game where you focus on building towns first.

My question is how is Endless DLC 2 now that they've added in Rimmerworld. Still typical Early Access shit I take it?

I once played DoA. Selected minimal amount of habitable planets with largest space and no homeworld. Ended up exploring space with single ship for good amount of turns until found colonizable planet. Then found out you can't build shit manually on colonies, you can only invest money (like in sword of the stars) Then i met incredibly aggressive religious wisp race who screamed at me that i am a heretic and as i realized i can't calm down that piece of shit i dropped the game.

Aurora.
Everything else is far below it.

It's buggy and shit and they're still experimenting. Horatio update they changed the tech tree to look more and function like Space 1 (originally it was separated into eras and looked like Legend's tech tree) and they changed the. Wait for it to leave early access if you don't care about testing and leaving feedback and shit. I think it's shaping up pretty well though.

vid related goes over the update.

And they changed the combat a bit. I don't know why I cut it off there.

Didn't someone fix the diversity with a mod?
Or, even better, made it an option alongside ethnic homogeniety so I can live out the dream of space samurai and nazis removing space kebab and the federation from star trek?

really? That's good

Even better, I wasn't a huge fan of how Legend's tech tree looked/worked

Distant Worlds is pretty fucking good. GalCiv3 is starbase spamming : the game, Stellaris is basically the space 4X equivalent of Kim Kardashian and ES2 is in early access.

I would be excited for it but Amplitude has the bad habit of shipping their games with terrible combat systems. I don't know why they didn't just make the player directly control the units in EL. The more you leave to AI the more likely something is going to fuck off.

Just play Distant Worlds (or Aurora if you're autistic).

come on Holla Forums lets jump into the Col hype
I'm gonna get that mod that makes the game more like original Colonization,
but what other good mods are there?

whats this about rimworld and ES?

to be fair, when I say they changed the combat a bit I mean before the update you chose 1 battle plan out of three. Now there's a bit more to it like moving ships between flotillas and "card deck building" and the decks are what you use in battle with more cards coming. Still cutscene heavy like 1 was. I imagine it'll be ready by summer as Amplitude only spent like 6 months on Legend when it was first in EA, and there's only two factions left to add in Space 2. So three or four more updates at most for polishing and what not.

There was a bunch of changes and new features added basically in that last major update generally speaking, and they rolled out some fixes yesterday I think. Here's the patch notes for the Horatio update if you're curious - steamcommunity.com/games/392110/announcements/detail/526194594576804179

But it's shaping up pretty well. If you liked Legend's fairly unique and interesting abstract-ish gameplay due to how variant the factions were, you're getting that but in space now. Space 1 had the interesting factions and stuff, yeah, but it wasn't that different like it was in Legend unless you were Cravers or something and they're going deeper into making the factions more different.

I think the user was talking about Horatio being added, but I don't know where the "rimmerworld" thing comes from. Must be some reference that went over my head.

I've actually been playing Endless Space 2

I know, the program is quite the gamble, but I've been having fun with it, it has pretty much expanded what made the first one have potential. It takes some elements like the government system from GalCiv2, economy aspects like galactic trading companies have been added to add some decision making instead of just fiddling with numbers, and has also greatly expanded the variety of planets, both in type and in the different phenomena that they have.

The battle system though is still kind of wonky, it attempted to refine aspects from the original but it boils down to be the pick-a-card RNG tactics that are mostly defined by "my ships are the biggest/have the best guns", though it does provide some variety by giving different ship hulls more than one combat functions that allow for dedicated formations, but it certainly isn't a big upgrade. It's pretty good looking though, watching your ships duking it out is downright beautiful in ES2.

Factions themselves, in typical amplitude tradition, have defined mechanics that makes every match unique as you choose the priority of colonization and upgrades. I'll wager that some of them are still kind of broken, the lumeris can colonize like no tomorrow since they "buy" planets to colonize, completely bypassing the need to build a dedicated colonizing ship and sending it to the desired system leading to ridiculous situations where approval means shit and you keep taking everything, everywhere, ever since one of their traits is high approval by default.

All in all, I find it fun, it's not groundbreaking by 4X standards but it's good to see that the devs chose to expand and refine mechanics that play to the original ES' strengths and potential. inb4 it's only an appearance and sega bamboozles the fuck out of me after final release.

That's the thing with Amplitude's games I think. I don't think they're really looking to be groundbreaking, but different. And Endless Legend was pretty different from any 4x I had play before with good ideas taken from elsewhere or ideas changed and turned on their head a bit. I got my friend into Legend and he loves it, but he struggled early on cause he couldn't get it out of his head that wanting to play Legend like Civ or other 4x's is actually detrimental.

Space 1 though, as much as I love it, was not quite there. But it seems they're doing some neat shit in Space 2 so here's hoping. Assuming, like you, I don't get fucked by Sega either.

I certainly agree, I made that statement as a recognition instead of a condemnation, mostly because some people have this weird expectation that sequels always have to be some next-level, genre-defining, groundbreaking breakthrough hit that's supposed to blow eveyone's mind. I really like their model and approach to 4X by refining the factions instead of the gameplay, since that way the replay value remains high as you want to try different things with the different factions to see their full potential at work, instead of a 4X like civ where early/mid game has gameplay variety in each faction but reaching late game always leads to a very samey experience. Not to say that civ is bad, it can be quite fun as well, it's just that the patterns become very apparent after a few games.

Amplitude is a chill studio and they've become good at what they want to do, I only hope that sega don't fuck it up for them.

Currently playing DWU

its literally a fuel simulator

Stellaris is bretty gud, takes quite an effort to get into. Still in love with Sins of a solar empire : rebellion and any mods I can find for it; strake mod A+

Star trek, holy shit brain

Well I guess that's fair if you're still in the stage where you're learning things and getting into it.

who here knows Call to Power?

Judging from the track record of big publishers acquiring small devs… well, it's only a matter of when, not if.

I played it back in the day, but wasn't it pretty much Civ 2 with a way uglier color scheme?

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I just played for like half an hour, and I can tell it isn't civ alike at all
even though it may be similar map like scheme, the gameplay core mechanics are very, very different
for example, you don't even manage citizens, and tile improvements are constructed overworld, each tile produces a certain amount of things, and it seems they're all worked on at the same time
there seems to be a lot of more complex stuff, like even crime in cities, but the game being old, has really bad not informative interface
and not mention any sort of tutorial o quick help stuff

Yes, yes you are.

Does it fix the T3 unit balance?

Are you for real? The only truly fucked and hard to get used to part about CoP interface was the editor since they pretty much gave you the shit they used to make the game, but other than that you've got tooltips for just about everything.

what do you want from me, 4x genre is fucking dire

I'm glad to see the development is going well, I quite liked Endless Space and Legend. If they're changing the combat, that is also very good, as the system in ES1 got stale after awhile.

Is star ruler good? If so then which one is better, 1 or 2?

It's good. 1 is a better experience, 2 is better at being a game. Galactic Armory mod is mandatory for 1.

GalCiv is okay, but it really isn't that different from the prior games. Not enough for me to recommend, if you have the prior games, anyway. If you don't, though, totally get it. It's fun.

Does this count as 4x?

that and the propulsion tech is the best part of the game imo.

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Stellaris is decent to pirate, but it has a lot of problems. The upcoming DLC (remember pirate only) should help out a bit, especially if you like roleplaying.

This one. Trust me.

Americans will think that was a sex joke

I absolutely hate the card diplomacy system of star ruler 2. I spend more time fucking around in there than playing the actual game.

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how do you survive at star ruler and not get overrun by the enemy automated ship printers

happens when you dont start near a star cluster

They declared war on me (again) and I decided to play around with them and after taking over a colony and killing a few of their mining outposts I gave their home planet a visit. The gave up very quickly right then and there

It's the only diplomacy system I've ever liked, personally.

Get good at printing ships and consider setting the max ship size to something more reasonable unless you have a fetish for massive ships

there is an option for that? and by getting good at printting ships, that means that the design doesnt matter and just copy the plain AI ships?

by the way, the mods that add more races also makes the whole universe too small for everybody, the vanilla game already had enough races

I like it personally. My only issue with this game is LITERALLY EVERYBODY is friends with everybody else, and they're all angry/furious at me. It's very scary

oh my goth, this looks awesome!

reminder that this game aged pretty well

does anyone remember the hotkeys for scenic views?