Endless Legend

ENDLESS LEGEND THREAD
And the rest of the Endless games, I guess.

I'm going to play with some friends later today and I want to try doing something new.
Never tried espionage all that much in this game but I loved how OP it could be in Civilization. Anyone got tips for it? Is it worthwhile doing? I can see my spies farming XP and leading my armies late game.
I know there's a faction dedicated to it, but I'm thinking of running with Vaulters and focus on spying for the surprise factor. How hard is it to pull it off?
I might change if we end up playing teams and take Shadow if someone allies with me as Draken.

I see that Endless Space 2 got some updates in the last months, how are they?

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I think it's doable, but you must keep in mind the basic principle for factions in the Endless games: the fact that each is based around a mechanic or gimmick. The Vaulters are more about defensive play and just shitting as much science as possible, your teleporter tech makes you a top of the tier bamboozler for anything related to defense, but not much else. If you go for full espionage, try the dedicated faction instead.

I've played since the early access actually and it's pretty good, the updates have added depth to certain aspects, like how expansion is now much more important through the special constellation bonuses, but combat and diplomacy remain sort of weak. They tried make damage a bit more deep by making weapons a risk-reward assesment and missiles can now be shot down by other guns, but this only makes long range combat unreliable and what the AI ends up doing is just shit out fleets of nothing but short-range beam and projectile weapons and you in turn end up doing the same because going mid/long range ensures your fleet's demise. Regarding diplomacy, the influence pressure tweaks and the addition of context-specific options are good, you can now ask for other's fleets to leave your space and can denounce an ally when they start a war you didn't agree to, but the rest remains "bribe faction enough to get them to accept something" or safely ignoring a threat with nothing happening, it's even funnier when you clearly have the upper hand and the AI still threatens or even declares war on you.

Still, I find it enjoyable and I'm waiting on the vaulter update to see how they will play now.

Precisely.
I was counting on using the teleporter shenanigans to be able to keep a single defense army and then pump up science to keep them strong stat-wise, freeing a lot of money and investment for espionage.
Pretty much keep all my agression to espionage fuckery, really.
Maybe pillaging with stealth units? Never tried it either.
I'm not too worried though. My greatest accomplishment was one day opening the diplomacy screen and seeing "Frightned" beneath the Necrophages. If I can scare a swarm of all-devouring bugs, I'm pretty sure I can do some Vaulter 007 spying.

Shame about long range, I loved making fleets with focus on missiles and shooting down half the enemy fleet on the long rage phase in the first one.
I never got the influence pressure to work, even in the tutorial when the game tells me to do it, they just declare war and that's that.
A.I. doing dumb things is nothing new to series and it happens enough that it's charming to see. When they notice they're pretty small, your army is on the way and realize they're about die, they generally declare war out of desperation or try to bribe you with everything they got for instance.
The only thing i don't quite agree (or maybe I don't fully grasp it yet) are the land battles.
They were visually pretty good (I like how diferent units get diferent sprites and all) but it seems that, unless you outnumber the enemy 2:1, you're fucked. And that's minimum: you'll take so much losses, you're spend a fuckload of time replenishing forces.
Then again, I only played galatic-trees and didn't focus on military. Maybe I should take the Imperium of Man and crush Xeno's.

Long-range was actually the norm, in trying to make mixed-weapons a thing like it was in the original ES, they instead just shifted the dominance with short-range. Regarding land battles, it depends not just on your forces, but also the buffs you've added in the military management screen, force distribution between troops/tanks/planes, as well as the combined defense rating on the system you're invading. Brute-forcing your way through a defended system, especially at mid-to-late game where military tech upgrades begin to stack, ensures you'll take a lot of losses, the best way to counter this is to always buy the upgrades in the military screen as well as adding invasion-oriented modules on your ships, creating dedicated invasion fleets to stack a massive bonus and just watch as you waltz through every system like they're made out of cardboard, you'll need to refill a fleet after taking at least four systems, feel free to stack even more invasion fleets on top of that for hilarious expansion results.

Speaking of Legend, what tips can you give me for proper expansion? I entirely depend on the imperial planning bonuses to not get fucked as well as spamming and shitting tons of stockpiles because I feel like I lag behind. On my current game with the roaming clans I'm second on the scoreboard but I don't think I'm playing all that well, am I doing something wrong? Also, fuck everything about the quests, they're such a bitch in that game.

any tips for someone wanting to get into this game?

They're gimped with having to use dust for science and only having a 1dpt boost on forests. I think you made a wise choice with the vaulters. Spies won't probably be generals, you'll be putting all your points into actually making them effective.

How new are you to 4x games?
If pretty new:
4X games are usually slow at the start but ramp up pretty fast at the end. This genre of games is all about keeping options open, identifying openings or oportunities and then chasing them to formulate a plan that lands you a victory.
For that, my first advice is: don't try to win the first game you play. Focus on exploring all facets of the game, seing everything the game was to offer and how every system interacts with everything else. Then play another match.
Over time, you get a sense of "balance", how much should you risk/invest and when to pull back and defend.
The Wind Walker factions (wood elves) are generally a good faction to start. Good bonus and straighfoward to play.
You got stuff like Necrophages and the fish-people that are really awesome factions but require a large knowledge of the reset of the game to pull off (and Necrophages remove diplomacy almost entirely, don't play them at first).

What else… don't focus on only one thing, especially at first. Remember that you always need a bit of everything. Even Dust (the in-game currency) isn't enough: yeah, you can buy 90% of the stuff in-game with it and solve a lot of problems, but if you rely too much on it you're gonna run out quickly and find yourself in trouble.
Don't over-expand. 5-6 cities is enough to win games. You can do more when you learn how to deal with approval (I reached 45 cities once, prepare to hemorrage money, resources, troops and risk rebellions every turn if you try to).

Don't fall into the trap of upgrading your troops with TEH BESTESHT GAER EVAR. If you're at peace with everyone and have nothing to build, sure. You can spend 20 turns making a single soldier. If you're in cold-war and expecting an attack, pump out soldiers with one or two upgrades. If full-blown war, just pump out soldiers without upgrades: it's much more important to keep that bodycount up.

Diplomacy is really fucking important. Try to keep friendly, frequently check to see if you trade technologies with other empires. Buy/sell your luxury resources to them too: it's often better than selling at the market (since not only you have to unlock it but the AI will directly send you other resources in turn instead of having to convert resources to dust and then that dust to resources, wasting a lot).
Focus alot on expanding your cities. As soon as you can build a new district do so. Large cities earn 80% of their income from the tiles they can "reach", not from the citizens.
Usually, a game goes for 300 turns.
By turn 200, you should have a clear goal on how to win the game. Compare your science production to others, or your economical income and see if you can pull ahead. Pick wathever it is you're doing best and focus on it for the last stretch.
DON'T START WARS WITH MORE THAN ONE PERSON. It's downright suicide and ruins your economu with all the rading and broken trade routes.
Unlocking the market and mercenary market is crucial if you're new to the game. It might become optional later one with a bit more experience.

I plan on playing them the way I usually play Civ games:
Also worked for culture, but that's boring.
A what now?
I don't think dust for science is all that bad. They don't really seem to need dust for other things. And you free up some production/research because you don't need to build/research labs and libraries.
Also, I guess stealing techs saves you money?

Come to think of it, I could make a custom Vaulter faction that borrows some of the spying bonus from the Shadows. Gonna call them Bunker Rats. They come out at night to steal their holy resources.

You always need dust for other things, it's one of the most important resources in the game.

games2gether.com/endless-legend/forums/9-tips-amp-tricks/threads/3851-early-game-patterns

Enjoy, the EL equivalent of grab pottery etc.

Note the Cult is completely fucking different, you want to put eveything in dust and influence because an early 6 village with give you more fids than any one technology, plus you get it instantly and don't have to build.

1 "dust per turn" was for the Forgotten, I think some of their heroes have that or something. The dust for science is terrible, you have to choose between governors for your cities or being able to research. Remember espionage is kind of shit with out high levels, so you won't be stealling much of anything.

I would personally use just use your espionage to drop fortification. The Marine armed with a holy resource is one of the best units in the game.

You can break the Cult so easily with custom-factions by removing the "raze city when you take it". You can also reach some ridiculous amount of troops (I got to 12 units per stack) and that means all the villages/nests of creatures you convert will produce up to that limit. You still can't settle new cities, but you can take their cities and use them to stage atacks from there (recover and retrofit your army there). They'll never produce as much as your capital (not even half as much) but they're good F.O.B. to support and army that keep growing every turn and comes in waves after waves after waves.

Custom factions are so damn fun. I never thought they'd change up the game so much (since they didn't in ES) but all those little unique traits make the system great.

This is just vanilla.

try cellulose mutation

Ooooohhhh, I know what I'm doing next time I play cultists.
Also found this on google (pic related).
Life goal now.

THIS IS A SHILL THREAD

Sega is having their yearly "make war, not love" campaign, and this is a psychological prepping for you to want to participate.

Sooner or later, you guys are gonna make "shill" an auto-ban and then the actual shills can have a field day on the board.
Have you read "The Boy who cried Wolf"?
Really educational that one.

hi shill

LIKING GOOD VIDEO GAMES IS SHILLING, WE HERE AT Holla Forums ONLY POST TO TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH WE HATE EVERYTHING

this guy is more then likely correct tbh considering the fact that endless space 2 got the vaulters as a dlc playable race now

Diplomacy is usually not easy to pull off in games and make it feel authentic, because social interactions and their intricacies are pretty damn complex.
That said, I've played ES2 since the early days as well, and I hope to christ they fucking fixed the politics mechanics. Politics used to be absolutely broken, wherein some systems would devolve into anarchy and rebellion and you could not prevent it whatsoever due to reasons (especially noticeable with cravers), then it would automatically become a government of a certain type which the majority of your population hated, and it created this inescapable rebellion cycle wherein your empire kept entering anarchy, having a new government nobody liked forcibly instated, and causing more rebellion and anarchy. That shit was over a year ago though, I would expect that something that horrendously wrecked would have been altered by now, I know the discussions for the game were constantly griping about the politics at the time.


My nigger
I'm actually the guy who wrote the guide on how to play them


What? So we can't talk about Endless stuff because Sega published EL? Amplitude is probably one of the extremely few developer studios that consistently puts out solid content and looks and plays well (color me shocked because they're actually baguettefags). How do you know we crafty clever shills aren't shilling for those frogs? Can we just shut down any thread we don't like by screaming shill? We see Senran and Granblue shit all the time, why don't you go sperg at them for constantly "shilling" their games?

they're the kinda shit which makes my dick rock hard tbh

too bad that alot of their troops use tools and not limbs designed for combat

I get it lore wise but still, it's fricken gay

i think its more to do with the mechanics, since they wanted a universal way to balance things out and make all factions upgrade their weapons and armor using the same resources and thus same tech. The only way around that for Necros to evolve is to make them unique and make the upgrades an actual part of their bodies, which they probably could have done if they just made the body-evolution upgrades act the same way the weapons and armor upgrades did. So it'd effectively be just a cosmetic difference.

it's those kinda little things which add to make races more unique really would make the game alot more better

That was a horrible time of things
anyways, the new Vaulters are a pain in the ass to remove in ES2 due to their portals and all the buffs they get to ground defense

They're pretty fun to play though and they make colonizing a little more strategic than it is with other factions, feels a bit like playing Vodanyi

I played Endless Legend. The combat is by far the biggest pile of stinking dogshit I've ever had the displeasure of being subjected to in a 4X game.

are they planning on making any other EL connections? I know its
Necros -> Cravers
Vaulters -> Vaulters
Something with the Vodyani maybe? I think there are supposed to be a couple other races that are evolved factions from EL races but I can't remember offhand.

they have the minor faction too "sisters of mercy" because ehhhh

Not at all, only factions who escaped Auriga are Vaulters, Sisters of Mercy, and 2 Broken Lords, at least at this point, they may update that later on with more expansions

wrong, Necros were a Concrete Endless project while the Cravers were created by the Virtual Endless as a weapon, shit went bad and the Virtuals tried to exterminate the Cravers but failed

I highly doubt it beyond the Vaulters and probably bringing over the BL heroes from ES1

Is there ever gonna be a sequel to dungeon of the endless
That game was comfy as fuck and had a nice core concept, but wasn't so "endless"

And they'll turn the galaxy into a buffet.

Agreed.
I ended up laughing at the "dificulty" prank, and the game ended up being quite solid and fun.
But honestly, I want from them is an open world RPG in the Endless setting.
Either some sort of Witch in the Legend setting or some X3 in Endless.

...

Fucking trees and their weaponized bushes.

Alright anons:

Currently playing Riftdudes from outterspace
Best would be Morgwar.
Worst is undeniably the Nomads in ES or Roving Clans in EL.
Strategy is to make everyone happy, expand very little and solidify what I have. The smaller I appear, the slower they take to realize "Oh shit we're fucked."
Just drop 30k Dust rushing entire fleets or Guardians in one turn right when they're invading you, watch that Military Strength gauge and then received the comunications of "Oh, oh shit, hey dude let's calm down okay?"
Works with every faction and especially with Dust-heavy one's (Broken Lords are indeed Broken, Custom-Broken Lords split the game in half with how broken you can make'em).

Oh and I've been meaning to ask:
How the hell does the Singularity Bubble thing works?
I see I have "slots" for those, but I can only build 2 diferent one's and while it's pretty funny that I can be Craver-lite with them, I don't long-term advantages in screwing my systems like that.

You spend a couple of turns building a buff or debuff for a system, and it goes into one of those slots. You can then activate it on a system you can see, and it applies its effects for a certain number of turns. It still takes up a slit while it's active. Filling up newly settled worlds with your great buildable pops is a much better advantage of the faction.

If only we had the industrial stockpiles mechanics from EL. You could ferry over population, thus ferrying population.
I like that we can still ferrry population with colonist ships, but it's rather slow and inneficient.
I just read that Depletion points are hidden and randomized at start for planets. Makes me a bit weary from using time compression on my own planets, but it might not be such a bad idea for newly colonized planets. Should have done that at the start I think.

Currently downloading the expansion, plan on playing vaulters.
Best would be vaulters in Legend, UE in Space.
Worst would be the Draken and Allayi.

My strategy mostly revolves around softly booming until I reach the next Strategic resource level of weapons and armor, before starting to take other nearby empires. That's what it is in general but vaulters works best with it.

Endless Space 2 feels like its going int he right direction but some of it is still really fucking shallow, I really wish they would improve ship/ground battles. If only there was a total war like 4x where the empire ruling was 4x and the ship/ground battles were RTS/RTT

Also fucking vaulters are OP in the new expansion and the pirate mechanics are useless

Pirates kinda serve to deter fast-expansion-no-army shenanigans.
Think about it: the only thing stopping you from dumping all your early production on settlers and making no military ships for 50 turns was the threat that maybe, some other player would declare war on you.
If your neighbour is a Craver, alright, legit threat. If not, then you were good. If Amoebas or Sophons, you can pretty much garantee there won't be a scrap before turn 100.
So they atleast server as a "military check" if you want to keep expanding I guess.
What I don't understand is how you're suposed to do diplomacy with them.
One of the first techs says you can talk to them but I haven't found out how.


Man, you can receive a declaration of war from someone, look them straight in the eyes and say "No". And that's the war.
Maybe they're worst against some faction, but out of 5 or 6 games I've done with them, that "force people with influence" crap lends itself to some funny shennanigans.
Draken are a lot of fun after you get a lot of experience with the game.
For a first civ however they might be a nightmare to play.

click on the pirate icon above whatever system their base is on, it opens their diplo screen. It's fairly barebones though.

What difficulty gives no bonuses/penalties to AI and players? Played Normal for my first game and it was an effortless cakewalk. I hope it's due to the game being imbalanced in player's favor on normal rather than the AI being shit.

they're not even a big threat then unless you're in a multiplayer game. Been playing on endless difficulty and pirates have been useless set to hard then too. And I took way too long to start producing an army, generally the AI cant afford to buy marks to target you until late game anyway

Was kind of surprised how easy and OP this was.

Everyone is just bribed by technology to be my friend and give me all their resources (I'm boosting every resource, even those that offer nothing to me, just because). Difficulty is Serious.

Game's research system seems to make it all too easy. Since everyone's getting different tech, there's always tech to give away. But tech cost rises with the number of techs you have, so you trade away the AI a bunch of low-level techs that aren't useful (and they research their own non-useful techs) which just lets you get further ahead because your techs are cheaper than theirs.

CULTISTS

Normal gives no penalties or bonus.
The game is fairly easy when you're half-competent. The AI might be a ton more agressive depending on the map and if it gets lucky with resources, but if you want a challenge, you'll have to up the dificulty.
Warning: the one above Normal is a rather big jump in dificulty because the AI gets bonus and they're fairly good at employing those bonus.

Apparently not a big enough jump since I raised the difficulty twice and went a whole game being defended by 2 unupgraded shit units

(Actually, immediately before winning the game I maxed out my hero's equipment and my military score became #2 just off him. Should have bought the books earlier.)

I guess it's like Alpha Centauri in that you basically need max difficulty to balance out the player's ability to know what techs to get in order to snowball and which techs are there just to slow the AI down.

Maybe. I haven't tried harder dificulties.
I don't really play 4X for the challenge.
They're relaxing games to me. Even against humans I always dicked around which lead to either funny wins or hilarious defeats.
I remember Endless Space raping you pretty hard with "Hard" dificulty. Maybe I should try EL harder one's too.
You can try something too: slap teams on it.
Put 4 bots on a team and 3 on a team with you. Might be more of a challenge.
Or slap 6 bots on a team and pick a partner for yourself.

...

AC doesn't even really require research to break since you can outplay the AI on terraforming so easily.
At which point you just research everything way before the AI. You might have a 20 turn variance on when you get crawlers depending on luck, but you'll win regardless.

It's still a similar problem to Endless Legend in that once the player has mastered a specific highly obviously optimizable part of the game they'll dominate the AI in everything else.