10/5/2023 0 Comments Endless space 2 easiest factionThat’s extraordinary, seeing as factions in most 4X games feel like they boil down to a skin change and a couple of buffed numbers.Age of sigmar. Its factions are so unique I’ve already played full games with three of them and started campaigns with two others. On the one hand, I really enjoy playing Endless Space 2. For all its issues, the AI here is at least semi-competent, which is more than I can say about its predecessor. I will say this about Endless Space 2 though: At least it doesn’t cheat, or at least not more than any other 4X game. Moreover, there’s no penalty to breaking an alliance because, well, you win, so I ended my Sophon campaign by annulling my alliance and getting a very anticlimactic science victory on the very next turn, after spending 15 turns confused about why I was apparently missing two technologies. I had to search the Steam forums to find out what was going on, which is never a good sign. There’s zero indication of this in-game though. Economic victory? You’ll need 50 percent more Dust, and so on. Instead of researching four technologies for a science victory, for example, you and your partner will need to research a total of six between your two factions. If you align with another faction, you better hope they’re going for the same win condition as you because Endless Space 2 makes you both accountable for victory. “Want an alliance? Too bad there’s no way for you to just say yes in this box.”Īnd then there are the weird things-like being beholden to an alliance for your win conditions. If someone demands tribute from you for instance, you’ll have to separately open up the Diplomacy menu, then add some amount you think will satisfy the AI, then send a request-as if you just randomly thought “Oh, I should send that guy some money.” Worse is the Diplomacy interface, which doesn’t even give you a way to respond to incoming messages. Your fellow galactic inhabitants flip-flop between demanding tribute one turn and praising you the next, and there doesn’t seem to be much logic to it. Like most Civilization-alikes, Endless Space 2 doesn’t know how to make its AI opponents behave like real players. My first match, I lost to another civilization’s economic victory before anyone had even fought a single war.ĭiplomacy is too capricious anyway. That’s about 5 percent progress towards winning the game every single turn. Trade is an easily abused system, an inexorable steamroll that will soon see you earning upwards of 30,000 Dust per turn. This brings me to my next point: Victory conditions aren’t at all balanced, with the Economic victory being particularly easy to achieve. You could make it two-thirds of the way through the game without even researching the technologies required to gain access. And that would be a huge mistake, because the Marketplace is one of the easiest ways to earn Dust (the galaxy’s money). Another menu-within-a-menu, the Marketplace, allows you to buy and sell luxury and strategic resources in a virtual stock market, but the system is barely touched on in the tutorial and sort of alluded to as a side note. Ship customization, a major focus of the tech tree, is an impenetrable wall of confusing icons and numbers with barely any reason to engage. Other missteps are definitely design flaws, and could’ve been avoided or mitigated. This problem isn’t limited to Endless Space 2 though. You’ll spend way too much time hovering over different technologies, trying to figure out what exactly you should be prioritizing. But in Endless Space 2, what does “Xenobiology” mean for your fledgling empire? Or “Inter-Species HR”? Yeah, I don’t know either. Playing Civilization, you know exactly what you’re in for when you research “Artillery” or whatever. The tech tree is the worst of the lot, owing in part to the same problems as any future-centric game: You know what you want to do, but not what the tech is called. Certain systems are buried three or four menus deep, waiting to be discovered and exploited, but it’s easy to overlook entire aspects of the game without realizing your mistake. Sometimes Endless Space 2 is so busy being pretty it forgets to actually convey any of the information it wants to convey. As I said up top, Endless Space 2 does have quite a few issues.įirst and foremost is the aforementioned interface woes. It makes you want to play the other factions, to see their stories even when the game itself occasionally flounders. It’s good space opera-pulp sci-fi with a heart to it.
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