Is there a way to upgrade ships without destroying them, the same way you can pay a little cash to update your units in civ ? Ok, in civ units are units and do not have setups and specific stuff fitted on them, so it is easier to do, but still ? Can't the game just upgrade your beam weapon grade #2 to grade #3 and refit the ship instead of thrashing it ? It's especially annoying since as soon as you start building your ships, a new tech pops in your tech tree and makes your shiny new ships obsolete... It is most annoying in peace situations.
There was an option in ascendancy (the game), another space 4X game (that was awesome btw, even if too micromanaging at the end), which allowed you to call your ships back into your shipyards and refit them with new tech modules. It was really usefull. And that way you don't lose all the xp your ship got.
Here it seems to me that the more experienced your ships are, the more obsolete they also are. That's a little bit ridiculous... :/
____________________
Otherwise my impressions on the game are quite good overall. It behaves similarly to civ on a lot of key points, like strategic and luxury resources.
However the population happiness is a lot more granular, where in civ your cities were producing at full speed as long as your happy population >= your unhappy population, and here, the more happy, the more productive the planets are. I think the granular factor is not so bad but it definitly makes the game a lot more painful to manage and lot more complicated/obscure. There was an overall simplicity with a lot less math in civ that made the game more enjoyable to play for me.
I really like the way you can customize your ships on another hand, as well as the presence of heroes.
I think their technology tree is interesting but the same way than population happiness, it's really too much convoluted to my taste. I liked the more linear and streamlined tech tree used in civ, which made all the tech benefits remaining coherent with each other. Here you can perfectly only research one specific side of the tree and go for exploration only, but that would be foolish. With the exception of the military tree, every tree are depending on each other : some improvements found in the diplo/economic tree can perfectly need resources or improvements found in both the other trees to work correctly. That, and also going too far in a specific tree will find you with incredibly high research time as your empire is obviously not able to digest the expensive high end researchs too soon, which will inevitably make you find a good balance between all trees. The only tree that is more independant to the others is the military tree, with mostly weapons and warfare improvements.
So eventually as much as I find that allowing players to be more advanced in some areas and backwards in some others, it remains an unpractical delusion. If I were them I would definitly put together the 3 civilian trees and only keep the military tree separated. Not necessarily putting them together the hard way like in civ, with links between each of them, but definitly with technological stages where you need to have filled most of the current stage to pass to the next, much like in civ with the iron age, the middle ages, the industrial age, and the modern times. It was also cool in civ to always have an overview from your advisors or just visually how much advanced or backwards you were compared to others, here it is a little more complicated to see.
Also, the thing I probably miss the most was the clear and obvious differences there was between every age in civ. It was always funny to bombard musketeers with cesession riflemen or WW1 artillery, or laugh at the medieval cities of your neighbor with your polluting coal factories. It gave the game a lot of depth, which I have difficulties to find back in Endless space.
Another thing as well, too many techs. I am playing a game with a gigantic galaxy so maybe I have too much resources at my disposal, but even with less resources production would be slower so it would remain in line with a slower tech developement. So, in any case, in my current game I am finding new researchs almost every turn. It's way too much. Goes too fast, and it loses a lot of its impact that we had for example in civ (again...) when you spent 15 turns learning for your next tech and could say "HOLY SHIT I KNOW GUNPOWDER NOW". Nothing of the sort here, sadly. I would prefer a lot less tech, but longer and much more significant.
But overall, yeah, I think that's quite a good game, just sometimes a little too much convoluted to be as fun to play as a civilization (civ 3). I still love it.
Author
Topic: Endless Space (Read 5059 times)