Amabel is a professional board game publisher who has been designing hex maps and war games for a decade now, but somehow has no experience of 4Xs. Join us as I bring my thousands of hours of experience (bolstered by my legendarily spotty memory) to bear and educate her about one of my favorite game genres!
To the stars! Endless Space 2 is the first space 4X on our journey, which means it’s time to introduce a new but related set of core peculiarities alongside what might still be the best presentation the genre has to offer. Join us as we navigate a galaxy peopled by giant trees, fish mobsters, robots from an abstract math dimension, sentient clouds of unrefined hack, and so much more!
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51:36 I assumed the question would be "what multiplayer?" and not about AI
Yeah that's true about hacking. It mostly doesn't matter for most civs. The Umbral Choir use it to an extreme degree, though, which is where the more calculated use of routes matters. It's their main method of producing citizens and even conquest.
I will say that 30 science per system, when you have 9, is 270 empire wide system without accounting for modifiers.
That is, like, 1 almost 1/5 of your total output, which is definitely something.
It's a little criminal that you haven't prioritized the trade routes earlier when you're playing lumeris. You'd be rolling in cash by now, as well as the luxury good that reduces cash buyouts then being far more tempting.
You were having trouble invading Saiph but, if you hacked Horatio, you could have forced him to use the Stampede battle tactic instead of Draft. Also, hacking can have other powerful outcomes, such as injuring heroes (that are governing systems), stealing resources from pirates, making minor factions give you a ton of science for a few turns, and various things can happen if you hacked an enemy's home system (so you may need to make several backdoors in order to reach the home system). So hacking can useful, but the AI is generally weak enough that you don't need to be too efficient in order to win.
If you really wanted to challenge yourself, then you could install mods like ESG 1.6 (just don't use the balanced galaxy generation setting) or Enfer Reloaded (which only changes the AI and nothing else).