New game for Civ Fridays, we explore Endless Space 2 with Horatio.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Sullla Livestream: http://www.twitch.tv/lcsullla/
Sullla Discord Channel: https://discordapp.com/invite/AhG2KwQ
Follow Sullla on Twitter: http://twitter.com/LCSullla/
Sullla’s Website: http://www.sullla.com/
Donate: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr…
Videos will take an hour or two to finish processing when first posted.
Comments and suggestions always welcome. Please avoid flaming or trolling.
source
Seeing this reminded me of Master of Orion 3. I think this is what it should have been. Many features of this are similar to what MoO3 had, just better.
Interesting to get your take on the FIDSI games after seeing your take on Humankind. From the perspective of someone who'd played a lot of Endless Legend and Endless Space 2, Humankind felt like a pretty major step backwards from the strengths of those games. Amplitude seem to be at their best when they're doing imbalanced but very interesting and asymmetric faction design. Humankind is imbalanced without being asymmetric in the same interesting way. I guess if you're dealing with historical human cultures you run into some pretty bad implications if you start saying that culture X had a completely different resource model than "normal" cultures, but even stuff like the social policy system in Humankind is much less interesting than the political system in ES2.
Glad it's up here now. I tried watching the twitch vod and the ads are going crazy every 5 mins a set of 3 ads. Considering you do this for fun I am sure this is twitch being crazy.
I'd really suggest playing with the Endless Space Gaming mod. It fixes a ton of bugs, and makes a number of changes that helps fix broken or pointless mechanics.
Maybe your chat answered, but only attacker class ships focus fire – explorers and defense ships do not focus fire. You can see this on the attacker class trait on your ships.
Horatio, pass the pickled alien livers please.
Here you go, Horatio.
Thank you, Horatio.
The endless games always have great music. Humankind has the same sound, but the Dungeon of the Endless and the Mechanicus soundtracks mostly break the mold. You could say G4F records has… a sound track record!
Some early comments and observations, I'm only about an hour in:
It's funny to me that you underrate Dust and the Econ victory. I'll agree that production and food are better for the early game and for level 1 Luxury resources, as they get the early snowball going, but rush-buying with Dust is very powerful to get new systems snowballing in the midgame. I consider the Econ victory to be my "default" victory condition after Conquest, which is my usual victory condition. Trading gives a lot of Dust. (Also, because I played ES1, 2 and EL before Humankind, it's always "Dust" to me, in HK, hah. Unlike you always saying Gold.)
Cymbal's suggestion of scouting with the initial Hero is one I agree with, for his exact reason – you get levels on your first Hero much more quickly, and you get scouting info back. Depending on the Faction (which changes what type of Hero you get, what your ship designs are like, how many scouts you start with, etc), I sometimes attach the Hero to a Scout. Scouting gives XP to the fleet – which includes the Hero – and you get more of the +5 XP / +10 XP curiosity rewards on your Hero. With galaxies with a lot of spots to Scout around your home system, you can have a level 4 or 5 Hero quite early.
The Influence cost to Praise a minor faction is dependent on how much their rating of you is changing per turn, and scouting curiosities in their system makes them like you, so it's better to praise them, then scout all the curiosities in their system. So sometimes it's best to leave a Scout sitting in their system to build up Probe stock (and for you to build up Influence to praise them).
I don't think you mentioned it yet, and it doesn't matter as much for the Horatio as compared to, eg, the Riftborn or Vodyani, but you can spend Luxury resources to double the race specific population bonus of your populations. The cost is 1 of the luxury per pop you have. It does not include all the gene splice benefits for the Horatio, sadly. You didn't have the resource to do that anyway, when you looked at the pop screen the first time, iirc.
I think I'll save my comments about where I think faction balance lies until later, although I will agree that the Riftborn AI is the strongest AI. I will say that I do think this game is extremely fun to play Single Player, as it's very asymmetric design, but that does lead to some… discrepancies, hah.
You touched on the DLC Factions at the start – IMO the Vaulters are super fun and are a good AI to add to the pool of AIs, they tend to do well, but aren't quite as snowball-y as the Riftborn. They're a worthwhile purchase. I think the Umbral Choir (Penumbra expansion) is very fun to play as, but I have mixed feelings about turning on the Hacking mechanic in games where I'm not playing as them. And the Hissho (Supremacy expansion) and their mechanic sorta suck, sadly.
wall of text! This is my one of my favorite 4Xes and I've played it a ton.
I think your first splice was a mistake, for two reasons: Every non-Horatio pop in your systems is bad. It's less true early in the game, but one of the long term hassles is getting rid of non-Horatio pop, so you want your assimilation to kill every unit of pop. Also, system pop growth type is mostly dependent on how many of a pop in the system. Z'Vali grow slower than Mavros because they compete with Horatio on your home system. So you also ended up delaying your second assimilation.