does Endless Space deserve to get slated by its community?

[greydan]

:violin:Endless Space:violin:

I'm not a designer, of anything, so it took me a few hours (ie half of my first evening with it) to see what Endless Space is

4x Minimalism

in case anyone is as sketchy on minimalism as I was an hour ago, here's the relevant quote from wikipedia

the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts

which ES has delivered

(also it's the most delicious UI in any game ever and just wow)

but the community are antsy, demanding every feature from every other 4x ever get jammed into the game

for example, a chap who wants three different kinds of kinetic round 'for tactical depth', but can't explain how they impact anything beyond visuals and his illusion of choice

3MA have covered fans' terrible sense of design before and I suspect ES is a prime example

of course it's entirely possible that Twilight's Immense maps broke me and now all I can handle are CKII's soap operas and baby's first 4x, Endless Space, so I thought I'd come to the oracle and ask for guidance

[Gormongous]

Bruce talks about this a lot on the podcast especially. Many strategy gamers think they want realism, when in fact they just want granularity of decisions. You just have to trust that the developers have the clarity of vision to avoid making their game everything to everyone.

[owenjones]

Absolutely! That really encapsulates my thoughts on CKII well. I think the thing that kept me from other Paradox games was the numerous screenshots of sliders to adjust everything in minute increments. CKII cuts to the core of this, taxes are either Low Average High or Extreme, not 5.4% instead of 5.3% tax rate. That level of granularity makes much more sense to me.

[brkl]

Man am I crap at these games (Thumb here, not one of you TMA guys ). I really like what this game is doing, though. I used to play Master of Orion, but lately when I've tried 4x games they just went over my head. Way too complicated systems not presented well. This one doesn't seem so impenetrable.

It's still Alpha, so I guess it's forgivable it doesn't always communicate things like what certain techs give you and what tech you need to get for instance in order to travel longer distances. The game could use some more species and more graphical representations to make them feel different. Right now only ships look different, but since cities and such aren't represented, the species don't really feel that different. But I suppose that's expensive for an indie.

It's got a really nice atmosphere to it, which is important to me at least.

[sclpls]

Having finally played Endless Space I can now totally see the criticism that Rob & others had about the lack of flavor. I think the flavor text in the game is good, but it definitely doesn't do a whole lot to try and bring the player into its universe. On the other hand, I'm loving the board game-like elegance of the clean interface and rules. Some people dislike the card system in the battles, but I loved it. An improvement might be if the cards worked a little more like a game like Popular Front, where playing the right card against your opponent nullifies their card, etc. At any rate, I like that it adds an element of unpredictability to combat whereas in so many 4X games combat tends to boil down to fairly simple mathematical calculations.

[sclpls]

looks like I spoke too soon, Endless Space actually totally has a feature where certain cards cancel each other out. Nice!

[Jaraknarn]

That is something that most 4x's I've played struggle with. Ie, do you have X number of ships more than your opponent? You have won.

Ship to ship combat struggle to include some of the ways to tackle this problem that some more standard RTS' have implemented. Morale, group disrupting weapons like cannons and grenades.

Do you reckon a power distribution management mechanic would add some depth and tacticallity? Boiled down it. Would be a bit like the Stances infantry ground units in some games have. So divert power to shields, less weapon damage, more resilience and regen and vice versa.