/v/ - Video Games

Pretty broken. I played it on release and Riftborn were broken to the point that there wasn't much of a game left underneath them. They use production instead of food for population, this does not reduce their actual production, and they default to high-production low-food planets as habitable. Net result is a three for one where they can easily outgrow and outbuild everyone else.

From what I've heard, later patches/dlc have added races that are somehow EVEN MORE broken than Riftborn. I honestly don't know how that's even possible, but that's what I've heard.

>>16815044

I honestly consider it one of the best I've played, I got it since the Early Access after enjoying the first Endless Space and I've had a good time with it. Although, while not fully agreeing with >>16815094 I have to echo some concerns after the release of recent expansions. The free updates did provide some useful gameplay tweaks like the constelation bonuses and ironing some of the diplomatic issues from release, but other areas have been hit or miss.

For example, the hacking mechanic has some serious contradictions, I've had hacks shut down by factions that I started from their home system when the tooltip says that's impossible, and is generally an inferior way of espionage when compared to other 4X titles, including Endless Legend. Behemoths handle in a clunky manner and you generally want to either make them Obliterators, which is of little use when everyone else decides to spam Citatels, so it sort of cancels itself out, and there is little use for Juggernauts since you can drown them in fleets if you tech up properly, which is the way everyone plays anyway since staying ahead in science is one of the focus of the 4X genre.

It also doesn't help that warfare in general has been receiving some pretty nasty nerfs, like how you can't raze or pillage a system if you're not running a dictatorship unless you want to suffer a hefty approval penalty or how the Hissho got effectively nerfhammered to the ground. I understand that there are issues when playing overtly agressive, like how the Hissho could get free systems without approval penalties just by invading constantly, but the way they've gone about it has been concerning. I've also read that the latest expansion has been sort of undewhelming, but I haven't tried it myself.

All in all, I've had a good time with it but I can't deny some of its flaws, I can say that if you enjoyed Endless Legend you'll probably enjoy ES2, but you can also try the first one if you want to give yourself a taste, though the tweaks to gameplay set each other apart, they still play pretty similarly.

>>16815109

Fuck, I forgot to turn off the flag

>>16815094

Sounds like a significant issue in multiplayer, I'll just play single player probably so I guess it will be fine.

>>16815109

Would you classify the game as comfy at least?

>>16815122

Looks like garbage.

>>16815144

Most definitely, the soundtrack does it great favors to get that comfy feeling. If you're not particularly inclined to action, you can amplify the comfy by playing factions that are more oriented to science or economy, like the sophons, the lumeris or the unfallen and just chill while growing your space nation.

>>16815044

Can't talk for the multiplayer since I don't play 4X to compete with other players, but the singleplayer is pretty great.

It's basically what Stellaris wanted to be if it wasn't such a convuluted bland mess.

The mechanics are simple to learn but there's some depth that you can strategize with, as usual with their Endless games.

Factions all work in vastly different ways but there's plenty of a core gameplay that they all use to keep it familiar and common among them all.

Diplomacy is better than Endless Legend which was already way ahead of CIV or similar, the Influence resource really helps to make it a viable gameplay mechanic instead of a reinforcement of everything else.

The economy is also quite interesting and detailed but really not max autismo so you can use and abuse it without having to go full jew, and if you do, you're gonna ruin everyone else.

I actually like a lot of what they did with ground troops. Every fleet has a "firepower" of soldiers it's currently carrying and you can make some models for your ships to carry extra dudes. When you invade a planet, you use those points as the ground troops to invade, which can be killed, and you refill your fleet by orbiting friendly territories. On the other hand, you have an empire-wide stock of ground troops that's used to refill your fleets but also your ground defenses, produced by some buildings and any excess Food you're producing.

So basically, they made a way to slow down your massive blob. You can defeat all fleets but you're not gonna take planets with no ground troops, so you have to keep going back and forth to refill, slowing down your momentum and giving your opponent time to react but also draining from reserves that could be used for defenses AND it gives a purpose to Food once you hit max pop.

It's really nothing special actually, but it's a simple idea that works far better than what you've seen in other map painters and has the bonus that it's not rigid at all. Plenty of methods to mitigate how many troops you lose and vastly increase your resupply rate so you aren't actually stopped IF you spec heavily into that.

Another point is that the game has a pretty great story and lore behind it. I encourage you to read all the tooltips and details about it because it's quite amazing.

On top of that, the Devs are steadily telling a story with every expansion about the Academy and The Lost with the latest expansion upping the stakes a lot more but it's still not concluded.

If nothing else, it's at least a very original story that ties in with most factions there.

I'll tell you that there's a big gripe to be had with the game though, which is graphical design.

The ships look great, the leaders and the heroes look great, the planets and other stellar bodies look amazing, but… You won't actually be looking a lot at them.

Most of your time will be spent looking at menus and grid-like representations of things. It's not that bad, the UI is quite functional and well drawn and the grid-models work well enough, but it can get a bit boring after a while.

You can understand this better if you also play Endless Legend, where you're staring at surreal landscapes and weird creates about 80% of the time.

>>16815109

>the hacking mechanic has some serious contradictions

It's a very badly explained mechanic and to be honest I'm not sure how they'd even go about explaining it in the first place. It's not too complicated, but it's really not easy to put into words.

For your example, "I've had hacks shut down by factions that I started from their home system when the tooltip says that's impossible", whenever you start hacking an owned system AND that system has ANY defensive program at all, it triggers a trace signal that will try to reach the source of the hack.

General thumb rule is that the trace is about twice as fast as a hack and very little changes that. So if you start hacking from their home system into a system next to it that happens to have a defensive program, it's going to trace it back to the starting planet before you finish even hacking that planet.

What you WANT to do with hacking is make a long ass route of secure nodes that you know have no defensive programs, put your own there to assist and make it take as long as possible to reach the source. Hacks that take 20 turns are the average for instance.

You should also consider that, although the entire hacking mechanic is convuluted, it's effects are quite powerfull if you can exploit them and the Umbral Choir is a beast if you master it.

>>16815094

>races that are somehow EVEN MORE broken than Riftborn. I honestly don't know how that's even possible, but that's what I've heard

Speaking of which!

The Umbral Choir are a faction that have no home and everything they own is cloaked all the time.

They have a main base that sits in a special system and can be expanded to house more population by building extra space, but they can't make more bases. At best they can hack a special system (any that has no planets), make a relocation beacon there and teleport their entire base there. Do it before charging it and you damage your city though, it's an evasive maneuver in case your base is found.

What they have instead is Sanctuaries. Basically, if they can hack an unowned system, they can build a sanctuary there that houses population and sends resources directly to their base. Another faction can colonize a planet in that system and never see the Sanctuary, oblivious that the UC are there! The relay beacons they build also give the bonus of that system to their base so you can build more (but they consume Bandwith so they limit your hacking).

So basically, you have a single base that is collecting resources from all over the fucking galaxy, building and expanding incredibly fast in late game.

This is not what makes them dangerous or abused, though.

See, one of the hacking operations anyone can do is turn a citizen into a Sleeper. Sleepers give visibility into a planet and are counted empire-wide. At 5-10-15 you drain part of their economy as well with greater amounts.

However the UC has a few more options here since they were the faction that introduced hacking.

With 2 or more Sleepers, they can build a Sanctuary even in an owned system. And with a Sanctuary, they can sacrifice one of their pops (that they grow super fucking fast) to automatically convert a sleeper in that system. They can cover every faction with a gazillion sleepers and drain their economy to grow even faster, seeing everything their factions are doing.

And if they finish a hacking attempt, they also have the option to abduct all the Sleepers in that system into their planet, transforming them into a special pop that has a massive FIDS bonus.

But wait! There's more!

The UC isn't limited at producing population or ships in their home system and send them out, they can pick a Sanctuary anywhere in the world and set it as their spawning point of population and\or ships!

So if you declare war on them, they'll use the Sanctuary they placed in one of your core planets to buy and produce a gigantic fleet in 5 turns that you'll never see because they are all cloaked and your system will be consumed in a single turn! Imagine an Obliterator literally popping out of nowhere! Imagine a faction that can actually BUY A FEW PER TURN ANYWHERE IN THE GALAXY.

After a while, you do end up feeling like the Dick of the Galaxy. UC has no real land to defend, nothing in particular to contest and if they start fucking with someone is either because they joined an alliance or they are bored. And the only thing that counters them is strong anti-cloak detection and good firewalls.

>>16815176

Holy shit, I know firsthand that UC is annoying as all hell after going for a supremacy victory and having their home system jumping all over a huge galaxy but I had no idea it was THAT broken. It's kind of disheartening since I've read for a while now that Amplitude has been outsourcing the development of more recent expansions to another studio since they're focused on their new game which probably explains where the broken is coming from. Thanks for the coments on hacking I'll now proceed to do a UC playthrough just to be a massive fucking dickhead.

Distant Worlds: Universe, have fun.

>>16815044

If you pick it up, do yourself a favor and turn the resources in the galaxy down a notch from the base setting. It's really really really easy to get all the resources you could ever need without any conflict otherwise, and I find that it cheapens the overall experience because of that. Starting wars or forming alliances because someone is sitting on the only rich supply of Hyperium in the galaxy is excellent.

>>16815185

To be honest, the latest level of anti-cloaking beats the latest level of cloaking tech and you only need a single ship with a module for that to work, so the UC are kind of in a run against time.

Their Sanctuaries also can't be moved so once you have anti-cloaking up, you can purge your own systems from them and injecting Sleepers there will be a lot harder after that.

If you force them to move their base all around, you're also slowly killing and slowing them since that's a process that takes some of their hacking power and destroys their base if they do it too fast.

Only serious broken and dickish thing that you can is abducting Sleepers in a Vodyanoi Ark. Since their population covers all slots, they tend to have a small amount per Ark, but if they park that shit in a system that has a Sanctuary, you can start a hack and one turn before it hits, you convert everyone into a Sleeper, only to abduct them all afterwards. The other player will simply see an Ark suddendly going entirely empty and producing nothing until he puts more people there!

It's really not that much of a problem if you consider that just about every faction is broken in their own way and several common mechanics of the game also break the rest if you focus on them.

Trade routes for instance used to be so lucrative you could just buy everything and everyone for the rest of the game once they were up, and that was common to everyone (but the Lumeris benefited from it a bit more).

Obliterators also sound OP until someone builds a Citadel. And then you build 3 Obliterators and fire them all in the same turn at the same system.

I much prefer the game like this since it's more fun to see how you can break it and most of these problems would only upset you in multiplayer anyway.

>>16815176

I'm gonna second the "hacks are really powerfull" thing here. They require good timing though.

Two things I've managed to do so far:

>Cripple Super-Hero from the enemy and strand their attack fleet

I only need 3 extra turns for siege to pummel ground defenses low enough that the invasion only cost me 10% of my soldiers. What's best, the massive fleet fought mine with no Hero Skills boosting it, garanteeing a loss.

And in another game:

>cause the ground defenders to pick "Riot" action

It's so freaking good you'll never believe it when you see it. I mean, imagine picking "Blitz", an action that usually kills 20% to 40% of the attacking force, but having it kill only 5% while decimating 90% of the defenders. It requires really good timing with the hacking and your fleet movements, but when pulled off, it just fucking hands you an entire planet.

>>16815109

>you can't raze or pillage a system if you're not running a dictatorship unless you want to suffer a hefty approval penalty

Not entirely true. You get -10 for pillage. Say you pillage 5 planets (a normal number of planets for mid-game pillaging), you'll get -50.

But at that point in the game, you can easily off set that with 2-3 Happyness boosters.

And I mean, it's more of a roleplay element: you're not an ebil space nazi? That means you don't raid.

In all fairness, if you're gonna be invading and pillaging, then you DO want a Dictatorship anyway. The other forms of government are more economical/diplomatic based.