United Empire Quest Question (Spoilers) spoiler. Posted by 2 years ago. The subreddit for fans of the game Endless Space. Post your stories, news,. There are many paths for these humanoids, though they tend to prefer economic and military development. 1 Population Traits 2 Political Traits 2.1 Imperials 2.2 Mezari 2.3 Sheredyn 3 Potential Unique Faction Quest Rewards Due to a unique turning point in the UE campaign, you will receive a one-time choice to indoctrinate your citizens into a new culture. If you choose this, you will.
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Umbral Choir
Hard to master? How come?
Well, at first any player can instantly understand the basics of UC but the tricky part is to adapt their unusual ways. Of course, the purpose of this guide is to prepare you for what’s to come.
While playing as the UC, the biggest virtue you must adopt is the patience! You should never ever seek out fast small gains in early turns because the UC is already strong a faction in the early (1-50) turns. If not prepared, the UC becomes a joke at later stages of the game.
From their war goals to the economy they have a prety unique style. Of course, their biggest disadvantage is having only one system. That hurts late game FIDSI production very hard but don’t worry with good planning to transform yourself throughout the stages of the game, you will catch those multisystem users and make them part of your everlasting peace. Let us start!
General Playstyle
They have auto cloaking ships. They have one system and they can only have their own population. Their faction quest is quite easy too but what else?
I would put the UC as an exploration/expansion faction. Yes! Even though they are designed to be a tall faction I would say, they play like a hybrid of both (tall&wide) playstyle but very much depended on expanding the other systems via sanctuaries.
So naturally, you should always try to find systems to put your sanctuaries on and that means exploration! Of course ideally, you should always find the systems where your opponent’s potential colonization places and fill it with the population to make them sleepers faster during later stages of the game.
The UC is a hidden faction and this will last in early turns (1-35) but after that, you are going to battle to remain hidden by upgrading your stealth from millitary tech tree. Even though you really don’t need any military tech during that time, it will be natural to spend some time on military tech. This will prevent you from worrying about the military side of the game, preparing your fleet the future and making you are a solid competitor for the Behemoth quest line.
Behemoth gameplay is a must to stay strong in mid and later stages of the game. Auto cloaking will help you when settling in dangerous locations. Also, you are going to need every other possible gain from outside since you have only one system.
The UC has to spread its range with backdoors or sanctuaries early on to make sure be present before another faction. Even if you think you are present every one of the nodes in near your home faction (including your neighbors). Otherwise you have to fight to get backdoors in great distances.
Setting up a good position at far away will help you to kickstart your hacking operations in later stages. Even if you should never focus everything at once, it will be a good idea to spend some turn for 1 or 2 backdoors in great distances; as the game progress, it will be much harder to get in those places. Always remember to play a long game and never disturb your long term plan with fast gains.
The UC’s biggest strength is being a hidden force and when you reveal yourself it must be felt like a big surprise.
Early Game
The early game is where you maximize exploring -don’t worry I’ll get to the economic and other stuff later on- so what that mean is, you can pop out a third scouting ship even a fourth (depending on the map). The UC also can use special nodes very early on so it’s ideal their exploration ship can go faster and probe too.
You mustn’t waste turns for hardcore hacking (improving relations,etc.), just focus on getting sanctuaries, backdoors, and special nodes. Always remember to play for the long game in patience.
You must identify your closest neighbors by turn 25 because you have to get closer them and if you are lucky they will start colonizing one of your sanctuaries. Getting an early population inside your opponents is the key to continue staying at the top.
It’s also possible to get one sleeper to your neighbor just to get a hint on which techs researched. Therefore you can try to match the colonization possibilities and able to put your sanctuaries on systems where it might get colonized by the opponent.
It’s also possible to get one sleeper to your neighbor just to get a hint on which techs researched. Therefore you can try to match the colonization possibilities and able to put your sanctuaries on systems where it might get colonized by the opponent.
Mid Game
By the time you reach mid game, you should already control 3 special nodes, a bunch of sanctuaries inside your first target with steady population growth, ended all of your food and industry buildings.
Know that until you are sure that you will get attacked or you are going to attack, you’ll never in need of a fleet, unlike traditional factions. During mid game, you should focus on increasing your stealth level and assimilate a minor faction.
Because you can access the special nodes very fast your options becomes many. You can purge minor factions very fast or go for the buildings you lack resources. You should also get two Behemoth to your system during this time. Always try to exploit the fact that you can use the special nodes.
I’ll go about the war in later but during this time you should be fighting with one of your neighbors. UC could be a pacifist politicly but their actions are not. Their gameplay even reflects their story. Their way of observing is to infiltrate the organisms they are curious about. So in a way, they always seek to expand or grow. When coming close to the late game you need to evolve your population to Umbral Shadow.
Late Game
When you set your war goals to boom your economy and achieved. You can literary become untouchable! Overcollonization penalties shouldn’t worry you and with the help of the early distant hacking points, now you can reach for distant lands. You only need to be patient again. Patiently create a bunch of sanctuaries on your next target and declare war.
With the high bandwidth capabilities, you can now play your own version of Deus-ex hacking mini-game! You get to place lots of defensive programs to lock your opponent down. You have many possibilities with the high bandwidth, never make it go to waste.
You are going to be get detected eventually but that doesn’t mean the fun stops. Your late game super weapons are also quite powerful too. Not only you can dodge incoming fires, but you can also spawn your Obliterators in different positions.
The UC is very strong once you do all the pass the initial challenges but that doesn’t mean you are out yet! Even though you’re all industry accumulates in one place you still can’t catch the late game production of multiple systems.
Being patient doesn’t mean staying idle. You have to wait for your perfect time and strike at once. Archive your war goals and retreat to gather your strength once again. I’ll be in more detail about all of these in the next topics.
Choir Economy and Espionage Theory
Because of the nature of the UC, I believe both topics are intertwined with each other. You mustn’t approach hacking the same way other factions do. Hacking isn’t just some cool tricks for UC. It’s their economy! So, let’s delve in.
FIDSI
Initial challenges for the UC economy are Science, Production, and Food. Having one system means one building type and that means less upkeep to worry about. Also, you won’t need any ships to protect yourself which we established already.
What you constantly need is increasing your food. Food is the top priority in every stages of the game and the way you gather is limited too. Always use your hacking for expanding or connecting with a special node via Transmigration Beacon. Adding that +50 IDSI is a quite big deal in the early stages.
Now the important part about the UC economy is that the buildings which give bonus FIDSI for each population are not working for the population outside of your system. So, what you should always be seeking to build buildings which give a bonus to planets or planet types. That’s why you should always focus your hacking on expansion.
From early to mid game, when picking your tech, you are going to juggle with industry, science, food and the colonization. There are 3 major factors are going to interfere with that decision. Starting location, special nodes around you and colonization.
Don’t worry about colonizing to small planet sized systems. If you think you colonized to a bad place just don’t send your population there but use it as a backdoor for other expansions. It’s wise to send your populations to your good sanctuaries where your opponent has potential to colonize. Because ultimately you gonna need to transform your populations into your super population: Umbral Shadow.
If you think you are getting unlucky about not being able to match your sanctuaries with your neighbor’s colonization. What you can also try, hacking your neighbor and attempt to change their politics to ecology. With luck, now you can manipulate the AI having free colonization, meaning you will get better results of sanctuary places.
You won’t need to expand your home system at first but as you abduct your sleepers, you need space in your home base for transforming your regular pops to super pops. Ultimately your economical goal is to max out your spots with super pops. After you think you have enough population in your home system you can now focus on getting more population-based buildings.
About the special nodes; of course, the better ones are the one gives you direct +50 ISDI and you should only spend bandwidth for those but that doesn’t mean others are also important as you progress through the game.
Resource gathering and Behemoths
Behemoths are an essential part of the UC economy. Since you have more access to more special nodes and having auto cloaked Behemoths, It will be foolish not to play around with them.
At first, you should get the scientific behemoths first. Lowering science cost should be more useful for you to increase your hacking capabilities even further. Your 2nd or 3rd option should an economic Behemoth.
Your resource gathering capabilities are slightly limited for the UC but that doesn’t mean your options are too. At early stages establishing fast colonies could be the start of something but the soon as your opponents start kicking you out or stopping your hacking with defensive programs you are going to feel pressure. That pressure increases as you realized the only way to increase your luxury resource gathering is by laws. Therefore it’s possible to push for a mining Behemoth but that would be a waste for luxury resources until you have entered late-game luxry resources.
You see, the reason to get more resources are not important for the UC; your system upgrades cost a lot and you only get to do one! So, you can skip the whole luxury resource mini-game for half of the game and focus on strategic resources.
Due to the high cost for system development building, it’s possible to wait patiently for the higher tier luxury resources (e.g. Endless Foundries) which gives more % based bonus and gather it and spent it on your first system development level; The last stage of system development cost 250*3 resources! Since exploration is a natural fit for the UC you wouldn’t be missing much by rushing this.
Best way to gather resources for UC is via behemoths. In early turns where special nodes giving population-based bonuses (e.g. neutron star) were bad but now they have a use in your empire. Mid-Late game strategic resources are best to collect from special nodes.
Hacking and Umbral Shadow
Once an early game annoyance pirates become your friend in the late game. After you finished expanding lots of special nodes and infiltrated your desired locations. Now you can gain an extreme amount of resources by hacking pirate droids. They give random resources but if you have unlocked much higher tier curiosities this operation becomes much more important.
Trying to maintain good relations with the minor nations and doubling their income via hacking is a possibility but it’s not that lucrative enough to waste so many turns on hacking maybe in time if this option gets buffed I’ll let you know; right now if anyone can assimilate them and all your work could go to waste.
Of course, your ultimate goal is to pursuit for umbral shadow populations and there are 2 ways of getting it. One is hacking and abducting with the cost of 2 sleepers the other is conquering a system and abduct them with the cost of 1.
Also, their food consumption is higher so rushing for super pop isn’t a good strategy in the long game; you will slow your process. To boom your economy you have to have a substantial amount of food production in order to maintain umbral shadow and keep growing steadily at the same time. Since you have only one population boosting them with the luxury resource is the most important matter to help them.
Sleeper leaching is a newly introduced thing which UC has the capacity of being the best at it but focusing that early on is a high-risk low reward situation where you can hurt your growing. Your opponents will fight you but if you wait for enough to sustain multiple sleepers per turn then you should start leaching.
I would also advise only starting leaching during late-game or war times. You can only hurt their economy really bad when they are trying to upkeep multiple fleets and late game is where people start making real money.
War Philosophy
Manpower
UC’s manpower issues can only end after a long period of time. Because of expansion and food consumption, the UC isn’t best to suit for ground battles or boarding pods. They can barely fill their own ships. This situation will only get better in the late or super-late game. You can try to obtain from trading or minor factions special grants but it will be a waste really and you shouldn’t push a hard thing.
Having said all that you still have the best options when it comes to conquering systems. That is sieging! Since you can establish sanctuaries inside your opponent base and you can use any of your sanctuaries to spawn ships. Yes, you guessed it right! After you won your space battles you can fully dedicate one of your ship designs to besiege them in few turns without spending single manpower. It’s utmost important for UC to spend the least amount of manpower in battles.
Since these siege ships are going to be bad in movement you should consider redesigning them giving it movement speed and change it back.
The best part about the UC is you can change your ship designs at any of your sanctuaries. That means you can just modify for each battle or situation. Scouting won’t be a problem for a hacking master like UC but be sure to pay attention to others and do a few more clicks in order to win.
The best part about the UC is you can change your ship designs at any of your sanctuaries. That means you can just modify for each battle or situation. Scouting won’t be a problem for a hacking master like UC but be sure to pay attention to others and do a few more clicks in order to win.
War Goals
You are hidden but you get to have only one system. That means you can’t govern your opponent’s wonderful systems. Besides the usual razing and looting you get to do one thing which other factions can not. Abducting all of the sleeper population in a single turn!
This is your one and the only one that matter goal in the game. Yes, you can abduct with the cost of 2 sleepers but not only that is costly it’s a slow and risky process. Not only you are notifying that you are present and targeting your opponent. You are also putting your self in danger and slowing your expansion by busying your hacking operations.
Therefore you have to plan your target many turns before in order to have a good amount of sleepers. Ideally, large systems are a good way to go. It’s also important for your target to not know you are targeting there. If you readied your sleepers before you attack, you will notify your opponent by leaching its resources.
So the most optimal approach is to ready your population in sanctuaries end finish defenses by sieging and before you strike the final blow and invade you make sure you have enough sleepers at there. When you conquest now you can abduct all that sleepers and your population in the home base to super pop. Just make sure you have enough population to turn otherwise it’s waste. After you have every possible population or filled up your coffers you can start razing to end the war.
Ships and Tactics
Say you have maxed out your system with super pop (umbral shadow) then your only war goal is to destroy really. But you get to that place in patience. Always remember to have multiple sanctuaries in enemy territory before you attack. With good production line, you can spawn 3-7 ships in one turn depending on the size.
The UC has to bring the fight to enemies territory otherwise it’s too weak to protect it’s own. With the constant barrage of ships, you have to make your opponents yield. Repairing and upgrading is your best offensive tool.
Spending dust on repairing shouldn’t be considered as a waste since you can reinforce the rest of the spots with sanctuaries. UC ships are mediocre at best. In order to compete, you gonna have to research additional slots. Because of the high amount of support modules, they are good at siege (as I said earlier). You have to use lots of massive assault tactics and keep fighting over and over each turn.
UC ships are mediocre at best. So, in order to compete, you always have to unlock additional slots. They are good at ambushing strategies or siege. Due to manpower issues, your fleets are going get weaken, you can use some different battle tactics (e.g. Lifepods Away) in order to have some control over it. Since you will explore with your generals though you will have better generals than most of the factions.
Ambushing is a great tool for you to dictate your tactics. Since your ships are auto cloaked and you can spare additional support modules you should use your battle cards right. It has changed quite a lot and with good scouting, you can now more idea on what to expect. Changing your ship spawn location each time in order to ambush the supply lines for your opponent is highly annoying. After you pressured one place really hard you can widen the war by attacking different places.
Just imagine spawning a core cracker in one of the opponent’s citadel system. Sanctuaries are one of your best offense.
Just imagine spawning a core cracker in one of the opponent’s citadel system. Sanctuaries are one of your best offense.
Political Situation and Hero Management
UC is in a bad political situation. Your population creates a huge amount of pacifists and their collection bonus isn’t helping the situation. Also, both of the UC population has the same political traits and since UC doesn’t have any population management therefor trying to micromanaging populations to effecting political clime is out of the question.
So, your only solid option is to change your government where you have more control over your laws. Starting in a democratic government is actually very useless for the UC but in later stages where you have multiple high-level heroes with senate bonuses unlocked…yes, then going for democratic is actually useful.
At first, glance maintaining science can be good law because of the lowering system improvements but laws from industry (+30 food in sanctuaries) or ecology (tech-free colonization) are quite good for expanding your empire.
Since with the population and government type you have, it’s almost impossible to change freely. Changing your government type to dictatorship is actually can be lifesaving. So, connecting +50 influence special nodes could be a good solution for your influence problems.
Federations are an absolute no-no for the UC since you only have 1 system. After you think you expanded enough and well. Changing to a republic is a good idea. Their bonus is good and they have 2 slots of representation and you still get to manipulate the elections.
UC hero gameplay is limited. However, you can still squeeze some strategies to gain good admirals. Because of the good scouting and exploring potential. You can put your other heroes in scouting ships for exploring higher tier curiosities and since its good for UC to skip some of the luxury resources in order to upgrade cheaply with higher tier luxury resources, you can have a good synergy with your overall UC strategy.
UC hero gameplay is limited. However, you can still squeeze some strategies to gain good admirals. Because of the good scouting and exploring potential. You can put your other heroes in scouting ships for exploring higher tier curiosities and since its good for UC to skip some of the luxury resources in order to upgrade cheaply with higher tier luxury resources, you can have a good synergy with your overall UC strategy.
It will be relatively safe with exploring in cloaked ships. UC has the potential of having high-level admirals with this strategy but you can always sell your heroes to market If they truly have no room to grow.
Their own race is suited perfectly for the governor where you can increase even further your hacking capabilities. Their admirals only have one good skill and that is the %20 dodging which isn’t something to be overlooked at too. You should always look for a good fighter though.
Diplomatic Relations
![Endless space 2 factions Endless space 2 factions](/uploads/1/1/3/9/113903761/220890964.jpg)
Diplomatically the UC have few options to consider. Their relationship with the pirates is complicated. During the initial phase of the game, they are really going to bother with hacking or blocking your way but this is an only a small hickup. Unless they are on a superb system or multiple pirates blocking, you shouldn’t destroy them because after you increased your hacking capabilities having good relations are very beneficial for you.
Since the UC are not good at gaining luxury resources it is a good way for them to keep hacking their droids for random loot and as you unlock more high tier resources you can even get those. It’s like a loot box but during late game dedicating multiple hacking operations for this is a quite lucrative business. You might even want to ally yourself with the pirates so that, they will bother someone else with hacking and attacking. Even protect them with your own fleet if anybody wants to destroy them. Why would you kill the goose lays golden eggs?
The UC can achieve high influence easily by having the connection with the special nodes and you should consider purging minor factions without bloodshed because of the manpower reasons. Even very distant ones are an ok target for you. The purging cost will increase so after you purged the ones you liked you should purge just to prevents others having other perks because at the late game you will have lots of influence stacked up and nothing to spend it on.
Because the UC needs to turn their sleepers into super populations, it has to declare war to one of its neighbors at some point in the mid-game. So you must maintain your hidden status until you attack. Since the UC is bad at trading, having trade deals won’t do that good. You can also try to make deals with others for manpower or other luxury resources since both of you very much in need of. Science deals are a mediocre thing for you due to possible high science income. Maybe join in an alliance just to focus others but in reality, they play like a lone wolf.
Playing Against Umbral Choir
Fighting with an invisible force isn’t easy but once UC becomes opaque you can see how fragile it actually is. Of course, the detection is your best tool for this job. Pressuring UC into investing military tech making them slow down.
They are very good at building wonders. You if you late on building one you might as well quit but if you manage to squeeze mid-game wonders it will definetly disrupt them.
Your only way to approach hacking against UC is the counter-hacking. That means you have to spend your bandwidth to many defensive programs and trace the source. Shutting down a simple hacking won’t do you any good since their hacking offense is high. Simply focus on researching more defensive programs and try to trace them. If you are lucky you can cause blackout in their system and really hurt them.
Regular check-ups for turning sleepers are quite an easy way to dispose of them you just make sure you have enough happiness. Before the war, you have to make sure where their sanctuaries are. Destroy them or at least prepare for them. Since their defenses are very weak you can push for a fast invasion.
Obliterating systems where you are not present could have the potential to disturb their momentum. Their ships have a low number of weapon systems and their manpower is always a problem for them. Dedicating a few ship types just to throw some EMP or swarm missiles are maintainable against battling with them. Of course, boarding pods are very good against their lower amount of manpower ships. Also, make sure that you never out of decloaking tools.
Endless Space 2 United Empire Quest
When dealing with UC you have to approach it like you dealing with a snake: by going to head. If you won’t pressure their system hard enough. They’ll keep sending you fleets to your systems. Even though you can maybe produce more ships comparing them, it will take a while for you to gather all of your ships in one place (except Vaulters of course). Pressuring them is a hard blow to their economy as well even if they successfully escape to other special nodes. Their other connection to special nodes will destroy.
You have to increase your siege duration but even if they penetrate your defenses faster than you gathering up forces and addressing the situation. You must have a citadel on your best system in order them to not attack easily even if they penetrated the first line of defenses. You have to defeat them in ground battle. If they are stacking in one place very hard. Always remember that you can ion wave their asses.
Author: By Cmon S.man say your stupid line
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It took me a while to warm up to Endless Space 2. I regarded the first game as something of a qualified success, but the fantasy followup Endless Legend left me completely cold despite having some ideas and mechanics that were, objectively, very good indeed – it’s the first time ever that I’ve bounced off a game without being able to really explain why, and to start with I was afraid that the same might be true of Endless Space’s sequel. Partially this is because I made the mistake of buying it a week before it came out of Early Access, foolishly assuming (because I’d done the same thing with Battle Brothers and had a whale of a time) that it wouldn’t be too different from the finished article; instead Amplitude released a 3 gigabyte patch on launch day that papered over a lot of the obvious Early Access holes and made it significantly more coherent as an end-to-end experience. Gothic 2 angus und hanks.
Mostly though — and even after 27 hours playing it, I still think it is a valid criticism — it is because, just like Endless Legend, Endless Space 2 kind of sucks at building the emergent story of your empire’s growth from a single planet to a galaxy-bestriding colossus. This is surprising given the sincere effort both games have made to improve on the comparatively sterile experience of Endless Space by injecting oodles of character into every element of the game; ES 2’s races are fully voiced, have unique techs in the tech tree, narrative questlines that provide some backstory to who they are, and — very importantly — each have at least one gimmick that ensures they play very, very differently, from the nomadic Vodyani who have giant arkships instead of colonies and who must generate new population units by leeching life essence from foreign inhabited systems, to the mechanical Riftborn who build new population in their colony production queue and who can conjure up time-manipulating singularities around systems that provide either a bonus or a malus to any colonies located there. Heroes and leaders have 2D animated portraits, there’s an absolute ton of unique art for improvements, techs and events, Endless Space 2 has taken note of Stellaris’s early game exploration and provides its own stripped-down version where you send scout ships around to explore anomalies and curiosities etc. etc. — there is a lot to like about Endless Space 2, as well as some really good ideas around trade and military that I’ll go into in a second.
The thing is, nearly all of that was also true of Endless Legend. I’m getting on better with Endless Space 2 now since I instinctively prefer the sci-fi setting — and not just on a thematic level, since the standard star-nodes-linked-by-warp-lanes layout that the galaxy map goes for fits the gameplay far better while allowing for plenty of interesting decision space around ship movement — but there’s no getting around the fact that the two games are very similar. In particular they share a crucial weak link: the FIDSI system that all of Amplitude’s Endless games are based around. This will be very similar to anyone who has ever played a 4X before, as it’s shorthand for the usual 4X production of Food, Industry, Dust (money), Science and Influence (culture). The Endless series puts a particular spin on it, however: it puts generation of these resources front and centre and has a ruthless, ruthless emphasis on making them go up. Which is fair enough in a way, since this is the feedback loop at the core of all 4X games: you improve your colonies by building buildings that generate more resources that let you build bigger buildings etc. etc. The thing is, something like Civ VI1 understands that building a Library should have an impact in the game beyond making a number go up, even if it’s a superficial one. This is why the Civ series is quite big on having your improvements appear on the map and provide some level of interactivity or benefit besides a +20% to colony Industry or a +3 Science per colony population. If you boil a 4X down to a pure numbers game it comes dangerously close to being exposed as the time-wasting End Turn-clickathon these things really are – but this is exactly what the Endless series does, with improvements disappearing into the ether the moment they’re built with the only tangible evidence of their existence being that you’re now producing 10% more Science or whatever.
If nothing else, Endless Space 2 has at least let me figure out what bugs me about the series. It’s not that the various empires don’t feel distinctive or characterful, because they do. They just don’t feel like my empires; whereas most cities or colonies in regular 4Xes end up having a fairly distinct story behind them the only story behind a typical system in Endless Space is that there was colonisable space there and you expanded into it to generate more FIDSI. This is compounded by Amplitude’s love of runaway exponential growth curves and some truly atrociously tuned win conditions. There are six victory types in the game: Conquest (capture all opponent homeworlds), Supremacy (occupy x% of the systems in the game), Science (research the four techs at the very end of each of the categories in the tech tree), Wonder (build X number of special wonder buildings across your colonies), Economic (generate X amount of money during the game) and Score (game ends at turn 200 if no other victory condition is fulfilled). It feels like Conquest and Supremacy are the same thing since you’ll usually end up accidentally doing one while trying to do the other, but otherwise there’s no problem with them; they feel like meaty achievements that have some good narrative moments scattered along the way. Economic, Science and Wonder victories are horribly broken right now, however, as they’re all expressions of how good your empire is at generating at FIDSI — and thanks to some extremely poor balancing it’s very, very easy to thoroughly break your FIDSI output so that you’ll achieve any one of these conditions about 10-15 turns after deciding to go for it. Economic victories in particular are really bad because you can break your Dust generation so hard with the trade system you’ll win by Economy every time unless you turn that victory type off.
(This is how broken Dust generation is in Endless Space 2 right now: there are achievements for generating 1 million, 2 million and 4 million total Dust across any number of playthroughs, the implication being that this should take some considerable time to do. I got all of them in a single game when I turned off the Economic victory condition that was capping my Dust gathering.)
Anyway, the ease with which you can win means games of Endless Space 2 end extremely abruptly. Fighting wars is the best way to generate your own narrative here, but it’s very difficult to kill off more than one race before you win by other means. The fact that none of the non-war victory conditions are particularly interactive compounds the problem: the Economic and Science victory conditions are literally “Get X amount of Science/Dust to win”, while the Wonder victory condition has a little more nuance to it but boils down to having Y number of colonies with good Industry output, where Y is the number of wonders required to win. It’s all rather unsatisfying to interact with, and feels more like you deciding to end the game because you filled out the tech tree and built all the improvements than it does a real, earned victory.
But what about the quests, I hear you say? Surely it shouldn’t be hard to tell a story if there is an actual story written into the game? Well, that’s what you’d think, but it turns out the quests are just as poorly balanced as the rest of it. It’s the same problem Endless Legend had, where quest objectives are spawned on the other side of the map past three hostile empires and you just don’t bother with them — and when you do your reward is 50 of a resource that you’ve already stockpiled 1000 of, or 1000 Dust at a time when your empire is generating 50k per turn, or a shield module for your ships that’s somehow worse than the bog-standard tier 1 shield you researched 70 turns ago. Even within individual quest chains there’s extremely poor balance: one example for the United Empire asks you to pass 4 Industrialist laws, which requires you to tech down to tier 4 of the Empire category of technologies to get the required number of law slots. This takes about 50 turns of buildup, and then the next three stages of the quest have laughable requirements like “Have a colony that generates 200 Science per turn” when the techs required to fulfil the previous condition collectively cost a total of 100,000 Science. It’s really uneven and incoherent, and that’s the last thing any kind of narrative should be.
It’s not all bad news, though. In fact Endless Space 2 is far from it. Despite all of that bitching, and despite my fundamental feeling that this is more a game about how thoroughly you can break your economy than it is building a space empire, there’s a lot of cool systems in Endless Space 2. When I’m thinking of actual individual parts of the game such as the space battles I have nothing but good thoughts; there’s a lot of interesting mechanics to get your teeth into, while most of the boring faff that infests 4Xes has been shooed away. Take planetary invasions, which I mentioned earlier; something like Stellaris has you actively recruiting armies from your population, loading them onto troop transports, bussing them over to the target system, unloading them so that they can fight the invasion, and then loading the survivors back onto the transport after the planet has been pacified so that they can hike to the next one. That’s a lot of incredibly tedious micromanagement that Endless Space 2 has simply abstracted away with its Manpower mechanic. A certain percentage of your Food output is converted to Manpower each turn; this fills a Manpower pool up to a cap that you can raise with techs. Manpower is spent in automatically filling up planet garrisons and — this is the important part — in building all of your ships, since every ship your build now has a default complement of troops, and it’s these that are used for planetary invasions. Once your battle fleet has disposed of any opposition in space, it can then immediately drop its troop complement onto the planet surface to duke it out with the planetary garrison: it’s your fleet Manpower strength (which can be boosted by having more ships or ships with special troop modules) versus their Planetary garrison Manpower strength (which can be boosted with improvements). There is nuance to be found in invasions, but it’s found either on the macro empire level (where you can set your empire-wide troop balance between Infantry, Armour and Air units) or the broad battle tactics you and your opponent use for the invasion. Troop management itself has been removed from the equation entirely; once an invasion has been won or lost you simply pull your fleet back to a friendly system for a turn to replenish any spent Manpower strength.
Trade networks are another area where Endless Space meets with success through abstraction, although it’s a more qualified example than planetary invasions since they’re also the primary reason why Dust generation is so broken right now. At some point in the early midgame you get a tech that lets you build a Trading Company HQ in one of your systems. Once the HQ is built, you can then build a Trading Company subsidiary in another one of your systems. When both the HQ and the subsidiary are built, trade will automatically start between the two with no further input required from you; this brings in both Dust and a smaller amount of Science, but it also does the following:
- Starts levelling up the trading company whose HQ you just built. The more levels it has, the better it is at making money.
- Starts filling up an unlock bar for your second trading company. Once it’s full you can build another HQ, and another subsidiary. However, once both of these have been built Trading Company HQ 1 will be able to trade with both subsidiary 1 and subsidiary 2, and the same is true with HQ 2.
Endless Space 2 Wiki
You can have up to 5 Trading Company HQs in your empire, and the implications of this should be clear when taken with the second point above: the base number of trade routes you can support is the square of the total HQ + subsidiary pairs that you have, making it a system with a literally exponential increase in effectiveness. There are additional system improvements you can build that increase a system’s Trade Value, and you can also sign Trade Agreements with other empires that give you access to their Trading Subsidiaries (and vice versa), and if you stack all of this stuff you can make your trade network an incredibly broken thing; it’s not that it generates more Dust than you can spend as there’s a hidden inflation mechanic that increases Dust buyout prices along with your income, but the problem with it is that an endgame trade network will be generating nearly twice the amount of Science as all of your colonies put together. It’ll need a couple of balancing passes to fix it up so that it’s a bonus worth going for rather than the driving force behind an endgame empire’s research, but I really like the base mechanic since at no point does Endless Space 2 have me manually faffing around with individual trade route destinations (Firaxis should really be taking notes here); it just wants me to set my hub systems and my spoke systems and then does the rest for me.
Wherever you look in Endless Space 2 it’s pretty much the same story. Very few of the mechanics present are new or innovative, but they’ve been built in a way that makes them far more pleasant to deal with than previous examples I’ve encountered. An interesting thing about Endless Space 2 is that Amplitude have clearly looked at Stellaris, swiped a couple of the mechanics (exploration and population politics) and implemented them in a much more 4X-y way – and they work a lot better for it. Exploration is based around sending scout ships to explore curiosity sites with probes; it’s a one-click process that’ll yield anything from special ship modules to planet anomalies to triggering new questlines, and while it’s less involved than Stellaris’s elaborate event chains it’s a much nicer system mechanically. Politics are a little more impenetrable — I’m not sure where the actual decision space around the political system lies beyond “Push button to influence the election to get the party you want elected”, but then I couldn’t see any depth in Stellaris’s far more detailed system either and here it’s at least a nice bit of flavour with a moderate impact on the game, as each party has its own set of laws that you can enact to provide empire-wide bonuses. The interactivity has been stripped out of space battles entirely but the depth of the mechanics has nevertheless been widened slightly – the outcome is now 100% dependent on your ship configuration and the tactic card you choose going in, which influences the range your ships will engage at. This makes ship design somewhat more thoughtful as it’s here that your battles are now won or lost, as you build ships that can make use of particular tactics cards to counter a known enemy ship design. Diplomacy has some weaknesses — I can never tell exactly what is causing an empire to hate me — but they at least give you plenty of warning before declaring war, and there’s a pseudo-warscore system in place that’ll let you — or them — dictate the terms of any peace. It certainly works a damn sight better than certain recent examples to be found in games whose names rhyme with “Spivilization”.
Endless Space 2 United Empire Questions And Answers
There’s a lot to like in Endless Space 2. Notably it’s the first 4X I’ve played in a while that I’ve had genuine fun playing — not qualified fun, not fun despite bugs or poor balance or a psychotic, broken AI, but actual moments of unalloyed delight. However, this is because I’m of a certain mindset; I enjoyed pulling apart Endless Space 2’s changes and additions and seeing what made it tick as there’s an above-average quantity of excellent design in here. The flipside is that that design is paired with some absolutely awful narrative and balance problems that cripple any long-term pull the game might have (as the current winning strategy is to build a trading network — not to optimise it, but simply to have it), and while Amplitude will probably fix them in the near future I’m getting a little tired of giving 4X games a pass on balance issues that are bloody obvious for anyone willing to spend a weekend playing the thing; since this is a genre that’s supposed to support hundreds of hours of repeated playthroughs that’s a shortcoming that I’m no longer inclined to ignore. So nice try, Amplitude; I liked this one better than your previous effort and I feel much more open to revisiting it in the future than I do Stellaris or Civ VI, but you’ve still got a long way to go before you properly nail it.
Endless Space 2 United Empire Quests
- And this is the only time you will hear me namedrop it positively, as it doesn’t look like Firaxis have fixed any of the broken shit I complained about eight months ago. ↩