PhilBowles
Deity
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2011
- Messages
- 5,333
ES definitely needs flavor text added, and more immersive diplomacy. It's still much more of an empire building game than sins though. Sins is really just a war game, where ES has many paths to victory.
As of the last expansion, Sins has a whole suite of victory conditions, including diplomatic and science (the latter basically works like Civ V's Utopia Project: research a certain number of techs to unlock a victory tech) - as a nice homage there's even an Orion victory condition (beat the advanced alien defenders to capture the artifact planet). Yes, it's still reliant on combat at heart, but that's the impression I have from ES as well (it was of course also truer of Master of Orion than it was of the equivalent Civ games of the day).
An experienced strategy gamer should be giving a game 1 try on the default difficulty if they're totally unfamiliar with the mechanics. If you're playing civ at 7 or 8 you should be at or near the highest difficulty in ES very quickly. So much of 4X strategy is universal. I played one game of civ 5 at level 6 before moving up and I only played a few of 4 at Emperor before moving up there too. Once you see all the elements of the equation it shouldn't take long to compare them to your previous experience and translate that experience into the new game. I don't see that as a defect in the design of any particular game.
I'll start my next ES playthrough at a higher difficulty, but the above describes my general approach. It took me longer to get the hang of Civ V at Prince than ES on Normal, although I'll admit this was due to the early rush; nothing in the strategic game posed a challenge at that difficulty, making it simple once the rush was held off. Maybe it's just the lack of this early rush in ES that made the game so easy in the early stages, but I suspect there are other issues that contribute: the lack of coordination among AI players, their apparent failure to research terraforming techs early so I have the choice of the best systems (it's a shame that, unlike MOO and Distant Worlds, you can't have dual ownership of a system, with different factions on different planets). At equivalent levels of Civ, the AI will expand and form alliances.
What more, or as a result, the gameplay is pretty universal too. I mean, a production center, a money center if needed, then science everywhere else. Hold on for a while then grind out the win of your choice based on your superior science. How many strategy games does that describe?
Perhaps it would help if ES didn't feel so simply functional - yes, the elements are much the same as in many other games, but so far at least I'm not really finding the immersion necessary to grind for extended lengths of time, and play in essentially the same way I play other strategy games, and still feel engaged.
If it was optimal to specialize counter to the terrain what would be the meaning of the terrain? You generally do it because circumstance is forcing you to
This would work if there was a shortage of terrain of each type, and at least be more interesting if the decision about what is optimal less clear-cut. When you have planets that provide 10 science and 0-2 of everything else, you're not presented with much complexity in decision-making. You basically never need to focus on planets with good food production, since exploiting a world for food until it reaches its population cap can be done anywhere (ironically, other than being easy to colonise, Terran planets don't seem to be of much value - I imagine when terraforming is discovered there's a tendency to "terraform" towards less hospitable planet types), since Alien Grafting is an early tech and can grow your pop to maximum quickly. This also makes the different planet types feel less like terrain being explored and more like different game 'levels' - the harder planets to colonise are harder because they give more bonuses (this is not the case in, say, Master of Orion games; although harder to colonise worlds include the types most likely to be mineral rich, colonisation decisions are strategic - a key benefit of colonising a world of a difficult type is that you can get that lebensraum before your rivals, and may be protected from invasion).
One kind of interesting thing to try in ES that may not be immediately obvious is that each of the 3 non-military tech branches contains a unique but viable route to building your economy. The left tree uses trade routes (which generate a crazy amount of science and gold, but you have to be at peace) along with cheaper rush buying. The bottom one uses terraforming to make all your planets good types along with a few genetic engineering flavored "buildings" that generically increase productivity. The right tree has factories and research labs. They've also each got their own techs for increasing the amount of firepower in your fleets. You'll end up going down all of them but you can choose to be farther ahead in one than the others depending on what race you are and what your territory looks like.
I played this way and went down the terraforming route (which for some reason also contains the Craver hull technologies, as well as superior engine types).
You might be better off just autoing all your battles in ES. Your fleets will do a bit worse on average, but that can be an element of the difficulty setting. And it's not that they'll do worse than the enemy fleets, they just won't be getting an advantage because of a particularly weak area of the game design. I too have noticed that the AI seems to be pretty much picking cards at random, ending up with one that doesn't get countered but has no effect anyway fairly often.
I see also what was meant by the poster who said the cards seem largely cosmetic - you are never going to beat a fleet with substantially superior MP, or lose to one with much lower MP, regardless of card choice. I did quite like the cards my hero got if only for the graphical effect of the whirlpool card and because it finally made the hero system feel as if there was some character to it.
ES actually does have enough races to fill up a map. They opted not to make them exclusive in a game though. I can see good reasons for or against that choice.
Not sure what the good reasons against it would be - it would be nice if there was an option in set-up for 'Unique races'. Of course I could just set one of each in my set-up decisions, but then if I want to play a random faction I may not end up with the missing race.