Stellaris in all its unfinished mess is still 10 times the space 4x game that endless space ever was with all its dlc and patches.
Why? We're going off what was shown and the release is supposedly very close, why blindly give them more credit? EL was pretty good but all its innovations are pretty much void given that AI never uses them correctly. The biggest problems of ES and EL for me are late-game and mid-game without a whole lot to do and AI never utilizing the systems to its potential (maxing ships in ES, outfitting units and research in EL).
You've gotta admit, ES and EL both have probably the best UI for a 4x game out there.
Yeah, I cant acuse them of having poor aesthetic taste. They know Ui design and they have that minimalist visual style down.
Fixed that for you.
Endless Space 2 Hands On: Buying Planets As The Mafia-Like Lumeris
Endless Space 2 is the sequel to French studio Amplitude’s cosmic 4X game, though it feels just as much a follow-up to their exceptional fantasy strategy affair, Endless Legend. Comfortably sitting next to all the numbers, resources and planetary management are lively stories, epic quests, and fascinating space-faring species, each with distinct hooks – the ingredients that made the company’s last game something special.
I traveled to Amplitude’s offices to get my hands on the game, and thus far my goal is to try and get rich – the noblest of pursuits.
I’m the invisible hand guiding the Lumeris, a species of amphibious deal-brokers, money-makers and corporate Mafia-types. Most 4X games have a wealth-obsessed faction, the Ferengi of their respective titles, but there’s more to this race than makin’ moolah.
Their society is run by four powerful families, whose support of the government is necessary to keep it running. Each family is responsible for different pillars of civilization, like farming and production, and while they compete, they have to work together for the betterment of their species. Family, then, is important to the Lumeris, and as they aren’t ruled by an aristocracy and don’t have much truck with religion – two major excuses for war – they are largely pacifists.
All of this is important because these details aren’t just flavour; they have a tangible impact on the game. With their citizens being driven by economic success, the Lumeris gains +2 wealth for every pop, the abstracted resource that represents these citizens. It even affects how they spread throughout the galaxy. While other races might build colony ships, sending them out into the void in search of new homes, the Lumeris see colonisable worlds as business opportunities. This is reflected by their faction affinity, called ‘planet broker’.
Every species has an affinity that sets them apart from the rest, an ability that defines them. Planet broker means, essentially, that the Lumeris can buy worlds. The idea is that they hire private companies to do all the work for them, removing logistical niggles like constructing colony ships. Each newly purchased planet costs more than the last, ensuring that they can’t just gobble up a galaxy. It’s more than a colonisation technique; it’s a strategy for making cash. Before a fully-fledged colony can exist, it starts as an outpost, and the Lumeris can sell these outposts to other factions for a quick wealth injection. It’s a business.
The Lumeris aren’t the only faction whose colonisation efforts come with a twist. The Vodyani, for instance – a species of parasitic, power-hungry vampires that are reminiscent of Endless Legend’s Broken Lords – are nomadic. When they colonise a world, they are really just exploiting its resources, while all the important stuff, the infrastructure, is kept inside these massive, space-faring Arks. These vampires are a powerful bunch, but they grow slowly, which is why they also have the ability to abduct people from other worlds.
In my desire to swim in a vault of lovely money, I start sending out exploration vessels, hunting for new worlds to add to the burgeoning Lumeris Empire. While this largely involves sending these ships down the space lanes that create a galactic web, Amplitude have given them a new ability that makes exploration a little bit more involved. Probes can be launched, revealing what awaits the ships at the end of their journey, like colonisable planets or potential threats. This is handy, of course, but they also serve another purpose: unveiling the galaxy’s secrets. See, while the systems that pepper space are part of a vast galactic network of lanes, there are some worlds and anomalies outside the web. They can be accessed, eventually, by using a warp drive, but not if you don’t know where they are. Probes can help with that.
My little exploration vessel has been earning its keep, discovering two minor factions: the Kalgeros, who look like four-armed Krogan monks, and the Deuyivans, who are weird pacifist monsters that love science. Neither of them are very impressed when I say hello. It’s in my interest to change this, because minor factions can make convenient chums. Like their Endless Legend counterparts, they confer special bonuses to any major factions they are affiliated with, but must be bribed, threatened, helped, or in the case of the vampiric Vodyani, brainwashed before they’ll be your pals.
While all of this has been happening, I’ve been pouring over the research menu. It’s quite busy, but thankfully still legible. Research is split into different eras, and before you can move onto the next one, you’ll need to unlock eight techs from the previous selection. I’ve had my eggheads working on unlocking the mysteries of Xenobotany, which will give my ships overclocked engines and thus allow them to travel further in a single turn, and we’ll eventually be able to colonise tundra worlds. Who doesn’t want to live on a frozen planet?
Finally, thanks to the efforts of my scouts and my new tech, I find a suitable place for my first outpost. It’s got a lot going for it. I’ve used probes to explore it a little, uncovering special resources – I’m pretty sure they’re magic mushrooms – and even an indigenous species. The latter differs from the aforementioned minor factions in that they are very primitive and are essentially planetary bonuses, and can’t be befriended. Poor guys. I’m going to be their mate anyway, in my heart.
My first outpost is well positioned, connected by space lanes to two colonised systems, the first being my homeworld, and the second being the homeworld of another major faction. This benefits me because populations in Endless Space 2 can choose to migrate. Immigrants can mitigate slow growth, but importantly they also make a world, and thus the empire, more diverse. It’s a pleasantly optimistic mechanic that means the more varied the population, both in terms of ideologies and races, the more opportunities an empire has. It encourages diversity.
The Lumeris are mostly pacifists. This means that they tend to be happier when everything is nice and mellow and we’re not going around slaughtering aliens. Not only does this inform the sort of decisions I’ll have to make to keep everyone happy, it also informs the sort of bills I’ll be able to pass in the senate. The senate is what you’ll want to save up influence for, along with diplomacy, as it’s the currency of politics. From this screen, influence can be flung at bills to augment your society, but what bills you get to choose depends on the traits of your population. Thus, those bills reflect the people toiling away in your glorious space civilization, and the more varied they are, the greater the range of bills.
I start to get lost down the rabbit hole of building a perfect empire. As I obsess over my research options and building list I can see exactly what I need to do to achieve my goals of getting filthy stinking rich. I need this tech to make people happier, and those happy people will give me more influence, and that influence will help me pal up to the aliens, and those aliens will buy all the prime real estate I’m bound to have. Endless Space 2 is by no means simple, but the various interlocking systems seem to fit so well together that it does appear to be quite easy to start making long-term plans, even early on. This is no doubt helped by the distinct and specialised factions.
I’ve yet to touch on war, because I didn’t actually get into a proper one with a big faction. I did, however, blow up a bunch of pirates. Battles are different from both previous games. The card-based combat from the first Endless Space is gone, and there’s nothing like the involved tactical battles from Endless Legend. Instead, fights are entirely hands-off, as you sit there, watching gargantuan space hulks battering each other.
Have I mentioned how stunning Endless Space 2 is? It’s one of the most striking 4X games that I’ve gawked at, from the slick design of the UI to little touches like the way the game slowly reveals planets you’ve discovered with subtle yet cinematic flair. But it’s the battles that provide the greatest levels of eye candy. Damn, they’re gorgeous. A work-in-progress AI director determines what you see, revealing both the monumental scale of these conflicts, as well as minute details like the physical hull damage inflicted by a missile. I know that, after a few hours, they’ll start to become mundane and I’ll just want them over with so I can get back to the game, but they make an incredible first impression.
I do worry about the fact that these battles are just cinematic, though. Space 4X games often shy away from doing interesting things with combat, but both of the earlier Endless games showed some inventiveness. That said, there’s still the planning phase. When you engage another fleet, you get to choose a fairly simple battle plan – it determines the path your fleet takes, from straight lines to feints – based on your tech, and you can see what battle plans your opponent might choose. You might not know exactly which one they’ll select, though you can see which plans they favour, and attempt to counter them.
Heroes, I expect, will be what really determines the outcome of a fight. These important characters can govern worlds, be on the senate, or go off on space adventures with their fancy ships, of which there are four types, one for each class. They can level up and are blessed with special abilities and bonuses, so their inclusion in a scrap makes a lot of difference. Loadouts will help too, obviously. Both the ships of heroes and the regular ones you’ll construct on your planets can be beefed up with new weapons and engines as you work your way through the research menu.
I confess that I might be sold on the early game already. The influence of Endless Legend is clear and welcome, with its quests and fleshed-out, unique races, but it’s the new way of looking at the people who make up these space empires that’s left me most intrigued. The need to juggle all these different species and population groups within the faction is a wrinkle that, until now, hasn’t really been explored in a 4X game – at least not to this extent. The big question, then, is how will Endless Space 2 handle the late game, where so many 4Xs fall apart. With its Early Access launch imminent, we’ll soon find out.
Endless Space 2 is due to enter early access later this year.
Interview: Endless Space 2’s Devs On Why They Traded Independence For Sega
Amplitude Studios has grown significantly since the Parisian developer, as a small team that you could count on one hand, first conceived Endless Space. Now they work out of two floors in a high-rise near the centre of the metropolis and are busy working on their fourth game, Endless Space 2. Recently, they announced a partnership with publisher Sega.
It’s an evolution and escalation that’s echoed in their games. Endless Space 2, then, is an opportunity to show everyone just how much they’ve grown, combining the ideas that birthed their first game with the lessons they’ve learned through the much lauded Endless Legend. I spoke to the company’s two founders to discuss why they’re making the game now, what the partnership with Sega means for the studio, and more.
“Endless Space 2 is, in many ways… we don’t have a proper word for it, but in many ways it’s a reboot,” explains co-founder and creative director Romain de Waubert de Genlis.
He seems a little hesitant to use the word ‘reboot’ because it isn’t starting from scratch. A lot of the original game can be seen in this sequel, but at the same time it’s not a direct continuation. It’s connected, both to Endless Space and Endless Legend, but as fellow founder Mathieu Girard clarifies, it’s a bigger perspective on the universe and its origins.
The studio didn’t start work on this sequel right away, after the launch of Endless Space and then its DLC, because they didn’t want to burn out. They wanted to be stimulated by new things, fresh perspectives, and also have time to consider the feedback from their first game. Endless Legend gave them that new perspective, and its impact on Endless Space 2 is dramatic.
“It showed us how we could do better,” de Genlis admits. “When working on Endless Legend, there were all these cool things we added that would have been so cool in Endless Space.” One of those things was the refreshing prominence of the fantasy 4X game’s narrative, which Amplitude wove throughout multiple levels of the game.
“Endless Legend has proven that it’s possible to add a strong narrative layer to an otherwise very systemic game,” says Girard. “4X games are, in essence, systemic games where you put game mechanics together and then have an experience emerge, but then we proved it was possible to have a great story arc for each faction and lots of cool stuff that made it unique compared to other 4Xs.”
Along with their unique hooks, like the vampiric Vodyani’s ability to kidnap people from other worlds or the Lumeris’ use of private companies to buy entire planets, each faction in Endless Space 2 has its own narrative arc, with epic quests accompanying it. You can read more about those factions elsewhere. This isn’t a zero-sum situation, either, notes de Genlis. “It doesn’t replace, just enhances, giving players more tools to feed their imagination.” Nothing has to be taken away for a story to thrive.
So while the narrative and universe-building is now part of Amplitude’s DNA, mechanics and meaningful choices that go beyond each faction’s story beats remain just as important. Some of that is also inspired by features from Endless Legend, like the tech tree that offers a multitude of choices but splits them up into different eras, but there’s plenty that’s new as well, like the focus on the population and politics of a faction.
People – whether they are space parasites, tree monsters or amphibious deal-brokers – are what make a faction, and they are defined by a set of traits. The Lumeris, for example, are pacifists, caring more about affluence and family than war. This determines what makes them happy, and what a leader must do to maintain the support of their people. Populations aren’t static things, however. They can transform as immigrants appear from other worlds, bringing with them their own traits, and then they can transform through the choices their ruler makes.
“The political system is in some ways perpendicular to the faction system, because even though a faction can be scientific or militaristic, they can still evolve depending on your choices,” Girard tells me. “So there is more depth for the players to make different factions based on the choices on the political side.”
While some of these factions are new, returning players will also notice the return of some classic races. “It’s a good mix, to have classic factions, to revisit them with the new gameplay mechanics, and then to bring in new stuff, especially the community faction,” says Girard.
The aforementioned community faction was created as part of a competition. You can take a gander at them here, before they find their way into the game. Even among the unique factions that Amplitude have designed, they stand out. “It was something missing from the universe,” de Genlis notes, hence their inclusion.
“They must have unique gameplay, or take advantage of one or two special parts of the game,” Girard says of the faction design process. “So some will be especially adapted to diplomacy, or war, or the economy. To make sure we have different gameplay styles for the player, we make sure that we have factions that cover different parts of the game and which allow for different playstyles within the factions. And then we build on that with the story.”
Art, gameplay and story all feed into each other, beginning with looking for an archetype that makes room for a specific playstyle. “And then we sit down with the artists, present this to the them, and what we tend to do is work with a group of artists – four, five, six artists – all of them try to give it a shot, showing how they see these factions,” de Genlis explains. “What’s interesting is by seeing them draw, so it could be just the way they look, but it could be their lifestyles, most of the time that will feed back to both the storyline and gameplay, and then we start working with this circle between these three types of jobs – between game design, writing and art – until we have something we love.”
It’s not rigid and set in stone. In Endless Legend, the lore was still being worked on until the last weeks of development, de Genlis tells me, laughing.
Population and politics aren’t the only new mechanics that Endless Space 2 explores. Amplitude have reconsidered combat, which has shifted from the card-based battles of its predecessor, and is very different from the tactical scraps of Endless Legend. There’s a planning phase, where players can see the potential strategies of their opponents, while selecting one of their own from a list determined by their fleet and technology they’ve researched. After that, a titanic space clash is shown off with a level of grandeur and cinematic detail that’s rare in the genre.
“We’re working with a national movie director [Bertrand Le Cabec], and our engineers have made the tools for him to select the angles and direction, motion etc,” Girard explains. “Then the game is going to generate events – this ship has joined the battle, this ship is firing its weapon, this ship is damaged or destroyed – and the [AI] director is going to filter all these events and pick the one that makes the most sense, avoiding repetition, avoiding stuff that’s too short or not interesting. Every time the director is trying to find the best angle and most interesting stuff to show.”
Then there’s the ground combat, where players need to make a choice about how to deal with or manage an invasion, and all the while troops duke it out on the ground, as preemptive bombing strikes batter the world and leaders attempt to evacuate or defend the planet with everything they’ve got. Again, the impact this has on a population is an important factor, reminding players of the stakes: there are civilians at risk and they aren’t just numbers.
In July, Amplitude made one of its biggest changes: a partnership with Sega, joining fellow strategy developers like Creative Assembly and Relic Entertainment. It’s an arrangement that’s been in the making for over a year, while Amplitude was in discussions with other companies.
“They weren’t the first ones to approach us; they were probably the last ones,” de Genlis says. “We never imagined big companies would look at us seriously. They asked us if we wanted to work with them, if we wanted to join them, and we were just like ‘No, no. We’ll meet you, thank you, that’s cool, that’s nice.’ It’s flattering, and after a while we started really thinking about it.”
“It really made us think about what we wanted to do as a company,” Girard adds. “We want to make games that we like, with big partners like Sega providing all the boring stuff, which we don’t want to do, whether it is IT, or business, or localisation work. They are, as they present themselves now, a service company, while the studios like Amplitude, and of course Creative Assembly and Relic, are leading the creation. It’s all the benefits without the inconvenience.”
Making their decision easier was the fact that both of them were already big fans of Sega’s other studios. “We love their games. Romain is more into Creative Assembly’s games; I’m more into Relic’s. And there’s lots of our guys who love these studios and their products as well. And I think there are fans of our games at Creative Assembly and Relic too. There’s a lot of affinity. But it doesn’t mean Sega is going to force us to work together. If we think some cooperation is interesting and preferable for both studios, then we can do it. If we want to work on maybe the AI together, and exchange, it’s possible, but it’s not mandatory. It’s great because it’s based on our needs.”
The timing was perfect. Just over a year ago, Girard and de Genlis were realising that their projects needed to be bigger and more ambitious so they could compete with all the new 4X titles coming out, and that made development more expensive. “We’re not alone anymore, and we needed to adapt, we needed more money, more marketing, more presence, and that’s not our job. That’s why the timing was good, with these companies coming to see us, to see if we could work together.“
An assumption is sometimes made that, when a developer partners with a publisher, especially a large one like Sega, they won’t be able to take risks anymore, or that their creativity is threatened. Not according to de Genlis. “Independence means you are free to take the risks that you want. The thing is, when you’re alone and you take these risks, sometimes you can just die if you don’t do it properly. Which is okay, it’s your own choice, but it means that after a while you decide to not take risks anymore, and then you stop being creative, and then you die.”
The partnership with Sega, then, means that Amplitude can concentrate on the things they love the most, while Sega handles the more mundane stuff. The mundane stuff doesn’t include dealing with the community, however, as that’s something Amplitude continue to be extremely passionate about.
“When we recruit someone for the team, we make sure they can interact with the community,” de Genlis says. “It’s a requirement. Not just to make jokes, but to talk about the game and expand and share. This whole process of exchanging with the community is part of their job. And of course we build upon that to do everything we can to reduce the distance between our players and ourselves.
“It’s important to hear our players tell us what they love and what they hate about elements of our game. We want to make sure we have these exchanges before we ship the game, not after. After it’s not too late, but there are so many things that you could have done differently if you knew, and that’s why we try to make sure that whatever we do, we do under the spotlight of our players.”
That spotlight will soon be brighter than ever, as Endless Space 2 heads toward Early Access this month.
