Thought #1: GOD DAMN I LOVE THE ENDLESS SPACE SOUNDTRACK. If nothing else this game was worth it for that. IIRC the files are .oggs in the game folder so I can yoink it as-needed for any other space games. One mild annoyance is how the music changes depending on what screen you're on, some songs are great on the galaxy map while others are better in a sub-menu.
Entirely agreed. ES looks and sounds fucking brilliant.
Thought #4: Even though it doesn't seem massively changed from my last stab at the game I'm still enjoying it. Will have to see if this continues.
I fire it up whenever I see it's been patched. Unfortunately, the gameplay issues and AI haven't been addressed, so the game still has no lasting appeal beyond looking and sounding amazing.
Considering how streamlined most mechanics are, it actually puzzles me how AI can be so poor.
I'm puzzled by it as well. ES has what I assume are two pretty massive advantages over most 4X games: there's relatively few game mechanics, and decisions are fairly deterministic. In other 4X games I typically start a match with a pretty detailed plan in mind, but I rarely know just how great that plan is or how many of the details I'll have to re-work on the fly due to circumstance. In ES there's really no need for a plan - most of the things you can do from turn to turn are either clearly optimal or sub-optimal, on the turn you can choose to do them and forever afterwards.
I know f-all about AI, but it seems to be that if you sat your ass down and described when not to do stuff, and let the AI randomly pick whatever not filtered out by that list, the AI would end up being pretty fantastic. And yeah, I'm sure that is an insane amount of work, but it's not exactly rocket surgery.
seconded. I have beaten ES just once: felt so tedious that I never again attemped the feat. The amount of cheating is hilarious, and still they squander all their ill-gotten riches on random fleets and poorly designed offensives that always end in failure. It's like fighting space red army under a demented Stalin. Damn shame, because the game at his core is somewhat good. I remember playing the beta and saying to myself "well, they'll surely improve the AI for release...". Fuck them froggies.
I was talking about the game on maximum difficulty (AKA "Endless"). Unlike you I hugely enjoyed learning how to play the game - something I hate in pretty much any other 4X game. My issue with the game isn't that it doesn't hold up for 2-3 matches, but rather that it is too... Deterministic, for lack of a better term, and the AI is too damn stupid for the game to have any lasting appeal. There's essentially just 1 way to play ES, and whether you win or lose comes down to the game difficulty and whether one of the AIs got a lucky start (on Endless there's a good chance an AI will snowball into a VC with literally super-human speed, regardless of how ineptly it plays).
AI in pretty much all games cheats and especially in 4X titles.
Which in no way means that all AI is the same or remotely equal.
Warlock's AI, for example, is pretty good at the tactical combat portion of the game. Indeed, it's the best AI there is at that sort of thing, by a wide margin. It's also 10 kinds of crap at the strategic management portion of the game, but to some extent gets around that shortcoming by breaking a bunch of the rules - rules the player can't directly observe it breaking. And no, I'm not picking Warlock at random here, it's a somewhat comparable game in that it too is very deterministic and simple by 4X standards (then again, I'd argue Warlock is a wargame, not a 4X).
The AI in ES isn't good at anything at all. It can't coordinate its fleets, so its fleets zip about like headless chickens. It can't figure out which combat cards to play in combat, so it often plays outright detrimental ones, or none at all. It can't assign leaders to where they're most needed, so it isn't developing as fast as it should and it can only magnify the combat or invasion effectiveness of a fleet that really needs it, by happy coincidence. It can't gauge relative fleet strengths, so it merrily suicides hundreds of thousands of credits worth of hardware over the course of a match. It doesn't know what improvements to construct or where to construct them, so it is monstrously inefficient at running its empire and actually sucks so fucking hard at it that I half suspect it would bankrupt itself if it played by the normal resource rules.
The challenge comes from how massively its cheating snowballs. Per the AI's special rules, just about any system earns and produces as well as the most perfectly perfect mega-system would in the hands of a competent human player. Which means it, however inexpertly, can throw around a shitstorm of semi-decent stuff, and it typically has a lot of equally fucking retarded opponents to throw all that stuff at. Thus frequently creating a snowballing doom-empire that, even if it's too damn stupid to kill the player, will hit one of the victory conditions much, much faster than it should be possible.
Both in general and in the case of ES in particular, the problem isn't how much the AI breaks the rules. The problem is when the AI isn't any good at playing by the rules it has to play by. For example, if the ES AI wasn't such a fucking clown, the cheating wouldn't cause anywhere near the kind of snowballing doom-empire thing that currently happens in the game. Because an AI empire with a lucky start would be facing organised opposition.
pirates spawn in off the radar systems.
Exactly right.
I'm not entirely certain, but I believe (non-event-) pirates can only spawn in systems that have been outside Sensor and Influence range for more than 2 turns.
