by Sly Boots » Thu Jun 01, 2017 10:14 am
So, I've played one campaign of this now, and started on a second.
It's good. If you played and enjoyed ES1 I would recommend it without question... it's broadly similar so you'd be confident enough diving in and not feeling all lost at sea initially, while there are some gameplay tweaks so there's still some systems to learn as you go.
I won't go into details explaining the gameplay as I'm sure by now most people can understand the basics of what a 4X game means, but in a nutshell you start off in one system of a galaxy populated by various other races, and look to colonise other worlds and systems, unlocking a technology tree that allows you to colonise different kinds of world, system and fleet improvements, terraforming options, etc etc etc.
There are numerous paths to victory - the obvious military conquest one, dominance (owning a certain number of systems), economy (having a certain amount of cash), science, building wonders and one or two others.
In my last campaign I won a science victory, researching most of each of eight tech trees. It took about 12 hours - the value here is replay I would say, rather than bingeing on one epic 50-hour campaign - and I think in that time I maybe took part in about 10 space battles, and most of those were when pirates entered a system where my fleet was parked. Whenever I encountered another race I'd go the diplomacy route, and none felt the need to wage war on me (was playing on normal difficulty, expect it's harder to be diplomatic on higher settings).
Space battles are meh, but you can auto-resolve them. It isn't just a question of greater numbers, as you can fit-out your ships for short, medium or long-range attacks, with a choice of energy or projectile weapons (each of which requires a different module to defend against as well), which combines with different pre-set strategies... so in effect if your enemy is a squadron of short-range fighters you might want to take them on with long-range specialists and bring them down before they can reach you, and so on. It's quite customisable, although as the battles themselves play out as a cutscene you'll likely still want to skip the actual action. It's not the best, but it's not really the focus so hey.
Where I think it shines is the difference in playstyle between the, I think, 9 different races, all of which can be fully customised if you want to make your own unique one.
For my first campaign I was a race of sentient tree-people. Most races colonise systems by first setting up an outpost that take around 20 turns to turn into a colony (at which point you can then start developing them). The tree-people send out special scout ships that hover around a system for 10 turns, seeding them with this weird space-vine stuff that then forms a network between all your worlds. When the vines reach the target system you can colonise immediately to your heart's content. As a result, you can expand extremely quickly.
In the second campaign I've just started I'm a predominantly mercantile race, who don't use colony ships to set up outposts, instead they buy out systems instantly to set up an outpost, so quick expansion is possible if you have the cash. When they meet minor races (who own a single system but aren't part of the main opposing empires), they can start bribing them so that after a certain number of turns you can they buy out their system.
Each race seems to have its unique foibles and characteristics, so it's going to be fun trying them all out.
As I said, recommended.
Also worth noting that there's been a few patches now and I didn't encounter a single bug so far.
My face is tired.
