In fact, failure to optimise your growth according to the specific planets, biomes and features of a system is penalised, forcing players to be strategic in their approach to building and growth.
Sure, you might specialise to an extent in one area over another, but all your cities/colonies will have the same selection of improvements. Normally in 4X games, you’ll want to build all the things in all the cities. I like that you can investigate anomalies in the system once you have a colony, and that colonisation within the planetary system doesn’t require more settler ships. At this point, players can build upgrades and buildings, colonise the rest of the planets in the system and continue to expand their reach across the galaxy. Like in most 4X games, this outpost will grow over time, eventually becoming a colony. Players will need to send a colonising/settler ship to the desired planet and create an outpost. In fact, I am still mostly befuddled by the optimum science progression in the game, despite my best attempts.Ĭolonization is rather interesting, though. However, in order to get a new hull and create new kinds of ships, or colonise different types of planets, you will need to research the correct technology that might be hidden down a skill tree you didn’t even consider that you might need.
I normally love research in 4X games, enjoying pursuing a more culture and science approach over military. The decision of whether to fire off a probe or investigate an anomaly can be important and strategic, and utterly confounding if you haven’t even noticed the probe button.Įach aspect of the game seems to follow this theme. Discovered anomalies can yield resources, including luxury goods, gold or even influence, and are also tied into the numerous quests that pop up over the course of gameplay. These can either be fired off into space to find other nodes, opening up greater travel or investigate anomalies on planets within the various space systems. However, the exploratory crafts can launch probes. Just as an example, exploration happens within clusters of planetary systems with starting spacecraft moving along set travel lines. Each of the hundreds of buttons has an attached tutorial, and if you don’t read the info (or assume you’ll understand it because you’ve played so many 4X games before), you will probably miss out on half of the strategy and gameplay available in Endless Space 2. There is simply so much going on, so much to figure out. This goes to the heart of what makes Endless Space 2 both intriguing and horribly daunting. Normally, I would go into the various mechanics in the game at this point, but that would turn this review into a Wiki instead. The same could be said of Endless Space 2 – you probably won’t get bored, but you might also be totally clueless for more of the experience than you’d like. These games are usually so massive, though, that even with my pacifist tendencies I can get through a game without getting bored or running out of things to do. To be fair, though, I only really enjoy three of the four Xs: eXplore, eXpand and eXploit, preferring to avoid the eXterminate aspects.
On the upside, the most important turns of the game seem to me to be the first 70-100, and you should have a hard time unlocking enough improvements by that point to be overwhelmed by your options.The 4X genre isn’t for everyone, but it’s one of my favourites.
If your concern is simply that the list of improvements is bewildering, that is something that you'll eventually just get the hang of - after a few hundred hours in the game you should know the gist of everything that is available to build with a full tech tree, even if you still don't have the exact names, costs, or placements, on the tech tree down.
My advice would be to unlock planet cracker labs or public 3d printing early so you can leave your systems on industry>dust or industry>science conversion as the fallback production item, or keep medium and larger ship hulls unlocked and queue up a bunch of blank hulls at each system so any extra industry is sunk into something that could potentially be useful later. Well, in the early game, and even in the mid/late game depending on how delicately balanced your economy is, you can bankrupt yourself pretty quickly by going overboard on improvements.