For instance, one advanced research building, the Optics Research Labs, doesn't do anything at all unless your public approval is fairly high. Third, and this is key, a lot of bonuses are circumstantial: some of the discoveries on the "science" part of the research web are only moderately useful in themselves, but are game-changing if you meet certain conditions. The importance of these combo effects was especially acute with Endless Legend, but it's still true here. If he's not managing an industrial or agricultural system where his insatiable drive for consumption can thrive, preferably in the hot climates in which he excels, then he's being wasted. If Risto Libera-the overseer that I imported from a race of ravenous insectoid cyborgs called the Cravers-is splitting his time between fleet command and system management, he's probably being wasted. Second, hero characters are critical force multipliers both as fleet commanders and settlement governors. It's not until you start seeing notifications that everyone else is hitting game-wide milestones-how the hell did they build a star system that generates 100 money per turn so fast?!-and reaping unique rewards that you realize you're slowly bleeding-out in your land of milk and honey.īroadly, I think three things account for this in the Endless games: first, the factions have some wild variance that means they play by very different rules compared to one another (Austin and I talked a little bit about this in the podcast on Monday). It's very easy to putter along in relative isolation, not feeling any immediate and pressing needs, but also falling farther and farther behind the power curve without a clear sense as to how or why. In fact, all of this is so rewarding that it obfuscates how much you probably suck. Every technology and development choice you can make feels incredibly useful and powerful-wow, look at those numbers climb! You can see your empire improving turn-by-turn. Like in Endless Legend, this short and accessible on-ramp immediately dumps you into an open-ended and seemingly unstructured strategic wilderness. Its clean and welcoming interface, coupled with a decent contextual tutorial, makes it easy to find your footing and start making straightforward decisions that seem like they would add up to a strategy. Even as abstracted as Civilization is, it's an enormously complicated game with absurdly long threads of cause-and-effect that would be excruciating to pick-up without the comforting knowledge that, after six games and however many spin-offs, you've done all this a hundred times before.Įndless Space 2 feels like what would happen if I were encountering a Civ game right now, for the first time in my life, with Civilization VI. Civilization would have this problem as well its accessibility, I increasingly believe, is a figment born of familiarity. If it's instantly accessible and intuitive, chances are it's an unambitious copycat of a popular franchise.īut that also means that it takes a long time to figure out what, exactly, the game wants you to be doing. Because I increasingly think that getting into any exciting strategy series is going to have to be a little weird, hard to parse, and uncomfortable. It's like when I'm trying to read Italian: I know enough Spanish and Latin to get the gist, but I'm definitely missing crucial information in every sentence.ĭespite how it sounds, this is actually a great thing for strategy games. But it always seems to be speaking a slightly different dialect of game design than I'm used to. It's palpable how much thoughtful design and polish has been applied to this stylish and evocative game. I'm still having a great time with Endless Space 2. But at some point, these games always remind me they are a cutthroat competition, and that secretly I was losing the entire time. Build times and research times continue to fall. When I'm learning each of their games, I never feel like I'm bad at them. Endless Space 2, like all of Amplitude's 4X games, does a great job of making governance feel like an epic accomplishment.
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