Endless Space Walkthrough and Review(Description)Part 2-KJS
0I fell in love with Master of Orion II when it came out first (1996) and since then I look for a worthy successor. Played several 4X games and they had their pros and cons. Endless Space is one of the better 4X games and absolutely worth buying, in my opinion. Wouldn't have played 300+ hours else, heh. I am reviewing it including Disharmony expansion.
Galaxy: Endless Space offers some variety of galaxy shapes and sizes, some favoring defensive players, some favoring offensive ones. Additional finetuning of the galaxy is possible. I miss the opportunity of creating a REALLY huge galaxy, but maximum size with just one opponent works ok as a sandbox mode. During exploring you will find nice bonuses, a few pirates, wormholes (basically dividing the galaxy until you can travel through them) and finally different wonders, so exploring is actually fun.
Background story: You learn about the Endless (usual Elder civilization which went extinct) during playing. The game lacks lore summary articles, but there are traces of this ancient civilization everywhere (galaxy wonders, technologies, factions, leaders), which adds to immersion.
Factions: The games comes with 10 to 12 moderately unique prebuilt factions (depending on whether you get Harmony and Vaulters). Each gets specific traits, innate bonuses, ship bonuses and a few special technologies to encourage certain victory types and hence playstyles. Prebuilt factions are different enough to motivate you to try them all. Additionally, you can create your own faction by modifying a prebuilt one. Meaning you can replace their traits completely, but you have stick with their innate bonuses, ship bonuses and special technologies. It has still a high degree of freedom, I enjoy building my own faction a lot.
AI: Computer opponents (artificial intelligences respective AIs) offer a solid challenge. Especially the 'evil' factions tend to attack you early on, so you cannot simply expand all over the galaxy or rush through the technology trees. Later most AI will attack you when they run out of colonization space - unless they are busy with other opponents. But they also attack each other for same reasons and their reasoning is mostly transparent (+x for long period of peace, -y for common borders etc.). At higher difficulty ratings they are more unfriendly (but not hateful) and get the usual strong production bonuses to offer more of a challenge.
Leader: You can hire a few people for boosts to your empire or your fleets. They make a real difference and usually have a nice background story. It takes some time to learn about their feat trees, but once you became familar with it, your leader can turn a fleet into a nearly unbeatable force. Which you will need to fend off the many enemy ships at higher difficulty ratings... Using leaders to improve your empire helps a lot at the beginning but loses importance as it grows.
Production: Production is done on system level mostly, saving you some time compared to games which do it on planet level. So most buildings affect all colonized planets, ships are produced by the entire system etc.. However, you can specialize your planets (usually: food, industry, research, money), explore their moons and terraform the planets. Terraforming is an interesting feature here because depending on faction and situation you can be better off with unfriendly environment. Since production shouldn't be automated, you will spend a lot of time with tweaking your systems. But that's true for many of these games...
Technology: There are basically four technology trees and they sometimes offer different paths to specific technologies. It honestly needs quite a while to get used to them, but it offers interesting decisions to make. Technology names are often NOT related to their benefits, so at the beginning you will have to check their descriptions often. Other games did that better. Well, on the plus side you have many interesting concepts in the tech description texts - some scifi fans will like them.
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