Endless Space Impressions
I am super impressed with Endless Space so far. The ui is just as awesome as it looks.
It seems to be heavily Dune inspired which makes me ecstatic (the way the planets line up is way too similar to the opening scene of the movie to be a coincidence, and your main currency is "dust" lol).
Alt tab friendly. And the tutorial screens are thorough and well written.
Some of the navigating through menu controls are really terrible. Not sure if I can rebind them or not (can't find anything in the menu, but you know, alpha). In the research screen for example you can left click to queue up research after your current one is done, but left clicking it again doesn't remove it from the queue. Right clicking at any point is just a back button. Some of it just doesn't make sense. Tech tree is nice. It's not single branch, so there are dependencies on earlier tech, but it's not like civ where you end up getting shit you don't want just because you have to. It's separated into 4 different bushes so you can just focus entirely on research if you want.
It's not balanced yet apparently so I won't dock it for some of the stuff (and it could be that I don't fully understand them yet too!). Heroes seem over priced, and the game seemed overly slow (later as I would check the new game page again 'normal' speed is for a 'slow paced game' and 'fast' is 'a normal speed game' so yeah that makes tons of sense :/ ) . I don't know if I've just been raised on more complicated stuff or if it's the lack of graphs (big sad face here) but it seems a tad simple. More complicated than civ 5 for sure, but not really to gal civ 2 level.
Also the map is smaller than I was expecting from the description of it. It might just be a visual trick as it groups the stars into systems instead of showing all the planets from the map screen. Stuff may end up being bigger than it is through a visual illusion.
You never get to actually customize what your ship looks like (completely unlike gal civ 2). You get a really attractive looking base and then throw mods on that have no visual representation and just add stats. I don't know how complicated this gets so not sure if you can leave the computer to just auto improve over the game.
The diplomacy and trading screens are hard to mess up. They're just like any other strategy game's.
Graphics are pretty good. It doesn't have some real space porn in it like Sins of a solar empire (it might in the rts parts, but in the normal map screen it doesn't), but when it zooms on planets, those textures are really nice.
Music is amazing. Half just down beat techno thats really relaxing and nice in long strategy games and when stuff speeds up it's like a non-shitty linken park song.
Still haven't tried any of the rts battle parts. Don't have a military yet!
I'll be editing this post later to put more impressions in. Ask any questions you want if you care to.
