ItвЂ™s not ideal, but I have to admit it is fairly well balanced.Д¬olony development isвЂ¦ somewhat lacking, I feel. Of course, you might suddenly run into an alien empire which is making googly eyes at one of your future expansion sites (the AI gives no fucks about expansion penalties) and have to rush out a colony ship to ensure that you can swipe it first, securing the colony but eating the subsequent happiness penalty before youвЂ™re really ready to deal with it. Thankfully the implementation here isnвЂ™t quite as hamhanded as it is in Civ V and it seems to work more-or-less as intended thanks to techs in the expansion tree which gradually remove this expansion penalty and ensure that itвЂ™s only a factor in the early- to mid-game the upshot of it is that you need to pick the first few systems you colonise very, very carefully because itвЂ™ll be a while before you can get any more. Expanding too far too fast will incur a sizeable happiness penalty on every star system you own. These bonanza systems are the priority targets for colonisation, but the developers have added in a brake to stop you from gobbling up every single colonisable system you find, and itвЂ™s the same one Civ V uses: happiness. A lot of the time youвЂ™ll strike out, only discovering a couple of gas giants or a bunch of planets you donвЂ™t have the technology to colonise yet, but that just makes it all the sweeter when you find a six-planet system with two Terran worlds and plenty of room for future expansion. All these different planet types come in a range of sizes from Tiny to Huge, which dictates how many colonists you can cram onto the thing once youвЂ™ve got it colonised, and planetary anomalies вЂ“ both positive and negative вЂ“ provide a final wildcard element to what youвЂ™ll find when your scout ship reaches a new system. And Lava and Barren planets, along with asteroid belts, can only be colonised after proceeding a long way down the expansion tech tree. Arid and Tundra planets can be colonised after just a few turnsвЂ™ worth of research.Arcticand Desert planets become available in the mid-game. Three of them are colonisable from the very beginning of the game: Terran, Ocean and Jungle. Each star system contains up to six colonisable planets, and thereвЂ™s many different types of each. Endless SpaceвЂ™s map is divided up into anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of star systems, with fleets only being able to move from star system to star system. Starting with the good, early game exploration is genuinely rewarding and exciting. Instead, IвЂ™m going to focus on the areas where it makes use of its space setting to depart from genre norms, as well as the bits of the game that perhaps donвЂ™t work quite as well as they should.

With that in mind IвЂ™m not going to waste my time outlining the basic gameplay elements of Endless Space. Most concepts in the game have some sort of analogue in Civilization, so if youвЂ™ve played any iteration of Civ youвЂ™ll be familiar with the process of developing your empire to the point where you can murder all your neighbours and your neighboursвЂ™ neighbours. It pulls all of these things off quite well. In a nutshell, Endless Space is a 4X (read: Civ-like) strategy game set in space with all the sci-fi wackiness that entails a veritable smorgasbord of exploration, colonisation, terraforming, research, ship design and space battles.

Writing the not-review a couple of months back has put me in a bit of a fix here since IвЂ™m going to end up repeating myself at length if IвЂ™m not careful. However, while it does nail the space empire game far better than any title since MoO 2, itвЂ™s still riddled with a number of flaws which drag it down and serve to blunt its effort to usurp the space 4X crown. The fact that IвЂ™m making the comparison at all speaks rather favourably of Endless SpaceвЂ™s quality.

This review is going to contain several comparisons to Master of Orion 2.

Endless space 2 diplomacy