Amplitude Studios, after expanding the Endless universe with the likes of Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless, has finally returned to its first love. Endless Space 2 can be considered a sequel to the original game, though it's more of revisiting or perhaps a parallel reboot than a sequel in the sense of a timeline. You know, whatever Elizabeth says about parallel dimensions in BioShock Infinite, it's that. Probably.
As usual, Endless Space 2 a turn-based, 4X space-strategy game where you take the role of one of the intelligent races who have reached the space age (no, humans are not on that list) and discovered that the mysterious Dust, a precious matter left behind by the Endless, can shape whatever the user thinks of. From there, you will meet other alien races, learn new technologies, and colonize mineral-rich planets in your pursuit of Dust and galactic conquest through war, economy, culture, and political power.
If there's one thing to note about Endless Space 2 is that Amplitude Studios took the time to have a clean user interface, which anyone familiar with the Endless series of games will be familiar with. While the developers don't necessarily mind the “accounting” that happens with all of the numbers and stats inherent in 4X strategy games, that's exactly what can make the genre unappealing to outsiders (who hate math). Here, the information that's displayed in ES2 is simple, clear, and precise without being an overwhelming data-dump, and eventually, it sort of melts into the background and becomes second nature over time. You won't need to open an Excel spreadsheet to figure things out.
Ultimately, Endless Space 2 boils down to exploring other planetary systems and managing your population. Each population will generate food, dust, production, influence, and science, the quantity being dependent on the quality of the planet in general. In the build I played for about two hours, the planetary systems my explorer ships found typically had three or four planets, one of which was usually habitable with the rest being too harsh for colonization using a colony dropship. But with the right technologies, you can cast a wider net of planets that your people can populate, creating denser, more powerful systems without having to stretch your territory too thin.
Exploration is thus extremely important, especially in the early game. A part of it is claiming territory, as the first civilization to establish a city from a colony outpost on one of the planets in a system has the right to build on all of the planets of that system (unless it's taken over during war of course). The other part is simply reaching different planets and having explorer ships send out probes to planets with anomalies, which grants minor bonuses like strategic resource drops and small amounts of dust.
Like an intricate web, planetary systems are connected by lines or dedicated speed lanes between them. But there will be other systems in the galactic map that are not connected at all, so you may want to send out probes in curious directions and see whether you're lucky enough to find planets that your rivals haven't discovered yet. Yes, it may a while to reach them since your explorer ships will essentially need to use impulse power, but that's not a high price to pay for discovering a unique system.
A Vodyani hero who can be recruited and become a commander or governorAnd as Endless Space 2 develops throughout Early Access, they will start including more planetary systems and galactic bodies. Hopefully, we'll get to see quasars, binary star systems, black holes, wormholes, and all kinds of stellar objects that will make Neil Degrasse Tyson giddy.
That said, controlling your population and making sure they are satisfied is important too. Your population isn't a monolith, and many of them will have different competing philosophies in your government like pacifists, militants, scientists, merchants, ecologists, and religious sects. If you spend your influence wisely and carefully, you can begin to enact laws that bolster the rate of production of a particular resource that you want to concentrate on, be it military defense, scientific endeavors, or peace.
This is where having a dictatorship may actually be to your benefit, since you can pretty much enact whatever laws you want without any dissenting opinions. (Sigh, democracy.) Of course, democracies have their benefits too, allowing you to have a stronger diversity of populations who might be good at different tasks—division of labor and all that. I'm hoping that Amplitude Studios adds some kind of benefit to having a spread of political parties, or else it will be to the player's benefit to put all of their influence into one party and that's it.
Epic space battles are epic!Amplitude Studios plans to feature eight factions by the time Endless Space 2 officially launches. In the build I played, there were four options: the Lumeris, a theatrical, deal-making race who aren't warmongers but has a touch of '70s mafia attitude if things get rough; the Vodyani, a vampiric and religious race that wishes to assimilate and subjugate all that it touches (sort of like the Cultists from Endless Legend); the Cravers, militaristic, consumption machines that must feed the hive and care not for talks of peace; and the Sophons, a diminutive race of scientists who just want to do experiments but aren't afraid to get out the giant energy guns if they're backed into a corner. Whom you choose will generally determine which path to victory is best suited for your race.
Since the developers suggested that new players use the Sophons for their technological prowess, I did so. But that meant forgoing a lot of battles since the Sophons are fairly scrawny and weak on the battlefield. The one space battle I did encounter, though, was quite theatrical, as all space battles will be. Both sides can choose a general strategy from a playbook, not unlike a football game, and then watch a dynamically generated cutscene with battleships firing lasers and missiles at each other until one side is victorious. We'll need to see how combat develops as the game goes through Early Access.
On that note, Amplitude Studios hasn't revealed an exact date yet for when Endless Space 2 will be available on Early Access, but it likely will be sometime this month (in September). The developers, particularly Creative Director Romain de Waubert de Genlis (what an awesome name, by the way), believe that a game should only be in Early Access for about six months. So we can expect that within that time, the game will be taken through its paces by galactic wayfarers—and I will be one of them.
