14 DAY TRIAL // Amplitude Studios just released the turn-based strategy game Endless Legend on Steam Early Access, offering a kind of fantasy-infused Civilization experience, which set off my radar like a Cold War era nuclear missile launch.
That can only mean one thing, it's time to dust off Endless Space and see if the endgame is still as disappointing as I remember it to be.
While I love strategy games to death, there is nothing that puts me off faster than a bad interface that gets in the way of what you are supposed to do as a Supreme Leader. And you can't even have heads rolling in the sand for the offense! Humbug!
Anyway, the most jarring issue with this type of pan-galactic conquest games is that although you possess the reins of the entire empire, your job remains as menial as when you were merely king of your lowly starting planet.
As you expand, your job transforms from glorious conqueror and civilization leader to glorified accountant and colony planner. Sometimes you can't even find competent generals to fight your battles, it's like the pilots can't be bothered to fight unless you constantly poke at them.
While that's fine and dandy in real-time strategy games that are based on twitchy gameplay and high APM, it becomes aggravating when turn-based strategy games don't have proper late-game interfaces and adequate automation features. So, I guess I'm off to get angry and disappointed.
One thing that starts off as an interesting and normal part of gameplay is colony building, because when you begin a game and only have four planets to control, you're desperately trying to min-max everything and micromanage every little detail of production in order to get the most efficient results.
Although at the beginning of the game this is a prized feature, by the time you have a proper empire on your hands, trying to micromanage 20 planets becomes a chore, even more so if you plan on founding new colonies which have to be manually built from the ground up.
This problem is somewhat sold by having governors that take over for you and direct the settlement's efforts toward a certain pre-determined goal, but sometimes they do more harm than good.
What would solve this issue would be the option to create some macros that could be applied to new colonies, a sort of magical recipe that gets a colony up and running before more in-depth decisions will set its course toward a certain specialized path.
What Endless Space did well was to have unique environments, making you choose between the available improvements and not simply building everything in every colony. What it did bad was having not enough of that.
Another issue was that although for the most part the interface was good in the beginning, the improvements soon started piling up and the lack of a filter made it cumbersome to scroll through all of them in the small improvements window.
I've been ignoring these small issues ever since I started playing Civilization and Master of Orion, and with every new game that pops up, a little part of me hopes that the empire management tools will become more advanced than back then and I won't lose interest in the games once I start expanding.
It was the same with Civilization, expanding past the seventh city started to become tedious, especially since a granary usually takes around 1500 years to build. Why not get some expert builders from the other cities to kickstart production?
One way this could be worked seamlessly into the game without altering the core experience would be similar to how fleet expansion works in games such as Sins of a Solar Empire, you can expand beyond a certain threshold and research new and improved methods to handle bureaucracy and large scale asset distribution.
But until the perfect game comes out, or at least one that manages to solve not having to command your each and every ship by hand when you want them to rally to a certain location, I guess I'm stuck slowly muttering my displeasure while I conquer the galaxy yet another time.