Endless Space, Endless Space Adventures

Endless Space was released in mid 2o12.  It is a turn based strategy game about space adventure and combat.  It presents a kind of civilization aspect in that there are many different ways to win.  Some of them are: expansion, diplomatic, supremacy, economic, and scientific.  It is a very long game.  With the standard game pacing, (it can be sped up or slowed down) then a single game can take around 24 hours depending on how the player acts.

Endless Space has many playable races, including the ability to create your own custom class.  With lots of different abilities to choose from, this leads to a lot of options and the ability to perfect your own unique play style.  Most of the gameplay revolves around managing your economy and fleets.  You have a resource called dust, which is used for pretty much everything.   Improvements that you build on systems you control cost dust to maintain, as do ships you build.  Taxes bring in dust at the cost of happiness, called approval.  Approval is very important.  If people are ecstatic they will work harder.  There are significant drops in FIDS (Food, Industry, Dust, Science) production if approval is lowered.

As you research things, you will unlock more powerful ship hulls, increasing your combat capabilities.  It is possible to annihilate an opponent early on if you can build ships strong enough to smash whatever they send at you.  The computer especially has a very hard time against this tactic.

Battle is played out in three phases, long range, mid range, and melee range.  There are three types of weapons, missiles, beams, and kinetics.  They are effective at long, mid, and melee range respectively.  There are three types of defenses, flak, shields, and deflector plating, which are defend against missiles, beams, and kinetics, respectively.  Each player in the combat is able to play a tactics card for each round of battle.  Some cards counter others, and each one has a different ability.  The key is to play the right card at the right range.  For instance, if the enemy has a lot of missiles, then playing a card that decreases missile damage is a good idea at long range.

Overall, Endless Space is a lot of fun.  It provides endless replay value by randomly generating the map every time you play and allowing you to use a lot of different races and combinations of traits.  It has a lot of gameplay options to tinker with as well.  I would highly recommend it if you’re a fan of slow paced strategy games.  After perfecting your strategy against the computer, join a match online and pit your skills against other players.

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