It’s not perfect yet, but still under heavy development. Let me know if you get a chance to play it :)
I haven’t tried it (because of time and I’d have to pay for the alpha), but I can already see this won’t live up to the MOO legacy.
Master of Orion was a very simple game. The complexity came with the repercussions of your earlier decisions (as it does with Civilization. Your first turns are founding a city but that decision has massive ramifications throughout your game.).
There is too much junk in the game, too much bloat. For example, why is there an ‘approval’ in the game? This is a space conquest game, not a politic game. I don’t NEED the approval of my subjects. I’m the one with badass space ships who can rain spherical blasts of annihilation. The problem with strategy game makers is that they keep trying to ‘add more’ which ends up hurting the flow of the game. I don’t want to stare at menus all night. The reason why RTS games took over from the turn based ones is that RTS games are bloat free (until RTS game makers made the same mistakes the turn based game makers did and add more and more bloat).
Master of Orion’s complexity was reserved for the ship building. You could design your ship in any way. It was player choice of how far they wanted to delve into the guts of it.
Above: Master of Orion was a very simple game with complex player decisions. Bad strategy games are complex games with simple player decisions.
My biggest complaint about these 4x strategy games is that they use space lanes. Master of Orion never used space lanes. You could pick any star and travel there. If we’re using space lanes, why not play a land based strat game? A game in space should logically be using the rules of space. Time and distance should be the limits and not these awful ‘space lanes’. Master of Orion could do this, and it was released in 1993 nearly twenty years ago.
So why don’t these so-called successors to Master of Orion behave like MoO and not use space lanes? I suspect it is because of the AI. Programming the AI is the hardest part of these games and using space lanes makes it much easier.
Think about the 4X space sim. You don’t need background music. You don’t need much in sound effects except for some sci-fi sounds for explosions and laser beams (easily and cheaply made). You don’t need graphics since it is space with dots as stars. And since people rarely play these games in multiplayer, you don’t even need to balanced.
But what do you need? Extremely interesting AI. I almost made my own MoO game since no one else seemed to be doing it right, but it was the AI programming that stopped me. The AI is the largest obstacle.
Above: Space lanes will cause Endless Space to not become a successor to Master of Orion.
It is EASY to add stuff and put in more features. I wish the makers of these games would start off their alphas with the bare minimum and focus on the fundamentals. Focus on the flow of the game.
I expect don’t expect Endless Space to succeed where all these other 4x space games have failed.