THE BIG "how does it work?" THREAD

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

I'm just going to start this since we're getting tons and tons of new players often asking the same questions and as a general FAQ for how things work players have discovered, which I also wish I'd seen when I started playing, so veteran players pls think of things you had to figure out or details players are trying to figure out.

When you set colony development level you cannot change it once you set it. Level 2=25 of one type of luxury, 3=75 each of two, and 4 is 125 each of 3 luxury units. Once you set which resource it uses it stays that way through the whole game.

Guarding an ally system will not cause diplo penalties or blockade their system. Blockades will however stop any ship you're in a cold war or hot war with in that system, including logistic ships moving food and pop units around in, and yes you can blow them up and receive dust.

Diplomatic pressure allows you to make demands of anyone you're not at war with, and similar war momentum allows you to impose a truce where they impose war reparations per turn.

Diplomatic imbroglio won't break an alliance. In fact alliances in ES2 unlike ES1 are extremely solid. They will however make demands of you and you can make diplomatic demands back. Once you make a diplomatic demand, basic or advanced, it resets to neutral. Having a system under another player's influence zone gives them +8 to diplomatic pressure up to a maximum of +10/turn. You can buy yourself more time before hitting the maximum pressure and gettng a demand by giving away resources and technology pushing it back towards neutral. Basic demands are resources. Advanced demands include switching who's suzerain/aka lord of a minor faction or giving 3 population and other options as well as a demand for resources. Why do you want to avoid that? Because penalties for not acceding to demands include thing like -75% influence or -15% on all FIDS for 15 turns for basic or -30% FIDS etc for advanced refusal.

The colony priority drop down menu on system management screen to your left does not set AI build order but switches population types between different colonized planets. For example if you set priority to science it'll do things like switch Sophon units to cold worlds where they get a science bonus, or for approval switch Horatio units to hot worlds to get their bonus, and if you have a colonized steppe and barren say, then the AI will move everyone off the barren where you get -8 per pop to steppe where it's -1 iirc etc. It only moves population units between worlds on system, but pay attention to the numbers--sometimes it's better to do this manually.

When you're invading systems if you move a fleet to that system the troops on that fleet will be added to the invasion on the next turn.

Trade routes are formed between your trade HQ and subsidiaries but will not connect through nodes unattached by wormholes/starlanes and will generate a small fraction of dust, research, and luxury resources. Other empires won't form routes with you unless they have also constructed a trade subsidiary (so if you have to give/trade tech with them, trade tech is a good option). AFAIK a trade agreement with another allied empire lets you get a small % bonus on all their systems too but I could be wrong about this. To form the actual route you need a clear line from your systems to theirs with no hostile systems between and for them to have a subsidiary and agreement.

[Stanley]

Nice stuff. Any more tips?

[Aidanya]

There are different tiers of luxury resources. The higher once take less than the basic ones per upgrade. This incentivizes you to use them for the higher tier developments. And it is worth doing too as they usually give better bonuses.

Some other random tips:
Heroes level up on planets when buildings finish. And the size (or production value) matters so if you are building a big wonder type building its worth asigning a hero there before it completes. It will surely level up from it.

Use a spaceport to populate new systems. after getting the first development upgrade you can send population to other systems. When a systems population is full its food is waisted. Instead send some population to newer systems. so the full system has new room to start making new population.

Continue on the above point. Try finding a system that has very high food and use that to populate systems with less or no food at all (do keep an eye on food upkeep needed or they will leave).

Update your battle tactics from the fleet management screen. The Turtle and power to shield tactics are fine but the other one should be replaced asap with something else, like anything else. Get Lucky is really good with laser weapons and Barrage fire with missiles.

Balance the weapons on your ships. Do not make all missile ships or all laser ships. The AI will counter you. Balance your ships and just pick the battle tactic with the right range to counter your enemys weapons and you will do fine in 95% of the battles.

Your money getting really low or have a very low income? Check the upkeep of your heroes. They can be very very high. Just unasign one if you need too.

The AI cheats on higher difficulties. If you notice that the AI is ahead of you or has more ships it does not always mean you are doing something wrong. The AI get boosts to their production an science.

Defending a system an enemy is trying to colonize is a good way of stopping it. This can be done with any ship with a weapon even scout ships.

Sell any materials and resources you dont need on the marketplace. You can get some good money for them. Also you can buy very cheap heroes there.

[Luxordz]

Guess I'll just ask this here, I thought behemoths took a huge resouce upkeep and could only have one at a time (least early game) why do the unfallen have 2?

[Aidanya]

You can have more than one. I believe everyone can get 2 at some point (not really sure when the 2nd one gets unlocked). And than there is a building that raises the cap by +1 for every of these buildings you have. But it also doubles the upkeep on all behemoths. So technicaly you can get as many as you want but to many of these buildings and the upkeep gets insane.

Also the Hissho have a hero skill that increases the cap if that hero is the political leader of the leading faction in your government. So the hissho can get more and they also start with 1.

[IamLegend]

Just wanted to know how to get better dust generation. And what the most important techs are for trade routes. I`m started to get hurt by bad dust generation on my current game. Even do i`m doing great on most other erea`s.

I`m a big civilization player and want to know if there are simular statistics. To see who has best army, most colonies, best economy, science etc. (in a graph)


(ps: lets make this tread a sticky)

[Aidanya]

Dust generation mainly comes through good upkeep management. Upkeep takes an insane amount of dust per turn. There are many many buildings you can scrap at some point to reduce the upkeep. Like some food buildings when the system is full. Or some of the starter buildings that give flat bonuses (+10 industry wont do much if your planet is making 1.6k). Most of the time happiness buildings are overdone as well and not every system needs defensive buildings. This all adds up.

As for trading routes i am no expert so someone else will have to answer that.

There are not any statistics on who are the best at something as this is not as clear cut as in other games. I can however give you a short overview on the races and what they are good at plus the ship designs.


Empire (+1 influence per population):

More of a jack of all trades faction. And influence can be spend to buyout stuff. With a lot of influence and buyout power they can keep up more laws than other factions and can really choose on how to play. If you want to play science you can buyout most science buildings and get it build up fast. Wanna play military just buyout a whole fleet in a turn. This also means they are better at a low industry than other factions with their easy access to laws and industrialist population. This faction is very forgiving on mistakes or shortcoming you might have on your planets. Later They get to change into either a science faction or military one or stay the same.
Their expanding rate is normal and look for well balanced systems.

Ships: They have more weapon slots than most (even colony ship gets one). But are below average on the utility slots. The small ships (1cp) are weaker than the rest with 1 less slot total. So they prefer bigger sized ships (carriers are one of the strongest out of all factions).


Sophons: (+1s and +3 on cold):

So a total of +4 science on cold planets. Also they get better starter buildings to give industry and food boosts on cold planets. They are the factions that like to colonize cold planets for massive science boosts. They also get +2 ship movement and are really bad at planet ground battles. So they are pretty much science all the way. They have a very strong military main quest line which makes their ships a lot cheaper to make. Also a late game science law gives a very good dmg boost. With easy research on better weapons and ship hulls they are not that weak on the military side. Their major problem is that industry and dust usually dont go well with cold planets. So they do need to balance that out and not forget it. For colonization it is pretty standard but good mix of cold planets + some industry is what they want (snow+arid systems would be perfect).

Ships: The base hulls are high on defense modules and low on weapons. Utility is low on attack ships and high on coordinator ships. The upgraded hulls for the ships always add a multi-choice slots making them more flexible. So its recommended to stay on a ship design untill you can get the upgraded hull.
Their carries can have 7 defense slots if they want making them very tanky ships Only unfallen beat it. Their main weakness is bombers squadrons as they do not have enough weapon slots to do both weapons and strike squadrons.


Riftborn (+5 ind +5 dust +5 sci)
Riftborn are machines. So they do not need food. Therefore They want to be on planets most others avoid at the start of a game. They are also a lot happier on sterile planets. As they need industry to make new population this is their main focus. Lava/ash planets are gold for them. They also need some barren planets or they have no science to speak off. This is a real strengths are u usually dont have for fight over contested good systems. What you want other usually stay away from. They expand very fast but take some time populating or building up a system because increasing population takes time away from building buildings. But fully saturated systems are the best in the game due to their high stats per 1 population. So quite a late game faction. For each population you have the cost for the next one increases. So if you can try find a system with 1 lava planet. Its very cheap to make population there and send them off with the spaceport to larger systems where it is much more costly to make it aka a population factory system.

Ships: They are very very specialized. This means an attack ship almost only has weapon slots and a defense (coordinator) ship has almost only defense slots. They also have no multi-choice slots whatsoever. They also have more slots but lower health than other ships making them very glass cannon ships.


Lumeris (+1 dust +3 dust on fertile):

The gold (dust) faction. Despite what many ppl say i think this is the best starter faction. They get really good dust income on fertile planets so use that to the max. try to get as many of them as possible. They expand very fast because they can buy outposts. This slows down a bit later when costs get higher. Focus on fertile planets and setting up trade routes (1 more subsidiarty than the rest). They also get +20 happiness. Very easy faction to do well on. Their problem comes when there are not enough fertile planets available. They struggle there quite a bit. With the pacifist government they have some pretty good laws. With a questline that gives +25% industry on ecstatic they are good there. and another +30% on systems with a hero i would suggest buying tons of heroes from the marketplace. You most likely have the dust for the upkeep. Making them a very good industry faction. Since you are mostly on fertile planets food should be no problem either. That leaves science. They are not strong there and would not play them for science victory.

Ships: Pretty average and balanced (slightly below average on de basic hulls) but they get +1 more slots form the upgraded hulls than other factions so suggest upgrading hulls asap (like sophons). making those above average and well balanced.


Unfallen (+2 food +5 food on fertile):

The food faction!! OMG +7 food per population on fertile planets. This is insane. expect your systems to be filled to the max in no time. Having said that this is pretty much all they do well. Look for planets that have 1 fertile planets and the rest sterile. This 1 fertile is enough food for the while system allowing them to settle the sterile planets easier and earlier than other factions. Their planet defense structures are much stronger than the rest and with the guardian population on some planets they are very hard to invade. Their expansion is slow but steady with the vines. Vineships need to be protected so they can really be punished early by a military approach. They get tons of bonuses by allying them with other factions so they do better in larger games. Their questline is underwhelming. They get terraforming to forrest. But this as mentioned above is not always what u want. This however does allow you to colonize full icy/hot systems you would normally skip by turning 1 planet into fertile.

Ships: Very tanky/defense heavy ships with lower dmg. Because of this short range weapons might be beneficial for them as they are more likely to survive the first couple rounds of combat. Pretty average over all with minor but some multi slot choices.


Horatio (+3 food +2 happy on hot)

The geneplicers. Sort of a design it yourself population. You can splice stat from other populations into your horatio consuming some if the population but adding its stats to all horatio population. So this makes it a very very late game faction. Early they are quite weak but splice enough populations and you can get very high bonuses. They get +1 population slot on every planet allowing you to have more of them as well. But every time you splice you need more food to maintain your population. Some really good populations to splice are cravers (good luck conquering one of their planets), riftborn, pulsos and Epistis. Sometimes its good to not immediately splice a population when possible because the loss of that population might be larger than the + 1/2/3 stats you get on your horatio (specially earlygame). With the increasing food cost keep an eye on that. Make sure your systems have enough food on them to sustain the horatio. Their ecological dictatorship allows you to expand a lot early as you can take every planet you want. use this for as long as you can and then you can switch to republic government type for double law bonuses. Because they have to eco laws that are very very very strong. They give +2% (4 if republic) industry and science respectively per spliced population. So with 5 spliced populations that is +20% industry and science and with 10 its 40%. Their starter planet is quite bad because its not fertile it misses out on some of the bonuses on early buildings. At 50 horatio pop 5% of your food is added as influance making it 1 of the better factions for cultural conversion. Also their manpower production is better than most. It is a viable option to play very defensive. As you probably already noticed its all about splicing and late game growth. They are by far the strongest faction late but the weakest early.

Ships: They have the least slots of all races but nearly all of them are multi-choice. So you can make whatever ship you want or need. But it will never be as strong as other races. So you have to be smart about it. Missing slots can be harsh on smaller ships (as a fleet of 7 small ships would be down 7 slots over another 7 ship fleet). But on the bigger ships this is less noticeable.


Cravers/vaulters
I dont really know these factions so well. Sorry someone else will have to do these

[Viktor]

Originally posted by Aidanya:

You can have more than one. I believe everyone can get 2 at some point (not really sure when the 2nd one gets unlocked). And than there is a building that raises the cap by +1 for every of these buildings you have. But it also doubles the upkeep on all behemoths. So technicaly you can get as many as you want but to many of these buildings and the upkeep gets insane.

Also the Hissho have a hero skill that increases the cap if that hero is the political leader of the leading faction in your government. So the hissho can get more and they also start with 1.

Every 4 tech related to Behemoths increase their limit by 1, you can see it putting the mouse over the Behemoth limit in the "ships" screen (Without having to build the building or have and Hissho in the goverment)

[AngryPancake]

In regards to Behemoths:

To research any behemoth related technologies. The players must first complete the co-op quest to research 23 military technologies. Without this quest no behemoth technologies can be researched.

After the quest is finished you get 1 free behemoth slot. You get 1 additional slot for every 3 behemoth related technolgies you have researched or you can build a specific improvement for it. BEWARE building the improvement will double the upkeep on all behemoths. So if you build it once you get 2x upkeep. If you build a second improvement you get 4x upkeep, then 8x upkeep etc. It rises exponentialy to the point when it will eventually cost thousands of dust.

There are 3 types of behemoths: Economic, scientific and military. As far as I can tell it only varies in module slot types, but you can fit any module to any behemoth.

Each behemoth takes 10 command points and cannot be assigned hero or be a part of a fleet.

Some technologie (for example ship hull technologies) improve the behemoth HP and slot power multiplier. (2x, 4x, 8x). This means that when you have 8x slot multiplier then every slot on the behemoth will have the same power as if there were 8 slots of the same type. For example weapon slots will deal 8x damage, but at the same time the construction cost for that slot is increased 8x. Eventually the mods will become quite strong. For example you can harvest 4x Quadrinix and Orichalcix by orbiting nebulas with fully equipped economic behemoth.

Eventually you will research specialization blueprints for behemoths (Juggernaut, Obliterator and Citadel). Juggernaut and Obliterator are in military tree and Citadel is in Empire developement tree.

After researching specializations you have to select a behemoth you have already build and click Specialize in commands. To specialize the behemoth takes fair amount of resources and quite a bit of dust. After choosing specialization the behemoth will become unavailable for 2 turns.

JUGGERNAUT
Changes the behemoth into military behemoth that works exactly the same as any other ship in the game. It can be assigned to fleets and heroes. You can choose one of two researches to improve it. One will make it all around stronger while the other will give it the ability to destroy all flotilas on a node where the Juggernaut is. THIS INCLUDES FRIENDLY SHIPS. Only ships in the same fleet as the juggernaut are immune. After the ability is used the juggernaut cannot move or attack for a few turns.

Researching juggernaut technology will unlock Tractor beam module. It can only be fitted to behemoths or carriers and it will prevent enemy fleet from fleeing battle.

OBLITERATOR
This is basicaly the Endless space version of Nukes. When you build Obliterator you can fire it on any system you have discovered with unlimited range. To be able to fire for free the Obliterator has to orbit one of your systems for 20 turns. You can fire it any time you want but it will cost you 150 Orichalcix and 150 Quadrinix if you dont wait 20 turns. When fired the shot is visible on the map and it takes certain amount of turns for the missile to reach targeted system. When it reaches the system it will destroy the system star, all planets, all population, all improvements and all flotilas currently in the system. Obliterator has only 2 mod slots. Both are utility.

Obliterator can be improved by either increasing the speed of the projectile or reducing the charge up time by 5 turns. You can choose only one.

HOW TO COUNTER OBLITERATOR
There is a technology in Empire developement quadrant that will allow you to build a force field around your system. If the enemy obliterator fires on the system with forcefield around it, the impact will destroy the forcefield, 50% of the system population and 50% of system improvement. Planets will survive.

HOW TO COUNTER THE FORCEFIELD
If you have 2 obliterators, try to fire the missiles in a way that the second missile hits the target 1 turn after the first one.

CITADEL
Defensive specialization. Gives defensive bonuses. And exclusive system improvements. Sets a blockade on the system where it is deployed without the need of the fleet being present. If there is a space battle in the system the citadel will fire on the enemy fleet while being untargetable. When deployed the Citadel is consumed. Also counters obliterator better than the forcefield.

KNOWN BUGS
Sometimes the Juggernaut just doesnt feel like firing at all during space battle.
EDIT: After some more testing I can tell that the bug is purely visual and affects exclusively projectile weapons. You cannot see the Juggernaut fire but the damage itself does go through.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by Autism Simulator:

Just wanted to know how to get better dust generation. And what the most important techs are for trade routes. I`m started to get hurt by bad dust generation on my current game. Even do i`m doing great on most other erea`s.

I`m a big civilization player and want to know if there are simular statistics. To see who has best army, most colonies, best economy, science etc. (in a graph)


(ps: lets make this tread a sticky)

Depends on your faction. UE lets you buy things with influence. On the common market this means you can do things like buy ships with influence then sell them for dust. Keep an eye out for your improvement costs. Later in the game it is very easy to be running -200 or more just on improvement costs per system. Trade works pretty well, but requires a tech. All the dust generating stuff is on the right or east quadrant of the tech tree and boosts the pacifists. I find that earlier on in the game is mostly where keeping your economy and everything else afloat gets super tricky, like first 40 turns, which often means just absolutely need to research dust generating techs and building some of those earlier on to not start going bankrupt. And as mentioned before, you absolutely should be sure to use the market place. Sell off your extra resources there and keep an eye on the spot prices. Each time you sell it increases supply thus lowering price, and likewise buying increases demand and increases price.

It actually would be kind of cool to have some ability to spy on who's selling and buying what to wage a dimension of economic warfare on your rivals because you can completely crash prices with a major offload. Buying all of one resource to try and keep a monopoly then price gouge every other empire would also be a really neat additional mechanic. Like if you knew a rival empire was relying on sales from a luxury resource it has a lot of, it would be kinda cool to then crash their prices and try other tactics to try and strongarm their economy. Something like how the Saudis flooded the international oil market and sold at a loss just to maintain cartel control and completely crashed Russian and Venezuelan oil who were moving in.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Originally posted by Aidanya:

Empire (+1 influence per population):

Oh you know what speaking of this, what the hell are you supposed to do if you wind up in a border tension situation with Empire? How exactly does the influence zone system even work? In ES1 it was pretty much just based on FIDS output of the population and a couple of techs, but here they actually made influence an entire new resource. So what goes into generating and growing that influence zone? Is your influence point generation the most (or only?) relevant thing in terms of expanding a system's zone of control? Because I'm sick and tired of the diplomatic pressure and needing to either give stuff away or accede to horrible demands but I don't want to just offload my systems. How do you win the battle of influence and territory zones against UE?

Originally posted by BlackSun:

When you set colony development level you cannot change it once you set it. Level 2=25 of one type of luxury, 3=75 each of two, and 4 is 125 each of 3 luxury units. Once you set which resource it uses it stays that way through the whole game.
.

Originally posted by Aidanya:

There are different tiers of luxury resources. The higher once take less than the basic ones per upgrade. This incentivizes you to use them for the higher tier developments. And it is worth doing too as they usually give better bonuses.

OH and also, no, you don't lose the previous system development bonus when you upgrade to level 3 or 4. System development stacks. So if say you used 25 Eden Incense to grow your colonies into Level 2's and got +30 influence from it, and then you upgrade to level 3 and use Transvine and Dustwater instead, you still keep that +30 bonus from the Eden resource.

[Aidanya]

Originally posted by BlackSun:

Oh you know what speaking of this, what the hell are you supposed to do if you wind up in a border tension situation with Empire? How exactly does the influence zone system even work? In ES1 it was pretty much just based on FIDS output of the population and a couple of techs, but here they actually made influence an entire new resource. So what goes into generating and growing that influence zone? Is your influence point generation the most (or only?) relevant thing in terms of expanding a system's zone of control? Because I'm sick and tired of the diplomatic pressure and needing to either give stuff away or accede to horrible demands but I don't want to just offload my systems. How do you win the battle of influence and territory zones against UE?

Yes the more infliance a planet produces the bigger the circle.
There are a couple ways of generating influance as non empire. Some heroes have realy good influance generation skills. So make sure you put them on your border systems. The other one is buildings and the planet specializations. But the best way is like u already found out and use eden essence (luxary rescource in one of your system developments). It gives +30 influance on your system. This is usually enough to defend. You could also go to war with the faction threatening you. This stops the conversion and if you conquer the planet you nutralize the threat.

Originally posted by BlackSun:

OH and also, no, you don't lose the previous system development bonus when you upgrade to level 3 or 4. System development stacks. So if say you used 25 Eden Incense to grow your colonies into Level 2's and got +30 influence from it, and then you upgrade to level 3 and use Transvine and Dustwater instead, you still keep that +30 bonus from the Eden resource.

You keep the previous developments and bonuses when u upgrade further but the higher you go the more the upgrade is gonna cost.
You have 3 upgrades upgrade lvl 2 lvl 3 and lvl 4. At the same time you also have 3 tiers of luxary rescources. Jadonyx, Eden, spuds and everything are tier 1. Hydromiel, Gossamer and stuff are tier 2 (and they also require a higher tier tech to be able to find them). and dustwater and bentic gems are 2 examples of the tier 3 resources and they again require an even higher tech to find.

Now to get to lvl 2 you only need 1 resource (25 of a tier1 and no idea on other tiers as you usually do this before you can access the higher tier luxaries).

To get to level 3 you need 2 resources. But the cost go up. You need 75 of a tier 1 lux or 40 tier 2 or 20 tier 3

For the last level it goes up more you need 125 of a tier 1 60 tier 2 and 30 tier 3

so using tier 1 rescources for the higher levels takes a long time seems hardly worth it.
All the bonuses stay the same over the upgrades so using the same resource in all 3 level could get u 3 times the bonus. But tier 1 usualy give a flat bonus that is good early game but becomes less late game (another reason not to use them for the last one). The tier 2s give a bonus per population. Much better for later in the game. And the tier 3 give very specialzied bonuses to stuff like trade and influance of which most are % based bonuses.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

I have a quick question and don't want to spam the forum with new threads but how does Autonomous Administration work? It says "+1 systems occupied before triggering expansions disapproval on Empire" but the flavor text makes it sound like it's only on the system you build it.

So does this improvement increase expansion limits by 1 empire wide each time you build it? Does it stack? Like if I built 3 of them, would that increase my colonization limit by 3 systems?

[CursedPanther]

Is there a system upgrade to boost luxury resources(not minerals) production? So far I can only find the upgrade on certain heroes assigned to the system.

[Frogsquadron]

Cool thread, well-deserving of a sticky.

[Viktor]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Is there a system upgrade to boost luxury resources(not minerals) production? So far I can only find the upgrade on certain heroes assigned to the system.

There is a Planet Specialization that increase the resource income from that planet (strategy and luxury). I think it is investigated in the industry/dust tree tech.