I had a crack at Eador – Genesis a while ago. An indie strategy game with a lot of simple charm and depth, it impressed me. And I mentioned at the time, there was a glossy sequel in the offing. Now it’s here!

I had a go as soon as I got it installed. I really enjoyed the first one, which apparently didn’t enjoy as wide a distribution as it deserved until it recently hit the big time on GOG. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting of this newer one. It’s got all the charm, depth, intelligence and irregular hexagony tiles as the first one. Hurrah! Although, well, it’s really got all the same things as the first game. Like, exactly the same.

There was a nagging feeling as I played the tutorial level of the campaign. Going back and checking, it was correct. It’s word-for-word identical in terms of the story. I think the help panels are a bit clearer, but even they rang a bell. Not that I read them too closely. I knew what I was doing, because the game is the same as last time.

Perhaps I’m doing it an injustice, there may be vast additional levels of detail layered into the late game that I haven’t seen yet. It also felt less unfair than the original was, a bit more forgiving of rookie mistakes. But also slower to play, as the 3D graphics take a little longer to do their thing, something that’s particularly noticable in combat. There, the units really crawl about. They look great doing it, but it’s a bit America’s Next Top Sloth. But I don’t need to go on at length – go and read my original review. It all holds good here.

I want to stress, this is still a good game! Worth playing, and great to see they haven’t broken anything that didn’t need fixing. It also looks great, rather than something I might have played in the late nineties. I’d still say it’s well worth a go. But you could basically go and read my initial review. There’s nothing new here that I need to talk about, other than the graphics.

Given I can buy the original for £4, whereas the shiny new one costs £12.50 (prices based on GOG, converted from dollars), I guess it totally depends on how highly you prize looks over substance. Personally, I don’t think the improved look is worth the extra cash, especially for long-term fans of the series who might be expecting more of a sequel, but that’s just me. I’m all about internal value over looks. Just ask my wife.

‘You may not have requested it, but I’m going to go ahead and send you a copy of Snowbird Games’ Eador: Genesis. I’ll call it, say, Master of Magic in Russia. The game is the labor of love for one Russian developer, Alexey Bokulev, and the game’s recent launch on GOG.com marks the first time it’s really been widely available… but if you’re a fan of turn-based strategy games with a bit of RPG flair, I think you’ll dig it.

Hit me up if you have any questions!’

Sure thing, PR guy! I’ll hit you right up! Hitting PR guys is so totally my thing, I really dig that!

The menu screen – ticks all the expected boxes

I’m a crushing cynic. According to my instinctive reactions, the only thing I’ll dig is a trench. Then I fill it with petrol, throw my childhood dreams into it followed by a match, and stand a couple of metres away in the flickering shadows, slugging back vodka from an unmarked bottle and snarling bitterly to myself. I’m not exaggerating. So imagine my disappointment on downloading Eador and booting it up to discover that the enthusiasm is well-founded, that this is a little gem of a game about which I’m hard-pressed to say much that’s mean.

The campaign starts with you in the shoes of a young apprentice type, being taken on his first tour of duty by a cheery older magician. He’s picked you out to learn the arts of magic and leadership, so off you trot to the nearest hexagonal tile to begin your training for world conquest. You must learn to explore the world, pick your fights, recruit your troops and arm your hero if you are to become all that he intends.

Nothing graphically striking here, but certainly nothing to grumble about. If you’re used to fantasy strategy games like this, it’s a very clear and simple interface.

And so begins a saga of turn-based, fantasy 4X strategy. Sure, it’s a little generic. If you know classics like the Age of Wonders, Heroes of Might and Magic or even King’s Bounty, you’ll be in peaceful and familiar territory. Nobody has reinvented the wheel to create the shattered world of Eador. You strive against other immortal masters to conquer the many shards of Eador. On each, you have a central stronghold with an upgradable set of buildings to generate income, troops and more upgrades. And your armies are led by heroes of various standard templates, from the skeleton-raising necromancer to the sword-swinging warrior.

Tile by tile, you must conquer the land whilst gaining gold and experience, that your mighty heroes may be able to crush your rivals and hear the lamentation of their women. If  lamentating women floats your boat, anyway. Personally, I can’t think of anything more likely to raise my hackles. A slower approach is to bribe your way across the map. Or use spells. Or all sorts, really – this game loves giving you options. Millions of them. There is a deep deep strategy game here, more than I’ll ever get round to coming to terms with.

Spells, as shown in the spellbook here, provide a dizzy wealth of special abilities and options.

The interface is nicely animated, albeit pretty old fashioned. Colourful panels give you quick and easy information with cheerful artwork. It’s fairly instinctive, but the campaign tutorial is also excellent. It lays out information at a user-friendly pace without getting too slow or preachy. The tutorial, the campaign and even the game are also full of well-written, tongue-in-cheek humour. I really like it that if I try to send my hero to an inaccessible tile, I have an option of two dialogue boxes to close the panel. One says ‘typical, just my luck’, the other says ‘Damn loafer!’

You can buy out most new tiles if you want to avoid combat. You can instead train you hero up by exploring each tile, gradually revealing a number of tiny dungeon instances full of loot and monsters, or new shops you can spend in or loot. Once a tile is fully explored, which takes a while, it grants a bonus to income. Turn by turn, little moral dilemmas often crop up – help an influx of new immigrants with new gold, or enslave them all as workers. Or send them packing. You want to play as UKIP? You can.

Your hero will always give you an honest opinion of your chances in a fight. He’s usually pretty accurate, too. These slugs will shred you.

Combat is also hex-based, but also full of detail. Plenty of different troops and abilities to tinker with, from poisonous spiders to deadly fiends to armoured swordsmen. All very D&D, again there’s nothing startlingly original, but it’s comfortable, friendly and fun. I crushed my first opponent’s vastly superior army by trapping them in a bottleneck where they could only fight my harpy queen a few at a time. She’d been boosted with a couple of spells, making her extra tough, but I knew she’d never last. Which is why I’d made a dark pact with evil powers, so that when she died, she was replaced by a terrible fiend. What the harpy started, the fiend finished, along with the army of skeletons I raised from the bodies of the foe.

It may be old graphically, and maybe the sounds are nothing to write home about, but that means it runs fast and smooth. You can get through hundreds of turns quickly and enjoyably. The humour lifts and lightens the game, and there’s great forum support over at Snowbird, the developer. They’ve got funding for a graphically up-to-date sequel through Steam’s Greenlight program, which is about to enter beta now.

Combat screens are bright and a little clumsy, but the information is all there, all easy to find and very clear. And kind of endearing, to be honest.

The only gripe I have is that I couldn’t take screenshots with FRAPS. That’s really it. It’s not an easy game, either, come to think of it, it takes patience and thought. That’s very much a plus to my way of thinking, though. I don’t like an easy win, even on ‘easy’ settings.

I like this a lot. Simple yet deep, with strong writing and a clearly avid fan base. It’s been a while since we got sent something so unexpectedly good. And it’s very affordable, at a mere $4.79 on GOG. Obviously I’m bitter that I can’t froth and rant while I savage the game, but that probably makes me a better person. Damn you, trendy PR guy, for improving my mood and making me once more face the sunlit realms with renewed optimism. I both salute you and this work, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing how the sequel shapes up!

Here’s what the sequel is looking like so far…

The End of Flesh? Sounds bad. Better fly into the sun and hide.

The Enhanced Edition, which my original copy automatically upgraded to on Steam, is the same game as the original. It’s subtitled ‘End of Flesh’ on account of the new playable faction, the Loa, a faction of Borg-like AIs who presumably aren’t keen on organs and whatnot. They’re able to reconfigure fleets on the fly and live on barren planets useless to the others, I’m enjoying using them. Especially now everything works. No random crashes, the menus make much more sense, the tooltips  provide more help than a blank box saying ‘insert tip here’. It’s all good.

Except the game, really.

I won the battle at Alpha! Great! Which one’s Alpha and what was the battle there?

Most of the things I originally liked about it hold water, to be honest. It’s big, detailed and ambitious. It requires a lot of thinking to get very far. It looks good, especially during big space battles. If you’re willing to work at it, there’s a lot to love in here. But good lord, do you have to work at it.

It’s slow. Not just in terms of a 4X strategy game, where you need to plan ahead and really think about what research or exploration you’ll do first. Hitting the end turn button can deliver a wait of up to five or six minutes, even on a system like mine that’s no slouch. Most of this seems to be the computer auto resolving AI actions, so if you play against other people or smaller numbers of enemies, you’ll probably be fine. But go for a full house, and it’s interminable.

That bottom battle, with the four anonymous participants, I have to wait an extra minute at the end every single turn for that to resolve. Frustrating.

Research and exploration, big parts of the game, are both laborious. Not only is the tech tree is randomised, so you can’t always get the same technologies, but many options require a first-pass research attempt before you can even begin trying to invent them. Realistic, yes, but not a great game mechanic. If you’re investing time into the game, having it all thrown back in your face makes it harder to enjoy. Waiting six turns to know you can’t have those new torpedoes really stings.

Stay on target… stay on target… Oh hang on, it’s behind us.

Exploration is similarly tough. Sending fleets anywhere uses an abstracted mission system, where you kit out a fleet, point it in the right direction and send it off. Once they’ve gone, they won’t come back until they’re done, or until you cancel the mission. It’s ruthless, although again realistic (sort of) – if you’ve sent everyone away to explore and then get ambushed in your home systems, they’re not going to have a homeworld left to land on. Surveys will run off without completing if they get attacked and don’t beat the enemy in a single turn. Sensible, but frustrating.

Doubly so as combat, despite looking fantastic, still suffers from a  murky interface. And a single turn of combat is often inconclusive, as your ships are easily dented but hard to finish off. You see a fair bit, too, with random aggressors turning up to bombard you with meteors, pirate raids, alien menaces from beyond the stars and so forth. Most of these are inconclusive irritations rather than the fun they could be. Some are game ending nightmares, of the Dwarf Fortress Fun variety. None of them can be predicted.

A pirate fleet looking good amongst lost stars. The combat consisted of five minutes of them pursuing a freighter they couldn’t catch, utterly pointless and very dull.

Yes, you can turn a lot of this off (or up, if you’d rather) when you set up a game. And personally, I enjoy a lot of this graft, it does feel strangely authentic. But I’ve been working at learning this game since release. If it feels a bit more intuitive now, it’s because I managed to play it when it was broken through perseverance. I know about the world I’m playing in through extensive forum and wiki reading, not because the game teaches you. There are good tutorials on how to manage the baffling menus, but they’re out on the net, not in the game where they’re needed.

So it’s slow, confusing, cruel and often tedious.  It does repay your time, eventually. That moment when a fleet of boarding shuttles captures an enemy dreadnaught and turns it on its friends? The last minute successful defense against a lethal ghost ship?  Watching the fire of your enemies’ once-deadly leviathan patter off your now-upgraded lance cruisers? It’s good stuff at heart. I still get that one-more-turn feel from it, as well as the glow of an obscure game mastered that Dwarf Fortress gives, actually.

Here’s one way to clear asteroids – fly nose first into them. No more nose, but no more problem.

There’s almost as much detail and faith in the player in here. Not as much charm, somehow, perhaps because the way it looks makes you expect something more user-friendly. I don’t think the developers are stopping work on it, though, so maybe in another year this will be a sleeper hit. Plenty still to do before it becomes a true Total War in Space game. I’d love to see a custom battle option, for example, to play about with the great fleet fights.

There’s a lot of loyal love on the forums for the game, and I can definitely see why. That love comes from a fairly specific subset of gamers, I suspect. This isn’t a mass appeal game, and it certainly has plenty of flaws that should put most strategy gamers off. If you’re looking for a long term challenge, though, and enjoy complex tactical thinking, this could work for you. I like it despite the broken bits, masochist that I am, and the gameplay values below reflect that, but I stress that this is my personal taste. I strongly doubt many people would share it, and I don’t exactly recommend the game widely as a result, but please prove me wrong! I’m a masochist, I like the warm glow of self-destruction.

Warm glow as drives and life support fails – model’s own.

Ramirez! Go to all the orange checkpoints!

So welcome to the planet Vitris-47, where an oppressive regime controls everything and war is always present. You are part of the resistance, you’ve somehow managed to get your mits on an advanced mech and you’re going to use it to take the fight to the bad guys, the Idalin Empire. Who I believe make medicine for ADHD as a sideline. Handy, as you’ll need some to pay attention to the utterly bog-standard sci-fi backstory.

The story of the liberation of the planet is played out as you stomp through the levels, shooting apart the enemy and collecting cash for upgrades. Between missions, you can spend cash on a variety of bodies, legs and guns for your mech. If you collect enough stars in a level, you unlock a special ability, such as extra resistance to collisions or a free-floating gun for your hovering sidekick. Which is a living crystal entity called a Tikky. Of course.

Well, the mechs certainly are sapphire. More than that, it’s hard to say. Or care.

Gare was originally a free browser game, a neat little WSAD-controlled point and click shooter. It’s now available as a full desktop version, a step the Brazilian developers have taken in order to… what? Cash in, I guess. I seem to recall playing the browser version once, and I don’t think there’s a vast difference in the two. But I could be wrong.

It’s a pleasant enough shooter that vaguely recalls ancient games like Blood Money or Gauntlet in some ways. A top down shooter in which you navigate a maze, shooting everything in your path, with collectable upgrades or cash for said upgrades. You can play it your way to an extent, as a slow and heavy mech or a fast and scouty one, by using different chassis. The guns come in a close-up spray-and-pay version or a long range sniper gun, with an intermediate version between them. But they don’t really feel very different.

‘Gare’ is short for ‘garage’, something no good mech game is without. That’s no guarantee of quality, sadly.

Nothing does, in fact. The enemies do have different powers and guns, even appearances, but they’re small and monochrome and all sort of look the same. Your mech is so much more powerful than they are that even on higher levels, there’s only a limited sense of challenge. Just pound away at them and they eventually explode. The levels have a smidge of gameplay difference, sort of, in that sometimes you’re patrolling, sometimes you’re liberating colleagues, sometimes you’re trying to kill a boss. But it all comes across as the same – trudge round a level killing everything, ticking objective boxes. Even the star collection thing isn’t a challenge – three stars on every level, and they aren’t really hidden, you just need a bit of patient grind to find them.

See me? I’m the one in the middle with the green and blue health bars. See everyone else? They’re the exploding ones. I think. This is supposed to be a night mission, so it’s extra dark.

The sound is good – twinkly hypno piano beats with digital-sounding blasts and explosions. The graphic style draws so heavily on Tron that words like ‘borrowed’ or ‘influenced’, as deployed by the developer, feel a little underpowered. Try ‘nicked from’, that’s about the level. But it does look good, at least.

Overall, it’s strangely relaxing to play. Almost muted, I’d say, I didn’t find much excitement in it. I could see the appeal if this was a free browser game, certainly, but it’s not. It wants to bill you $9.95 for the pleasure. That’s not a lot, true. You won’t get a lot for it, though, just an uncomplicated if good-looking game that will keep you entertained for an hour or two at best.

Should you talk about this? I’d vote no, not really. There’s plenty of other games out there for a similar cost that you’ll get a lot more out of. Or find an abandonware copy of the original Gauntlet. ‘Elf needs food badly’ is a classic. This is a pale imitation.

Assuming your mission was to install a sense of numbing tedium in the reviewer, that is.

Anyway, along came Dark Asylum – a point & click horror adventure game which, despite not being this author’s genre, looks pretty damned interesting. Any game like this required a lot of thought in the art and sound departments and it sounds like Jon Draper has those covered. Given the low price point that he’s pitching this at, if you’re remotely interested in this type of game we suggest you have a look and pledge at least a fiver.

Have a look at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/678002393/dark-asylum-0

Before digital distribution kicked in, the only media for software distribution was physical. Floppies gave way to Zips, which moved to CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMS and all that Dual-Layer stuff. Blu-ray kicked in right at the end of the physical media period, offering a paradigm shift in mobile data storage. Driving these increases in storage requirements were bigger and more complex pieces of software – including games – as well as higher and higher resolution video. As a guideline for the gaming industry, sales of physical music media declined by 46 percent in the ten years between 1997 and 2007.

As a result of this orderly and controlled physical packaging of products, games were highly polished before release. Any ‘downloadable content’ was small and limited to updates. The first disruption came with ‘direct2drive’ websites (concurrent with Steam’s beta period in 2004), who were able to offer expansion content via digital download. Of course, relatively narrow Internet bandwidths (at least, by today’s standards) limited the size, scope and market impact of these.

Game studios were therefore focused on creating a ‘finished product’. Games development periods were longer than is standard today (years as opposed to months), and thus offered a more immediately rewarding experience out-of-the-box. Emphasis on replay value was high, with difficulty curves often steeper and additional content available via in-game ‘unlock’. The unlocking of additional material is something that has clung on to games even today – more content is unlocked by completing special features – but at the time, such elements were often vast, game-changing components (like ‘multiplayer mode’) or at least of novelty value to the player (such as unusual hats). There were often quick, cheap methods to unlock large quantities of game content: cheat codes. Companies such as Equalizer even successfully carved out a niche as physical media containing a host of ‘pre-game’ hex hacks.

Updates and patches were naturally digitally distributed, and thus were kept to mainly bug fixes. Of course, with the rise of direct2drive and some games companies’ penchant for retailing expansions as digital downloads (we’re looking at you, Bioware), the notion of digital distribution had started to slowly seep in. Games studios could create a product safe in the knowledge that they could later provide ‘unlockable’ media for a price.

The advent of DRM (Digital Rights Management) hastened the onset of web-focused distribution. Many CDs (such as Half-Life 2) required extensive patching before they could be played, and even then needed to periodically connect to the Internet to verify the content as bona fide. In 2008, Mass Effect consolidated SecuROM for DRM authentication via a server as standard. Consumers gradually became used to a slew of downloads accompanying a game. The emergence of Steam as the pre-eminent digital distribution system from the release of Half Life 2 (mid-2004) and the gradual increase in user-end bandwidth removed several barriers to widespread user adoption. EA believes that digital distribution will be the pre-eminent form of games sales “in the coming years”.

So where does this leave games development studios? Because most users on digital distribution networks have authenticated financial details with the vendor (i.e. debit or credit cards), studios can monetise their products in a variety of unique ways. ‘Free-to-play’ games have been around since the mid 1990s (Neopets, anyone?), but notable MMORPGs such as RuneScape have seen limited success in upselling users to some sort of fee-paying membership for additional content. The App Stores (and other digital distribution portals) provide a quick and instant way to upsell from Free-to-play to paying membership without further subscription. It’s very easy to spend your money, especially when playing games in your spare time on your tablet or smartphone.

This means that increasing numbers of games have social elements – which benefit from friends’ recommendations, a secure sales technique – or offer entry to the game at a ‘free’ point. Some games require a small initial investment but use competition to move players to pay for items that will allow them to act on a par with their online peers.

An offshoot of this is the emerging presence of tablets and tablet PCs in the core gaming market. Without digital distribution in place, this could never have happened – there are no mainstream tablets with optical drives necessary to engage physical installation media. Some companies chanced USB key distribution of their product, but this is inevitably inferior to on-device purchase. Tablets, with their ecosystems of App Stores full of ready-to-pay consumers, self-marketing and self-selling sales portals and networks of media coverage offer a much richer retail opportunity than distributing games via physical media. Of course, as a result, smaller studios can create and release more niche titles with minimal overheads.

For some gamers, the experience of digital distribution amounts to nothing other than frustrating hours on the phone with their ISPs’ ‘help desks’. Admittedly, there are potent disadvantages and valid philosophical criticisms of the digital distribution system. Although I do sympathize with gamers who do not have access to reliable internet service and do acknowledge the validity of some of the criticisms, upsides of digital distribution outweigh its downsides. For example, gone are the days when gamers had to search through several stores just to find a decent copy of an old PC game – platforms such as gog.com offer games from years long gone. Furthermore, providing small indie studios and ambitious programmers space to operate and grow is a worthy cause and is a good enough reason for this lowly writer to argue for them.

The year is 666X. A powerful youngster, wise beyond his years, awakens from a B-Ball induced coma aboard the mysterious dwarf space ziggurat Necron 7, held captive by the Malevolent A.I. Cuchulainn. With no memory of who he is or where he came from, he adopts the identity of X114JAM9 and sets off into the Post-Cyberpocalyptic Wasteland in search of the enigmatic Cyberdwarf, the only one who can reveal to him the terrible truth behind his forgotten past and make sense of his harrowing future.

The announcement promises “a Barkley 2 Kickstarter campaign later this month”, which should be worth checking out. What’s even more worth checking out is the original Barkley Shut up and Jam!: Gaiden.

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It’s a comedic role playing game where you take the role of Charles Barkley, the last B-baller on earth after the great B-ball purge. To say any more would ruin the set up of the game, you really just need to check it out yourself. Don’t be deterred by it’s graphics or anything else about it; Barkley Shut Up and Jam is both an incredibly funny game, and at the same time, a very good game.

It’s available for free on the Tales of Games site or from the Barkley page. Alternatively, you can download it directly here.

I’ve played this game quite a bit both before release and after – mostly in multiplayer with James Wells, another author at Mana Pool and during this time there are quite a few things we’ve learned.

This guide is correct at the time of writing, based on Endless Space v1.0.30.

Custom Faction / Race Design

In absolutely all cases, a custom faction is better than the pre-made ones. You can tailor the race to your play style and the type of game you are playing and it’s generally the best way to go. A lot of choices are perfectly viable, but I would recommend you think of what you want to achieve with your race and try to design some synergies between your chosen traits. In order to get the best selection of points for positive traits, there are a few negative traits you can pick which really make no difference at all to your chances. I recommend you always choose them:

• Dust Impaired (Hero) – Makes the abilities your heroes can use during battles more expensive. Honestly, this makes no difference at all. You’ll rarely use them and if you play correctly you’ll have plenty of dust once this becomes an issue.
• Sloppy Sawbones (Hero) – Increases the time it takes for your heroes to heal after they are injured. Several comments. First, the fleet with your hero on it will rarely get completely defeated. Secondly, if this happens you have bigger things to worry about than waiting a few turns longer to get the hero back. Administrative heroes will never suffer from this, it’s a no brainer.
• Feeble Warriors (Defense) – Reduces the defense on your systems. You should focus on not having your systems invaded in the first place – if this does happen, having additional points to spend in both industrial capacity or fleet/combat strength is far more valuable to deal with this. The only effect is that your systems take less time to surrender during an invasion, generally by a few turns at most.
• Optional if you are short a few points for your ideal traits: Deep Roots – Makes it harder to gain ownership on systems. It’s not the end of the world, but it can be a bit of a pain later in the game if you’re engaged in massive wars. Still, it’s the best negative pick after the ‘must haves’.

Always pick a custom race. Seriously.

There are so many options/viable strategies for positive traits that I don’t really want to give you a template for this as you should try and work around your own strengths and weaknesses. I’ll highlight a few exceptionally good choices though:

• Optimal Structure – +30% Ship Size. This is in my opinion the single best trait for fleets/ships/combat as it’s completely flexible for all strategies. Why only have an offensive or defensive battle trait if this would work for either? Perfect synergy with anything else which boosts ship combat or fleets in general. Combining this with for example additional hit-points provides some very dangerous ships indeed.
• Optimistic – Morale is very important in the early to mid game, when you’re expanding rapidly and occasionally wish to grab a planet with a negative anomaly. (Alternative: Naive – which gives a boost based on number of people you’re at peace with and can stack up rapidly if you’re the peaceful type. Naive can provide more morale per trait point than Optimistic under the right circumstances)
• Scientists - Research is the key to everything. Boosting your research is therefore an excellent idea. I wouldn’t max this unless your entire race design is based on science all the way, as the cost is a bit steep.
• Dust or Huygens ring - Having some dust to purchase your early heroes provides quite a boost.
• Legendary Heroes - Never underestimate this. With this you can have Administrator heroes at level 3 immediately, you can pick the first labor perk, followed by the perk which gives +15 flat production. This is an enormous boost at the very beginning of the game as your home world will have twice the production compared to anyone else.

As for affinities, most choices work as long as you ensure your traits and affinity have a good synergy:

• Avoid United Empire, Cravers and Pilgrims. They’re just not that good compared to the others.
• Automatons can be nice if your race is designed around production.
• Sowers are nice as you have far less food issues on lower tier worlds and get a few nice unique production technologies.
• Sophons are a good pick for an increase in Scientific Output.
• Hissho are a powerful pick if you are extremely aggressive. Design your race accordingly.
• Horatio are very situational but can be a powerful choice. Legendary Heroes is a must-have.
• Amoeba is highly underrated and extremely powerful for early rapid expansion as you don’t waste time searching for nice systems.

Nox Aeterna, one of Evil Tactician’s Custom Races

Early Gameplay

• Set your Home world exploitation to  Food – unless you have the sower Affinity in which case you set it to Production.
• Scout your constellation immediately and don’t stop until you’ve discovered all of it. At that point, have scouts sitting at wormhole ends to meet new races and pop out as soon as you have the right technology.
• Colonise the next system as soon as possible, generally the first one you come across with a habitable planet.
• Research N-Power Plants first, the tech which gives you a flat +10 production among other production bonuses. This helps your colonies build up more quickly.
• The next research is almost always one of the bottom tree, depending on the planets in your surrounding systems. You want to colonise most of your constellation before other players do so. Your target should be to go straight for 5-6 of the best available systems at the earliest opportunity. In a small constellation with no other players, colonise all of it. You only have to colonise 1 planet per system for now, the rest can be done by the colony itself.
• The other research is a matter of going through the available tech trees in turns, simply keep going at the ‘cheap’ technologies. The only early exception is the wormhole technology in the bottom tree. Depending on the size of your constellation you might want this sooner rather than later, so you can push into the galactic core and grab good systems before other players do. If you started with the Amoeba affinity, wormhole tech is a priority as you can fly straight to the nice systems.
• Establish which system will be your ‘ship production’ system early on and focus this system on  industrial output. Systems with more planets and bonuses which increase production are ideal.
• Early on, dedicate your home system solely to population growth – remember that colony ships can also be used to transport population.
• Grab an Administrator hero (production/food) and start it in your home system. Once the hero has a few levels, don’t be afraid to rotate him through your systems to help them build up early on. This hero will eventually be placed on your ship production system to boost it’s massive production even further, but right now you want your colonies kick-started.
• Once you can afford it, grab a Corporate hero. This hero will be stationed in your home system – unless you found an amazing system which would function better as trade and science hub. Focus this hero on dust/science output as much as possible.
• Your third hero will be used for your fleet and actively patrol your empire and blow annoying things to little pieces. Pick one with fleet/pilot skills.
• Your hero selection might not be ideal – so adapt accordingly. If you have no administrator, simply grab a corporate and start with the perks which increase labor, then swap him to with perks later on. There are enough levels to effectively swap roles later in the game once you gain access to more heroes and I’ve had great games with only heroes of 1 type.
• Once you have the first combat technologies, design a ship and start building at least a couple. Keep an eye out for pirate activity and make sure you can counter at the very least their fleets. To this end, your initial ships are fine with only deflectors as defense as ballistics is all the pirates will use. Avoid wars, focus on creating the foundation of your empire. (Unless you are Hissho, in which case an offensive strategy and conquering systems beats building up slowly)

Mid to late Gameplay

• Mid game arrives much quicker than you think, so prepare accordingly.
• Your home system will at this point change from population growth to trade  and science hub. Change it’s focus accordingly.
• You need an active fleet with a hero – ideally utilising the maximum number of command points available to you.
• Colonise additional planets within your systems once you run out of space. Don’t colonise too soon or you will suffer from negative morale.
• You might want to grab the bottom tech trait which enables moon surveys and removal of the mediocre anomalies. This will help you make some vast improvements to your systems as the improvements based on having explored moons are now outright fantastic.
• Ensure you get the technologies which increase your scientific output. In particular the one which gives a flat +40 science to your systems as it’s a lovely push to your science! Really, don’t slack on science!
• Try to acquire a cooperation treaty or two. Even if you’re planning to be aggressive, don’t fight too many wars at once, as there’s no benefit to doing so.
• Colonise and reinforce choke points. Until late game, most travel will occur through the warp lanes and you can defend accordingly.
• Don’t build system improvements that don’t provide benefits. Seriously, don’t. If you have no moons, the moon based improvements are a waste. If you have no planets of the type required by an improvement, don’t bother with it. Sounds obvious but many people waste so much dust.
• Don’t build defensive improvements everywhere. You don’t need them. Focus on defending frontier worlds. The dust you save from not having defensive improvements on systems away from borders with opponents, can be used to maintain more ships. Which you can used to actually defend said systems properly.
• Keep an eye on your tax levels. Adjust this frequently. Lower taxes makes for more productive citizens – don’t keep the tax higher than you need to keep your dust balance positive.

Ship Designs

How you design your ships makes a fair bit of difference to your performance in combat. Luckily, designing ships is incredibly straight forward in Endless Space, and tends to come down to a pretty standard set of tactics. There are two types of ship design:

1. The hard counter. Generally required when you are behind in technology or are otherwise struggling to defeat ships from a specific opponent/design. These ships are generally designed for 1 task only and their survival comes second to completing their mission.
2. The general multipurpose design. The ships you will build when you either don’t know the opponent, or are ahead in technology. These are meant to fight anything rather than be specialists against a specific type of opponent. These ships are generally designed for survival.

The ship design screen in Endless Space. Not much to it, really.

The hard counter

This one is easiest. These ships are meant to fight a specific opponent, so you must know what you’re trying to counter. These ships require your best weapon type, preferably two different weapons to avoid getting countered easily. Defensively – you stack only the defense against the weapon you are trying to counter. Reflectors for Ballistics, Shields for Lasers and Flak against Missiles.

The best hull type for this type of ship is the Destroyer. As each race has different names for their Hull, look for the ‘Small’ (1cp) hull type with -20% bonus on weapon modules. This enables you to stack more weapons on these ships. Cheap and cheerful is the motto here. Stack 5-10 defense modules (depending on opponent / relative tech levels) and fill the rest with weapons. Either Ballistics OR Lasers + some Missiles to throw your opponent.

If your tech level is very far behind and you don’t feel you can easily hard counter – your last resort is cheap Missile boats. Stack nothing but Missiles on these ships and pretty much keep throwing them at their fleets in batches. Don’t send single ships as that wont really accomplish much.

The general multipurpose design

As I said, designing ships is pretty easy. First pick a hull, generally the largest you have available as having sufficient defense and hitpoints is key. Note the bonuses on the hull types, you generally want ones which give bonuses to the type of module you have equipped the most. You can swap hulls during design (within the same size) so compare your space when you have filled it completely. You might be able to squeeze a little more out of a different hull.

Then;

• 1x Intelligent Tools. Additional ship repair every round – this increases your effective hitpoints in combat enormously.
• 1x Engine Module. Take the best of second best. The exception is smaller ships with a lack of space. On bigger ones, the engine is pretty handy unless you’re trying to squeeze out more hitpoints or weaponry.
• 1x Smart Cargo. These are brilliant for obvious reasons: they give you more space on your ships. They make your ships more expensive but quality > quantity.
• 1x Accelerated Magnetics. Brilliant increase to your defensive capabilities.
• 10x Armor
• 10x Kinetic Plating
• 10x Shield
• 10x Flak
• 15+ Beam Weapons
• Fill any remaining space with additional weaponry, or armor if you feel your ships need a little more health.

Anyone who is behind in weapon technologies will struggle immensely against Dreadnoughts build like above. This doesn’t work well on small ships. For Medium sized ships, adapt accordingly by halving the number of modules. You can’t go wrong with Dreadnoughts though and unlocking these should be a priority in the mid game.

I recommend you build at least 2 different type of ships for your fleet and mix their primary weapon types. This will make it a lot harder for your opponents to hard counter your ships. Obviously an ideal fleet carries all weapon types, so has 3 different designs, but this isn’t always feasible.

Terraforming and Exploitation

Some of the most raised questions are in regards to Exploitation and Terraforming. Most people don’t really know what planets are suitable for what purpose, so a few bits of information will go a long way.

Tables originally created by messej at the Endless Space Forums.

 Planetary Output per Planet type, and Best Exploitation:

No Exploit	App					Total						Best
Asteroid	-15	5	10	11	8	34		>3<	>3<	>3<	>3<	37
Helium	-15	5	6	8	14	33		3	3	3	>4<	37
Hydrogen	-15	5	6	17	9	37		3	3	>4<	3	41
Methane	-15	5	15	8	9	37		3	>4<	3	3	41
Barren	-10	6	6	11	6	29		3	3	3	>6<	35
Lava	-10	6	11	8	6	31		3	>6<	3	3	37
Arctic	-5	6	6	8	9	29		3	3	3	>5<	34
Desert	-5	6	11	7	5	29		3	3	>5<	3	34
Arid	-5	7	8	13	6	34		4	3	>6<	3	40
Tundra	-5	7	7	10	10	34		4	>5<	3	3	39
Jungle	0	9	9	10	6	34		>5<	>5<	3	3	39
Ocean	0	9	7	10	8	34		>5<	3	3	>5<	39
Terran	0	9	7	12	6	34		>6<	3	4	3	40

Simple put, use the exploitation marked with arrows for each planet type. Some planets are suited for multiple exploitations, and your strategy in the star system will dictate your choice. E.g. prioritise  food when your system still has free population slots, otherwise focus on Production, Dust or Science. Don’t slack on production in underdeveloped systems, you can always swap their exploitation to Science later.

Maximum population size by planet type, both at the start and after all technologies/improvements:

Last but not least, your late-game choice of planet type/terraforming depends on what exploitation you want to focus on in each specific star system. On your ship production system(s), focus fully on production. On the rest, Science is usually the way to go unless you’re struggling for Dust, but your terraformed planets should bring in enough to meet all your needs. If you do struggle, develop 1 system with only Arid planets set to Dust exploitation as that will bring in a lot of Dust. The below starts with the worst planet types and ends with your ‘ideal’ planet.

You cannot directly terraform from a tier 4 to a tier 2, you need to go through each tier to get to your final desired outcome. You obviously need to posses the required technology.

Terraforming

• Food: Any -> Terran.
• Production: Lava -> Desert -> Tundra -> Jungle -> Terran*
• Science: Barren -> Arctic -> Tundra** -> Ocean.
• Dust: Desert -> Arid -> Terran

* At end-game a Terran with Farm Exploitation is better than a Jungle with Production, due to the food to industry conversion, until then, the Jungle/Production will trump it.
* Use only to progress to the next tier, never leave a planet at this for this output type. Don’t bother terraforming this if you cannot reach the next tier immediately.

In a word, yes. Kickstarter’s unique model – a model that hasn’t really been possible before now, excepting very large social enterprise funding schemes – works like a good old staple of the written publishing industry: the advance. Back in the day, when the written word was king, a publisher would offer a writer an advance – a sum of money based solely on a proposal –  to go ahead and support his or herself while writing. With the growth of publishing and distribution agency models (like the Amazon Kindle Store and Apple’s iBookstore), advances have started to squeeze. Publishers are happier to offer a cut of any potential proceeds rather than stump up money at the beginning of writing. As a result, starting up writing is difficult. No publisher is willing to pay you a fee while you write.

Take a look now at the games industry. In a way, video games have always been agency-managed. Before large agency distribution systems, like Steam and Apple’s App Store, individual retailers acted as agencies on the behalf of the publishers. They sold the product and took a cut of the profits. Online distribution is no different, except that the volumes are larger. When the volumes are larger, the cuts are slimmer. That means that any starting developer has to gamble quite a lot on investing time making a game – there’s a high chance that they’ll see no returns whatsoever.

Advances have never really existed in the video games world. Publishers have either tended to absorb promising studios and have them work as salaried in-house employees, or negotiate distribution deals (now rarer as developers can typically ship directly to the ‘retailer’, or digital distribution portal). Very, very rarely would a publisher provide funds for a small studio to work on a project.

Of course, this is where Kickstarter radicalises the video games development industry. Advances are now a thing. Indie developers can have an idea and pitch it to a crowd. That crowd could then provide an advance to keep them clothed, fed and housed while they work on the idea.

But the industry disruption goes deeper than just the advance. Marketing, outreach and sales are no longer handled by the publisher – they’re handled by the Indie dev team themselves. Kickstarter provides marketing – not least to your immediate backers, but also to friends and families of those backers – as well as direct sales (‘pledges’ of financial support are typically rewarded by games licences, as well as novelty items such as T-shirts). So what we have is a no-strings advance that carries satisfied customers from the word go. It’s a massive change.

So that’s why Kickstarter is so exciting for Indie developer studios. Now add to it the growing simplicity of video games programming overall, with most games development environments now able to run on modern travel-friendly laptops instead of static desktop machines or specialised gaming computers. Devs don’t need to whittle away at a game locked indoors, with little hope of financial reward or recognition. Kickstarter’s streamlining of fundraising is complementary to rapid indie games development – it removes uncertainty. As we’ve known for years, the threat of uncertainty is a serious barrier to creativity. And that’s why Kickstarter, along with all the other awesome technology cropping up right now, is heaven for indie developers. Get over there and start supporting projects you fancy, right now.

Anyone is free to download, play and use the contents of this mod in their own mods – provided that credits are given accordingly. We highly appreciate the inclusion of a link to this page.

Click here to go straight to Downloads.

Imperium Aeterna Mod

This mods adds and changes the following in your Endless Space game

• A new Tech Tree, adding 5 Technologies (with custom icons!), which each give a new System Improvement (see screenshots).
• An overhaul of the Combat Modules, which adds more depth to ship design (see v1.4.0 release history notes  for changes).
• Reworked the Ship Classes, so there are now 5 distinct classes instead of minor variations (v1.5.0).
• Added ship defense bonuses to Engine Modules, making them more viable in ship design and providing a real benefit in combat.
• Planet Creation, a new technology near the bottom of the Expansion tree which enables you to terraform Asteroids into Barren planets.
• PlanetSize Terraforming, new technologies which enable you to increase the size of planets.
• Coloured Anomalies – making it much easier to spot positive and negative anomalies on the system view.
• Coloured Planet Types – making it much easier to distinguish between the different tiers.
• Coloured Exploitations – making it easier to distinguish between exploitation types.
• Coloured Tooltip Benefits – making it easy to instantly spot what benefit applies to what aspect of your empire.

Click any of the screen shots for a larger version.

Installation Instructions

(Windows 7 – for any other OS, find the equivalent folder where your Endless Space user data is stored.)

1. Download the latest version of Imperium Aeterna at the end of this article.
2. Extract the Archive. (Download 7-Zip for free)
3. Goto: C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\
4. Create a folder named “Modding”
   e.g.
   C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding
5. Place the entire ImperiumAeterna folder there.
   e.g.
   C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding\ImperiumAeterna
   C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding\ImperiumAeterna\Index.xml
   C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding\ImperiumAeterna\Folders
6. In Steam – Right Click Endless Space -> Properties -> Launch Options
   Add: +mod ImperiumAeterna

When you launch Endless Space, the bottom left of the title screen of the game should show you the version of Endless Space you are running, with the version of the Mod right below it. Have fun!

Updating to a New Version

Updating is extremely straight forward, but here are explicit instructions for those who asked

1. Delete the ImperiumAeterna folder in C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding
2. Place the new ImperiumAeterna folder there instead

That’s it – you should still have the launch option present in Steam, and we don’t change this between versions.

Save game compatibility between versions is not guaranteed, but is rarely a problem. You’ll run into minor problems between ‘bigger’ version changes as the AI might become confused.

Uninstalling or Disabling

Disabling the mod is incredibly easy. None of the original game is ever touched, so this is perfectly safe.

If you wish to play Vanilla:

• In Steam – Right Click Endless Space -> Properties -> Launch Options
  Remove: +mod ImperiumAeterna

To play the mod again, simply add the launch option back!

If you wish to Uninstall permanently, add the following step:

• Delete C:\Users\Your User Name\Documents\Endless Space\Modding\ImperiumAeterna

Release History

Missing versions have never been released and were development versions. We’ve tested many things which have been scrapped for various reasons.

v1.5.0

• Reworked the Ship Classes so there are now 5 distinct classes instead of minor variations.

v1.4.8

• Made mod compatible with Endless Space v1.0.38.
• Moved all language references to Localization file to create support for other languages.
• Added Dyson Sphere by Tiaximus as 5th Orbital Improvement.
• Included PlanetSize Terraforming by Tiaximus.

v1.4.2

• Added defense bonuses to Engine modules to make the higher ones more viable in Ship Design.

v1.4.1

• Custom Weapon Icons for the top tier weapons, following existing vanilla design.
• Custom Icons for all new ‘Orbital’ System Improvements.

v1.4.0

• Rebalanced Weapon and Defense Modules in the biggest overhaul yet
• Renamed almost all Weapons
• Added MIRV (swarm) type Missile Weapon
  • Launches 5 warheads
  • Takes 2 rounds to reach target (medium speed, only 2 intercept chances)
  • Lower damage than other missile weapons
  • Designed to swarm and overwhelm defenses
• Changed Missile type Missile Weapon
  • Launches 2 warheads
  • Takes 3 rounds to reach target (slow speed, 3 intercept chances)
  • Best crit chance of all missile types
  • Less predictable damage due to larger min/max damage range
• Changed Torpedo type Missile Weapon
  • Launches 1 warhead
  • Takes 1 round to reach target (fast speed, only 1 intercept chance)
  • Predictable, flat damage output
• Added several dual turret options among the beam weapons
  • These have reduced damage per shot to compensate and work great against smaller targets
• Added new Beam Weapon ‘Deathray’
• Added new Kinetic Weapon ‘Black Hole Generator’
• New custom icons (which follow the existing design) have been created and included for both, and will be used in a new version as soon as the developers enable this functionality for custom ship modules.
• Added secondary defense type to the Defense Module types
  • Flak deflects the occasional kinetic slug
  • Shields intercept/absorb low level missiles
  • Deflectors deflect/absorb some beam weapon damage
  • These effects are not present on the first 2 levels of each defense module type as they’re intended to provide benefit against a secondary weapon types several tech levels lower than itself.

v1.3.0

• Added the Planet Creation Technology.

v1.2.4

• AI will now Research the Technologies and build the Improvements.
• Fixed the ‘Population Bug’ – The population capacity increase was never added to Planets.
• Rebalanced the Construction Costs after a few Multiplayer Games.

v1.2.0

• Integrated Colored Anomalies.
• Changed all Names & Descriptions of Orbital Entrenchment.
• Drastic Re-balance of the Improvements.
• Made the naming consistent with the rest of the game / tech trees: capitalisation, etc.
• Fixed the system improvements and techs so they don’t have text ‘overflowing’ in odd ways in the game.
• Changed the Improvement icons to ones I felt were more fitting, each has its own now. (Tried to keep them consistent with the improvements – unfortunately custom art work for System Improvements is not yet possible in mods.)
• Created custom Tech Icons (yay pixel art!) for the 4 technologies.

Credits

(Click any of the links to go to the an appropriate page of either the mod or person in question)

Imperium Aeterna incorporates the following mods either partially or entirely:

Orbital Entrenchment Mod by Igncom1 – Provided the initial basis of the 4 ‘orbital’ technologies and their improvements. The version used in Imperium Aeterna has evolved a lot since then, undergoing re-balancing, bug fixing, custom tech icons and more.

Colored Anomalies by Luminality – Incorporated entirely. We’ve made extremely minimal modifications to this mod, mostly to make text easier to read.

PlanetSize Terraforming by Tiaximus – Incorporated with small modifications to costs for balance reasons.

Special Thanks to:

Tiaximus from the Endless Space Modding Community, for direct contributions to Imperium Aeterna.

ThorTillas from the Amplitude Studios Development Team, for helping track and resolve a bug with modding improvements.

Ail from the Endless Space Modding Community, for pointing us in the right direction with the same bug.

James Wells from Mana Pool, for endlessly playing and testing the mod for balance and bugs.

LFFPicard / Gary Thwaites from Mana Pool, for playing and testing the mod in his very first Endless Space games. Poor guy doesn’t even know what Vanilla looks like!

Medieval Gamer / Meghan Burton, another good friend of mine who also played and tested the mod in her first Endless Space games.

Anyone else who indirectly contributed to this mod.

You, for reading this far!

Imperium Aeterna Downloads

Latest Version:
Download Imperium Aeterna v1.5.0

Older Versions:
Download Imperium Aeterna v1.4.8
Download Imperium Aeterna v1.4.2
Download Imperium Aeterna v1.4.1
Download Imperium Aeterna v1.4.0
Download Imperium Aeterna v1.3.0
Download Mana Pool Mod Pack v1.2.4
Download Mana Pool Mod Pack v1.2
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