Trade is an easily abused system, an inexorable steamroll that will soon see you earning upwards of 30,000 Dust per turn. This brings me to my next point: Victory conditions aren’t at all balanced, with the Economic victory being particularly easy to achieve.

You could make it two-thirds of the way through the game without even researching the technologies required to gain access. And that would be a huge mistake, because the Marketplace is one of the easiest ways to earn Dust (the galaxy’s money). Another menu-within-a-menu, the Marketplace, allows you to buy and sell luxury and strategic resources in a virtual stock market, but the system is barely touched on in the tutorial and sort of alluded to as a side note. Ship customization, a major focus of the tech tree, is an impenetrable wall of confusing icons and numbers with barely any reason to engage. Other missteps are definitely design flaws, and could’ve been avoided or mitigated. This problem isn’t limited to Endless Space 2 though. You’ll spend way too much time hovering over different technologies, trying to figure out what exactly you should be prioritizing. But in Endless Space 2, what does “Xenobiology” mean for your fledgling empire? Or “Inter-Species HR”? Yeah, I don’t know either. Playing Civilization, you know exactly what you’re in for when you research “Artillery” or whatever. The tech tree is the worst of the lot, owing in part to the same problems as any future-centric game: You know what you want to do, but not what the tech is called. Certain systems are buried three or four menus deep, waiting to be discovered and exploited, but it’s easy to overlook entire aspects of the game without realizing your mistake. Sometimes Endless Space 2 is so busy being pretty it forgets to actually convey any of the information it wants to convey. As I said up top, Endless Space 2 does have quite a few issues.įirst and foremost is the aforementioned interface woes. It makes you want to play the other factions, to see their stories even when the game itself occasionally flounders. It’s good space opera-pulp sci-fi with a heart to it.

Lumeris endless space 2 guide