They were supposed to add something to help this, but I rarely saw those agreements. I don't think there's anything apart from military considerations forcing me to maintain peace. Still, even in Civ5 I often think 'this guy sells me Ivory and it helps my happiness so I have to maintain those relations'. Those huge dividing quests sort of help, as well as special planets - those are nice, those give a galaxy some structure. But you don't care about their resources (it's more convenient to trade on the market), you don't have about their tech outside of the power of their military (and it's mitigated by the power of military not being as defined by tech as usual, ground troops have separate pseudotechtree, many modules are found through exploration), combat plays by some arcane rules so it's hard to do something about countering their armies apart from adjusting your kinetic/energy attack/defense ratio. It's a common problem in 4X games that you don't care about other people other than the size of their armies, but here they're complete black box. Or a Colonization game where you rarely care about other colonies. It feels more like a simplified Anno game sometimes than a 4X.

AI is bad.īut you're right about solitaire feel being one of the biggest problems. Those maps are beautiful but they never made them functional: I could only look at them in schematic mode, and even then it's hard to see anomalies and many features. The game is gorgeous and innovative but, like Endless Space 1, it felt like a basis for a great game. Surprised by universal acclaim of Endless Legend.

Terraforming endless space 2