The greatest stories are the ones you make in your mind. It’s one of the key reasons why I personally believe the strategy genre gets away with being relatively unchanging over the years. Look beyond Endless Space’s rich (and wonderfully batty) sci-fi exterior, and you have the same gameplay mechanics as Civilization or any 4X strategy game going back to the first, but whether you’re playing as Amoeba, or the dude who cloned himself so that he could spread his perfection to the stars, the tapestry of the Endless Space allows you to form stories in your head that can rival any Bioware epic, and that is why strategy games are, in their own way, endless.

Endless Space is a 4X strategy game with all the usual suspects – exploration, expansions, exploitation and extermination…. Exploration is fairly light – you literally just find systems for you to colonise, and eventually you’ll encounter other races, but everything else makes up for the rather simple game maps. The real game is in managing your empire – there are many different planet types in the game, and you can’t colonise them all at once (you need to research techs for the more ‘advanced’ ones), and in addition to this there are strategic and luxury resources to consider, any planet anomalies that will affect performance… there’s a lot to take in, but the game isn’t punishing about it on the lower difficulty settings.

See? Right out of Battlestar Galactica or something… it’ll grow on you

The economy of the game is divided into four areas: Food, which governs the population growth on planets at a system wide level (the more planets you colonise in any one system, the more food you need to keep the growing population fed), Industry simply governs how quickly you can build things, from ships to planetary and system improvements. Dust is the in-game currency, and is only really used for speeding up production; healing heroes and using hero abilities (can be useful in diplomacy too). Fleets and planets need maintaining, obviously, but that’s a passive tax that you need to allow for when you’re managing your economy anyway – mostly you just hoard it.

Diplomacy is as good as any other game, we guess – aside from games that focus on diplomacy 100%, we never really feel that it’s ever an outstanding gameplay mechanic. Everyone exists in the state of cold-war when they first meet, and it will require the research of certain techs in order to make peace, trade, make alliances etc… The game is good at giving you plain feedback as to how your relationship is with each race, and when it changes, and it’s easy to figure out what actions will cause change. Generally though, as you grow and expand (because what else is there to do), the AI will take offence, tensions will mount and then they’ll probably attack you, as that’s what AI’s do. Anyone who’s ever played a game of Civilization will know what I’m talking about, and its much the same here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though as it could be worse.

You can create custom factions, with unique ‘traits’ to tailor your empire to how you want it

We’ve spoken before about combat in the preview – granted, it’s still not all that perhaps it could be, even Civilization gives you more tactical options, but to be honest it’s grown on us. If you look at grand-strategy games and how they abstract combat, we can’t help but feel fortunate that Amplitude at least tried to give good presentation. And ultimately the abilities you can choose for each of the combat rounds (Long-range, Mid-range and Close-quarters) give you that dynamic and tactical breadth to take engagements beyond the base ‘combat strength’ that every fleet has. You have to take into account what kind of ships are there, what kind of weapons they favour… missiles are deadly, and if you don’t pack enough counter-measures your fleet will get chewed up, regardless of your firepower.

There are three types of weapons – missiles (long-range), lasers (mid-range) and Slugs (close-range), and each weapon type has a countermeasure that can be installed on ships ( there are other defence and support modules, but only three offensive modules at the moment). Each race’s AI seems to have natural leanings towards certain weapon types, but there’s little racial diversity beyond the empire traits – there ARE race-specific traits and some races even have their own modules etc… but it’s not a lot, and everyone always has access to the same three weapon types. The exception of course is the Cravers, as they are such a unique race that they have several unique gameplay aspects, including technology.

Technology is divided into four areas, each with a theme but many of the games concepts are spread across multiple trees

Like most strategy games of this nature, there’s a peak… eventually, you’ll have researched everything there is to research, seen everything there is to see – even with the ‘random events’ that alter the playing field for everyone, and all that’s left really is to Win. Even then, your empire will reach a state of critical mass where not only is it just a matter of time before you win, but your empire will probably get so complex that you won’t have the energy to maintain it anyway. Like any good 4x game there are different ‘types’ of win conditions you can choose to alter the focus of the game, but hopefully the DLC will be swift and interesting.

Endless Space may not push any boundaries or possess much ‘wow’ factor, but it’s a very enjoyable 4X strategy game, set in a rich and diverse science-fiction universe that begs exploration. It’s no Sword of the Stars II, but then Sword of the Stars II is no Sword of the Stars II either. Given the choice, we’d rather have a more limited, but realistic game then be promised the moon and only get given a cardboard cut-out instead. From here, the folks at Amplitude have given themselves a great framework from which to expand and improve on the base game, and like we said during the preview we hope the numbers are good enough to fund all their future endeavours.

Top Game Moment: Getting to the later stages of the game and seeing your big Battleships and Dreadnoughts be brought to bear for the first time. Although still, not a big fan of the ship designs, but what can you do?