It's very easy to putter along in relative isolation, not feeling any immediate and pressing needs, but also falling farther and farther behind the power curve without a clear sense as to how or why. In fact, all of this is so rewarding that it obfuscates how much you probably suck. Even as abstracted as Civilization is, it's an enormously complicated game with absurdly long threads of cause-and-effect that would be excruciating to pick-up without the comforting knowledge that, after six games and however many spin-offs, you've done all this a hundred times before. Civilization would have this problem as well its accessibility, I increasingly believe, is a figment born of familiarity. If it's instantly accessible and intuitive, chances are it's an unambitious copycat of a popular franchise.īut that also means that it takes a long time to figure out what, exactly, the game wants you to be doing. Because I increasingly think that getting into any exciting strategy series is going to have to be a little weird, hard to parse, and uncomfortable.

It's like when I'm trying to read Italian: I know enough Spanish and Latin to get the gist, but I'm definitely missing crucial information in every sentence.ĭespite how it sounds, this is actually a great thing for strategy games. But it always seems to be speaking a slightly different dialect of game design than I'm used to. It's palpable how much thoughtful design and polish has been applied to this stylish and evocative game. I'm still having a great time with Endless Space 2. But at some point, these games always remind me they are a cutthroat competition, and that secretly I was losing the entire time. Build times and research times continue to fall. When I'm learning each of their games, I never feel like I'm bad at them. Endless Space 2, like all of Amplitude's 4X games, does a great job of making governance feel like an epic accomplishment.

Endless space 2 united empire