4x fantasy à la Endless Space

After watching the released factions videos, I must say I'm intrigued. I loved Endless Space, and after hearing that the same studio will be doing a similarly styled 4x game set in a fantasy setting I was a bit put off, but now I'm back on board and can't wait to play it. The thing is these factions either don't seem like the classical fantasy races or they seem to have some interesting twist to them. Plus, it would also seem that Endless Legend is in the same universe as Endless Space. And by looking at the screenshots it's obvious that Amplitude is sticking to the same design philosophy for the UI (which was fantastic in ES, maybe even the best as far as strategies go). Is anyone else at least curious about this game?

I had a lot of fun with Endless Space, even though I sucked at it. Have to agree about the UI, it was clean and clear of clutter or menus on menus.

I put in a lot of time with Endless Space but it hasn't held my attention much past my first few playthroughs. I am open to another game by them but I hope they cut down on the number of building and tech upgrades in favor of larger and more meaningful steps. I think it was the tedium of having to take care of a dozen planets that bothered me about the original.

Also, the presentations for their races in Space had much more personality than the game itself, so I'd wait for some examples of that before getting excited.

@veektarius Yeah, you're spot on about Endless Space. I sure I've read (or seen) somewhere that EL will have quest, nothing too deep or distracting, more like filling out your races backstory stuff. Also there will be city-states that you can conquer, bribe or do quests for in order for them to join you. So yeah, it would seem like Amplitude is trying to make a more engaging game. One of the biggest faults of ES for me has been the combat. It just felt bad and flat. Hope they do something different with EL.

The combat in Endless Space was pretty terrible all things considered, I auto-resolved all but the most crucial battles, but it's probably my favorite spreadsheet and resource management game. I had so much fun just researching tech, colonizing and squeezing the most out of my star systems with mellow space tunes in the background.

Here's hoping they learned a lot from ES.

@dimi3je: I liked the format of the combat. I think that if the RPS tactic selections had more obvious visual effects and the pace of things was sped up a bit (e.g. time from firing to impact) it would have seemed a lot more engaging.

@veektarius Don't get me wrong it's not its RPS nature that's bothering me. In fact, I would agree with you that the representation of combat was the main problem with the combat system in ES. When ever I engaged in combat (at least with the Disharmony update, which is great btw) I just selected which cards are to be active and then selected the auto mode. This way the cards get used but without that whole silly cinematic thing. The fact that i liked the option not to see how these ships look while blowing each other into smithereens speaks a lot about how bland those battles turned out no matter the stakes. In other words, I expect decent looking space battles from ES 2 if it ever comes out and am curious to see how they will handle the combat in EL