Two days ago I finished my first game. This was the fourth game I started, but the first one that wasn't aborted by a patch (that sounds worse than it is, but alpha saves weren't compatible with beta, and beta saves weren't compatible with the released game). The first game I simply lost because I wasn't building enough ships. Or lost... I just gave up after I declared war on my neighbor and I saw the number of fleets... The other alpha game and the beta game were nearing the endgame, but I don't know how I would've won those games.
And that's exactly what the problem is with Endless Space. Apparently there are seven ways to win, but I have figured out only three of them: scientific (just research the whole science tree), wonder (build five buildings that are on the end of the exploration tree), and expansion (own enough of the galaxy). Of these three, I only found information on the expansion victory progress. The fourth victory condition is domination, so that's probably easy to grasp what that is. Finding the homeworlds of other civs is rather difficult though, they're not all kind enough to let you into their territory. So domination and expansion seem to have some overlap. These military victories didn't seem so appealing, because wars are pretty slow: invading a system takes several turns. Generally speaking, if a civ dedicates to researching military techs, they will research faster than your fleets can get to them. So unless you research military techs yourself and retrofit your fleets just before you invade, you are going to be in a world of pain.
Unless...
Well, combat is
rock-paper-scissors, with the minor tweak that different weapons are better in different phases of combat. You start out with mass drivers (short distance), and you can research lasers (medium) and missiles (long range). Armor blocks mass, shields block lasers, flak (OT: I think it's awesome that the word in english for flak is an abbrevation of a german word) blocks missiles. Anyone who has ever played Galactic Civilizations (and you should: that game is miles better than any single-player game of any version of Civilization will ever be... but it doesn't have MP) will know that this can lead to an embarrassing situation. Strangely enough, the techs for offense and defense for the same weapon are linked to different research paths.
For example, the path that researches mass is the same path that researches flak. So you can build a fleet with good mass drivers and good flak, and if you encounter someone who has been researching missiles and shields (instead of lasers and armor) than your opponent has a problem. The major difference with GalCiv is that you can't find out anything about your opponent's fleets (at least I haven't figured out how in the 50+ hours I've played the game), so you can't build a "golden gun" (or glass canon, whatever tickles your fancy). So in my last game I was at war with two civs, one with better missiles than my flak, and one with, well, I don't know, a lot of ships but I doubt they grasped the concept of "weapon" (yet their fleets appeared strong: ship modules have their strength depicted with a fist symbol, and the total number of fists is presented to you as the strength of that fleet. But in the rock-paper-scissors world that doesn't mean a lot.) Strangely enough, I had a negative diplomacy modifier with that civ because my military was weak...
Anyway, as the science tree had a lot of goodies in it, I decided to win this by science victory.
By the time I had figured that out, it seemed inevitable that I would win. The AI figured this out as well I guess, as they were hostile towards me. The endgame was tedious, but with the constant fighting it was prolonged even further. I would've liked to win by diplomacy, but from the start the AI's clearly didn't like me. If I had figured out how to change this, I would try again to win by diplo. As it is now, I'll just play a different game.
Would I still recommend this game? The basic mechanics of the game are good, and you get to make a lot of decisions that influence what you can do next. Basically this means that you have a lot of options, and most of the time there's no obvious correct choice. This is unlike Civ, that is comparatively a more linear game. Perhaps the other victory conditions prevent the tedious endgame: I got to do very little with the diplomatic and economic interactions with the AI, simply because they didn't like me (they didn't like each other either, btw, so it wasn't something personal
). If only the game would give some more feedback on how you are doing and what the effect is of something you are about to do, then the game would be a lot better. Or maybe this information is available, but me with my meagre experience with the TBS-genre is too inexperienced to find that info. The lack of information doesn't make it a bad game: the mechanics are still the same, with or without information. However, in the example above about the RPS combat system, if you don't know what you're fighting, and you happen to find the right combination of weapons despite the lack of information... is that wisdom, or is that luck? Some people here use spreadsheets to calculate where to put their workers, other people use governors for their cities. If you want to explore the galaxy and see where you end up, there's nothing wrong with luck. If you are analysing the histograph every turn, then you don't want to play Endless Space.
I hope you like this tiny review. I know this game interests a lot of people, so I figured I'd give some first hand experience. 30 euros is not a lot of money for a game. However, more expensive games are usually on a discount most of the time, sometimes even right after the release. I think you could get civ5 for 40 euros at the time of the release, and you could buy it now for 5 euros if you're lucky. Compared to that, Endless Space is too expensive. On the other hand, I've put 50+ hours in this game, so I feel it was worth my money.