Endless Space: A Strategy for (Che)e(a)sing Your Way to Victory

I’ve been playing space based “4x” computer games since the days of Avalon Hill’s “Galaxy”[www.mobygames.com] in the 1980s (which ran on my parents’ TI 99/4a) and BBS door games like “Trade Wars 2002”[en.wikipedia.org]. You don’t want to know how many hundreds of hours I spent conquering the universe as a geeky, socially maladapted teenager (ugh).

As an adult, I’ve logged about 400 hours on Endless Space (about half of it in the last few months), and recently added “The Learner Is Now The Master” (“win a game in Endless difficulty against the AI”) to my list of Steam Achievements. Edit: I've also recently won on Endless as the Vaulters. As you might guess, I’m kind of obsessed with the game, it scratches my OCD, and “incremental accomplishment” itches fairly well. I won my “Endless” game in an old / huge (the bigger the better in my view) Ring Galaxy with 5 players (4 AIs and myself).

Note: I generally play as the “United Empire”, and with the “Disharmony” expansion, so comments here will reflect a bias towards strategy that works well with that civilization type and that version of the game. I’ll modify this at a later point once I’ve explored other civilization types (“United Empire” is the default and thus the one I’m most familiar with playing).

I’m writing this strategy guide, because I’ve seen several posts offering advice on how to achieve the aforementioned achievement by basically cheeseballing the accomplishment by designing custom races with extreme disadvantages. I wanted to write a guide that demonstrates how to do it with the standard races. Note: there’s still plenty of “cheeseballing” going on, the game does have some highly exploitable and nonsensical AI behaviors which I’ll lay out for you that are very helpful when playing at the higher difficulty levels.

First key to winning at the Endless level: don’t have aggressive immediate neighbors. You want to make peace with your neighbors, at the very least, if not everyone, and keep it (mostly). Often, your neighbors want “peace” more than you do, and will trade heavily for such (so long as you have the tech to enable that). Eventually, you’ll almost always have to declare war on one neighbor, but as Germany found out in two world wars, fighting a war on multiple fronts is highly undesirable. Note: “Cravers” are particularly bad neighbors, since they have no interest in making peace and attack without mercy; Cravers on the other side of your neighbors can be dealt with: they tend to have “glass cannon” fleets that a strong stack (once developed) will rip through like paper, and “Offensive Retreat” will let you snipe their insanely large stacks down to a manageable size.

Second key: military and heroes. Build up maxed out fleet stack with a dedicated hero ASAP, and keep building it. Ideally, eventually you’ll have at least two ultra powerful fleets that will punch well above their weight. If you don’t have a strong military, your neighbors will sense your weakness and pounce. “Wasting” money on military instead of development is a necessary evil. You can get away with a relatively small military, if your fleets pack a powerful long range punch and can take a moderate beating (heroes help tremendously with both). Edit: I always max out the "Veteran" skills before anything else. Why?

a) the bonus double experience point that sequence caps out with
b) maximum flexibility in deploying heroes to systems and fleets as needed
c) you can often max these out while you're still fighting pirates, scounts, and other small stuff and don't need to maximize offense/defense/melee capabilities

Third key: science wins. No matter what you do, you’re going to wind up pretty much dead last in FIDS for quite a while, even with heroes giving you multipliers on your core systems. The only way to compensate for this is develop technologies that will enable your ships to survive attacks, your systems to max out their potential, and for you to lay the groundwork for eventual galactic domination.

Note: I’ve never messed around with terraforming and transformation, so I can’t say much about strategy around them. I win without them.

How did I win playing Endless difficulty? At a high level: I made peace with my neighbors, kept it, built up my military without crippling the economy, then crushed one of my neighbors, forcing them into a Cease Fire in which they handed over half their systems, and towards the end of the game, I let my systems go crazy converting industry to Dust with “Advanced Dustgen”, and won an “Economic Victory” (which is your easiest path to victory as a “United Empire” civilization).

Tactic: get the “make peace” and “trade” technologies early so you can avoid conflicts, and negotiate for “Peace”.

Exploit: always, always, always, always “trade” agreements, commodities, and cash for science (with rare, strategic exceptions that get you to 4+ in a commodity); science stays with you when an agreement is broken by either party (this is a key point, and something you can “exploit” extensively) never take the AI’s first offer, always go into the Diplomacy interface and check out your options before agreeing to anything

Tactic: paying a lump sum is often (but not always) cheaper than paying per turn on a trade, do the math

Exploit: check the Diplomacy interface every turn… at various points, the AI will be desperate for cash, and willing to make absurd deals: “all our luxury resources for 12 dust a turn? Sounds great! Where do I sign?”

In my view, this counts as an “exploit”, but, hey, it’s legal, right? Grab all the resources you can in these situations, even if you don’t need them… that will give you much more flexibility in trade
avoid wars, entanglements, etc. as much as possible… you want people trading with you, and giving you free money (see below)

Exploit: AIs you are at peace with will often give you free money!!! That’s right: they’ll give you thousands in “Dust” per turn, all the up until the point at which they go bankrupt and have to break all their agreements (this is a fairly predictable course of events, and will happen repeatedly); at various points, my Dust focused “United Empire” was receiving far more cash from leeching of this sort than it was generating internally! Cash earned this way can buy science in trade, and speed up development of systems considerably; a good cash pile is also essential for retrofitting your fleets in one fell swoop and thus keeping up with the Joneses as scientific advances accumulate.

Exploit, Part II: if you didn’t catch it, the ability to leech money from an AI until it goes bankrupt is one of the reasons you trade for science: get the science, trigger the AI to break the agreement (so no penalty to you) by going bankrupt, wash rinse repeat. The AI, for instance, seems to inevitably value Open Borders very highly, you can trade “Open Borders” over and over again for scientific achievements, for instance, often once every several turns, without any penalty for breaking agreements

Tactics: different AIs will value luxury and strategic goods differently (goods they have a monopoly on will be valued a lot more than ones they don’t); buy low, sell high. :)

Tactics: keep your systems “ecstatic” as much as possible - especially with “Colonial Rights”, the bonuses are huge; but if you can’t, optimize for industry production as the UE (higher taxes yield higher production)

Tactics: a strong military is essential to keeping the peace, and scaring off neighbors thinking about attacking you; it also keeps pirates from screwing you over early on in the game; max your stacks ASAP, and put a combat optimized hero at the head of your fleet

Tactics: build durable ships; avoid glass cannons. But: it doesn’t take more than two or three levels of defense to keep a ship alive, especially if you have “Repair” active on the bigger ships in your fleets (this is pretty much essential). It make take a while, but if you can kill one or more of the AI’s ships every turn without losing any of yours, you’re going to eventually win the battle.

Tactics: invest in Long Range Kinetics, light defense (as explained above), and support modules, Repair and Engines being the most important; Repair enables your ships to operate without “supply”, and Engines let you have a smaller set of fleets that can move rapidly to exploit opportunities or react to danger

• Long Range Kinetics: I never spend an ounce of Dust on “Beams” or “Missiles”; Kinetics are re-targetable (as other strategy guides have pointed out), and almost invariably let you kill at least four ships in the Long Range Combat phase (one per firing round). “Kill them before they kill you” is a good motto to follow, and Long Range Kinetics are the best way to achieve that;
  
  
• “Offensive Retreat”: LRK also makes cheeseball hit and run tactics effective. Even if your ships can’t go toe to toe in Medium and Melee, you can whittle a stronger fleet down to size without giving the enemy a chance to close, and likely inflict much more damage than you receive during the “Long Range” combat phase
  
• Defenses: you will eventually have to stick it out and fight through all three phases of combat, and LKR will do little or no damage at “Medium” and “Melee” range; if you can knock out a substantial amount of the enemy fleet at Long Range, and then be durable enough to survive the remaining two rounds of combat with little or (preferably) no fatalities, you’ll win every conflict (although it can take a while)

Exploit (this is also good Tactics): when you go to war, focus on high value systems, and lead with your strongest, hero reinforced fleet(s). The AI will throw everything it has at you, and a fleet that can take a licking and keep on ticking will often face several rounds of combat in a single turn, which provides you with the opportunity to inflict huge amounts of damage on the AI’s fleets; multiple failed attacks on the AI’s part will also lead cause your heroes to level like crazy. The AI doesn’t learn from its mistakes, and will keep on attacking you even when doing so is clearly futile. In my successful Endless game, I probably ran through twenty combats in three or four turns in a single system, and didn’t lose a single ship. As a result, my heroes often gained several skill points in a single turn. In point of fact, I think I lost one ship the entire game! Obviously, not having ships destroyed allows you to spend less money building less fleets, and invest your resources elsewhere. Ships and fleets that survive combat also gain XP, and become more effective and stronger over time.

Tactics: run your combats on Manual until you get a sense of how your ships (and that of the AI you’re fighting) perform in combat; note: the AI’s fleets are often (but not always) glass cannons, so their combat strength can be overstated (“Manual” combat mode lets you confirm or disprove this)

“Manual” lets you tell whether or not the AI has “Repair” enabled, whether the AI’s ships are “Glass Cannons” (what it sounds like) and thus also when to use alternative attack techniques like “Guillotine” and “Nosebreaker”

• I use “Nosebreaker” regularly, it almost invariably results in at least 4 of the AI’s ships being wiped out the first round (really vicious result when fleet size is small), and it ensures that repairs won’t be effective; if the enemy seems to take damage well, NB is a great way to overcome that and whittle away at its stacks
  
• I use “Guillotine” when I have a large number of ships, and enough firepower per ship to wipe out the enemy’s ships without concentration of fire via NB; this lets you also attack weaker ships down towards the end of the line
  
• It will also give you a good sense of which Combat cards are effective, and not, and how effective they are (yes, I hate that part of the combat mechanic, but not enough to let it damage my appreciation for the game’s better qualities)

Exploit (also good Tactics): Cease Fires are very useful. Again: don’t accept the AI’s first offer, you can often horse trade for more systems if you negotiate. Take every system you can get… even if you’re winning the war at the time of a ceasefire, you’ll get the systems sooner than you would otherwise, plus you’ll have a breather for integrating them into your empire and “gaining control”. PLUS: you can still cause trouble for the enemy: invest in influence enhancing tech and system improvements that will let you overflow your influence onto the AI’s systems… which, so long as they are not at peace with you, then become fair game for attacks and besieging without triggering wars (which keeps the AI you’ve got a “cease fire” with out of your territory). You can often incrementally fight an AI into the ground this way, systematically conquering territory without ever formally declaring war.

To wrap it up and summarize: pick good neighbors, keep up with the Joneses in a military sense, lie, cheat, and steal to get as much science as possible, smash your enemies with Kinetics, make sure your fleets can take a licking and keep ticking so they can turn ordinary leaders into super duper heroes, and take the time to actually study the way battles play out.

There you have it: How to win at the Endless difficulty level in Endless Space, one of the best 4x space games out there, from a veteran 4x space gamer. Hope you found this helpful!