Endless Space Combat mode?

I have been watching gameplay videos of Endless Space on YouTube and all I see is that we are shown the spaceships from one camera angle and the battle goes on. We have to choose the game card which decides the way in which the game will be played. All we have to do is to set some action for the spaceships to do and they will just keep doing it. We have to just watch it in just one camera angle that’s it. The only difference that appears is that of the spaceships. Every time we change or upgrade a spaceship, the different spaceship is seen in the battle. I am planning to play Endless Space and do all the battles take place in same way?

Actually the combat in Endless Space is somewhat like a game of Rock, Paper and Scissors. Like stone breaks scissors, scissors cut paper and paper covers rock; here in Endless Space too same rule is followed, attack damages enemy spaceship, defense negates attack, and other such options. You just have to sit and watch the actions unfold as the game automatically generates the scenes. This whole system becomes boring when you have to watch the same scene over and over thirty to forty times in a single turn. Just imagine that you are choosing cards and watching some video going on in loops for numerous times. This becomes totally boring in the further stages of the game.

It seems that developers tested Endless Space only in small maps and not in the large maps. This system which has repetitive loops of same video for around 20 to 30 times works great in small maps. But when this whole video is repeatedly played in the large maps, it becomes boring. First of all we spend time in managing the empires and then these whole big videos start playing. So this becomes hectic and tedious to watch the same video for hours and hours. Also it becomes boring when your one empire is under attack on large map and you want to expand empire at some other place. So in other words, the game is next to boring when played in large maps.

The card system fails at some point because it seems like on any difficulty level, the AI fails to use most of the cards. AI usually plays using the basic combat cards like attack, defense or use basic powers. I noticed it first on Easy difficulty but thought that it must be because of low difficulty level, but the same thing happened on higher difficulty levels. AI doesn’t even use the repair card. So it seems more unrealistic as the enemy doesn’t try to repair itself even when under heavy attack. Also it seems like AI is provided with unlimited money. This is because the rate at which they develop it seems that they don’t have any limitation on money and thus within some 100 to 120 rounds AI gets fully upgraded empire and spaceships.

The combat system is very dull in Endless Space as the number of opponents and player’s ship are same. Both the sides have eight ships that are brought into the battle and both the sides start firing colorful particles of various shapes at each other. Even if you have big spaceships out of which even one is capable of destroying enemy’s eight ships, you will see large eight ships flying in the space. Again you have some random spaceships flying in the scene which keep shooting the colorful material in random places of the space. Also there are explosions in the space which you think might be of enemy getting damaged, but later you realize that some random object exploded. It all makes it difficult to recognize the events taking place and only way to know presence of activities is by looking at the combat bar on the top of the screen.

I think option to choose amount of spaceships to be taken in the battle should have been decidable. This would have helped to play game more strategically. If we knew that we have more powerful battle ships than enemy we will only send 4 or maybe 5 to attack. We know they will be enough. The other battleships would be available for other battles. This would also save the money if at least an option to have selected number of spaceships flying in the battle. I think that developers should bring out a patch for this as it would be very useful in multiplayer games.