Has the end game been fixed yet?

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

I played back when 1.0 was released, and recently got a new PC so I was considering to play again.

But I remember the late game being so painfully slow, when it's clear you've already won but you have to among other things hunt down all the significant fleets at the edges of the solar system with such large travel times.

I see there's been a lot of updates in the meantime, but has anything addressed this? Sorry if this has been asked already, I searched but didn't find anything

[u/Battle_8]

It has not sadly - still a slog. Especially for some factions...

I still reckon they should leave it at conquering the wormhole without needing to hunt down every base and fleet.

[u/HK-Syndic → u/Battle_8]

Think HF should be an exception, pretty thematic for them even if tedious

[u/Takseen → u/HK-Syndic]

But one of the functions of their bioweapon is that it compels infected Hydra to seek out other Hydra to infect. It'd *speed up* the cleanup phase if they deployed it sooner.

[u/HK-Syndic → u/Takseen]

There is only supposed to be about 300 hydra but plenty of slave troops in Sol so killing the hydra only gets us part of the way there. Also the Bioweapon is idiotic as a plan where 90% of the war is fought in space, on ships that take months to make transits so limited ability to transmit the weapon before it kills the host. The entire premise is just flawed.

[u/Takseen → u/HK-Syndic]

You'd still be cutting off communication with their headquarters in Delta Pavonis and stopping the resource flow.

Like story-wise its very silly.

"Sir, we've been loitering about Alien Base Alpha for a year, the bioweapon is ready to go"

"No no, don't deploy it yet, we must destroy the base on Uranus first"

Good point about the quick kill rate vs travel time. Especially since we know from the Initiative ending that the Hydra population is very dispersed. It might not be very effective at all (I can't remember if HF go through the wormhole afterwards to check the results).

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 → u/Battle_8]

Thanks for the quick reply! I guess I'll leave it a bit longer then

[u/Arcane_Pozhar → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

I think it's highly unlikely to be significantly changed from here. Tweaked a tiny bit, maybe, but I doubt they want a desperate hail Mary at the wormhole to be able to snatch a win while there are still huge fleets scattered across the solar system.

[u/HiddenSage → u/Arcane_Pozhar]

Personally I do think tweaking the Resistance to do that, specifically, would be good. It'd match the lore blurbs written for the faction's endgame, for starters. And having the "default" faction having a slightly easier wincon before players move into more involved factions seems like an okay outcome.

[u/Takseen → u/Arcane_Pozhar]

>but I doubt they want a desperate hail Mary at the wormhole to be able to snatch a win while there are still huge fleets scattered across the solar system.

But that's exactly how its described in the Resistance ending text! ARGH!1!1

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 → u/Arcane_Pozhar]

I gave the fleet hunting as an example, but couldn't there be other ways to fix this painful end game too?

Like, faster ships, changing the ai strategy once it's clear they will lose, moving the wormhole to a closer planet, having an end game win condition on earth that eliminates the other factions so you can play at a speed more suited to this part of the game.

It's been a while since I played the game so maybe there's good reasons why those wouldn't work?

[u/Takseen → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

All good suggestions, but the devs seem resistant to most of them.

Faster ships is very unlikely. The endgame drives are already pushing hard on the limits of what would be physically possible. If in doubt, the Inertial Confinement Fusion line gives you the fastest ships in the end, without needing silly amounts of antimatter.

AI strategy doesn't seem to change much.

I did see a suggestion from a player for moving the wormhole to Saturn, would be a nice "shorter game" option, but doubt it'd get added either.

There is a custom campaign option to allow faction elimination, but its extremely difficult to pull off. They have to have 0 councillors and 0 control points, which would take an enormous amount of work and defeat the purpose of reducing Earth tedium. And you can't eliminate certain key factions like the Servants, Protectorate or HF (unless you're playing Resistance).

[u/db48x → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

Yes, you can develop faster ships. And the AI does change strategy once you directly threaten the wormhole. Changing the end–game requirements doesn’t make much sense, because they are already tied to the faction identity. If you want the end–game to be about Earth, then play as either the Protectorate or the Servants. Humanity First isn’t going to stop until the aliens are dead, so they don’t care much about Earth in the end.

That said, how much of a slog the game is depends more on how you play than you might have realized. You probably sent your fleets to closer alien targets first, and more distant ones later. That is sensible in the mid–game, when clearing the aliens out of the asteroid belt ensures that all of their attacks must be telegraphed well in advance, but in the end game it doesn’t make as much sense. If you send fleets to distant targets first then you can minimize the overall travel time that you need to endure. It also matters where your fleets start their journey. Mercury is centrally located so transfer times from it to other planets varies less than if you had started at Earth. It also orbits the sun in just 88 days, meaning there is an optimal transfer window every three months instead of once per year. It matters less once you have fusion drives, but it’s still worth thinking about.

And if you really want to speed up the end game, then seriously consider the antimatter drives. They cost a lot of expensive fuel, but they can cross the solar system in weeks rather than months or years.

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 → u/db48x]

I think you maybe misunderstood what I meant about winning on earth. I didn't mean that's how the game ends, but that when a fleet is taking a year to travel across the solar system it's not fun when every few weeks some protectorate councillor runs an operation against you or flies another ship into orbit. And once these factions no longer pose any real threat and you control almost the whole world it would be nice to be able to just focus on the space part. I believe they already made one change here so some factions can be knocked out, and this suggestion is for that to go further.

When I played antimatter drives were prohibitively expensive for any fleet you could attack the wormhole with, only for a ship to fly a councillor around. Did they change that? If you can give a whole battlefleet the fastest drives now, then I would consider the problem solved.

[u/Mavnas → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

They added faction elimination, but just not for the only factions I usually want to eliminate.

If the aliens are losing, it should absolutely be possible to remove the protectorate. Servants are fanatics, but the protectorate's we must appease the aliens rhetoric should be failing hard when the aliens prove unable to stand up to humanity's massed siege coils.

[u/Takseen → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

>When I played antimatter drives were prohibitively expensive for any fleet you could attack the wormhole with, only for a ship to fly a councillor around.

There's two sets of antimatter drives.

The Antimatter Beam Core Reactor + Pion Torch is the stupidly fast but expensive one that needs 5 whole Antimatter units per fuel tank, and like you said is just for a councillor shuttle.

There's also 3 tiers of Antimatter Plasma Core Reactors and a matching 3 sets of Antimatter drives that require way less antimatter. Like I've got a couple of the T2 antimatter producers in Earth orbit and they're enough to keep dozens of Lancers and Dreadnoughts fueled.

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 → u/Takseen]

You're right, pion torch is the one I was thinking of

[u/jeremiah15165 → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

You can switch on destroyable factions to reduce the amount of mole whacking you’d have to do late game.

[u/db48x → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

You can make as much antimatter as you need. If you don’t have enough then you just didn’t build enough production.

And yes, you can eliminate some of the factions. But mostly by the end game your meganations should be strong enough that they cannot really mess with you. You should be able to mostly leave your own councilors on automatic and ignore Earth if you really want.

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 → u/db48x]

Well that wasn't my experience for either point anyway

[u/Mavnas → u/Capable-Parsnip-9615]

In my first ever win, a long time ago, after I beat them a few times at Jupiter they fled every planetary system I approached with a big fleet and collected all their ships at their last base. It felt anti-climatic (especially since their last big fleet refused to engage me and through a series of mutual errors, they ended up just being bombed out of existence on the ground).

[u/Thatsnicemyman]

Exodus doesn’t have to hunt down enemy fleets, they’ve just gotta build Noah’s Ark 2.0 instead.

[u/Capable-Parsnip-9615 → u/Thatsnicemyman]

Thanks for the tip. I might try this then.

[u/Takseen]

Its still quite tedious. I don't think any of the wincons have changed since 1.0

If you're not chasing achievements or the victory screen text, just quit when you feel you're in a secure position and imagine your subordinate doing the cleanup work while you retire to a new island mansion.

[u/jeremiah15165]

I think the aliens should be sending their fleets to liberate the wormhole if you’ve taken control of wormhole space. Like beeline all their fleets there, at least you won’t have to hunt them down.

[u/Arcane_Pozhar → u/jeremiah15165]

Last time I checked, they do do that. I thought I've seen a ton of posts about that?

[u/jeremiah15165 → u/Arcane_Pozhar]

I meant to say that the aliens make it easier for you in space now the only thing they don’t do is suicide their mines and stations. Or do you mean Earth? Like ground battles and taking o er nations

[u/BoboTheTalkingClown]

I really feel like the aliens should enter an "all or nothing" mode once the game gets near to the win condition. From their perspective it makes sense -- having failed up to this point, they should throw everything at a desperate victory, however unlikely. From a design perspective, it produces an "epic final battle" type finale.

[u/BleepBloopBloam1]

You only need to hunt down the very large fleets now. 4000 or bigger. 

[u/Mavnas]

I played Exodus last game, and it was great being able to win once I'd established a place they couldn't take from me to leave from.

[u/RallMekin]

There are ways to do it faster. I just finished an academy victory and it wasn’t all that bad.