System based development is ok with me. Per planet would be far too tedious late game. I just think of systems in ES the same way as planets in gal civ.
Yea, not sure I get the "planet based" thing, nor do I get the "scope" thing. Systems develop both horizontally and vertically, and you have various avenues for early expansion (in general tho, you want to snap up as many systems as you can as soon as you can). You typically end up with far more systems than you do cities in most 4X, so having each planet produce on its own would be an insane amount of micromanagement. I like the abstraction that the planet development tech gives which allows you to 'specialize' the planets individually, but still have them contribute to one production queue. I've honestly never gotten to the end of the tech tree in Endless Space, it's massive. My main gripe with is is MP-imbalance (i.e. favoring one specific kind of build), but 4X in MP is bad in general so that's just how it goes.
i wish there were more defensive advantages in ES other than that one tech on the left tree. If you could turtle up a bit more then alternate win cons might be viable in mp.
From what I hear that's a common problem with the Endless games, they do seem to work on it, but I don't know how effectively. I haven't played them myself (let alone MP) though, so this is just what I've seen others saying.
To be fair I haven't checked on it in awhile. It's actually a fairly common 4X problem, but that's just the nature of the beast. Pox I am balancing runes against each other in a limited timespan, but with 4X you are balancing across dozens of systems and scales, and then when you introduce making your own races like the Endless games and people are going to min-max the heck out of it. I'd suggest they do away with letting people take negative traits, because you can never price those properly as players will mitigate them with their build so it's just free points. There are some that basically every race picks in multiplayer, for example, there's one that makes you permanently at war with everyone - which is basically not a real drawback in multiplayer.
