Endless Space passes 300,000 sales, celebrates with discount, free DLC
Science fiction 4X Endless Space has totted up 300,000 sales, so developer Amplitude Studios has announced a free content update and week-long sale.
If you're yet to try the turn-based strategy effort, it's 50% off on Steam until March 18.
The fourth free DLC pack is called Virtual Awakening and should be available on Steam today. Its content was chosen by community polls. Official blurb, feature list and new screens below.
- Virtual Awakening features:
- Free Weekend Rewards
- Four unique Heroes including a powerful Virtual Endless
- Extra Technologies and Buildings focusing on asteroids and gas giants
- Global Interactive Events (including an event designed by Codename_Veers)
- New Escalating Random Events (two of them designed by KingJohnVI)
- Additional Exploration Rewards and Planet Anomalies
- AI Improvements
- Ability to scrap buildings
- Enhanced hero management
- Better affinity and faction trait management
- Other additions and improvements
- Victory Warning alert messages
- Improved blockade effects: now activated on Guard and Invasion only
- New Auto Scrap button for unnecessary improvements in the Empire view
- Redesigned game speed effects
- Tax Rate tooltip in the Empire view
“Driven by their need to terraform and cultivate, it was only a matter of time before the Automatons turned their eyes to the least hospitable planets: Gas giants. A probe ship departed for an uncolonized system, hoping to test technology that could transform these jovian worlds into something livable.
It was a nice plan, but luck and reality had other ideas. The gas giant had a derelict platform orbiting it that had been of the Virtual Endless war effort - and the Virtuals had left a guard behind. Worse yet, the system was rich in minerals from its asteroid belts, so a small but well-equipped group of Pirates was also keeping an eye on it.
Automaton, Endless, and Pirate - an interesting enough mix. But there was a fourth unknown actor, watching from the “surface” of the gas giant. Deep in the viscous atmosphere, where the boundaries between gas and liquid and solid are vague and changeable, an intelligent life form tracked the signals from the platform and wondered what was going on.
Up above an uneasy truce was reached: Automatons experimented while the Pirates kept an eye out for profits. The project went smoothly until one of the Automatons, who had shown unusually clever behavior since landing on the Endless platform, noted that the radiation seeping from the planet might be transmissions from a sentient race.
Finish the testing at the risk of genocide? Try again elsewhere, regardless of the costs? Steal the technology and see what you can get for it? There are many questions, not the least of which is: What exactly is going on with that unusually clever Automaton?
The galaxy is about to get even stranger.”