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I never update this OP! If anyone wants to start a new thread please do.quote:Clockwerk wrote on Dec 2, 2015 16:11:  Endless Legend is an upcoming Fantasy 4X game by Amplitude Studios, developers of Endless Space. Set in a fantasy version of the Science-Fiction ES, Endless Legend sets out to fix balance issues that plagued the original. Gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has played Civilization, but the standard 4X formula has been shaken up enough to make Endless Legend more than just another clone. Currently available in a nearing-completion Early Access state via  for $30-35. There are a lot of innovations and I'll go in to detail about some of them, but here is a loose bullet-point feature list:
Is this game good? Is it worth buying in Early Access? Is it worth $35? The short answer is: Yes, yes (it's almost complete and has improved steadily throughout EA), and that's entirely up to you. If you're interested in the concept, it's at worst another Endless Space: a 4x game that's cool and fresh and you have fun for your first few plays, but that lacks longevity because of powerful dominant strategies. It remains to be seen whether there is anything completely overpowering like an Admin hero rush in ES. Every faction I've played so far has felt very strong at what they do. The Factions Click for big  The Roving Clans are the mercantile faction. They build their cities on the backs of giant beetles which can be uprooted and moved at any time. They can't declare war on other factions, being a mostly peaceful people, but if an aggressor pushes too hard and their defenses fail, they can just up and move their cities to another region. They get a cut of all gold spent or gained on the Marketplace, and start with a bunch of marketplace-related research unlocked from the start, including the ability to disguise all-mercenary armies as bands of neutral units and roam wherever you want with them.  The Broken Lords are a faction of chivalrous undead who eat dust, the currency in the Endless universe. They do not heal naturally, but can expend dust to heal units and create or feed population. Their heroes give cities boosts to gold production and upkeep.  The Necrophages are a Tyranid-like swarm that can not comprehend diplomacy and is constantly at war with all other factions. They gain a lot of food production boosts and their heroes provide cities with early food bonuses, making them IMO the strongest early-game heroes (heroes can be recruited as any faction). They convert the corpses of slain enemies in to bundles of food surplus which can be fed to any of their cities.  The Wild Walkers use lots of ranged units and gain bonuses to their cities and units in and around forests. They can hide their units in forests, and they have vision of any enemy units in regions they control and in their neighboring regions. Their heroes provide strong production bonuses, but they no longer unlock them until they've leveled up a few times.  The Vaulters are an ancient version of the same Vaulters from Endless Space, and they play similarly. Mostly isolationists, Vaulters focus on research and gain benefits during the harsh winter seasons. Late-game, they can teleport their units between cities. Vaulter heroes provide some Research bonuses to your cities.  The Ardent Mages do some things that I'm not too familiar with. They're also science-focused, like the Vaulters, but they're more combat-focused and not so much a bunch of turtling isolationists. I don't know much about what makes them special at all, they have some kind of obsession with enduring pain but I don't know how it plays out mechanically. I'll play a game as them later and update this. I hear they're a little weak right now, they're the only 'underwhelming' faction power-wise.  The Drakken are a group of diplomacy-focused dragons. They get a lot of diplomatic benefits, including the ability to expend a lot of extra influence to force other factions in to certain standing with them (e.g. peace, war, alliance). I don't know a whole lot about them yet, but they seem very strong particularly because their starting hero is a healer, and because some of their diplomatic options grant them nutso early-game bonuses if you're willing to stick a lot of your population on Influence production. How about some pictures? Click for big. These are mostly lifted from the Steam Community screenshots section so feel free to hit up the store page for some promotional pictures. It's a great-looking game in action, the visual style is simple but post-processing effects (particularly a tiltshift depth of field) are well-used to give the impression of a miniatures game.       So, is anyone else playing this game? I bought it early in EA and tooled around a little bit, but didn't give it any serious thought until recently. I'm very impressed by the changes and rebalancing it has seen throughout EA and it feels complete and playable right now, the only major content still missing are the 8th faction and the final 2 eras of research, but the game is currently paced around the four existing eras and doesn't feel like it's really missing anything. A game is faster than other 4X games (~150 turns maximum on the fastest speed) which might change as the other two eras are added. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2014 06:26
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Really interested in this even though I never played Endless Space. It looks so pretty! How would you compare it in its current state with AoW III or other 4x fantasy games? Do we have a release date yet?
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Aug 25, 2014 04:25
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As much as I like AoW, I prefer less combat-heavy 4X games and there aren't really any fantasy 4X that I can think of without a strong combat focus. HOM&M, AoW, Warlock, Master of Magic, etc. are all about fighting and battle strategy and don't focus as much on diplomacy or empire-building. EL is closer to Civ in that regard. Combat exists and it's a constant part of the game, but most of your time is spent making empire-level decisions, the actual battles are over pretty quick and while they do have a level of depth that Civ doesn't have, they're not anywhere near as complex as Heroes of Might & Magic or Age of Wonders. Your units don't have active abilities and the only orders you give them are setting a stance and telling them either where to move or what unit to target (but not both). I'm preferring it to Civ, but I'm not sure yet how much of that is just because it's new and still fresh. I don't think there's a release date yet. You probably have quite a while before it's gold. It doesn't feel like Early Access right now other than the occasional crash (I've had two crashes in five full games played). There's not much actual content to still be added, and once it's in the focus will be on Tuning Up The Graphics On Level 3, balance tweaking, and adding polish. Their official Roadmap puts them at around ~40-50% of the way to release but that doesn't feel like an accurate number when playing the game. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Aug 25, 2014 08:48
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Two quick questions: 1- Can you still get heroes from another race? That's one of the things that always seemed 'off' about Endless Space. 2- What actually got me to look up this thread was reading rumors/speculation that all of the Endless games were interconnected (The ship crash in Endless Dungeon somehow relates to the goings-on in Endless Legend and that is how the Vaulters become an Endless Space faction?) any truth to this? The game sure looks pretty as hell, but what I am most interested in is hearing whether they've missed the pot holes Endless Space fell into (way too reliant on Heroes, flashy game but ultimately a bit shallow and plays out the same each time).
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Sep 1, 2014 02:54
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Sorry this post came out so long and wordy! You can still get heroes from other races, which thematically is a little odd (Why should my Roving Clans be able to hire a Necrophage hero, if the Necrophages are aggressive beasts that are permanently at war with everyone?), but I can get over it because Master of Orion 2 did the same thing. Mechanically it works out better than it did in Endless Space. Each hero gets three skill trees, one is generic, one is based on their class (infantry/ranged/support), and one is based on their race. The race tree is usually the best for heroes that you're going to stick in a city, but there's no longer just one specific hero type (Admin) that you want for every city. Each faction sort of has a focus on a specific FIDS output (Food, Industry, Dust, Science for anyone who didn't play ES) and that faction's heroes tend to give bonuses to that output. Necrophage heroes are the best for food, Wild Walkers for production, Roving Clans for gold, etc. Most of the changes to the system are individually minor but come together to fix a lot of the issues that ES had with heroes. You're still very reliant on them, but you're not praying for an Admin hero every time you start a game. There's a major incentive to use them in Armies (ES' fleets) because they're an actual unit that participates in battles and is generally stronger than the units they command. There's a large recruitment pool now that changes on a regular basis, instead of a selection of three heroes that updates every 50 turns or whatever. It's not hard to get the hero type you're looking for, and if you're looking for city managers you don't always want to just shoot for an Admin hero that boosts Food and Industry. I think right now Necrophage heroes are a little too good at city administration, since they give a bunch of bonuses to Food which lets you take all of your population off of food and put them on something else, but I never feel like I'm getting dicked over by not finding the right hero type like I often did in ES. You don't need to spend faction customization points to guarantee an early Admin hero. Also, being able to convert industry in to stockpiles of food or industry that can be shipped to other cities means you don't need to get a new Admin hero for every single city you found - you can have one heavy production city mass-producing food or tools for your newly founded cities. I'm not too sure about connections to the rest of the Endless universe. They're definitely there - you play on Auriga (the Unique quest planet from ES), the Vaulters exist, there are a lot of nods to ES and Dungeon of the Endless, but I've never been the type to dig too deep in to lore, so I'm not sure if there's an actual connection between the DotE ship and the Vaulters leaving Auriga. I also haven't completed a game as the Vaulters in EL, so I don't know how their faction story plays out. I think their unique victory condition may have something to do with leaving Auriga? That seems to be what it was building towards. I still don't have enough experience with the game to speak for variety in strategy or late-game meta balance. I think it might fall a little flat in that each faction sort of has a predefined strategy (subject to change once we get faction customization). There are faction quests that kind of railroad you in to doing specific things (Capture <x> region, explore the ruins there with a hero-lead army with at least two infantry units, capture a city belonging to this player to prove you're powerful enough to be feared, etc.) but there's some randomization in which ones you get each game. My biggest fear with EL is that you're basically going to be playing to your faction's quests instead of doing exactly what you want to do. You can definitely ignore them, but they provide some unique items to equip on your heroes, free research, etc. and it remains to be seen (for me) whether you're really hurting yourself by skipping them. If anyone is interested, I just got set up to stream games on Hitbox, and I could stream a quick game of EL so you can see how it plays out. I know there's not a whole lot of interest in this game, so if that's something you want to see you're probably best off PMing me or letting me know in this thread when you would be available to watch it, since I've mostly been busy with the new Diablo patch lately. Actually, I'm starting a game and streaming it right now: http://www.hitbox.tv/funnypostcollabo I don't have a mic, but if you have any questions feel free to ask in chat. e: Stream is over, sorry it wasn't more exciting - I lost my starting army and hero on like turn 4 which really set me back and I didn't get to do much except languish in obscurity. If I wasn't streaming I probably would have restarted at that point. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 03:26
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I remember seeing this game when it first popped up on Steam, and promptly forgot about it. Then I saw this thread and bought it. I'm impressed. I have no idea how good the balance is going to be in the long run, but first impressions are that this is a slick, well made game with really solid art direction. I absolutely adore the graphics and sound (the main theme music has gotten under my skin already). And I'd agree that the game seems to do a really good job of innovating standard 4X strategy tropes. Forcing only one city in a region is a great way of encouraging thoughtful expansion instead of Civ style wide empires. Custom factions should be interesting. Not that I would abuse them to utterly crush my friends with tailor-made strategies or anything like that. But it does make the prospect of battling a cheating AI on the highest difficulty seem more appealing. My biggest complaint with Civ 5 was always that the AI became very easy to rickroll on Emperor difficulty, but the unfair advantages became awfully transparent at Immortal and above. Make or break for me will probably be the AI. I miss the days of GalCiv 2.
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Sep 1, 2014 10:51
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Thanks for answering all my questions last night Collabo. Will be picking up the game tonight!
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Sep 1, 2014 19:29
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I played this when it first came out on early access and it definitely had potential. I'm waiting for it to "release" before giving it another shot though.
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Sep 1, 2014 19:47
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Let's all remember how ES was hosed up tremendously by vote-by-gamer bullshit they had going. The devs had better learned their lesson, otherwise we'll be getting the same "LOLMEMESLULZ" bullshit that came up, because they couldn't distinguish between critical gameplay mechanic decisions they could discuss among themselves and trivial bullshit like "A CUSTOMIZED HERO ENTER YOUR MARY SUE WARRIOR HERE".
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Sep 1, 2014 21:07
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That is why I'm hesitant on buying, as much as it looks like this game is up my alley. 'Galdos AI' is not something I'm going to forget about any time soon - not because it was the worst thing to ever happen in a videogame, or even the most egregious thing to come out of ES's voting, but it is just so indicative of the kind of crowd that communal design appeals to.
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Sep 1, 2014 21:23
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LotsBread posted:Let's all remember how ES was hosed up tremendously by vote-by-gamer bullshit they had going. The devs had better learned their lesson, otherwise we'll be getting the same "LOLMEMESLULZ" bullshit that came up, because they couldn't distinguish between critical gameplay mechanic decisions they could discuss among themselves and trivial bullshit like "A CUSTOMIZED HERO ENTER YOUR MARY SUE WARRIOR HERE". So what you are saying is I should get this game right now before it goes bad.
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Sep 1, 2014 22:29
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Yeah, that's definitely a fair point. From what I've seen of EL votes so far, they're much more subdued. Here's the current G2G vote, where users get to vote on the stats of the next minor faction. We're not voting on the design or theme, just the stats - there's no room for dumb memes here. here's how the votes for the 8th faction turned out. The winning entries are actually pretty cool and unique without having any dumb memes attached - it's a religious cult that only gets to build one city, 'buying out' minor factions with Influence and using them as small cities. The unit and city designs that won look neat.  I'm similarly hoping that later votes don't devolve in to meme-offs. e: Also worth noting that in the previous vote for a Minor Faction design, the 'funny lol' joke option actually lost. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 22:30
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I'm streaming another singleplayer game of Endless Legend: http://www.hitbox.tv/funnypostcollabo I'm going to play on the fastest game speed this time, and as a faction that I actually know how to play so I won't embarrassingly lose the game for myself within the first 10 turns. I'll be streaming for about an hour to an hour and a half, then coming back later to finish the game. This time I'll record VODs so I can post them here afterwards. No commentary on my part, just pure gameplay. If you have any questions about the game, feel free to ask in the stream chat.
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Sep 2, 2014 01:38
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That's reassuring. How is the multiplayer right now? Is it viable to play a full game in one session, and is there a big community?
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Sep 2, 2014 01:39
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Huh? I pre-ordered ES and all the vote I remembered were either completely inconsequential (pick a hero portrait or color scheme for ship from one of these three options) or something like "hey, we have 2 features we want to implement, which one do you want us to do first?"
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Sep 2, 2014 02:11
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Funnypost Collabo posted:I'm streaming another singleplayer game of Endless Legend: Watching your stream and I got to say the game looks surprisingly good in motion. May have to get this.
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Sep 2, 2014 02:19
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MrBims posted:That's reassuring. How is the multiplayer right now? Is it viable to play a full game in one session, and is there a big community? I haven't had a chance to play Multiplayer yet, because I don't know anyone else who has the game  I've read good things, though. On "Fast" speed, a 7-player game (one player for each faction currently in the game) takes about 2-3 hours to complete in Singleplayer.Here's the VoD of the first half of the Roving Clans playthrough I was just streaming: http://www.hitbox.tv/video/244481 I'm leaving for a while, but I'll stream the second half of the game and post the VoD sometime tonight or tomorrow. Unfortunately we got a relatively small landmass and I got boxed in the corner - playing as Roving Clans, I'm not able to declare war, so I wasn't able to aggressively take the land that the Necrophages gobbled up right at the start of the game. I've kept a fairly large army and they don't really want to fight me, so the best I can do is harass their units and hope to provoke them in to declaring war on me. I'm going to have to win through economic supremacy, I guess. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Sep 2, 2014 |
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Sep 2, 2014 02:59
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Just picked the game up, gonna play for a few days before I am ready for MP. http://steamcommunity.com/id/Galactic
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Sep 2, 2014 22:44
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I was in the mood for some turn based strategy and decided to pick this up, and just finished my first game, playing the Drakken. Or at least I had far more score than any of the AIs and finished the storyline quest (which did not have a happy ending, so I'm curious how it goes for the other races), and I'm going to count that as a win, since I didn't feel like conquering them all. Overall, I'd have to say the game depends on how much work they're still going to put into it during early access. There's the seed of a great game there, but it still needs both new content and some balance work. I found the city management a lot of fun, once I got the hang of it. I'm not sure how balanced it is; it seems like I stumbled onto some extremely powerful cities and others were pretty meh, but this might change later. How you expand your cities benefits from a lot of advance planning, which will really reward careful play, but might turn off some people who don't want to spend 15 minutes taking notes to get the most out of their city. I expect multiplayer is going to need strongly enforced turn timers. They did something interesting with science, which I'm not sure I like. The techs are in tiers, but each time you get a tech it greatly increases the cost of every other tech (sort of like social policies in Civ5). On one hand, this makes it much less likely to get a runaway science leader like in Civ games, but on the other means you want to take as few techs as possible. For instance, each tier has a tech for hero weapons; you either want to skip all of them, or only take one on the tier you're going to need it, since having two gives no real benefit but basically slows your science for the rest of the game. Other techs are similar; I ended up completely skipping the marketplace techs except for hiring heroes for the whole game, since the (minor) advantage from being able to buy resources wasn't worth the sacrifice. I think a better compromise would be to make each tech in a tier increase the cost of other techs in that tier only, so that backfilling tech doesn't cripple you. Combat is fairly simple now, and I'm hoping it gets more content. In my game the Drakken got 3 units, total. Their starting unit was basic infantry, they got a fast flying unit(cavalry equivalent, I think) at tier 2, and at tier 3 got a flying support unit that had a ranged attack and buffed units next to it. As far as I could tell this was all they ever got (though they could train the units of assimilated minor races as well). Instead of unlocking better units with technology, a unit's strength (and maintenance cost) was based on its level, and every time you advance an era your units start at a higher level when built (and cost more production). I can see where they're going with that, but it made putting together armies kind of boring, and I do hope for more variety. I did notice that there was a retrofit unit button so maybe they eventually plan to have more unit types.
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Sep 4, 2014 05:50
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I got this yesterday, and I've only played a little bit but I like what I see. We shoud probably set up a steam group for easier game set up when we eventually do start doing multiplayer.
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Sep 4, 2014 09:35
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Bought the game yesterday, played about 13 hours. Here's my first impressions: Firstly, the map is lovely. It's vibrant, filled with interesting and unique resources, and the 'provinces' system is good protection against 4x sprawl. Top marks for that. City management is fun but definitely not intuitive. I had real trouble determining what resources my cities needed to be in physical proximity to in order to harvest them - only well into the game did I realize that strategic and luxury resources provide no proximity bonus, while the third type of map resource provides massive boosts. Combat is... ok. On one hand I appreciate a system simple enough that I can reliably auto-resolve battles without worrying that the PC is going to cost me unnecessary casualties. On the other hand, it's exceedingly simple - terrain didn't seem to matter at all other than my Wild Walker game where they received bonuses for shooting from forest tiles. In reference to Bremen's comments about unit variety, I didn't find it that terrible. For Civ you basically have four types of units up into the Industrial age (infantry/cavalry/archer/siege) and upgrading a swordsman to a long-swordsman seems little different from upgrading your base infantry from level 1 to level 2. The minor races you can absorb also add a great deal of variety, even if I'm still lost on how to assimilate more than one. I like the layout of the tech tree, but upgrading hero's armor & weapons (which seems to be a major part of why you research) doesn't feel like it provides particularly hefty bonuses. This might be because - and here we reach my biggest problem - the AI seems to be lamentably bad. Playing on normal difficulty as Vaulters I quickly raced ahead to a huge tech advantage, researched my giant infantry unit, and proceeded to lay waste to all of my neighbors without losing a single unit. After defeating the first modest army that the enemy put into the field they AI seemed uninteresting in fielding anything stronger than city militia. All of my cities were quickly at 'rebellion' level happiness, but none actually revolted and it seemed to have little effect on slowing my conquests. The biggest challenge was saving up enough influence to declare war (a problematic mechanic, since that same influence is also used to switch your empire to a war footing). Also annoying is the fact that Vaulters clearly have some great lore behind them, but my quest bugged out and failed to complete, leaving my stuck on the second stage of "You emerge into the overworld" although I had conquered almost every opponent. Endless Legend's style and lore is great, it looks beautiful, I really *want* to like this game... but the idiotic AI is what turned me off Endless Space and it doesn't seem they improved it much. Add me on Steam so we can see what this is like against human opponents. http://steamcommunity.com/id/GenVec
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Sep 5, 2014 17:13
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Decided to grab this because even though I ended up being ultimately disappointed with Endless Space, I got a lot of playtime out of it. Seems pretty cool so far, just like Endless Space the different empires have interesting lore and unique playstyles, which I always appreciate in this kind of game. Played a few games up to turn 80 or so and the early game seems a little bit slow, but that might be because I don't know what I'm doing. Probably also doesn't help that I've been playing Broken Lords (the coolest faction) since they seem to be pretty non-standard. I like that you can equip your troops in different ways but haven't been able to experiment on how much of a difference this makes yet. Is there a way to direct units to a specific tile and then attack in the same turn? My troops keep blocking each other.
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Sep 7, 2014 17:59
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LotsBread posted:Let's all remember how ES was hosed up tremendously by vote-by-gamer bullshit they had going. The devs had better learned their lesson, otherwise we'll be getting the same "LOLMEMESLULZ" bullshit that came up, because they couldn't distinguish between critical gameplay mechanic decisions they could discuss among themselves and trivial bullshit like "A CUSTOMIZED HERO ENTER YOUR MARY SUE WARRIOR HERE". They changed that over time. They've since removed the ability for people to vote on what they want to vote on ( which led to poo poo like them voting for cosmetic stuff over Raiding ), and made all the cosmetic/dumb poo poo be a separate vote from the important stuff. Major gameplay bits like Raiding, improved Diplomacy, etc are also not things you can vote for, and are things they are just working on passively behind the scenes. The whole voting mechanic is now just there for dumb people to get really excited about what the bunches of pixels look like, rather then allowing any control over the game development itself.
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Sep 7, 2014 18:07
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Blisster posted:Decided to grab this because even though I ended up being ultimately disappointed with Endless Space, I got a lot of playtime out of it. Seems pretty cool so far, just like Endless Space the different empires have interesting lore and unique playstyles, which I always appreciate in this kind of game. Played a few games up to turn 80 or so and the early game seems a little bit slow, but that might be because I don't know what I'm doing. Probably also doesn't help that I've been playing Broken Lords (the coolest faction) since they seem to be pretty non-standard. I played about 90 turns, also as Broken Lords, but it felt like I was just hitting end turn over and over with no real goal in mind. I thought I would declare war on my neighbour for something to do, but it turned out it would cost me 80 influence, and I had just spent all my influence on an Empire Plan and I was only making about 6 per turn. Perhaps foolish of me, but I had already spent the last 20ish turns building an army and moving it to their border cites, so it was a bit of a blow. There was a quest line about not sucking the screaming souls out of innocent victims to sustain our unholy existence, but the first two parts just rewarded me with Spices, which increase food production, which the BLs don't use...  A few other things that confused me: How can I make roads? Or are they only made via Trade routes? Also, how do I make Trade Routes? Can you see the name of Regions anywhere before you build a city in them? You can see it in the cities list once you have built there, but before that? Can you build multiple cities in the same region? Is there any way to see what population you need to build a new city district?
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Sep 7, 2014 22:52
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Darkrenown posted:I played about 90 turns, also as Broken Lords, but it felt like I was just hitting end turn over and over with no real goal in mind. I thought I would declare war on my neighbour for something to do, but it turned out it would cost me 80 influence, and I had just spent all my influence on an Empire Plan and I was only making about 6 per turn. Perhaps foolish of me, but I had already spent the last 20ish turns building an army and moving it to their border cites, so it was a bit of a blow. quote:There was a quest line about not sucking the screaming souls out of innocent victims to sustain our unholy existence, but the first two parts just rewarded me with Spices, which increase food production, which the BLs don't use... quote:A few other things that confused me: quote:Can you see the name of Regions anywhere before you build a city in them? You can see it in the cities list once you have built there, but before that? quote:Can you build multiple cities in the same region?
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Sep 7, 2014 23:50
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sarmhan posted:Make sure you're working on your faction quest if you aren't, also influence is needed for all diplomatic transactions as well as plans. To get more make sure you're building districts. cities/districts upgrade to level 2 for more approval/science/influence automatically if they adjacent to 4 districts. What? Aww, I'd been making a sprawling snake-city to reach more resources. Thanks for the answers!
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Sep 8, 2014 12:55
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After my comp stomp on normal I decided to try Endless and I have to say, it's definitely more challenging. Quest-spawned monsters tend to be level 6 while my soldiers are still level 2. So the environment is fearsome, at least. Right now I'm trying to understand the logic of the AI's diplomacy - they're just fantastically friendly, all the time. I'm bordered by two huge empires that could probably roll over me pretty quickly, one Broken Lords and the other Wild Walkers, and despite my relative inferiority they're both breathlessly eager to be on good terms - to the point of offering me huge sums of dust and advanced tech for peace treaties. I've read somewhere on the forum that the diplomacy is still being worked on, but I've realized that I've yet to be declared on in any game, no matter what the situation.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:05
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Chiming in to agree with the "beautiful but..." comments. The game is kinda scuppered by the same turn resolution shenanigans as Endless Space. For example, I waded into some village for a quest which caused a pretty ungodly strong enemy army to appear as an event, and the only way to get away after a first retreat without the entire army dying (because you lose half your maximum health with a retreat order) was to run away before the AI finished moving all of its pieces. The plan was cut off short by completing some research which popped a big 'NICE ONE NOW PICK A NEW THING' window up before I could move back into my capital, and I lost my only experienced army and had my hero on cooldown as a result, game over right there. The inconsistency of the village/side-quests is maybe the single biggest problem, it's a bit like an oldish city-building game called Imperium Romanum in that it makes every single unknown action into a minefield of potentially bad things - that was annoying in IR, but if Endless Legend is intended to be multiplayer-focused, I think you're going to see a lot of people playing past each other rather than against each other. That's really not helped by declaring war requiring a ton of Influence, which is hard to get a head of steam up in without jeopardising your military and civil production. Your choice at the moment is to declare War by effectively throwing 160 production/growth/research away, and who really wants to do that?
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Sep 8, 2014 17:41
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I dislike the closeness, somehow the neighboring people can make 2-3 settlers before I can output 1 no matter how many times/paths I try and they settle most of the land around me.
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Sep 9, 2014 12:34
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Try a bigger map with fewer players. On the highest difficulty settings the AI seems to either get a bonus to production or perhaps an extra settler off the bat, so it's easy to get hemmed into a peninsula. So I just finished my first Endless Difficulty game as Vaulters and it was... interesting. There were a lot of very close battles, mostly against wandering monsters and quests. A Drakken faction won the game by accumulating 260k influence and I don't believe anyone ever declared war, from start to finish.
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Sep 9, 2014 17:59
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New patch today; fixes, balancing, new battle system (I have no idea what changed), and a mac version. I'll give it a try and report back. Also I owe this game an apology; in a previous post I complained about the lack of unit variety; today I noticed that you can design units using the equipment you unlock with tech and resources. I'd just been playing through the game with default unit designs.
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Sep 12, 2014 04:22
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If you can confirm the AI is no longer incomparably stupid, that could be what gets me to put money down. I saw some remarks by closed beta testers that the AI was supposed to be much improved in the patch, I hope that is true.
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Sep 12, 2014 04:31
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MrBims posted:If you can confirm the AI is no longer incomparably stupid, that could be what gets me to put money down. I saw some remarks by closed beta testers that the AI was supposed to be much improved in the patch, I hope that is true. I can't really speak for the AI; I haven't been in any major wars. The patch notes didn't mention any AI changes, though when I was checking their blog I did see the AI is something they're working on. Edit: Ok, I got pinned in in my current game and eventually my neighbor declared war on me then sent an army to siege my capital, so it's not helpless. On the other hand the battle AI needs some work; I was playing the wild walkers whose basic unit are extremely long range archers, and I noticed their entirely melee army was content to sit there while my archers shot at them for a few turns. When I had to move a bit closer to shoot at their other units, then they attacked. But that seems to be pretty clearly a bug that will hopefully get fixed soon. Also, after the current patch the game crashes when I try to exit to desktop. Which is a pretty benign bug when you think about it. Bremen fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 05:10
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Bremen posted:Also I owe this game an apology; in a previous post I complained about the lack of unit variety; today I noticed that you can design units using the equipment you unlock with tech and resources. I'd just been playing through the game with default unit designs. Play the tutorial. It doesn't go into everything but gives you a pretty decent overview of a lot of the systems. Weirdly though it doesn't cover the market at all.
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Sep 12, 2014 14:07
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Ok, in my second game I just had the AI declare war on me fairly early (I'd just hit era 2) and blitz my second city; it didn't even wait to siege down the defenses and just killed the single militia. It then sent its army to siege my capital where it was joined by a second army, while my scouting force returned and liberated my original second city. In the end I won and started taking cities from the AI, but it was enough to have me seriously worried for a bit. One example doesn't prove anything, of course, but the AI certainly seems willing to declare war now, and isn't a complete pushover. This was on difficulty one harder than the default, if it matters. No sign of the "sit in a defensive position and get hammered by long range attacks" behavior I got in my first game, either.
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Sep 13, 2014 00:55
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Arumba just posted the first video in a new lets play of Endless legend. It's more of an introduction and tutorial than anything else, but it'll be interesting hearing his analysis of the game coming in fresh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rQh1ddA3GY
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Sep 17, 2014 05:27
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This looks neat, coming from Age of Wonders and all that, how similar are they? Someone already replied once in the AOW3 thread but i'd love to get more out of people. I'm already pretty much sold, but the devil is in the details and all that. 
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Sep 18, 2014 20:02
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This is far more of an empire builder then AOW. The combat is a bit weaker but everything else is deeper than in AOW. The way the different races play is a lot more distinct than the classes and races of that game too. I mean we have races that are completely shut out of certain mechanics (necrophage aren't diplomatic at all) and some built completely around them (drakkens with diplomacy, merchants with the market.) I love AOW still but every scenario is going to mostly involve slaughtering and adventuring. When I play EL I feel more like I'm playing a fantasy civilization where there are far more systems at play.
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Sep 18, 2014 20:27
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That sounds perfect. Ill watch some videos but thats exactly what i hoped for in an alterative to AOW3.
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Sep 18, 2014 21:36
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| # ? May 12, 2024 13:17 |
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Well this is fun. Still kinda buggy, though and the AI seems dumb as gently caress so far.
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Sep 19, 2014 00:49
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