Endless Legend, fantasyland trying to fix Endless Space's flaws

[Orobis]

This game needs just one more expansion to be complete: A water race, naval combat and an AI overhaul.

Tactical battles are kinda shit. There are no usable abilities, it's all about positioning your units and using hard counters. Animations are slow and cannot be skipped, same goes for moving armies.

This. The slow animations and garbage combat really drags the game down, which is a shame cause it has potential, they just need to tweak it a bit.

 

[Luka-boy]

This game needs just one more expansion to be complete: A water race, naval combat and an AI overhaul.

Well lookie here.

Spoiler

Announcing Endless Legend: Tempest & closed beta contest
26 August - Frogsquadron
Hey guys and gals!


We've been hinting at it for a pretty long time now, from subtle hints in our Meet the Team[www.games2gether.com] blogs to our answers around the forum, with tote bags labelled Endless Legend: Tempest mysteriously making an appearance during our Beer2Gether at Gamescom. The cat's finally out of the bag: Endless Legend's fourth expansion will be Tempest, focused around control of the seas of Auriga!

This expansion will introduce the Morgawr, an aquatic-based Major Faction specialized in naval warfare and manipulation of other creatures. Factions will now be able to fight for dominance of the oceans through the control of sea fortresses, although they will have to wrestle these from the grasp of the Fomorians, a new Minor Faction.

Bring your daughter to work is always a big success with the Morgawr.




Naval Warfare: Naval battles for everyone! You will be able to battle on the seas. All seaborne units can instigate and reinforce sea battles. Exotic mechanics and tile effects spice up this new type of battle!

Ocean Control with Weather System: Arcane structures have emerged from beneath the waves: these Endless relics provide strategic and luxury resources as well as other bonuses to the empire able to control them. To do so, their mysterious guardians must be parlayed with or defeated in battle. The same guardians will patrol “wild” ocean regions, making them a lot less safe to cross without a convoy. Expect clouds, rain and storms to appear on your map.

Sea Fortresses and Minor Faction Fomorians: New generated ocean regions, including a Sea Fortress, offer strategic locations in the water for players to battle it out. Anywhere from zero to three fortresses are located in each ocean region, so expect more in oceans that are more strategically pivotal, between islands or continents.

Tempest Closed Beta Contest



Applications for the Closed Beta of the Tempest expansion for Endless Legend are now open, and will run until September 1st (10 am, CEST)! If you think you're the Beta tester that we need, send us an email at: Playtest [at] Amplitude-Studios.com. The e-mail address must be valid if you want to receive an answer!




Please include:

• Your Amplitude forum username
• Your first name, last name and date of birth
• A link to your Steam account (it must be public then!)
• A DXDiag in text format so we can ensure you can run the game in satisfactory conditions (here[www.google.fr] is how to make one. Click on "Save all information" at the bottom right of the DXDiag window and attach the DXDiag to your e-mail)
• A couple of lines to tell us why we should choose you to be among the lucky ones to try out Tempest!
• Let us know if you participated in previous beta tests for Amplitude games - non eliminatory

20 lucky players will receive:

• An access to the Closed Beta on Steam
• A unique forum badge
• An access to the Tempest private forum to post your impressions

Also, please, only sign up if you think you will have time to play the game and be able to provide some constructive feedback. The closed beta will run from the 15th of September onwards for a couple of weeks.





Thanks, and good luck!

 

[rezaf]

Looks like they really (wait for it!) went overboard with the polygons on these.

 

[Jimmious]

Looks like they really (wait for it!) went overboard with the polygons on these.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

Sorry to butt in. Can somebody link me to a post of some guy in this thread, who was explaining what the races were like? I remember he put is so interestingly, explaining in concise terms about the various peculiarities each race had, that it got me more excited to try the game than anything else.

 

[Zarniwoop]

You can just read the ingame descriptions on the faction select screen you know. They're p. informative. And gameplay effects are spelled out by their stats.

 

[Trash]

Have they finally made the winters something to actually fear? Game felt lame to me after finding out that the apocalypse was just a minor inconvenience.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Have they finally made the winters something to actually fear? Game felt lame to me after finding out that the apocalypse was just a minor inconvenience.

With Shifters expansion it became even less of an inconvinience, really.

 

[covr]

It was never supposed to be an apocalypse, unfortunatelly. It's just a small distraction now, the expansion made it bit silly with chasing the pearls during winter. IMO the apocalypse meter from FF2 was much better idea.

 

[Anthedon]

Does it make sense to fight battles manually vs. using the automatic option?

 

[Zarniwoop]

Depends on your difficulty, who you're facing etc. Basically same rule as the Total War games. The AI (your side) sucks and will just LEEEEEROOOYYYY JEEEEEENKIIIINS until all the guys on one side falls over or blows up. So if it's a close battle or you're outmatched its better to play yourself and use strategy.

 

[Irenaeus]

I have much better results on auto-play than manually, which is weird.

Then again I haven't grasped the game's tactics well enough so far.

 

[ArchAngel]

AI is not very smart in this game, when you figure out how to (ab)use strengths of your faction you can win battles autobattle would lose or win battles without losses where autocombat would have casualties.

 

[Anthedon]

I have much better results on auto-play than manually, which is weird.

Then again I haven't grasped the game's tactics well enough so far.

That's my experience so far. But I've also just started playing. Time to git gud etc.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

when you figure out how to (ab)use strengths of your faction you can win battles autobattle would lose or win battles without losses where autocombat would have casualties.

What exactly are you talking about? The only super OP and exploitable faction is Vaulters/Miravi who recieve holy resource bonus and can easily out-damage even the highest tier units of other faction early on.

 

[ArchAngel]

when you figure out how to (ab)use strengths of your faction you can win battles autobattle would lose or win battles without losses where autocombat would have casualties.

What exactly are you talking about? The only super OP and exploitable faction is Vaulters/Miravi who recieve holy resource bonus and can easily out-damage even the highest tier units of other faction early on.

Each faction has optimal combat moves. With forest elf faction you want to kite as much and as long as possible, with Dust faction you want to optimize your soul suching and healing abilities by good placement and so on...
I have not played for a long time now but most factions had optimal play that was better with that faction than others. Also it was very important to get high initiative with your troops, especially elves. That allowed you to control the battlefield since most units could only attack or defend once per turn. So you could attack their fast or high initiative units to lock them down.

Also some enemies did better when attacking, some better when defending. YOu had to learn this and sometimes just move your unit next to enemy and let them attack you instead so they lose their defense bonus (like one of the creatures that would do AoE attack on retaliation but only could attack one of your units when it attacked).

People that bash EL turn based combat I know didn't bother trying to master it. I had lots of fun figuring out the best tactics and equipment based on which faction I am playing with.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

People that bash EL turn based combat I know didn't bother trying to master it

Because there is no point. Just max offence, moving distance and initiave, provide hero with utility passive skills/items that offer healing on kill/damage, imrpove damage and defense and you're set. There's hardly any reason to do anything else beyond that.
Kiting is only useful for suriviving the precious 6 turns if your army is outnumbered but that's about it, AI is hardly much of a threat even on highest difficulty available.

 

[ArchAngel]

People that bash EL turn based combat I know didn't bother trying to master it

Because there is no point. Just max offence, moving distance and initiave, provide hero with utility passive skills/items that offer healing on kill/damage, imrpove damage and defense and you're set. There's hardly any reason to do anything else beyond that.
Kiting is only useful for suriviving the precious 6 turns if your army is outnumbered but that's about it, AI is hardly much of a threat even on highest difficulty available.

Yes, once you get to higher tech and out tech AI and kit your guys with good armor and weapons and good utility items you steamroll. But that is not different than any other 4x game where you enter late game with an advantage.
The difference here is that early game and big parts of mid game, the tactics during combat play a bigger role than any other 4x game I played.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

The difference here is that early game and big parts of mid game, the tactics during combat play a bigger role than any other 4x game I played.

Don't believe it. Only had the need for """tactics""" in early game when outnumbered or to stall the enemy armies. Most encounters past 2nd tier required no tactics whatsoever, apart from fighting guardians early on, maybe and then only to rotate units in and out of range.

EDIT: I'm playing on Fast and Normal game speed, though, maybe mid game for you is dragged on for much longer, idk

 

[ArchAngel]

I played bigger maps and not on Fast.

 

[Anthedon]

When you scroll the map with the mouse it stops everytime it hits an object (city, hero, etc.). Is there any way to "fix" this/make mouse scrolling continuous?

 

[Great Deceiver]

Is Tempest worth it?

 

[Jimmious]

Yes it is. It suffers from the usual 4x problem: Weak AI
Also the combat is a bit weird...
But apart from these two its an excellent 4x game with a very nice "asymmetrical" approach to the civs/races and with quests/lore that make the world somewhat more interesting

 

[cvv]

Finally caved in and bought it for 75% off in the latest sale on Steam. And it's a pretty fucking fantastic game. I've been an idiot to wait that long. I guess what put me off initially was that UI. It's wonderfully functional but the aesthetics is straight from Endless Space, slick, science-fictiony and all that. I prefer something more fairytaly in my fantasy game, then again the lore seems to be a mix of fantasy and SF from what I've gathered so far.

Bitching about UI may seem retarded but I bought Endless Space on launch and couldn't play it because the UI didn't scale and on my 22" monitor I couldn't see jackshit. Fucking developers making games on their 50" inch plasmas not realizing real people will play it on much smaller displays. When I booted up EL my eyes almost popped out when I saw the UI is just as microscopic but thankfully there's a "Big Screen UI" in the options. That gave me a laugh. Sounds like a concession to special needs players when in fact it's the only way you can reasonably play the game.

Nevermind all that shit, game seems great so far, final verdict coming soon.

EDIT: I didn't buy the Shadows DLC, I've never liked espionage systems, never played a 4X with a good one. Am I missing anything essential or can I safely ignore Shadows?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

You can safely ignore pretty much all dlc apart from perhaps the guardians. The shifters one is even more pointless then the shadows and both added factions aren't particularly interesting.