Dear all,
A bit of news from the dev team of Endless Legend. We are working hard on finalizing the game, and it feels more and more to be close to the release goal.
We are steadily fixing bugs, having already gotten rid of the most serious ones.
We are also improving the AI constantly: the development of the AI took a long time, because the game is super rich in terms of game features, and we have to teach the AI how to do all this. Now that all of this implemented, the work consists in making the system work together adequately, and add a few “human” behaviors to make the AI act like a real player. We also took a lot of time developing AI monitoring tools (sadly you will not see them in the build) to understand what is going in (decisions, priorities, army missions, etc.). The AI is now able to wage efficient wars, and we are in the process of improving its self-defense.
We have performed yet another overhaul of the tech tree, essentially to answer to the worries of mid-late game lack of interest. This is still under test.
We have also changed the method of resolving attacks during the battle, to answer the concerns of combat between higher tiered units. VieuxChat helped us design a new combat resolution system, which is finalized right now along with the revamp of all units and item stats.
We have worked a lot on the lack of immersion during diplomatic interactions (which was already improved in the last build) and added animated ambassadors. It’s pretty cool and are looking forward to release that!
We have also enriched the traits list of custom factions to give more meat to the faction customization potential. We still need to balance it before we deliver it and power gamers can exploit the system.
The Mac version has been running for some time now, but we started QA for real this week. There are very few bugs, but the few ones are a bit blocking and need to be fixed (pause menu not appearing, diplomatic background missing). As nothing is ever simple, these bugs only appear in some older versions of MacOS which we do not possess at the office… The Linux version has also been started and is looking good, but I am not sure we can make it for release, especially because it would jeopardize the QA efforts to the detriment of the Windows/Mac game stability.
So I guess the big question is: when do you get a new build? Well we want something convincing with the latest AI, tech tree, and battle system, and we will need some QA and VIP feedback first. Yes, the spoiled VIPs will get a build this week end, and if all goes well, you should have one next week. Some elements will be kept for release though, either because we are still tuning it (custom factions for instance), or because we need an exclusivity to maximize press coverage (I think we all want the game to succeed!). We will try to deliver a Mac build as well, even though it has some issues on older systems.
But anyway, we will keep you updated on the progress of this new build. All in all, the game feels like it is almost complete, and we feel confident for a release at the end of the summer.
Cheers,
AmpliMath