I thought Empire plans were a great making your decisions matter. But they were a bit too harsh in EL1 for example if you go full economic turn 80 and your peaceful neighbor goes to war after getting the 50% more health it could be brutal. An elegant solution would be a 10 turn plan instead.

Broken Lords for me is all about the fact that early you do not get free food for growth and can't focus so heavily on production as the other factions. You have to get your economy of the ground much earlier and use it all for population and expansion. Then somewhere around the 3rd era you switch some cities from industry to pure economy and then have to balance your one or two larger cities whether for production or economy. At the same time around 3rd era your quest to conquer an opponents city pops up so the war machine has to start. I think this already forces much more interesting gameplay decisions than for example the Wild Walkers or the Cultists. Although I love all three factions.

​

CalmBreakfast wrote:

I thought Empire plans were a great making your decisions matter. But they were a bit too harsh in EL1 for example if you go full economic turn 80 and your peaceful neighbor goes to war after getting the 50% more health it could be brutal. An elegant solution would be a 10 turn plan instead.

Broken Lords for me is all about the fact that early you do not get free food for growth and can't focus so heavily on production as the other factions. You have to get your economy of the ground much earlier and use it all for population and expansion. Then somewhere around the 3rd era you switch some cities from industry to pure economy and then have to balance your one or two larger cities whether for production or economy. At the same time around 3rd era your quest to conquer an opponents city pops up so the war machine has to start. I think this already forces much more interesting gameplay decisions than for example the Wild Walkers or the Cultists. Although I love all three factions.

I think a better approach for empire plans would be a system that lets players freely invest points into perks when the influence is available. The old system made it so you wanted to create cities every 20 turns and made it so you would limit your diplo actions with other factions at times to meet the influence cost.  Also the old system encourage players to actually settle early to get the bonus yields and then raze those city by turn 19 and then resettle after you did your plan. They might end up doing something like they did in ES2 with it.

I think the system can be much better for the broken lords if they had other unique mechanics that interacted with dust that is not directly tied to buying out stuff all the time.    

​

AdamTaylor wrote:

I hope that this game plays much like the original. That style was very unique and fun.

I have Civ and Stellaris and GalCiv for those overall game mechanics. The Endless Legends system stood out.

Yep. However, the city building was minimalist in EL1. Mostly buying tiles. But I expect the game concepts they did in Humankind will give some inspiration for something new in EL2 to create beautiful cities and various effects with landscape.