I personally play on Impossible and win .... sometimes. An active, opportunistic play style is very helpful. You definitely need to use diplomacy to stop snowballing empires from doing their thing. Joint war declarations are a powerful tool! An early era2 war against a weak target (or a target that is bound to be troublesome anyway like necros) can be a good boost to your economy. Luring the enemy near your cities to take advantage of ELCPs fortification can give you the boost you need to win. You also need to anticipate who will be a victory threat early on. A roving clan player that was free to expand is often one of the earliest victory threats (dust...). All in all - if you dont play too passive and deal with victory threats, you can typically delay winning empires to about turn 150. This ideally gives you the necessary time to get your own victory conditions in order. But as I said, I only manage to do that in about half of my games (and I like it that way!). I think most players agree that ELCP serious is comparable with Vanilla endless (except with less early game aggression probably).

I know of a few players that can beat endless, they usually (ab-)use advanced multiplayer mechanics like salting to gain an advantage. Endless is only for the hardcore crowd and I am okay with that. 

ELCP doesnt change how minor faction discounts work and certainly doesnt mess with the localization. So yes, that tooltip is just wrong.

As far as I recall, the Production Reduction cost of the tooltip only says "in city," not "on Empire."

I know that EL's (and ES2's) tooltips can be difficult to read given the quirks of the parser that creates them from the game data, but in general if it does not say "on Empire" in an "on city" effect, that effect applies only locally.

Thanks for the prompt replies!

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

As far as I recall, the Production Reduction cost of the tooltip only says "in city," not "on Empire."

I know that EL's (and ES2's) tooltips can be difficult to read given the quirks of the parser that creates them from the game data, but in general if it does not say "on Empire" in an "on city" effect, that effect applies only locally.

To clarify, I wasn't speaking of the tooltip for Minor Faction villages, but of one of the Loading Screen tips at the bottom of the screen, as is seen here.  In that tip, it explicitly says it is a "within your Empire" effect, with the crescent "wreath" icon next it.  The tooltip for the Minor Faction villages just doesn't say either way if it's on-empire or on-city, which as you point out usually means it's only local. However, in the same tooltip, the very next line also doesn't specify that the "+1 pacified and rebuilt village" is actually an Empire-wide effect either, so the village tooltip just seemed non-specific in both directions in this case. Since the tooltip didn't say one way or another, I figured the explicit Loading Screen tip was the only concrete description to go off of.

At any rate, just glad to hear that this is indeed how it's intended to work, so nothing going wrong in my game.

Thank you for the clarification.

TAking a wild guess here, that loading screen tip is probably a leftover from an earlier design.

LeaderEnemyBoss, hi. I have a suggestion.

Can u create the possibility (option) to "Race specific heroes in market"? It would be cool addition. In my opinion - it more logical and immersion to be able to choose the heroes of only their own race. And expand the list of available races of heroes through capturing the capital of another race. That way, you could get other faction heroes, but only if you control their original capital.

I appeal to you, because you are the only mod developer who is theoretically capable of implementing this, as this requires deep access to the game code. What u think about it?

LeaderEnemyBoss wrote:

@Rustam Not sure what to say to you, here is a screenshot. If you cant select more empires, you installed the patch wrong

Thank you, I previously did not pay attention to the fact that first I need to choose the number of empires (on the left) greater than 8.

Kaiver-L wrote:

LeaderEnemyBoss, hi. I have a suggestion.

Can u create the possibility (option) to "Race specific heroes in market"? It would be cool addition. In my opinion - it more logical and immersion to be able to choose the heroes of only their own race. And expand the list of available races of heroes through capturing the capital of another race. That way, you could get other faction heroes, but only if you control their original capital.

I appeal to you, because you are the only mod developer who is theoretically capable of implementing this, as this requires deep access to the game code. What u think about it?

This is a gameplay change that goes beyond what I envision for ELCP (that is to stay mostly true to how Vanilla ELCP plays).

In generally my credo is: Save or it didnt happen. That doesnt mean I dont believe it didnt happen, but I need reproducable behavior to actually do something about it within a reasonable timeframe.

That Urkan thing on the other side should be easy to reproduce, so I can probably do something about that.

Some of these buildings already received hefty buffs, and others I see frequently used (Imperial News Network specifically). Please always take into account that depending on your settings and your level of play, different techs and buildings may become valuable. I will think about your suggestion for Self-Driving Plows though.

LeaderEnemyBoss wrote:

Some of these buildings already received hefty buffs, and others I see frequently used (Imperial News Network specifically). Please always take into account that depending on your settings and your level of play, different techs and buildings may become valuable. I will think about your suggestion for Self-Driving Plows though.

Yeah, thinking about it, you are probably right about INN and what I said about it was pretty dumb. Although in my defense, I've only played in single player, always go for Science, Economic, or Wonder victories, only once went for an expansion victory, and it was with the Necrophages, and tbh, I was falling asleep when I wrote that part of the post, so I am almost surprised it even came out as real sentences. 

And really, even if you only consider the Self-Driving Plows suggestion, that is enough to make me happy, because that idea was actually the first one I had and what motivated me to write the "list of all the technologies I find too weak" in the first place. The rest of suggestions were probably not really that good, anyway. Thank you.

Chesterfield wrote:

Hello there.

First of I wanted to say thank you for this community patch! It makes the gameplay experience so much better!

One thing I would wish you could fix though, would be the automated city government. I know it isn't a popular mechanic (people tend to optimize by themselves) but those of us who would like to use it, mostly stay clear of it because of the horrible mechanics.

It works adequate enough in everything but "balance". Then it's just horrible.I always envisioned this particular setting to actually balance ressources and population, not put mostly everything in industry and a little food. :(

Don't know if this is doable but I and certainly many others would welcome a fix to it.

Hear hear!

Does anyone have a link to the changelogs of the versions before version 2.0.1? Thought I might do some reading up on all the features of the ELCP, and was thinking to start at the beginning. Or will starting from version 2.0.1 give me an accurate enough idea of ALL the features? Or does someone have a sort of summary I can read? Was actually thinking of trying to make my own complete summary of ALL the changes and additions you've made to the base game.

ELCP started with version v2.0.1 in order to differentiate it from the vanilla versions (for multiplayer etc.).

A funny idea occurred to me the other day: would it possible and desirable to randomise the location of new pearls over the winters? 

My impressions is that at the moment they always appear in the same spot. And it there are already uncollected pearls, the cluster will just grow. Which turns pearl collection away from exploration to routine fetch exercise, similar to visiting those shops each week in HoMM 3. I find that actually pretty repetitive and tedious. 

Randomisation could add a little wiggle to it in that you again have to find where the pearls are. And I do like how "stealing" pearls can impact diplomatic relations.