Well... now it's known. It should be October 14. :)

https://twitter.com/Amplitude/status/783297286239621121

Could someone tell me something about this Shared Victory? Is this new type of victory, or just 'alliance based'? I'm not on top of things lately, and I could miss the info, if there was any.

Slashman wrote:

This all sounds really really great. I'm just a little worried about the AI handling this. Specifically, I'm worried that the AI won't be able to deal with the new mechanics well. I hope I'm wrong here.

This is something that we were worried about too, so we made sure to steal Florian from ES2 for a few weeks. He's been working very hard so that the AI will manage to juggle land and sea warfare - it's a lot to ask from a machine but our first results are promising.

Also, what, if anything, is being done to address the lull in the mid to late game in terms of not having enough opposition from rival empires which allow you to coast along to an easy victory?

I've been digging around in the diplomatic AI to address concerns that were raised about the AI not been sufficiently aggressive. There are more attitude modifiers in place now that should push that AI towards sabotaging quietly winning empires.

SireTriste wrote:

But what about the sieging mechanic? Will I be able to siege a coastal city from the seas? 

If I siege a coastal city with both land and sea forces, do I get bonuses of any sort? 

On the other hand, if I only siege it with land/sea forces, will defenders have a bonus?  

And will coastal cities have an approval malus if the neighbouring sea is owned by another empire, whether it's a friend or a foe? 

We're concerned about situation where players are unable to boostrap a navy because the opponent has too many ships deployed - it'd be frustrating for the landlocked player to be further penalised. We'd rather provide incentives for taking an interesting in the ocean than penalties for not doing so.

sdsbarbosa wrote:

Will Neros, the water guardian, get some update? I mean, walk on the ocean and be able to naval battle?

Cross-expansion content is always a contentious issue. Our philosophy is that each expansion should be entirely stand-alone so players aren't obliged to buy the others in order to get at all the cool stuff (and no, SEGA is not going to change this). I agree though, having Guardians walking around in the water and smashing ships would be a really cool thing to see.

rasputnik wrote:

Im a bit concerned about the Morgawr being very limited to effectiveness depending on the terrain that happens to spawn.

Im thinking of experience with naval centric civilisations in the Civ games, and the difficulty of selecting coastal tiles in early game (especially if a city tile needs to be on the shore before naval units can be built).  I'm all for more specialised factions, it's part of what Endless Legend so deep, but I'd fear an unlucky Morgawr player would be rushed by their more land capable neighbours before they could get a foothold into any naval growth.

We're doing a pass on the spawn-point selection algorithm to provide decent spawn locations for the Morgawr. The faction is not entirely useless on land though, especially given it's various special abilities. We'll go into the faction a bit more in a future GDD.

Jojo_Fr wrote:

In my signature I propose a link to suggestions about the Balance.

I'm afraid your signature hasn't survived the transition to the new platform - could you share the link here?

Please introduce an auto collect exploration button.

This is on the improve list. We'll do our best to fix the most important issues.

Naval combat needs to have a great strategic effect like in Civ5.Trade routes and blockades should matter and having a weak navy should hurt.In games like AOW3 you build naval units but they are worthless because they have no strategic impact.Obviously most important is the A.I understands how to actually play this new system.

I look forward to actually playing islands in EL with the new Endless British Empire.I think this expansion should complete the game finally.

Really cool ideas here, I like this a lot

But what about the sieging mechanic? Will I be able to siege a coastal city from the seas? 

If I siege a coastal city with both land and sea forces, do I get bonuses of any sort? 

On the other hand, if I only siege it with land/sea forces, will defenders have a bonus? 

And will coastal cities have an approval malus if the neighbouring sea is owned by another empire, whether it's a friend or a foe? 

Hurr-arrr! 

The oceans in Endless Legend have previously been vast open expanses with nothing for players to see or to do. Players have been asking for a long time for interesting things to do in these regions.

Overall Rationale

Sunken Ruins

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

A new set of point-of-interest locations are available for empires prepared to risk entering the ocean. These will provide rewards to players but will also continue to build the lore around Auriga and the Endless through additional side quests.

Sea Fortresses

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

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 however their mysterious guardians must be parleyed with or defeated in battle. These same guardians will patrol “wild” ocean regions, making them a lot less safe to cross without a convey.

We’ll be changing how ocean regions are generated, and this will include the creation of Sea Fortresses. These are strategic locations on the water for players to dispute. 

There are between 0 and 3 per ocean region: they will tend to appear in greater numbers in oceans which are more “strategically pivotal”, for example in a strait between two islands or between two continents. 

Ocean Region Control

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

Managing to capture all the fortresses in a region should provide an empire with additional bonuses, and while we don’t want cities and sieges in ocean regions we would like players to be able to take control of them.

An empire can gain complete control of an ocean region by capturing all of its fortresses. The empire’s trade and fortress resource revenues are increased and their units regenerate faster and can retrofit. These perks will be lost as soon as even one fortress changes hands however!

Naval Battles

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

Naval battles for everyone!

All seaborne units (embarked land-units included) can instigate and reinforce sea battles. We have a couple of exotic mechanics and tile effects in mind to spice up this new type of battle, but we’ll discuss these in depth (pun intended) a future document. In the meantime you can check out the section below for some information on how units will take part in this battles!

Embarked and Seafaring Units

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

Embarked units will appear in sea battles as a vulnerable “transport ship” unit. They will attack but will not stand a chance against a well-equipped navy. Hero transports will be better able to hold their own however.

In addition, a new set of 4 warship unit bodies will be available to all empires. These new units can be unlocked through research and can be equipped as the players see fit: they will tend to be more modular than land units, with items having a great impact on the units’ abilities in battle, to make up for there being fewer of them.

Seafaring units must be produced in a coastal city: they appear directly on one of the city’s coastal exploitation tiles, defined by the player.

Sea Weather

Sub-rationale

Feature overview

The expansion will add a new layer to the world called the “weather layer”. The weather layer is the size of the world map and laps around. Each hexagon tile in the weather layer has a weather type defined (“no weather” is a type of weather). The weather type defines a world effect to the terrain tile beneath it, but only if the tile is an ocean tile. The entire weather layer will move at the beginning of each turn based on the direction of the wind. The wind direction and strength can change slightly each turn, and the entire weather layer is completely regenerated at the beginning of each season. Like terrain on land, weather applies both on the map and in battle and can increase or decrease movement costs, block vision and even deal damage!

"Morgawr" Faction

Sub-rationale

Feature Overview

The faction receives strong bonuses for building near the sea and a majority of units they have at their disposal are warships. Their gameplay will focus on the new mechanics: they gain additional bonuses from sea trade and the control of floating fortresses. They will tend to control a dispersed set of land regions which feed into a well-controlled central ocean: think British Empire.

Fish-out-of-water on land, the new faction will tend to exploit the minor and even major empires to achieve its ends for them.

VIP Comments & answers

Sea weather

Nasarog: 

How will winter affect oceans?

The ice shelves will have an impact, certainly: we've had to plan a lot of things around them. Ocean weather (which we'll discuss in a future GDD) will also be different depending on the season. We don't have any new winter effects planned at the moment though.

The-Cat-O-Nine-Tales: 

I've been thinking, and I've started to wonder if the ruins and sea fortresses will be the only new features in ocean regions, or if there will now be greater tile variety beyond "coastal" and "ocean."

The ocean weather will add some tile variety, yes - and it will be flowing and fickle as befits the oceans

Nosferatiel: 

Quickdust sea: A large amount of dust has mixed with the sea. Any unit not moving at least one tile a round gets stuck til the end of the battle, receiving damage per turn. I can imagine such nasty things... :D

We think alike

We're hoping to have things like lightning storms and fog banks which move about each turn. The trouble is rendering them within EL's engine without excluding players with low-end systems…

Sea Fortresses

Adder:

How will the extraction of these resources happen? Only if you own the corresponding land extraction tech? Or will there be new techs for the naval extractors? Will there be new types of resources?

Fortresses have "facilities" attached to them which contain resource extractors or other special buildings. These "open up" as the game progresses and provide resources or other bonuses to whichever empires controls them. Fortresses will be discussed in more detail in a future doc! we've decided for this expansion to stick with the current set to avoid a complexity overload. The idea is that a proportion of the resources will be moved to the ocean based on the amount of ocean. Low-tier resources will mostly stay on land but on maps with a lot of water it will be more difficult to access, say, Mithrite and Dust-Water without using naval units.

The-Cat-O-Nine-Tales: 

Am I correct in comparing this to minor faction villages, but possibly without assimilation option?

The fortresses are similar to Minor Faction villages, yes, but they are not exactly the same. There is no "pacification" or assimilation - each fortress manages its own affairs: completing a quest for one will not have any impact on the others. They can't be bribed or converted, they don't need to be rebuilt…

Nosferatiel: 

Will they randomly appear in such strategic bottlenecks or will you have them placed semi-randomly, preferring to make them real blockages?

Their placement is procedural: there is a probabilistic draw of positions based on a number of criteria including the size of the ocean, the number of adjacent land and regions, the number of different continents it touches... etc

Nasarog: 

How about migrating citizens to the fortresses? Soldiers/Marines stationed there? Should be interesting either way.

Fortresses are more like converted villages really: they have a garrison and provide resources, but do not have any production queue, so they don't have any population either.

Propbuddha:

Will there be mechanics (ex. expansion disapproval) to prevent and empire from controlling a lot of fortresses?

Fortresses are a focal point for naval warfare. Ocean control should fluctuate more than land control: floating fortresses are not fortified and must be garrisoned. So the owner of the fortress can change really quickly.

It won't be that easy to control all the fortresses and especially to protect them from the other players!

Ocean Region Control

Eysteinh: 

ARR, does this mean there will be pirates?

Pirates? Well there will be hostile roaming fleets in the ocean regions...

Propbuddha:

If a player controls an ocean region, no players can move into it without declaring war? 

Ocean regions aren't totally like land regions: there is no closed borders concept here. You can move into it even if you are not in war with the owner.

Nasarog:

Will the ocean tiles contain their own unique minors?

There won't be any minor faction villages in ocean regions, as to benefit from their population bonus and to assimilate them you'd need to build a city in the region.

Adder: 

Just a quick thought, how is this going to work for the Cultists? It seems this clashes with the one-city concept

If the cultists should ever be able to trade in any manner, then that would have to happen exclusively by sea and across any number of ocean regions. So they'd need to spawn next to the sea in all cases, too…

There are no sea cities, only fortresses, but the Cultists can have as many as they like. We're going to tweak their spawn parameters to put them closer to the coast but as a rule they are a faction that will have more trouble with naval warfare, yes. Make no mistake: this is something we've discussed at length!

Propbuddha