Wilbefast :

- About the Balance directly, there is several topics from several guys. My own thread is here (I got more than 1000 hours of playing in multiplayer my point of view is experimented so) : https://www.games2gether.com/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/19479-list-of-suggestions-by-category-shifters-update

- A guide I writted about Endless Legend. If you want, you can read it deeply, there are some things about balances & uncorrects things : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635764665

Thanks for chiming in, wilbefast!

I'm a new-ish player but would just like to reiterate the need for improved AI & balance. This is a good game with so much potential, but that's what holds it back from being "great" - not any lack of sea content/mechanics. I cannot stress this enough. Personally I'd prefer to see all that time & resources being invested into improving opponent behavior & strategy (especially mid-late game as mentioned) rather than this ocean stuff.... I get that from a marketing standpoint you guys need to add content to sell an expansion, but that's not what we're clamoring for as players.

Like the guys who've posted above, I'm holding off playing EL until this new expansion is released - the AI is just too flawed & passive. So I hope some major changes are made! Otherwise EL will regretfully sit on my virtual shelf gathering dust, which is a darn shame because as I've said it's got so many things going for it and a ton of potential to be better.

Gwydden wrote:

robertiv wrote:

Thanks for chiming in, wilbefast!

I'm a new-ish player but would just like to reiterate the need for improved AI & balance. This is a good game with so much potential, but that's what holds it back from being "great" - not any lack of sea content/mechanics. I cannot stress this enough. Personally I'd prefer to see all that time & resources being invested into improving opponent behavior & strategy (especially mid-late game as mentioned) rather than this ocean stuff.... I get that from a marketing standpoint you guys need to add content to sell an expansion, but that's not what we're clamoring for as players.

Like the guys who've posted above, I'm holding off playing EL until this new expansion is released - the AI is just too flawed & passive. So I hope some major changes are made! Otherwise EL will regretfully sit on my virtual shelf gathering dust, which is a darn shame because as I've said it's got so many things going for it and a ton of potential to be better.

Don't take this the wrong way, but who is "we," exactly?

The overwhelming majority of people who buy EL never win even a single game, according to Steam achievements. Of those who have won at least one game, I would say most stick to single player. Of those who engage in multiplayer, I'd say at least a significant portion does it casually. Competitive multiplayer people, or those who find the AI not hard enough? Hardly representative of the majority of players.

Not saying balance and AI are not important, but they're rather low on my personal wishlist while naval content has been at the top for the longest while. I don't think I'm the only one. Empty seas bother me far more than any supposed advantage or disadvantage in MP. Plus, balance and AI are just the sort of stuff that should be addressed in a free patch, not a full-fledged expansion, but I think we agree on that.

That isn't exclusive to EL either. Most 4x games have a very low multiplayer population versus single player and I don't personally think that balance is the biggest problem facing EL. Balancing the game for multiplayer while affecting the single player experience is a recipe for boring gameplay IMO. It's fine for a shooter, but when you have races with deliberately different playstyles, it generally amounts to watering down what makes them unique.

In terms of AI, what I think should be the general aim for the devs is to have consistent challenge across the length of a single game from the AI. I don't necessarily think that should be at the expense of new content, but I also don't want new content that only I, as the human player, use to my advantage. Currently I think Guardians fall into this category a bit in that the AI doesn't really understand how powerful they are. I actually had a Cultist empire exclude a Guardian unit from an attacking force trying to break my siege on its single city. That made no sense...at all. But maybe that's a Cultist flaw in that they still address certain parts of the game like an empire with multiple cities.

Gwydden wrote:

Don't take this the wrong way, but who is "we," exactly?

The overwhelming majority of people who buy EL never win even a single game, according to Steam achievements. Of those who have won at least one game, I would say most stick to single player. Of those who engage in multiplayer, I'd say at least a significant portion does it casually. Competitive multiplayer people, or those who find the AI not hard enough? Hardly representative of the majority of players.

Not saying balance and AI are not important, but they're rather low on my personal wishlist while naval content has been at the top for the longest while. I don't think I'm the only one. Empty seas bother me far more than any supposed advantage or disadvantage in MP. Plus, balance and AI are just the sort of stuff that should be addressed in a free patch, not a full-fledged expansion, but I think we agree on that.

"We" would be the threads/players discussing the AI and mid-late game doldrums both on this forum and others, reviews, etc.

For the record, I didn't really say that the AI isn't "hard enough" nor specifically call for faction balancing due to multiplayer. I'm more talking about balancing the different stages of the game to maintain player interest, and to improve the AI's behavior so a given playthru doesn't start feeling static & predestined halfway through. If you disagree that that is the case, I'd love to hear what kind of setup you use so I can mitigate those issues myself! IMO when you present a ton of beautiful, rich content (as EL does) but have some fundamental flaws like the ones that currently exist, the game winds up being less than the sum of its parts and plopping more content on top of that doesn't fix them.

And sure, I 100% agree those tweaks should be a non-expansion patch if possible. My point was that with limited resources of time, expertise, and $$$, there's only so much a developer can do - I'd like to see a decent chunk of said resources go towards the AI because as it stands it's not something I'm inclined to put my own limited hours into. Feel free to disagree of course.

FWIW I felt like Endless Space had many of the same flaws. I own both games plus expansions, but unless there's significant improvement here I'll probably skip future Amplitude titles.

"The choice came down to either 1 naval unit per faction or several, shared by everyone and we opted for the later: for naval warfare to have an interesting set of counters everyone needs to have access to a varied roster of ships. The ships will share the same models (otherwise we would need 11 factions times 4 new models… simply a tremendous undertaking)."

Understandable but it pretty much kills the expansion for me. The best thing about Endless Legend, for me personally, is the diversity between factions. I would have preferred single, customizable, ship for each faction with different abilities, even at the cost of other features. 

Jojo_Fr wrote:

Wilbefast :

- About the Balance directly, there is several topics from several guys. My own thread is here (I got more than 1000 hours of playing in multiplayer my point of view is experimented so) : https://www.games2gether.com/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/19479-list-of-suggestions-by-category-shifters-update

- A guide I writted about Endless Legend. If you want, you can read it deeply, there are some things about balances & uncorrects things : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635764665

Got it, thanks

Gwydden wrote:

The overwhelming majority of people who buy EL never win even a single game, according to Steam achievements. Of those who have won at least one game, I would say most stick to single player. Of those who engage in multiplayer, I'd say at least a significant portion does it casually. Competitive multiplayer people, or those who find the AI not hard enough? Hardly representative of the majority of players.

Not saying balance and AI are not important, but they're rather low on my personal wishlist while naval content has been at the top for the longest while. I don't think I'm the only one. Empty seas bother me far more than any supposed advantage or disadvantage in MP. Plus, balance and AI are just the sort of stuff that should be addressed in a free patch, not a full-fledged expansion, but I think we agree on that.

Our player-base is pretty diverse, even within the single- or multiplayer communities. Some players want to win, other players want to find optimal snow-ball strategies, other players want to break the game, other players want to enjoy exploring the lore, other players want to have a story to tell... We use conceptual tools like GNS theory and Bartle's taxonomy to help us to predict and to satisfy the various different player agendas. Often these agendas will be in conflict. For example while we try to keep things balanced a certain degree of imbalance is desirable players who are playing so they have an interesting story to tell (and who couldn't care less whether they win or lose).

robertiv wrote:
I'm more talking about balancing the different stages of the game to maintain player interest, and to improve the AI's behavior so a given playthru doesn't start feeling static & predestined halfway through. If you disagree that that is the case, I'd love to hear what kind of setup you use so I can mitigate those issues myself! IMO when you present a ton of beautiful, rich content (as EL does) but have some fundamental flaws like the ones that currently exist, the game winds up being less than the sum of its parts and plopping more content on top of that doesn't fix them.

And sure, I 100% agree those tweaks should be a non-expansion patch if possible. My point was that with limited resources of time, expertise, and $$$, there's only so much a developer can do - I'd like to see a decent chunk of said resources go towards the AI because as it stands it's not something I'm inclined to put my own limited hours into. Feel free to disagree of course.

FWIW I felt like Endless Space had many of the same flaws. I own both games plus expansions, but unless there's significant improvement here I'll probably skip future Amplitude titles.

The snow-ball effect in most 4X games tends to create this kind of situation, as one empire -often the human empire- will tend to lead. If the AI has any kind of built-in self-preservation it will tend to avoid conflict with the leader. We don't want either for all the AIs to form a coalition and abruptly declare war on the player as the game draws to a close, especially when some have been allied with the player for a great many turns. 

Really it's the same problem as with balance: some players want the AI to replace a human, others want the AI to make the game exciting. Being competitive and being exciting are often in conflict as the latter may involve suddenly declaring war on a stronger empire and getting yourself eliminated. Our goal is to find some kind of compromise between the two. We've added a substantial number of new attitude modifiers recently in order to create more tension in the mid- to late-game: the AI will notably react to other empires' actions vis-à-vis third parties (attacks, eliminations, betrayals, etc) and also to other empires' impending victory. We hope this will be sufficient to deal with the AI's perceived complacency as frontiers begin to stabilise. These are things we'll be calibrating, with your help, during the open beta.

Frogsquadron wrote:

@Robertiv what you're mentioning as regards game dynamics are systemic questions, rooted deep in the design philosophy of the game. We want to keep factions behaving in a way that is rational when taking their personality into account, even though there is an element to which it'll react to what it perceives as threats or opportunities. Always a work in progress, however.

That reminds me: we've done some work too to improve how faction personalities are communicated to the player

Here is a diagram to explain the issue and the steps we've taken to solve it:

Before	After

All the new attitude modifiers I mentioned in my previous post are influenced in this way by the AIs personality, which is defined by the AI's faction faction but also other parameters like the game speed and difficulty.