Ashbery76 wrote:

I like it a lot apart from the poor Naval A.I.

Could you elaborate?

May be i should start a thread but here is what I think he might mean:

-Embarked units are listed with 3 range but they attack with 2;

-While doing so they seem to prefer (but not always) to go melee for some reason, interfearing with other melee units. By doing this, they behave wierdly and unpredictably (at least for a ranged unit);

-Boats with aoe do not take smart advantage of it, like fire ships (this might be known/intentional);

-Some units are immune to endless flames, which I guess is intentional, but the lack of any description about it makes it confusing;

-Sometimes you can move 2 armies in one tile. May be this has something to deal with the catspaw ability, as controlled armies cannot merge. I think I saw another post talking about this already though;

-Sometimes enemy boats do nothing or move close to your boats and still do not attack. I might be wrong on this one, it might be summersible units simply prefering not to surface and hold their defensive bonus.

thanks for the quick update. The fortress trade bug indeed made our games desync al the time. 

Great job you're doing, looking forward to try ES 2 when it is out of early acces

I like Tempest the most out of the 3 DLC w/factions. Though Shifters is a close second.

Hey, it is " if they're attacked by one empire then they become hostile to everyone" . And I would add that this works within each single oceanic region.

This way, it can be valuable to do sometimes the Fomorian quests within oceanic regions that are not competed yet by other AI empires.

wilbefast wrote:

Bear in mind that Fomorians don't become hostile towards empires until someone attacks them: taking fortresses via quests, for instance, won't make them hostile.

I'm sorry to bring up a 1-month old post but... maybe it's supposed to be that way, but that's not actually what's happening in the game. I wanted to play some Morgawr so I had to reactivate Tempest obviously (otherwise I play without it until the next patch), and the Fomorians are attacking me from the start. Every fortress that I take (all of them through questing, because of that exact quoted post that I remembered) is immediately taken back by roaming Fomorian ships. They're also actively hunting my Masterminds.

So either I've misunderstood the post and you mean that if they're attacked by one empire then they become hostile to everyone else (which then means that they will ALWAYS be hostile from the start since the AI can't do quests, so that's misleading), either they're hostile to the Morgawr by default for lore reasons, either it's actually bugged. Maybe I should make a new thread somewhere actually because I'm not sure how likely you are to see this answer.

Appreciate your reply. You guys are great at listening to the players community, so I sure hope next patch will fix most of the issues.  

If I may add my humble comments along the topic of this thread.

I think Tempest was a bit rushed to get it out before Civ 6, it may be a reasonable business decision, and hopefully developers dedicate some time now to patching and polishing it for all the people who showed their loyalty by buying it right away.

Here are my observations:

1. Movement is really quite weird sometimes. Probably due to discrepancy in land vs water moves it's very common to have a unit displayed on one hex, while the game thinks it is on another (like a settler with 0 moves who can't settle on the tile he is on , but can settle on the adjacent tile). 

2. Combining armies in water sometimes results in jumps backwards, but then moving the combined army seems to originate from the proper place (not where it is displayed), so another jump.

3. I don't quite understand why attacking empty but reinforced from outside fortress should give you control even if you lost the battle.

4. I certainly see more red error screens then before, most of them allow me to continue, but one crashed to desktop I think. 

5. Some Steam achievements (Kraken related + couple others) are not achievable seemingly. There are other threads about them, so I hope they are fixed eventually. 

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I don't want to be all negative, so would mention that most of the ideas behind this and previous expansions are awesome and the game is very creative and enjoyable, it just was more smooth and polished before the Tempest.

Adding this here because, for me, it falls under the general category of "Naval combat is sub-optimally balanced," which I think is a pretty legitimate critique of Tempest.  (That said, I am enjoying the Mowgowr and all the new quests.) 

1) Hero capacities seem oddly implemented for embarked heroes. 

In GDD-21, the devs state: 

Embarked General-assigned heroes will have considerably stronger “flagship” transports and their skills, notably army attributes boosts, will continue to apply on the sea.

However, I just tested Etalo Tegret's Army Damage Bonus 3 with my fleet, and it's clearly not making a difference. Same with the +Initiative accessory. (Tested by comparing listed values for navy when hero was assigned vs. unassigned. No change in unit values. If you do the same test for a land army, you'll see the values change.) 

Notably, stealth and last stand still seem to apply, so I assume the lack of "navy-wide" buffs  was due to technical complexity (i.e. not a bug, working as intended). This reduces the variety of ways to differentiate your navy, which leads to... 

2) As suggested in a separate thread, Fire Ships are overpowered and ripe for spamming. If the fire effect triggers, you're more or less guaranteed to do 60% damage, so even against superior forces, if you can get a few hits in with a fire ship, you can make a losing battle a real Pyrrhic victory for the other side.  

This message will be rude with Amplitude. I don't think it can have any effect for our Endless Legend because the game developpement is probably over now. But I have the small wish that It may have an effect on Endless Legend 2.

I am an experimented multiplayer, I writted a guide on the game. I debated to the following questions with others experimented players who play multiplayer. They think the same thing than me.

I love Endless Legend and I have played it much on multiplayer especially, but my duty is to say that there are core features bringed by the two last expansions which are a dissapointment :

- Allayi, Skyfins were great innovations. There are new strategies, and new player feeling about them. But Pearls is a boring arcade feature. It does not bring deepness or real new things to the game : you collect them periodiquely with few fast units, you build the obvious buildings which are opened with the winters (no choice, no strategy). It's just a "bonus" and it require some micro management (not fun at all in multiplayer especially).

- Morgawr, Morgawr incredibles cat's spawn feature and naval war are greats innovations too. Ocean is not a open bar now, you can really control them and prevent invasion even if you have weak land force. But fortress, fortress capture and fortress control are arcade features too. Basiquelly it's simple : only Morgawr do the quest, at the early game. After, it's more simple to kill formorians as navigating on Oceans is very slow. It's a waste of time to do the quest most of the time. Let's take one quest : Who will bring and sacrifice 3 minor factions units to control a fortress when you can just take it in one turn ? How can you find 2 wine booster in early game ? It's pure luck. This is a typically one of the very unbalanced quest you can have. Killing formorians give immediate reward, by the fortress extractors.

Let me be more clear : what is annoying and arcade it's all the action about Formorians & Fortress capture : bringing units, cleaning fortress, moving units to another fortress, recapturing a fortress taken by crazy formorians again and again.

New things are bringed to the game, but the old who could be reworked are not. For exemple :

- Heros skill trees are very repetitives. No diveristy. Always the same path. The central tree is useless. Only the right skill tree bring real difference between heros (even if 50 % of the skills are pure crap and always ignored).

- There is still no auto collect of pearls. This is very boring to collect them.

- No new units with the Expansions. It would be interesting to have a rework of the faction, to give them more deepness : reworked hero skills, new civ features. No, it's just a "plus" something : pearls, or naval fortress. There is no improvement of the existent limits of the game. Some may thing this problem is caused by the system of the independant expansions : this is impossible to create a real improvement, as it would require players own all expansions, and it's not the current system, where the features of one expansion are purely independ from another expansion...

I think the problem with these issues being arcade features is that at the end of the day that is somewhat how it is to be handled.

Pearls promote conquering land and preventing other empires from taking land to get as many pearls as possible. This while also defending the pearls in your own land if you want them to grow or just snatch them up. I treat pearls as a new strategic that is gathered slightly differently, and with different payoffs. Certainly, when I play the Allayi I tend to get very aggro in my regions and the regions around mine, and in multiplayer I strike up agreements with my neighbours relating to the pearls. I also am terrible and play at a low level for funsies with friends, so take that as you will. 

While I agree that running around gathering them is a bit of tedium, I also don't like the idea of just clicking a button on a unit and having it just eat all the pearls it finds. Auto-play is not for me. Perhaps a solution would be to have fewer clusters spawn, but the clusters will grow much faster per subsequent winter and to greater quantities possible, allowing for more benefit from the pearl-boosting capacities. This would entice culturing pearls but also make it so only the Allayi could have any meaningful early game pearls thanks to ruin searches. 

On the the Morgawr and fortress side of things I like the system the way it is. It means when you want to start controlling the oceans you need to get dominance very quickly or risk the frustration of losing them. Not only would this secure a mass of strategics thanks to the bonuses but you also then have the region, so if another empire wants it off you they need to declare war. Once the Morgawr get control of an ocean it can be quite challenging to get rid of them. Mainly because I play them I try to never allow people to amass significant navies unless they are my chums (heh). My biggest issue with naval control is fire ships, but that is another story. 

As for the fortress quests it's arguably the same issue as the villages on land, only with higher stakes. If I get the snark and awe quest from talking to a village with my settler in a region I am about to colonise, of course I am going to do it. If I see too many chiefs I almost exclusively kill them immediately after. One of the reasons I actually quite like the ocean quests is because (as the Morgawr at least) I will be out there first, and can get all the quests. But on land the AI, and other players, have the awful tendency to just pacify their villages. Which loses you the option of doing more quests. That means less chances of rare techs and less early game exploring to benefit from. 

As for hero skill trees, I agree. Would be nice to see some of the lesser used skills removed/merged, especially in the central, more general, tree. 

I was expecting to disagree because I am liking the game so much.. but all of your points are very valid and would improve the game.

Bear in mind that Fomorians don't become hostile towards empires until someone attacks them: taking fortresses via quests, for instance, won't make them hostile.

Well that does explain a lot. I was trying to just explore and do peaceful quests with my Skyfin, when all of a sudden, the Fomorians began attacking me. The same ones that were initially peaceful. 

Btw, Is that working as intended? I thought Auriga Affinity would protect me from attacks while exploring, but apparently not. :(

Ashbery76 wrote:

I like it a lot apart from the poor Naval A.I.

Uhhh...that's kind of a huge thing. If you have features that the AI can't properly take advantage of, what's the point? It will be Guardians all over again. And good luck getting the Allayi to last 60 turns.

This kind of describes my relationship with EL. Feature-wise it is the perfect fantasy 4x. But then those features just get wasted when the AI can't use them or doesn't understand them enough to take advantage. 

I find myself playing some games when updates roll around and then holding off and waiting for the next update to fix things. I was hoping Tempest would be the exception to keep me going, but so far it looks like I'm going to mothball it again until the next patch.

I like it a lot apart from the poor Naval A.I.

I'm kind of disappointed with Tempest too, but not because of perceived multiplayer problems.  It seems almost like the AI has taken steps back in some areas and the world generation seems to be wonky with certain settings.

I suspect that the increased scarcity of resources on land hinders the AI way more than intended. I'm not too confident that they can handle splitting themselves between land and sea activities well.

Well, I have to agree with Jojo. 

Visual aspect is great, beautiful, perfect. Gameplay aspect is boring. I have about 1000 hours in game, I bought new expansion 6th october and Im already bored. I really like the idea to bring the action to the ocean. But as Jojo said, there are too many arcade features. I don't want to do fortress quests, they are really costly. For example, 2 formorian units want me to control like 5 luxury fortress. Lol, rly? I need to capture 5 luxury fortress to get 1, right? Well, I don't know is it worth it.

Actually, I was pretty happy to see balance changes for forgottens. I love playing them and that changes opened few new strategies for me. And I think that is what an expierenced players want from this game at this stage. Not something new, but changes.

There are some obvious things that should have been added to the game but have not been.

For exemple, this thing as been asked a big number of time : when the garrison is full and units are builded in the city, produced units should be put out of the city. Because with a high industry you can easily produce more than 6 units per turn, so you waste your production. It's a very annoying problem.

There is too very old problem with Necrophages proliferators : you can have easily a huge army of 20 units, completely unstoppable, with zero upkeep if you have the technology Cannon Fooder and the level third of the military empire plan. It break the game and count of upkeep cost should be fixed. I mean "upkeep cost".

It's "Another thing I never liked : in any of my multiplayer games, I very rarely saw ONE guardian. Players don't build them. And it's not a beginners game, it's a game of experimented players. So if Guardians were usefull, players would build them. Something has to be done to make guardians more usefulls."

In multiplayer, 1/3 of my games crash. It has been reported on the forum many times. But this has not been solved. Sometimes, the save is corrupted, and no ancient turn can be reloaded, so game is over or there just miss option to destroid city or cant see when load save player in lobby or player cant write on chat in game.    -    http://screenshooter.net/102999855/xdwmgol

Games are very often Out Of Synchro. It has been reported many times too. But it's like that, from the very beginning... this is very annoying too.

There are others ancient problems which I had reported but never been solved.