Hello and welcome to the Endless Series.

To answer your questions as best I can.

1) YES! In fact you should NOT play without it enabled. It does so many things from fixing errors left by the developers to performance improvements.

2) The thing is that while I can't say that there are traps per se. You do have to watch out for the effects of winter. These change and grow more pronounced over the course of the game. Ans also there is the faction quest that all factions have. These are of course different and require very different things to complete them.

3) As it is your first game I would go for a medium sized map. Just make sure that you have a larger ration of ocean to land (60%) if you want to play with or want the Morgawr to spawn.

4) I myself have never had an issue with it. I believe that some people are obsessed with having their units act exactly as they want. But honestly combat is decided by your equipment, unit levels and army composition too.

Well anyway I'm sure someone will come along and contradict me on all of my points...but that's my take for now.

1. I'd start playing without it and switch when you can handle Endless AI
2. Don't micromanage too much and try to see bigger picture. You can have a great start and think going for a wonder, thinking you can catchp up your military later. But the thing is, AI can just declare war on you while you are defensless. Short-term plans usually suck from my experience.
3. I play on Large with 8 players, 1-3 continents, 70% land, many rivers, many anomalies, hard minor factions. Suggest same.
4. The combat resembles HOMM a little bit, I personally like it. It allows for some strategy here and there for sure. It can get annoying to manage those turns, but if you do it right then auto-combat will do the job in the late game.

mamarider wrote:

1. I'd start playing without it and switch when you can handle Endless AI

And then get stuck when the AI has a pathing hiccup and you cannot continue the game. Or performance tanks. Why wait to have a better gameplay experience?

And he doesn't have to start playing on Endless difficulty. You CAN start off on Normal.

I don't like some non-optional changes this mod brings. I think it is better to experience vanilla game first as it was intended to play out. And then you can switch to ELCP if you feel somethings lacking.

mamarider wrote:

I don't like some non-optional changes this mod brings. I think it is better to experience vanilla game first as it was intended to play out. And then you can switch to ELCP if you feel somethings lacking.

Oh you mean like the AI doing literally nothing with the resources they get? You mean like countless systems not working? And the game grinding to a halt as the AI gets stuck on a pathing issue it cannot solve and stops developing? You mean like the Allayi, Forgotten and Roving Clans not doing anything?

Well yeah I HATE those changes too!

Stop strawmanning, I've been annoyed by these changes too, and prefer to play without it, fixes or not.

For the record: which non-optional changes are we talking about here?

I'm also curious which changes are so horrible that you have to not play with a mod that makes the game overall better in almost every sense.

The AI changes are mostly what bother me, but also the modding tools in mutliplayer no longer working means I cant test mods in multiplayer.

CaptainCobbs wrote:

The AI changes are mostly what bother me, but also the modding tools in mutliplayer no longer working means I cant test mods in multiplayer.

The AI getting better bothers you?

LeaderEnemyBoss wrote:

For the record: which non-optional changes are we talking about here?

I like unit selling shenanigans for example and really miss them in ELCP. Selling a scout early on deep in the enemy territory after snatching those ruins... No fun without that. I don't like that I can't raze improvements ASAP as I get the city - I understand the reasoning behind this, but it is just less fun to pay for usless buildings and not be able to screw enemies over be razing all. There might be some other things that I can't recall now, the thing I am saying is while I enjoy the AI changes a lot, some things are just there that I don't like.

LeaderEnemyBoss wrote:
While I can understand that the latter is impractical sometimes, you know why it is that way, right? This was a bug that allowed easy access to cheats in multiplayer games, and obviously never intended by Amplitude. There is literally an internal game variable that says "enable multiplayer" which gets disabled by enabling modding tools. (I also doubt its relevant for most players, beginners especially).

I understand why it was removed in ELCP, but it made my life hard nevertheless. An option to disable it would be appreciated, though I no longer mod Endless Legend so it doesn't entirely matter.