Jojo_Fr wrote:

- Endless Legend is right to have a background that sets it apart, but I think it should make this background easier to identify immediately, more archetypal. More Manichaean too (with factions more clearly marked as bad, and others as good, or neutral).

No thanks. Pigeon-holing players into Camp A vs Camp B in a polarized system is not dynamic or realistic. The real world isn't so black and white. The Academy Quest in ES2 tells me the devs also view things more through the lens of moral relativism and less through the lens of dogmatic fanaticism.

I would love to see something of an artifacts system put in place. Empires will be able to find artifacts left behind by ancient cultures on Auriga like the Endless and Lost or even pre-Dust Broken Lords and Drakken. You could use the power of these artifacts to provide boosts to your Empire, with more powerful artifacts being unlocked as the game progresses.

And later on, spies will be able to steal these artifacts for their own empires or they can be used as trading items.

Better mod support would probably be the dream out of anything else though.

AdamTaylor wrote:

There's so many things to mention. I know a lot of great points have been brought up, along with quite a few that I disagree with. But personally, things I very much hope to see in EL2:

- Branching Questlines

Give each faction actual choices for their faction quests. Let us choose the path we want to take (maybe have a military, cultural or tech approach). Right now the faction quests are pretty dull. They're always the same, so once you've played a faction, you don't really care anymore, it simply becomes a routine that you go through instead of a real story to enjoy.

- More unit options

Each faction should have more units (having just three each is pretty sad honestly). There should be 2-3 per tech tier. Giving people a mix of infantry, cavalry, ranged and support/special units. Naturally with different factions having strengths and weaknesses for the various types (so some might be super melee focused and have more of those, with few ranged, but their melee units are designed to balance that).

This would apply to the minor factions too. Give each of them 3-4 different units (that we can use when they're assimilated as well).

- More hero types per race

Please give us multiple hero types for each race. No more of this single type for all heroes of a race. It just feels lazy. It would be great to see infantry, cavalry, support, etc heroes of the same race. Give us a lot more variety. And it would make hero choices a lot more impactful.

- Governor hero type

We need a new hero type that is focused on city management. One with fewer combat related skills and more towards building up or maintaining cities.

- Tab should cycle through whatever we're on

So if we're in a city, hitting Tab would cycle to the next city. If we're on a unit, it would switch to the next active unit.

- Let us remove districts

Give us the option to remove a district, as we can with most of the upgrade buildings. This would allow us to swap things around for example, like if we want to remove a basic district and replace it with a Garth of the Allayi.

- Let us rename heroes

It would be great to be able to rename heroes. Especially with how many duplicates can show up in a long game.

- Larger maps

Pretty straight forward. Give us options for bigger maps with more factions on them. I'd love to be able to play a massive map with every faction enabled.

- Improved map randomization

Just some tweaks to map design. Like making sure that you don't get regions that have a 1 spot section that is blocked off (having an hourglass shaped region with something like a ruin right in the middle basically means you only get to use half the region). The map generator should spot such things and correct them.

Also work on initial region balance for a new game. I find a lot of the time the regions where everyone starts can be horrifically unbalanced. Some regions might be super full of FIDS while others are barren, giving some players a massive advantage over others. Resources are similar. I think making all the starting regions have 1 titanium and glassteel node and the same number of minor faction villages would be a good idea. That way everyone starts on an even footing. If you want to waste your early turns exploring for other regions with your settler, that would be your choice. But at least by default everyone would start off more or less the same. There would always be some variance of course, but not some of the insane differences I've seen. Like having one faction start in a region with no major resources, while another started with titanium, glassteel and hyperium and two luxuries.

- Make terrain global, not region based

It just feels very artificial to have each region basically be a contained environment. Having one region that's lush and covered in forests, while the one next to it just barren desert. It seem so fake. The world should be laid out with an overall terrain layout (using the Earth standard pole to pole as default, with options for different setups) and then create the regions. That way regions can have a more believable mix of terrain in them.

- Better AI

Pretty much a given. The AI needs a lot of work. They need to play smarter and not just rely on "AI Bonus" to win. Make them play more intelligently when it comes to victory conditions and potential allies and enemies. Instead of just an arbitrary scale of simple actions to determine if an AI will declare peace or war, make them take into account other aspects. Like having them choose to make peace with one faction so they can focus on their war with another (instead of just going to war with everyone and getting crushed from all sides). And make them more willing to ally with someone who is close to winning if allied victories is on. If someone's close to winning and they have no chance of stopping them, it doesn't make sense to declare war just to get beat down, the AI should be more likely to try and ally with them to get the shared win.

- More music

The music in the game is awesome, but very limited. When playing long sessions it would be great to have more variety in what's playing.

- Instant Unit Move

Please give us an option to have units skip the move animation. So we can click and just have them appear wherever they will be. The movement animation is painfully slow.

- Increase Resource Limits

EL caps at 999 for resources. In really long games, this can be annoying, as some things you'll easily cap out with while you're still building up others. Increasing the limits to 9999 or more would be nice.

I agree wholeheartedly with what you said here. :)

My big thing is AI only 

i want to watch the world burn 

or find out what would happen if no players were there

And Better AI

The art and the 4x system at current state is top-notch for me.

So I would say:

- Better UI and smoother play: Much like ES > ES2 did.

- Upgraded graphics: higher detail, breathtaking environments.

- Better AI (...)

- Extended modding support: many things that affect the game immensely are not exposed in the xml files we modders have to work with.

Better performance - EL is horribly unoptimized even with modern graphic cards and CPUS

More faction unique units

Lightjolly wrote:

Better performance - EL is horribly unoptimized even with modern graphic cards and CPUS

More faction unique units

It is? I get decent performance on an i5 with 16 GB RAM and GTX 960 w/ 4GB of RAM

I want Endless Space on ground I mean EL with ES races and unit like Armored vehicles , Mechs and maybe Aircraft.

Lightjolly wrote:

Slashman wrote:

Lightjolly wrote:

Better performance - EL is horribly unoptimized even with modern graphic cards and CPUS

More faction unique units

It is? I get decent performance on an i5 with 16 GB RAM and GTX 960 w/ 4GB of RAM

Depends on settings and game turn. But mid-late game with 8 factions and largest maps gives me a mix between (12fps - 50fps, is that decent to you?) and I'm on an i7-7700, 16gb ram and Gtx1060

Are you using ELCP? LeaderEnemyBoss has fixed several causes of slowdowns in the vanilla game.

I purchased Endless Legend as part of a MASSIVE deal on Steam.  EL plus all the currently available packs, plus dungeon of the Endless and (I THINK) Endless Space, all for like $17.  I knew nothing about it but thought "Damn, that's a lot of stuff for under $20.  If it's no good, it's no big loss, but if it's good, then DAMN that's a helluva deal."  The latter turned out to be true.

There are things I immediately liked about EL.  The atmosphere was very "zen" to put it one way.  The races, while not wholly unique and original, had character and vibrancy and were distinct enough to be somewhat memorable.  The drastic differences in playstyles meant that one race wasn't really a carbon copy of any other (coughMEZARICOUGH) so Every choice was meaningful.  Your first choices mattered about as much as your later ones, if you were playing on any real difficulty level.  the amount of story packed in was enjoyable, though a LOT of it was delivered through walls of text that were eventually just automatic skip screens.  The faction editor made for fantastic replayability and experimentation, flawed though it was.

In short, there's a lot to like about ES and I think the strong points of the game (which should be carried into any hypothetical sequel) should be clear to those who've played.

What I want to see in a potential EL2 is, in a word, a bit of streamlining.  Don't make that face; it's not the dirty word you think.  Keep reading.

Item 1: 300 turns.  THREE.  HUNDRED.  TURNS.  Let's step back and be real: EL games take a LONG time to finish.  This is good--sometimes.  Sometimes it just leads to games going unfinished as the fatigue of lategame management turns into a slog.  Even turning the game to "fast" speed leaves a whopping 150 turns and, much as in ES and ES2, certain things don't scale with game speed, making a "fast" game not simply shorter, but very different.  conversely, "Endless" speed leaves the game with an absolutely STAGGERING SIX HUNDRED TURNS.  It's simply dizzying to consider the time investment to finish a single game at endless speed.  To make matters worse, certain factions like fast games, certain factions can absolutely dominate in endless ones.  That's not cool.  I'd really like to see a game mode that can be faster than this, say, a hundred turns?  It also needs to scale everything properly to that speed so certain factions aren't completely left out in the cold--DAMNIT I promised myself I wouldn't make puns...the point being that the massive size of an Endless session is a turn off to a great many players who might otherwise enjoy the style of game.  Making it available (AND BALANCED) in more "palatable" chunks might do wonders for the playerbase.

Item 2: Faction editor.  I like lots of the Endless factions as is.  I really like creating variants of them for fun, divergent playstyles.  I DON'T like that the editor can easily break the game for better or worse due to the inaccurate valuing of many traits and features.  This is also true in ES and ES2: some traits are ALWAYS worth taking and some you NEVER want to put down on your list--and many of those traits cost precisely the same amount of build points!  I know I know, "but RP!" Yes, fine, good, challenge yourself like that and enjoy it.  I'm not stopping you; I'd be quite the hypocrite if I chastised people for taking suboptimal stuff for roleplay reasons.  There is however MASSIVE potential for the editor to allow viable, interesting combinations that are both fun AND fair AND actually work together...if only for a few critical tweaks.  It needs to display more pertinent info more clearly, including some kind of preview of your custom faction's potential tech tree and starting conditions, so you don't create a faction that goes bankrupt before you can plant your first town on turn 2.  Which leads me to...

Item 3: The Initial learning curve.  Yup, I know veterans are sneering right now, but I'm not saying this one for me--not directly.  Here's a fact: the harder it is to get into your game and start demonstrating BASIC proficiency at it, the more people it will chase away.  4x games are complex; ES is no different.  However, as one of Extra Credits's many wonderful videos point out: Depth is bought with complexity, but too much complexity REDUCES depth."  Depth is what we want in our games.  Depth must be created by a certain level of complexity.  Beyond that precise level, further complexity does more harm than good.  Amplitude seems to understand that at least on SOME level, but I think it really should be emphasized a bit more: the game needs to start simple and maintain a more fluid game flow, if only for players to spend a little less time reading encyclopedias and a little more time enjoying the game before things get difficult.  The precise manner in which it could do this is up for debate and iteration, but it's nonetheless important.  There's a lot of stopping to read stuff, searching for icons that do something specific that you don't always need but when you need them you NEED them, and in a multiplayer game people are getting impatient waiting for you to remember where to find the "view city improvements" button or read the description of that special tech you unlocked through a quest you've never managed to complete and it's never been on your tech tree before.  The game can have a very "stuttery" kind of flow where things are stopping often for some reason or another--and this can be detrimental when all factions in the session are simultaneously trying to move units and declare attacks!  Think back to your first game or two of Endless Legend and how much stuff you had to figure out...and then remember that there are players with even LESS experience or talent than you who found it even MORE overhwelming!  That MUST be taken into consideration for a commercial product.

Item 4: For my first actual THING: I'd actually like to see a game where "heroes" is less of a term and "your hero" is more important.  Let us pick a hero--ONE hero--for our faction and unfold THEIR story.  Every hero HAS a story, but we don't explore ANY of them.  They're just unit leaders or buffs to our cities.  Backstory means nothing if it can't be carried forward.  Heroes could have their own personal questlines which come with their own rewards, like new tactical maneuvers/spells/special items for them only, etc etc.  Picking a hero can and should define how that hero affects that faction; picking a Drakken support hero should bring a different kind of questline than a fighter's tale, for example.  This whole thing where we can recruit a veritable army of "heroes" can get a little silly after awhile.  Even moreso in ES2, but I digress.  Make the hero of our story THE HERO OF OUR STORY.  We could even have rivalries if an opponent happens to pick a specific hero in response, triggering more intense battles, competitive quests and other plot twists!

Item 5: A bit more utilization of voice actors: It's cool that the factions have this voiced intro and stuff, but we could be utilizing that for things of note in game, setting critical notifications apart from the usual "ping" you hear when finding a ruin, starting a battle, having your city come under siege, losing an army, etc etc. which all use pretty much the same exact alert sound.  Sound is important in a videogame.  It gets our attention when we're not looking at things.  "The capital is besieged!"  "Behold...our wonder is complete!"  "My wounds...I cannot die here!" It doesn't have to be cheesy, but something succinct, but distinctive for things happening off your current camera position that demand your attention would break some of the monotony of "ping, click, click, click, end turn."  It would also help subtly reinforce the feel of the faction and hero you're currently playing and what's really going on at the moment--without constantly popping up alert windows in your face.  ES2 learned a bit of this lesson; their representatives chime in with their current mood and easily remind you who you're dealing with.  Mind you, some of them could stand to step up their acting game a bit, but that's another discussion entirely.

On the one hand, that may just mean I don't have fast strategies.  On the other hand, why would we need 300 to 600 turns then if a game typically ends at less than half that?

For those of you who is wondering about why I think Planetfall trailer is bad, try watching it with 0.5 speed or with a pause. The clips in the trailer are too short and they follow one another too fast on purpose. Push space on a random clip and take a closer look at the ground textures for example. You'll see what I mean.

Daynen wrote:

On the one hand, that may just mean I don't have fast strategies.  On the other hand, why would we need 300 to 600 turns then if a game typically ends at less than half that?

Because players have different skill levels, and less skilled players typically take quite long to end a game. I am also not sure if Amplitude themselves knew how fast games can end (tbf. EL wasnt as fast when it was released, the added DLC mechanics made it faster).

I would definitely like redesigned watchtowers, tribal villages and areas. The borders of real areas are not arbitrary, they go along natural easily defensible barriers such as mountain ridges or rivers. Pretty often the random shapes of the different areas are simply silly, and make absolutely zero sense. The same randomness is a problem when building watchtowers, quite often you are in a situation where the side of your home area that faces the enemy has zero foundations for watchtowers, but the side that faces your own empire has plenty.

I don't think that the areas should work randomly at all, I think cities should project an area that is under their influence, I don't see why there should be preset areas at all, simply have cities exert a zone of control so that you can't build city districts within 3 or so tiles of a neighboring city. You could also increase the exploitation radius around the city based on the level of the central district for example, and pacifying villages would need to be within x tiles of a city for that city to exert control over them. If a single village is in the range of several cities, then the cities need to compete over who controls the village; this would add a whole new layer to the game where you could bribe the tribes or use influence to drown them in your own propaganda, or simply burn down villages that refuse to see things your way.

Also, you should be able to build improvements in your villages (no new districts though villages shouldn't become cities), such as better fortifications and FIDSI/population boosters. A village would be treated just like a one tile city for the purposes of combat and siege.

Daynen wrote:

Loads of stuff

I really have to counter all of your items, sorry about that ^^

Item 1: The point of a turn limit is that you can force a game that refuses to reach a conclusion to an end, not to play a game that lasts for 300 turns. While I agree that there definitely could be an even faster game speed for online games, like Civ VI has, but the slower paces serve a purpose for people who want to play massive mega-campaigns with larger maps. Also, slower speeds make military much more significant since there's so much more time to conquer everything before the enemy can run away from you technologically. If your games last too long, I sugges dropping the number of opponents and reducing the map size. If you play to win, your games typically don't last that long, if you play to immerse yourself in a fantasy, then the opposite is true because you become loathe to end the game even when you have the decisive advantage and could do so.

Item 2: Yeah, well, can't really argue with you there. In fact, I don't think the faction editor adds anything to the game that is worthwhile, I'd just remove it completely.

Item 3: People who are interested in 4X games generally have a rather high tolerance for learning curves, but you're right here as well, damn my countering doesn't go as planned. I can offer advice though: Just disable all the DLC. The game is a lot more enjoyable that way if you're not interested in having your brain turn into a gordion's knot. You can then reactivate DLCs  one by one as you learn and want to try out new stuff.

Item 4: This is just a no; I prefer the story to be a faction story and I like the way Heroes work and how you can use them for a multitude of things depending on your situation. This is 4X, not an RPG, I want it to stay 4X and not try to be an RPG. This game is made for niche markets and there's no point in alienating existing playerbase while trying to get people that aren't even in your target audience interested.

Item 5: I dont' think it would add to the game that much. You're already liable to suffer from sensory overload with this game, there's just no reason to add any more pointless distractions to make things even worse. Playing this game well requires intense concentration, and any feature that is simply another pointless thing that distracts your attention. I'm sure one could get used to that, but there are noises the game makes that are actually important to hear.