I'm wanting the rumours of Kael (from Civ 4 Fall From Heaven) being involved to be true. Would be fascinating to see what he'd do with Endless Legend 2.

This thread has been really inspiring, to the point where I've decided to create a youtube series speculating about Endless Legend 2. Would it be okay to post it here?

​

Ethereal311 wrote:

This thread has been really inspiring, to the point where I've decided to create a youtube series speculating about Endless Legend 2. Would it be okay to post it here?

Sure man, go ahead :3
I love seeing new stuff.

Here's Episode 2 on the Vaulters:

And here's the transcript like before:

​The Vaulters are Tall Dwarves. And Dwarves care about two things, being safe in their caves and building that cave bigger.

So, where do they settle?

Digging a hole out in the open takes time, so Vaulter Settlers either need to spend time digging a Bore Hole, or find some kind of cave network that they can go into.

Well, what about Ruins?

Ruins in Endless Legend weren’t the most engaging pieces of terrain, mostly providing loot to players who could be bothered to engage with them as well as being very annoying tile blockers.

I want Ruins to be Valuable points of interest that can remain relevant throughout the game. And when I was playing a Kapaku game, I found out how much I liked Science and Dust being the reward for exploring them. But what about after they’re looted?

Well, what if they provided a massive amount of Flat Science that certain Tech improves?

And Vaulters get double the Ruin yields. But what about the Ruins that are on the opposite side of your Province? How do you gain access to those?

Well let’s talk about a new mechanic for your Military Units, Fortifying.

If a Military Unit fortifies on a tile for long enough, they build a Fort on that Tile.

These Forts are useful for two reasons.

First of all, they extract whatever resource is on their tile, meaning that you can use your Military to secure Resources.

Secondly, they create a garrison of Militia to join nearby battles, alongside providing the side that controls the Fort with a free ranged Ballista shot.

This way, your Military Units have a reason to be active around the map and inside your borders.

As Vaulters are all about Fortifying their Cities, these Forts are incredibly important to them.

Vaulter Settlers can also use their own Forts to expand immediately just as if they were a Ruin, while Vaulter Cities can only build Districts on Adjacent Forts, at a reduced cost.

So Vaulter Militaries are incredibly important in building out on the surface, but what about Underground?

I think Age of Wonders 4 did it pretty well, but I’d rather stick to the idea of the Underground being a dedicated DLC for now.

I’m just going to abstract Vaulter underground cities into granting bonus housing with the city only taking up one tile, but mechanically this leads me onto a new and old way of Developing your Cities.

Developments are Wonder tier Improvements that combine Endless Legend’s resource specific Late Game Improvements into a single package. 

For Example, a Bread Basket Development provides massive amounts of Food, while an Arsenal Development provides massive amounts of Industry. You can also build as many Developments in a single city as your Tech Level and Faction allows, and they all stack together. You can only build one at a time, but multiple Cities can work on a Development just like Wonders in Humankind. But Developments cost significant amounts of Dust to Upkeep as well as increasing Amenity needs which makes Larger Populations in heavily developed places significantly less efficient.

But Developments also affect adjacent provinces too.

Bread Baskets and Arsenal Developments Export a percentage of the Food and Industry they generate to adjacent Provinces, in exchange for Dust. 

But those Developments are for other Factions.

The Isolationist Vaulters instead just dig deeper and ever more illustrious facilities.

Vaulter Developments provide a lot of Housing and Amenities, while also granting Government Behemoth style bonuses depending on how many spare Strategic Resources you have. If we’re going full on the Dwarf Fortress vibes here, I’d even say that they forgo Endless Legend’s Exploitation Improvements entirely, instead focusing on improving the technology of their holes with Strategic Resources.

And there are two purposes of Strategic Resources. First is their Economic benefit.

From my experience with Humankind, each Strategic provides 5 of its relevant resources in the same way as Salt or Dyes providing Flat Food and Industry on Cities. Various Improvements also scale based on your Strategic Access.

Some of my favorite Improvements from Humankind for example include the Inventor’s Workshop which provided bonus Science per territory per Saltpeter, and the Vanilla Mod’s Coal Plant which gave industry per pop per Coal while also giving +2 on each Coal access which sometimes meant I’d have 30+ Industry per Pop. Combining that with the Russian bonus of increased Industry per Railway meant a stupid amount of Industry to do whatever I wanted.

I regarded them as being so valuable in fact, that I might even want to fight over them.

When it comes to Military and Strategics, I had a couple ideas but I had some reservations about how to explain them. After mulling around the idea of crafting weapons and armor for your heroes though did I come up with one that sounded really interesting.

To iterate on my previous video, I’m suggesting increasing each faction’s roster up to six with stuff like firearms and heavy weapons, while also removing their ability to change their primary weapons.

So here’s my suggestion. You have to make the weapons and armor for your Soldiers.

In your military screen you have a new Smithing Panel. It lists all the Strategics you have access to as well as a bar that fills up each turn. When that bar fills with using your Strategics, you get an Ingot.

When you select a Unit, you have the option of equipping that unit with an Ingot to upgrade them with Strategic weaponry and armor, with Larger Units requiring more Ingots to upgrade. 

Strategic Weapons provides a significant amount of Flat Stats to your units in addition to the Accessory bonuses that they used to give whether that be High Ground, Glory or Death.

Speaking of which, I quickly want to say that Endless Legend Combat should have a % modifier on damage when it comes to Attack and Defense instead of having a dice roll.

These Ingots can be Smithed further into Artifacts that Heroes can equip as they would any other Accessory.

With high enough Technology, you can even alloy multiple Strategics together, combining their stats, or increase the quality of your Ingots by increasing the number of Strategics to fill the bar in exchange for greatly increased stats. Just… don’t lose your Ingots.

After any battle where an Upgraded unit dies, a Scavenger Field is left behind where any army can scavenge the Ingots lost during the fight among a variety of other resources including Dust, Science and Manpower.

If you have too many Ingots to keep track of, you can always auto-equip units with whatever excess Ingots are available, or trade them with other Factions or with the Caravans, a specific Minor Power that I’ll touch on in future episodes.

Vaulters extract twice the Strategics of other Factions, can see any Strategic Deposits from the start of the game, and can create Ingots of one level higher than any other Faction. 

However, Vaulters units have mediocre baseline stats and their units require twice as many Ingots to be equipped but that equipment is applied twice. For example, you’d need two Ingots to equip a Marine, but you get double the stats of those Ingots.

This is basically the Technolover passive the Vaulters have in Endless Legend 1, designed to turn the Vaulter military into an elite and heavily armored force capable of standing toe-to-toe against overwhelming odds.

So, how do you win the video game?

For the Vaulters, the canonical ending is that they leave Auriga for good and I will explore that victory option in the next episode. 

But, what about the Vaulters who were left behind? 

The Second of the three Victories is the Fortification Victory.

You have chosen to remain on Auriga and survive through the last Winter. But, doesn’t that mean sitting in your base until you win the game?

Well, how about we take some inspiration from Frostpunk and say that Auriga’s winters are VERY bad.

Every Winter, your units move 1 tile slower, to a minimum of 1, and take 1 damage per turn outside of a garrison and your cities get -1 on your exploitation and take 1 Siege Damage per district, stacking for every winter you’ve experienced. In the final Winter, this reduction is applied every single turn until you are the only Empire left. 

If a City loses all of its Fortification, then it starts losing population each turn until it gets abandoned. Abandoned Cities can be resettled, but obviously you don’t want to lose them to just the winter.

So Fortification is significantly more important now, especially for larger and more developed cities with a lot of districts. In exchange for being more affected by Winter, Districts are significantly cheaper, increase your housing and provide significant amounts of Influence that lets you pay for additional cities. So it’s much easier to build really big cities for most Factions. Of course, since Vaulters need to build Districts on established Forts or ruins they’re much slower at this than other factions.

So why not ignore the surface entirely and live in your Dwarf Cave? This is what the Second Cultist recommends, that the Vaulters need to return to their Vaults and get on with preparing for the Final Winter.

Problems start arising though when they discover that they need to figure somethings out. For example, if their economies are determined by surface access to strategics, then they’ll need to develop underground transportation, creating an underground Railroad that lets you Teleport between Forts that are close enough together.

Second of all, your other Cities realize that if they don’t need to talk to the Capital then they can go their own separate ways much easier, increasing the Influence cost of your Cities. So you need to Garrison and Fortify the Teleporter Room in every Vaulter city you have, which takes a lot of Manpower that could be used for your Military, but those Militia can help just as much with defending the City as well as providing bonus Fortification recovery and resistance for the Final Winter.

The biggest problem however, is how to actually generate the power that all this will need. So the Second Cultist recommends digging deeper, digging so deep that the Vaulters can access the magma core of Auriga. To do that, however, will require Kapaku Technology.

While developing these ideas Vaulters out, I came across a lot of similarities with the Kapaku, who I think are actually quite fun to play. But considering that they spew smoke and terraform Auriga into a place that only they can use, they would probably make a lot of enemies.

So my idea is that the Kapaku were purged from Auriga, their cities shattered and Technology destroyed in an epic war before Endless Legend 2, with only the maddest of Vaulter standards daring to dabble in that heretical technology.

But the Second Cultist insists that this is the only way to attain progress, so you acquire the Kapaku tech and get to digging to the Planet’s Core.

It angers… an Urkan.

Multiple armies of Urkan Lice erupt into the region you constructed the Core Drill, quickly attacking the City. These dormant ‘Urkans’ are what the Second Cultist wanted all along, and you will need to dig a total of three times in three different biomes to finish the quest. Each discovery will provide a vast bonus to your Empire that will greatly prepare you for the coming Winter.

But the Cannon Victory that I talked about in my previous video will make your entire Victory irrelevant. You can’t prepare for a Winter that has been prevented from happening, and the falling debris of the Behemoth Moon is probably going to cause a lot more damage to Auriga than a Blizzard. So if the Cannon starts charging, then the Fortifiers as a Faction will declare a total Crusade against the Cannoneers in an effort to stop the mad Cannon Cultist from achieving his goals of stopping the inevitable Winter.

But there’s another Faction that is more than happy that Winter is coming.

Stay tuned for next time when I talk about the Allayi.

Hey guys, I've been busy writing my novel recently so I don't have time to edit the Allayi video so here's just the transcript that clocked in at 16 minutes in the recording:

​The Allayi… are Bats.

And Bats are often seen as Evil and Creepy because, well, they come out at night and screech a lot. Also, Vampire Bats.

So if they’re violent monsters capable of swarming over you during Winter, then what are they over the Summer? Well, they’re very much in control of what is the World Congress function of Endless Legend, effectively able to control what sort of buffs and debuffs all factions on Auriga get. I’m mostly rolling that into the general role of Influence, so the Allayi would also have a lot of diplomatic power. Furthermore, the Allayi shift between these two opposites every Winter.

The Mechanic that really stood out to me was this:

What if Half of their Manpower is Converted to Influence in Summer, and half of their Influence is converted to Manpower in Winter? That means that, if their actual Manpower and Influence income is equal, in Summer you’d have 3 times more Influence than you Manpower, and vice versa.

But what do you use both of these resources for?

Manpower, in my proposal, is a 1 to 1 representation of HP,  which means that you get to have a lot of spare HP for your military, as well as letting you build Settlers. Influence, meanwhile, mostly lets you expand, apply laws to your empire, and enforce diplomatic treaties.

But if the Allayi have the “We Chosen Few” trait, that means they don’t have a lot of population to spare, reducing their base Manpower, and they have increased costs for expanding their cities, so what do they do with these resources?

They can be very diplomatic and passive during Summer, and then incredibly warlike and aggressive during Winter, which would make them a very difficult faction to play.

So, how do they expand?

It was then when I was playing Humankind when I got an idea.

Allayi Settlers cost only manpower because they’re just carrying what they can on their backs, but you don’t control them.

They just wander off into the expanse of Auriga to become Independent Tribes around areas with High FIDSI output. When they settle, they act like a mix of Humankind’s Independent Peoples and Cultist Converted Villages. They don’t claim provinces, so they can be established in Allied or Enemy terrain which can be annoying for whoever wanted to expand there. 

They create their own small armies for Defense and can be bribed with Dust or Influence to have them export their exploited tiles to your Cities inside your Trade Network, which can be expanded through specific improvements and Merchant Developments, something I briefly talked about in my previous Vaulter video. Allayi do get bonuses towards bribing these Tribes inside their Trade Network, but it can get too expensive if you’re competing with too many neighbors.

You can also just annex them, but the We Chosen Few trait means Allayi cities cost significantly more Influence Upkeep than other Factions so you’d better make use of them.

During Winter, however, these Tribes can form Raids. Allayi Factions Allied to a Tribe can spend Influence to secure them as Mercenaries during the Summer, before applying Pirate Marks on enemy Cities during the Winter, making all Tribes you have secured send units towards that City. You don’t even have to declare War against the owner of the Faction like with Privateers, or you can if you want to include that city into your Empire 

You can even garrison your own units in these Tribes so that they use them on these Raids.

So letting the Allayi spawn Tribes everywhere is obviously not good, but to balance this, the Allayi can’t construct Forts due to their more nomadic nature. The Allayi also rely on their vulnerable Skyfins to extract resources around the Map, so they can be bullied off Strategic Deposits.

So the only two military resources that the Allayi can rely on are Manpower, and Training.

We’ve always had experience in 4X games, but the problem with experience is simple. You don’t get experience if you’re not out getting experience. This means if you’re not fighting, you aren’t getting better at fighting.

But in order to really make experience a resource, we can’t just rely on a select few Peasants who have survived a bunch of battles. We’re talking about the difference between those factions with an honed martial culture and those who aren’t focused on that. So how do we translate the idea of a martial culture into a 4X?

Here’s what I came up with.

Experience is both generated by Battles, as well as by your Regimen, which you can find in your Military Screen. 

Regimen is Training, and is divided up to all your units. For example, if you have 40 Regimen and you had 4 units, each unit would gain 10 Experience per turn. Every unit takes 100xp to level up, but each level reduces that unit’s xp per turn by 1, so your exp would inevitably plateau off, especially if you have a large force and weak training, like what you might find with the Necrophage.

But how do you gain Regimen?

Well apart from the main two, Heroes and Improvements, there are also Sagas. In Millenia, units that have achieved max rank can be retired and turned into Warfare XP, which can be used for a variety of purposes. Sagas are my iteration and they are… stories. They don’t provide material benefits like food or industry, but they provide more universal resources like Dust, Science, Influence, Manpower and our aforementioned Regimen in small amounts. You can have as many of them as you want though, so having a small contained standing army quietly generating Sagas for the future is a good thing. Furthermore, there are technologies which increase the max ranks your units can reach. These techs will make Sagas harder to attain, but they will also increase the yield of your existing Sagas.

So how do the Allayi interact with Regimen?

Well Tribesmen need to be tough, especially with Winter coming, and Allayi Tribes are especially tough.

So Allayi Tribes also provide a significant amount of Regimen to their Allies, especially if you Garrison your forces inside them, which can also be utilized in Raids. These in turn let the Allayi create an entire Economy based around these Sagas.

So obviously Allayi Tribes are very valuable for the Allayi, but why would other Factions tolerate the Allayi being so expansive? 

The answer is Pearls.

Pearls were fine enough as a gameplay mechanic in Shifters, but they did get tedious in the later stages of the game. So my idea is that the Allayi have discovered how to Cultivate Pearls as a Luxury Resource. I heavily prefer how Endless Space 1 and Humankind did Luxuries as opposed to EL and ES2, in that they were passive, but also had powerful benefits that created their own builds in their respective ways.

Each Luxury provides 1 Amenity, while Pearls provides +1 Food on Exploitation during Winter, partially negating, or even improving, your income during Winter. Pearls also function as a Strategic Resource for the Allayi, and they have the unique benefit of being able to make Pearl Ingots, which I described in my last video on the Vaulters. These are valuable not just as weapons and armor, but also to Create Skyfins, the Allayi resource Harvester which is important because Allayi create Tribes instead of Forts.

But Pearls also provide another special resource, Wonder.

Wonder is, effectively, Hero Unlock Points, and there are only a few ways to gain Wonder. The first and strongest source are Quests, which all give a significant flat chunk of Wonder. The second is exploiting Anomalies and Ruins. The third is through Developments. The Fourth is through our aforementioned Sagas.

Your Regimen is also supplied to your Heroes, which creates a feedback loop between your Military, your Sagas and your Heroes. This means a highly skilled military also comes equipped with a powerful pipeline of powerful heroes to back it up.

And I have a couple of ideas regarding Heroes.

First off, Heroes retain their inventory screens, unlike other Units, and can equip specific Artifice Weapons, Armor and Artifacts to greatly improve their abilities.

Secondly, all Hero skill trees are a combination of three Roles, their Commander skills, their Governor skills and their Senator skills. Each Role only has 3 skills in them, but each of these has 3 tiers to them, meaning that Heroes provide a very specific direction for your Army, City or Empire while also cutting out a lot of the design chaff.

Their Combat Role functions just like it did in Endless Legend, with Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry and Mages having their separate skills. Same with Governors like in Endless Space 2, with Guardians, Seekers, Overseers and Counselors.

But there’s a new job for Heroes now, Senators. Just like in Endless Space 2, Senators provide Empire spanning effects and are determined by their Faction origin.

Your Politics are now determined by your Hero Senator abilities, with a variety of Political systems available to you that alter and adjust the expenses of your Faction abilities. 

But adding Heroes to the Senate takes increasing amounts of Influence to enforce, alongside their exorbitant Dust Upkeep. And you can only add a Faction’s Hero to your Senate if they’ve been Assimilated into your Empire.

I’ll touch on Assimilation in the next Episode, but just know that it costs a lot of Influence.

If we’re talking about Politics though, there’s one specific design for Allayi Senators that I’d like to see.

“X% Reduced Influence cost for positive treaties during Summer. X% Reduced Influence cost for Negative treaties during Winter.”

And these % reductions from multiple Allayi Senators stack with your Diplomatic Attitude.

If you have enough Influence, you can unite Auriga under one banner without any enemy having a chance at saying no. But how much it costs to unite Auriga depends on the other faction’s Relation to you.

A Positive Relation between two factions reduces the cost of Positive treaties between them and increases the cost of Negative Treaties between them, and vice versa with Negative relations, a consolidation of the Warning/Compliment system in Endless Legend. A -90 standing for example will reduce the cost to close the border cost to 10% of the original influence price, while increasing an open border cost to 190%

All Diplomacy now takes multiple turns of negotiation to finalize, with both sides supplying their influence to enforce their side of the deal. A Faction that naturally generates a lot of influence will be able to outbid one with fewer Influence income, but both sides can be overcome by improving or ruining your relations with each other.

There are two events which can take place if you reach maximum relations with another player.

On maximum negative attitude, your empires reach a crisis, where the influence income of both empires is set to zero to outbid the other. Whoever comes out with the most influence gets to determine whether you reconcile your differences, or head to War. In this case, it might be a better idea to declare War against a more diplomatic foe before reaching max negative relations, so that they don’t have a chance to reconcile the whole thing with their excess influence and ruin your reputation with other Factions while boosting their own, possibly getting you into more crises while getting more factions on your side.

On maximum positive attitude, your empires become Allied, where both sides settle their differences and… well… ally with each other. Allies always have open trade routes, and Alliances can only be questioned and challenged if a crisis occurs, meaning that you’re stuck in that relationship until something really bad happens.

The shifting nature of the Allayi has always meant that their attempts at diplomacy and warfare have always turned sour as they can never consolidate their priorities under a single banner. With the Dark Season encroaching, more and more Allayi are becoming weary of the split in their society, between the Summers and Winters that always held sway over them.

But our Third Cultist, the Heavenly Cultist, suggests that there’s a third way for the Allayi. Because in Space, there is neither Winter nor Summer.

This concept is one that the Allayi cannot understand. There has always been a Winter and a Summer, nor can there be one without the other. So the Heavenly Cultist tells you that you need to convince your people otherwise, expanding your Senate and Saga stockpile until the possibility of reaching out into space is an idea that stretches into the people’s imagination, doubling your science per pop while also reducing the Allayi’s expansion penalty.

Your next priority will be to create or acquire multiple new cities in order to increase your population and production in order to weld massive pieces of metal together into an airtight shell, giving you access to arguably one of the most powerful generic units in the game. A Tank.

It requires a massive amount of Dust to fight and move though, so you might not be able to field a lot of them.

From there, you need to reach Age 5 before gaining the technology required to send your first mission into space. It… doesn’t go so well. Instead of winning the game, you get a special Wonder project to send a rocket into space, which provides more and more science with every launch.

But then you hear something you didn’t want to hear from the Heavenly Cultist.

All of this is not fast enough. Your people can’t just keep sending rockets to fail while Winter makes life harder, they need something more.

So he tells you to secure as many ruins as you can, to try and find something that maybe the Galaxy has forgotten to take away. Allayi have never bothered with Forts, but the Cultist gives you the ability to.

So you reach out to find them, and you find a legend of a crashed spaceship, its remains scattered across Auriga.

Go out and secure all the pieces, whether through Diplomacy or Tank Spam, and only then can you go into Space.

With the pieces reassembled, the Heavenly Cultist and your Loyal Elite join you on a journey out of Auriga. But not just yet, because the Heavenly Cultist sets a course for the Behemoth Moon. There, he says, we will find more craft to take more people off world.

You find a few, not enough to save a planet, but the Cultist is uninterested. He walks for hours and days, until he comes in contact with the Console Room. There, he sits down, exclaims that he can finally destroy the Anthill experiment that is Auriga, and initiates the Final Winter.

Those who went after him are cut down by security drone fire, with only the craft you came in on, the Argosy, initiating its Drive Engines and leaving Auriga to its fate as the Behemoth detonates in a massive Dust Explosion behind them.

The Seekers abandon their Planet.

The Fortifiers wall themselves in.

And the Cannoneers save the world by destroying it.

Auriga was always going to be a Tragedy.

Join me next time as I talk about the Ardent Mages.