Hey guys, I've been looking over the forums a fair bit lately. I've also played a fair few hours of Endless Legend and for the most part I really enjoy what is on offer. Let me just say, I've come from a position of playing a lot of strategy games growing up. My original foray into the genre of 4X was the original Civ game, which really sold me on the whole experience of empire building.



So, now that you understand a bit of where I'm coming from I can tell you what I think needs some polish for EL.



I love the region system, it works wonderfully to break up the old prevailing tactic of Infinite City Sprawl without harshening those of us that want to span the entire map. However, in the confines of that system the minor factions are a bit wonky. Firstly, some of them are powerful enough to be must haves (for example; Drudges for Broken Lords are crazy good, or Vinesnakes in general). Secondly, the region itself only really defines a few things like the Sharing, what city gets what minor faction settlement, etc. It works well at face value but doesn't give much more.

My suggestion is to consider making the minor factions more major faction specific. It is a big ask I know, but the idea that minor factions are a choice should be just that. A choice.

All I know is (and I might be the only one) but at the moment if I'm playing Broken Lords I'll go out of my way to assimilate Dredgers. If I'm Vaulters it's Haunts. If I'm Wildwalkers, I'm going for Bos.

Again, it might just be me but I'm going for the trait. I rarely use the minor faction units, which I'll talk about later.



Moving on, I will admit that I'm both a fan of the vision for the combat system and army building in general, but I'm also really worried that it'll stay in its current form. Two reasons for this; the actual system itself has heaps of flaws and the overall speed of the game is not suited to the combat itself.

First things first. I am of the strong opinion that the statistics used are the problem for a lot of the games overall problems. It is also an extremely simple fix. At the moment units die extremely easily, extremely quickly. My suggestion is to consider doubling, or even quadrupling the health of units. This would make choice of equipment much more free, and it would allow a lot more to be done in terms of customising and choosing your actual army.

Another suggestion I want to make, which I feel is needed, but that might not be a favourite for a lot of people. I'd consider dropping the limit of making everything either melee or ranged. Give people the option of both, and increase the number of weapons/armours you can give. I don't think you need to add more units, I just think the options need to be wider.



The speed of the game itself is likely just because it's still in alpha, but with only 200 turns to do things, it can be hard to really build up and go to war before you drastically outpace your own technology or you just run out of time. This plays into what you can actually get as well because when you develop enough, everything builds in one-two turns or for some of the higher tech buildings we're talking four-five max. That's fine, but more needs to be done to make cities more planned, or to make units more worth while. It's all well and good that I can pump out as many armies as I have cities, as long as I can provide the resources, but when it takes longer to march to a battle where a unit dies on contact with the enemy, it is less about planning and more about building everything and wearing them down.

Everything is rapid, you can easily out develop your own equipment and equipment itself is drastically better. Historically, yes things like iron totally obliterated bronze, or steel obliterated iron but we're talking about a game and it borders on unenjoyable if you're not willing to start losing men left and right. (not that the AI has really been too much of a challenge, I'm speaking in future terms when it will matter. Players will naturally min-max their empires to outplay their opponent, so we might as well start talking about it.)

My suggestion is, drop the difference between tiers slightly for equipment and up the costs or down the yields, or at least make specialising cities more relevant, at the moment I just generalist all my cities and have no problem. The upkeep isn't a problem if you produce 5 gold for every coastal tile and are willing to handle a few suboptimal cities.



One more suggestion I'm going to make is just one to improve the ease for the players. Broken Lords are nasty good, but it is also slightly irritating to constantly check to see if you can buy pop. They need two things done to them, cheaper buying pop units with a potential to auto-buy (which'd also be great for stockpiles to just auto-requeue), and for them to have some kind of penalty when they're unhappy. Last time I played them (current beta build, two days ago) I didn't notice a penalty for unhappiness.



Anyway, those are my suggestions at the moment.

It's a great game with a few things to polish up, but otherwise I'm enjoying it.



PS: One final thought, if the game is going to be moddable (it looks like it is) can someone please suggest to them as directly as possible to integrate it with steam workshop. It'd be killer to have it so accessible. (Or, whatever equivalent there is for non-steam players.)



PPS: Sorry guys, just noticed this posted in the wrong subforum. I've reposted it here. (I'll leave the original text, unless someone knows how to delete this post.)

I agree with the idea that the units die too quickly in battle. I'm not sure that doubling HP is the answer, but some combination of increased HP/defense and reduced damage output would improve combat balance. This would do a lot to undermine the dominance of ranged units. They would still be powerful but not ridiculously so. We'd also get a chance to see battles which lasted more than one turn. This seemed to be part of the designers vision, but at the moment the vast majority of battles conclude in one turn because the units die too quickly.