Pardon.



If you want to see more units per faction, please move on. This thread is not for you. If you want to read civil discussion, also, please move on. This is my special rant thread about why I think more units per faction is a bad idea. From this point forward, I recuse myself of good taste, diplomacy, or anything I consider good practice when attempting a dialogue between multiple rational parties.



BEGINNETH RANTUS



I come primarily from a Civ background. I've played Civ 5 a lot, and love it. And so I'm not quite sure why Endless Legend could benefit from more units.



By comparison, it has far more units now than Civ 5 could ever hope to have. And the devs have yet to balance this massive--staggering, mammoth, legion--number of units. Far more units than the devs had to balance in that modern 4x titan of code, resources, and player base known as Civ 5.



Here's the breakdown, as near as I can tell:



In Civ 5, you start with warriors, then unlock spearmen, then swordsmen, then pikemen, then longswordmen, etc.



In EL, it depends who you are, but for the sake of simplicity I'll start with broken lords. You start with an infantry unit which is equipped with swords and shields. You also can immediately re-spec him with a two-handed sword. You can add any of several pieces of armor to him to vary his defense strength vs his iniative. Then you unlock titanium. Like Iron in Civ 5, titanium is necessary to build an improved version of your warrior, the rough equivalent to a Civ 5 swordsman. Then you reach the second tier, and you can equip your infantry with tier 2 swords, shields and two-handed swords. So that's like getting pikeman, as your two-handed infantry upgrades from the equivalent of a spearman. Then you unlock tier 2 titanium, and your swordsman equivalent infantry is more like a longswordsman.



So in EL, we've described five counterparts to five Civ 5 units. However, EL also has glasssteel. So we have more units than in Civ 5 just from that. In EL, we also have accessory items we can give our units. Each one of those creates one new unit more than Civ 5 has.



And you have more base units anyway. In EL, each faction gets three, and can assimilate three minor factions for a total of six unit paths made up of infantry, ranged, support, cavalry, or flying. In Civ 5, for each tech era, there's generally two infantry--one sword, one spear--one ranged, one cavalry. EL factions get six *types* of units to Civ 5's four. And on top of having more types, EL can customize each type A TON. Want lots of health? Use all-dust equipment. Want to both have a good chance of going first and do bonus damage from crits? Mix titanium and glasssteel. Want a cheap throwaway army of max size to use swarm tactics? Just throw on a weapon and no armor. And you can have all four of those tactical unit designs for EACH of your six base types.



So many, many more units than the massively-funded Civ 5 had to balance so far. Let's keep going.



In EL, you can hire heroes. They are regular battlefield units, but get bonus item slots. You can hire any number of them, as far as I know, but only have one per army, and have to pair them with a regular unit. Great. So you can get infantry, ranged or support heroes--each with different abilities from an ability tree to further make them unique--and you can get one per non-hero unit, and fill up the field with one-unit armies led by heroes. Unlikely, probably not a good idea, but possible. Much like building chariot archers in Civ. So now, in addition to your six base units types customized any of at least 5! ways each (more, if you've researched bonus item slots), you can also have any of a number of other unit types known as heroes, each of which has just as many or more item slots to customize, and all of which have skill trees tied to their--not your--race for additional customization. So you can have a hero from each race and thereby have a hero customizing from the racial trees for each race.



Also, in EL, you can own units you can't even build. You can a) buy them from the market place, and get whatever's available, and b) assimilate a minor faction, build their units, then replace them with another minor faction.



So let's say that you have cities in five regions. Each one has a minor faction. Well, you can only ever have three minor factions assimilated at a time, so you're limited to 3 of your own units and 3 minor faction units, up until you build units from all three minor factions, replace one of them with a different minor faction, and then build that unit type. Now you have three of your own race's units and 4 different types of minor faction unit. Replace a minor faction again and get to 5 different types of minor faction unit. Sure, you're spending tons of influence to do this, but with all the bonuses you can stack to things in the ridiculously unbalanced state the game is currently in, why not? And if you're just deperate to have more units options I'm sure you can manage to swing it.



Now, let's talk about races. So far, we've acted like you only ever play one race, the Broken Lords. Which is a lot like Civ, because in Civ you only get two infantry, one cavalry and one archer for your base units throughout the tech period.



But EL isn't like Civ, and it has more than just the Broken Lords. You can also play the game a *second* time as another faction, and have three different units, probably of different types, definitely with different special abilities and different equippable weapons. And you'll get to do that not just a second time, but a third time. And a fourth. And, eventually, and eighth. So you get eight times three base units, if you play the game more than once or twice in your life. Compared to the four basic ones you get in Civ.



So the number of units in EL seems, to me, to MASSIVELY, insanely exceed the number of units available in my other favorite 4X, Civ 5. Civ 5 seems to be popular enough and get along just fine, and not only does it have fewer units, those units are far more boring because they're static combinations of stats that never changed except through experience--which EL units also have.



Personally, I think the system they have is great. Beautiful, even. I hope to the dear, sweet baby Jesus that they do NOT add any more units per faction. I would please, please rather throw all the moniez at them to refine and polish the living daylight out of the units and equipment they already have/are creating for un-implemented factions. You already get tons--TONS--of units for each faction. Not too many, in my opinion; I love having options, and I LOVE the lore idea of finally playing a game where I get to equip my troops with specific types of weapons. But I can't see how any reasonable, sane person can look at this game, scratch his chin, and say:



"Hmm. This is an awesome game you guys have going here, Amplitude, but really, you ought to add more units, because there aren't enough now and the way they'll interact currently just isn't complex enough to create deep gameplay."



ENDETH RANTUS.

You only swear about Civ 4 and 5. Look at others FANTASY 4X, Warlock, Age of Wonders....



I dont like the idea to add more units, In my opinion, we only need more customization content.



And this content need visual representations and passives abilities. In Civilization V (<3) atleast, you start with warrior but the same "upgraded unit (swordmen, musketeer...)" havent the same graphic model !



In EL atm, even if u "upgrade" or "create" a new unit, the graphic is the same, else the weapon.



PS : I read what you wrote but please, reconsider granting some colors and effects to the important points of your text or nobody will read it ^^ (or maybe a few)



NB : Is there a way to change my rating ? I made a misstake... Wanted to made it Excellent but I made Terrible. *FAIL*

Kingsguard wrote:
You only swear about Civ 4 and 5. Look at others FANTASY 4X, Warlock, Age of Wonders....

Whereas Civilization has units using modern technology, fantasy games have units using magic. That pretty much evens it out. E.g. Civ 5 has 60 units (excluding the 61 unique units) and Eador has 61 units plus 16 types of heroes.



I'm not making judgments about combat yet, since it's clearly far from finished, so I won't comment on whether EL needs more units or not.

Kingsguard wrote:
PS : I read what you wrote but please, reconsider granting some colors and effects to the important points of your text or nobody will read it ^^ (or maybe a few)

This isn't some dumb infographic. If someone doesn't have the attention span to read a well formatted post, then they probably don't have a well-thought-out opinion worth hearing either.

Tsadiq wrote:
Whereas Civilization has units using modern technology, fantasy games have units using magic. That pretty much evens it out. E.g. Civ 5 has 60 units (excluding the 61 unique units) and Eador has 61 units plus 16 types of heroes.

Also, according to SpaceTroll, there will be 55 units in EL, which I assume just refers to the base units (5 * 8 major faction units, excluding heroes but including settlers and boats, + 1 * 15 minor factions).

SpaceTroll wrote:
I see what you mean.

So here it is, all in all in the game we have 55 units, and all of these units can be upgraded and improved as you find new equipment through quests or technology.

as a faction you have access to 4 main units, + you can assimilate up to 3 other minor faction of your choice that will join forces with you bringing you their unique units. You can also use the marketplace to buy and sell units in order to set up your armies as you feel like.

but anyhow the main unit templates you can use in your army will definitely give a strong gameplay to your empire...

Well, 55 is not enough it seems, according to the numbers of Tsadiq, as we consider that EL is atleast 2x times more ambitious ^^



And 60+61, 121 for Civ 5 !

I think it would be interesting if certain weapons types got unlocked via quest, and not just for heroes. As Broken Lords you can arm your Stawalts with a sword and shield or longsword. But doing this quest you can unlock a Scimitar which will grant an additional bonus either through the damage levels or some other minor bonus

The beauty of the current system is not just how many different templates each faction can have based on three archetypes. It is undeniable that between techs and strategic resources etc. there is an abundance of different units available to each faction. The minor factions add greatly to this.



No, the real beauty of this system comes if you are, as I am, a fan of dynamic imbalance in games. Things are so much more interesting when everyone does not have essentially the same things available to him. This game will be so much more than Civ in that sense.



Is it hard playing a faction with zero ranges units? Sure, it can be. That is the fun of it.