Note: Sorry, this is a repost but I noticed it had posted into the wrong forum. Chalk it up to not paying close enough attention.



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.)

I agree that there should be done some re-balancing of minor factions - for example, Bos' faction perk absolutely useless for BL, and almost useless Sisters of Mercy, while Kazanji or Dredgers would be much more benefitting.

As for "every unit might be ranged" - no. Simply no. Currently, as BL player, I need to use Dust Bishops as my main AA-battery - even with "weak attack" perk, since only they can wield weapon with "flyingslayer". If I can use Stalwarts as rangers, then there's no point in using dust bishops with their low ini and dmg. Oh, and then we would nerf minor factions that provide rangers - why would I use some auxillaries when I can just use my own ranger-Stalwarts. That would simply kill part of fun and complexity of game. Doesn't sound good to me.

I'm assuming you'd use Dust Bishops for their support abilities, not just for their flying-slayer trait.

If Stalwarts can be given ranged weapons, there is nothing to say they'd make good ranged units. It should be about making each template desirable and reducing the amount of "I must take this because it's the only option."



So rather than saying "I need to use Dust Bishops to counter flying units" we should be saying "I might use Stalwarts with longbows, they have X quality. Or, I might use Dust Bishops with crossbows, they have X quality."

That might be as simple as having Stalwarts get a chance to heal when they kill something and having the Dust Bishop hand out buffs to other units. I see the idea as there for the support units as it is, but it just doesn't seem quite pushed far enough in my opinion.



Like I said, people are free to disagree, it is probably a divisive idea, I just thought I'd clarify my point after your insight.

Adding ranged ability to units that currently do not have it is, in my opinion, a terrible idea. However, this is so contrary to what seems to be the devs' vision of the game that I think there is zero possibility that such a thing will happen.



However, what I do think needs to happen to adjust the balance between ranged and melee is to make it so that units don't dies as quickly as they do now. Reduce damage or increase defense and HP such that units, in general, live longer. This would also give us the battles that span multiple turns that were supposed to be part of the game.



The 200 turn limit is nothing, just ignore it. The only reason that is there is that they knew that the initial placeholder AI would not hold up in the mid to late game. As more features are included along with tweaks to balance and to the AI, the late game will become more playable. Now that multiplayer is in, I can't picture ever actually ending the game at turn 200. Just play on.

Maybe the focus on range is problematic, but I guess my point would be open up the opportunities. Rather than all templates get all options, give more options to more templates rather than the strict melee or ranged they have now. Stalwarts with range doesn't worry me, the alternatives should be tankier. Range should be there to soften up the enemy, not destroy them outright.



I suggested doubling health because upping defence or reducing damage generally causes more problems with balance than it fixes. Having high damage and high health lends more to having combat mean something than to having everything survive everything. Specifically I'm using doubled health because the same problem was massive in Civ5 (like I said I'm coming from there) and it was where range chewed through everything and everything died in one turn. Then they made everything high health but barely touched everything else. That pretty much fixed it and make range support like it was meant to be. It's the same reason I'm not worried about range being open to customisation. As I understand it, the devs want us running more than just the one-two units and upgrading the weapons on the same template repeatedly - give us more choice. So I'm suggesting balancing it to that choice.

I just don't think an obsession over range being too strong is a good counter-argument - which is why I'm challenging it. Yes, I get why it's problematic but I think having ranged weapons there wouldn't break the game and it'd expand the military part of the game from "take a few units" to actually developing strategies and tactics around that. Again, it might just be me but I feel like I should clarify that difference between "give range to everyone" and "make all the choices valid".



The turn limit I get is 200 for development reasons. The point I was making was that everything happens so quickly that your moving through things quicker than you can use them, or as quick as you can use them. If I beeline to get the best army and equipment - which is fine, it's a valid strategy - I should be sacrificing something. At the moment, and given that a lot of tech feels mandatory, I'm not really struggling to keep up an economic game and a military one. The opposite side of the coin is that I'm also out-stripping all my equipment before I can afford to keep up to date - which is good, I would hate to think my entire army is constantly kept modern - but the combat system is so reliant on keeping everything up that it kind of defeats the purpose of teching up that new kit, though I tech quickly enough that I'm not really worried because I can skip entire tiers before I get into any kind of war. That said, yeah the balances and tweaks will probably fix this up, plus picking your own speeds and what not for gameplay. I'm more wondering if I'm the only one having that problem, I haven't really seen it expressed yet.