Not a native english speaker so beware:



So I picked up Endless Legend a while ago and actually never got to really playing it untill a couple of days ago. Had some other games to finish playing and time is limited. Anyway onwards to Endless Legend



1. Potential



The amount of potential this game has is staggering, I have gotten rather excited over the design choices made in the different races that are currently available and the different way they value resources and diversify the tile usage and value. It will be interesting to see what the other races will bring to the table, and that will be a challenge because the affinity to certain resources has already been assigned to certain races. There is lots of potential in other design choices like the tech tree and the era system as well as the way improvements and regions are being handled.



2. Tutorial



Now I am an experienced 4x player with way too many hours in games like civ5 and other 4x games so the game mechanics were reasonably self explanetary for me, however for the entry level player this game is going to need an insanely well developed tutorial. With the number of mechanics to keep track of it can be overwhelming in the start and people might get easily frustrated and not give the game a proper chance.



3. Randomness of starting locations



Random generation is good for a lot of reasons, but when it comes to the starting location/region of your primary city the game can certainly improve. I have mainly been playing the wildwalkers and on numerous occasions I have just had to restart the world generation because there wasn't a proper city location within 3 turns of my original start. I have also had a few occasions where my starting locations was so extraordinary that I raced the tech tree to era 3 in no-time without falling behind on production. More advanced scripting for city locations is something I would like to see, taking into account anomolies and potential Era I-III resources and luxury goods. Also a 'restart game' button in the menu the redo the world generation on the same settings on turn 1 would be a big plus, very similar to what Civ5 does nowadays.



[LIST=1]

Better scripting for starting locations

Restart game option on turn 1

[/LIST]



4. Combat



So wildwalkers start with 2 rangers and a ranged hero. This really really needs tweaking compared to the other factions when it comes to basically farming experience of minor factions. Even in auto combat if you pick defensive setup they barely take any damage and make grinding early levels incredibly quick. Combat in general needs a little tweaking imho, late game armor sets are so insane that they either need to be made more expensive or need to be downgraded. Also the talent for +1/1/2 experience per turn should be downscaled or you end up running around with just elites in armies and that basically nullifies the difference in ranks because everyone will have elites only. I would also suggest potentially capping the levels of heros and units per era. eg. level 4 as max in era1, level 8 in era2 etc. AI seems to be almost retarded in unit production and defending their cities, seems like there is a lot of work that needs to be done here to make them actually be some sort of military opposition. Last but not least; army composition, running around with 1 hero + 6 rangers should be penalized. There should be modifiers implemented in the combat system that will boost the efficiency of diverse units in an army instead of just stacking 1 unit type. It makes sense to have a mix between ranged/support and infantry and not just rangers without feeling any setback from that.

• Ranged Units need tweaking
• Late game Armor needs a cost increase
• Experience gain and levels need adjusting
• AI just sucks in combat
• Army composition modifiers
  
  

5. Tech tree and the Era System.



I love the way the tech tree is currently designed, where you can completely skip certain technologies that would be sub-par for your race while a must have for other races. There still are a few technologies that feel mandatory to pick in every era with pretty much every race, (extractors/rookery/production boost/science boosts). I don't think there is going to be any way to get around a few techs being mandatory for every race. However, I do feel there could be some tweaking done in the cost of technologies when it predecessor in a previous era has been skipped. Going straight for tier3 weapons and ignoring tier 1-2 completely should be penalized in the research cost. That is pretty much the only thing I would pick from the research tree, besides era4 techs being dull



6. The Dust system



Costs and maintenance feel rather low in the game, fielding a gigantic army with lots of heroes bought from the market seems to be incredibily easy without this having a major drawback on your expenses. Certainly hero talents can help a lot in the upkeep reduction but everytime I reach era 3 in a game Dust per turn just really doesnt matter to me anymore, which is a shame because it is one of the resources you are supposed to be managing closely and it should get you to make choices between buying a new tier of armor or buying a production queue instead of having no issues upgrading several heros and buying out production queues as well. In that regard; Ruins are giving way too much dust late game in my opinion, I can see the logic in a slight increase per era but 480 dust from ruins seems excessive.

• Make Dust a significant resource past era 2
  
  

7. The Map design



Randomly generated ofcourse but still in need of improvements. Watchtower Locations are sometimes only 1-2 tiles away from eachother without offering any additional field of view and that just makes the scripting for their locations sily. The size of some Provinces/Regions is pretty inconsistent, variation is a good thing but double sized regions just seems weird. The value of rivers with potential upgrades for food/science seems a little bit excessive as well. Having no rivers in a region can just completely kill off potential good city locations. Also I have found the Fog of War to be completely buggable during the map generation basically exposing the entire map to you including all the ruins and resources, it is a bug I am aware but a nasty one.

• Watchtower locations are clustered
• Region sizes
• Value of rivers seems excessive
  
  

Just my 2 cents on playing the game for roughly 50h

+1 regarding this set of suggestions.



I especially like the idea that skipping some lower era technology researchs, like tier1 weapon, should be penalized when researching directly the next level (tier2 weapon).

I pretty much agree with all of this too, and am 100% with you on the balancing and map generation/start position determination needs.

Im gonna agree with the Tier 1 weapons and armor, like if you you already have them it gets you a discount on the tier 2 weapons and armor. Also I still tend to thing that Palladian and Adamant armor and weapons need some tweaking that would make it an actual option. I dont want to give up those Initiative and Critical bonuses I get from Glassteel and Titanium. Once Era 4 comes around Hyperium and Mithrite are awesome.