So...I've played a bit now (~60 hours, mostly pre-branch) and have been meaning to provide feedback for a while, so here it is.



First, I think the game is great overall. Love your work. Now, here's why.



I like the unit system a lot, as I've mentioned elsewhere. The use of unit templates which the user builds out is excellent compared to the static unit configuration of games like Civ. Yes, I am an Alpha Centauri fan, and this system is definitely more powerful in terms of stat customization and more rewarding in terms of meaningful choices than AC's system was. I like the way it feels comfortably like D&D and Final Fantasy, especially with the skill tree choices. It makes it feel like you're really operating a faction with real leaders in it and genuinely outfitting a military. It also males it feel like I get to play a bit of games I love in a genre I love.



I like the city system a lot. Visually, aesthetically, it's awesome to see that as your population grows your city begins to sprawl out up and down terrain. I enjoy intentionally placing cities in locations where I'll have districts split among wide height ranges and can imagine class differences and property value by location and elevation. Who wouldn't want to live in a district built around a tree of life, or in which floatstone hovers over the streets? And the different factions have such beautiful and diverse aesthetic styles.



I like the resource system; I think it needs balancing, because things currently seem disproportionate to the game advantage they provide, but I like the idea of fixed income from certain sources and the realistic ability to allocate a workforce to certain pursuits to achieve one goal or another. I like the idea of the market, because resources--including people--did move between kingdoms, but something about the system seems anachronistic, like fluid market prices when historically prices were very much varied by location and the cost of moving goods between empires, rather than transaction history in a global supply and demand.



I love the look and feel. The look and feel is amazing. The art is gorgeous, and looks exactly medieval-fantasy with a sci-fi base to me. The menus are incredibly pretty--confusing as platypusses, but elegant--and transitions are smoother than in any other product of any type that I can think of, let alone a video game UI. The transition from city screen to map to army battle and back impresses me every time, as I seamlessly flow between them. StarCraft's out of game transitions between menus like the campaign and latter quick match screens are jerky, ugly and no faster in comparison. The world map view--the transition is amazing, the appearance gorgeous, and when to start hiding armies/resources is very well chosen.



I like the battle system. A lot. I like Civ 5's battle system better than Civ 2's and Alpha Centauri's and Space Empire 5's, and I thought Civ 5 had a good battle system until I played Endless Legend and saw it done correctly. Part of that is the smooth transition to hex tactical turn-based minigame, part of that is the elegant use of the world map, but most of that is due to the depth of gameplay this tactical option provides. I was shocked and impressed when I stumbled across the reinforcement system, staggeringly reminiscent of real engagements. I was horrified and appalled when I watched the AI's choices, both the AI commander and my unit's targeting choices when their initial targets died (which is often counterintuitive to the obvious choice of soldiers in a pitched battle to target the nearest weak foe). I love the 'one turn orders, two turns execution' system which approximates the real delay between a commander's orders and his men's best effort to understand and implement those orders as they think is wisest. I think the units need more wisdom than random(). I love the idea of using cavalry to pincer ranged units so they can be engaged in melee, using air units to consider or disregard flanking threats across elevations, and the idea of support units forcing you to adopt specific strategies like overkilling units to keep them from being healed. So I like the unit configurations, love the gear choices, and think the stats they provide need lots of iterating and balancing--lots (glasssteel vs titanium? I can smell the OP just thinking about the bonus amounts and to which stat. Init is more powerful than crit in most cases, AND glassteel has a significantly higher bonus to atk/def at t2 gear. And obviously no one researches t1 gear because that's a waste of tech--bump all gear back an era and I'll think about t1 glass/tit as my era-2 preference to t2 iron).



I like the research system. It doesn't feel realistic that t1 techs get more expensive in t2, but it helps the game pace feel correct. The techs themselves are way out of order and give bonuses way disproportionate to their era/cost. The only reasons not to start with seed storage is that you're the broken lords and the equivalent is for dust or you're the wild walkers and already have it. I buy the same tech in almost the same order every time, and there is no decision involved because the techs are woefully unbalanced. Part of that is because the singular victory type and AI behavior reward only one kind of gameplay, buy I strongly suspect a better ai and multiplayer will reveal the tech cylinder is more like a line. I like the equal-cost choice within an era, and the absence of in-era prerequisites seems like a good choice, but its hard to tell with the current imbalance.



I haven't really tried diplomacy yet. I've heard (in-game, via the glorious, long-awaited multiplayer) that it's excellent. Conceptually I have a general dislike for the idea that your citizens' efforts, rather than your activity on the map board, is used to set diplomatic policy and influence.



I'm very excited about new victory types. I've long enjoyed the multiplicity of viable strategies and the variety of subgoals to pursue towards different victory types in Civ 5; which, in truth, were only really different after G&K and BNW made diplomatic and cultural victory more than just point accumulation. Having multiple victory methods to pursue, especially simultaneously, gives a lot of depth to the decisions a player makes.



I'm rather disappointed in either the random map generator or the start placement generator, I can't quite decide. I think mostly the latter; the map itself shouldn't necessarily have a good spot for a city in every region; having one would not be very realistic and it's not necessary for balance. But where you start *is* necessary for balance and realism, and most often starting in terrible spots is both unrealistic and unbalanced. In reality, civilizations did not grow up--start the world's first cities--in the middle of the great plains or in barren tundra. It started in fertile river valleys, where resources were abundant rather than scarce. I don't care how hard it is to implement, why do start locations occur in the middle of a region with just grassland and forest, no river and no anomalies? I've tried building cities there, and they're awful. I always scout my region before settling, but I usually find only a mediocre spot that's in range before my maintenance costs scrap my units (better than the bad start, far worse than I ever use in any subsequent city I build in surrounding regions that I scout fully). I haven't played the beta enough to know this isn't fixed, but it was by far the most bothersome, most immersion-breaking aspect of the games I did start (and, 66% of the time, restart to reroll my start location). And half the time I'll start in a region that is just poor, and find the same is true of the immediate neighboring regions. Poor being relative to the one in five games where I get beautifully bountiful starts.



I'm no PM; I'm a gamer and a software developer. But if I were to pretend, and think the way I hope my development team's PM thinks, I would say that the remaining feature stories would not gate release for EL as it is now. I personally believe the game has all of the features it needs to be enjoyable as of the beta build--and the only beta feature I even consider necessary is multiplayer. Prior to beta it was a one-trick pony as a wargame with no diplomacy, but even so I think the design, the mechanics, the art are so strong that it made an excellent, if niche, product. What I would absolutely consider gating is the balance. Play your game; it's great. Materiel and tech of equipment currently make the units' base stats meaningless. Play your game, and focus on specific matchups. Reduce the glass steel bonuses. Up base defense stats or reduce the increase to armor. Experiment with health vs defense. Your cities are beautiful to build and grow; play your game, and build more. Mess around with seed storage, and the amount of resources population units give vs terrain. Maybe see what it's like to play a winter in which food cannot be harvested and in which the player must create food stockpiles or otherwise do something to keep from losing population units. Notice how after the first few units you never, ever run dry of strategic resources again.



I know during development you play the game. It's important, it's how you measure the success of your code change (at least, I always build and test manually before pushing code at the end of a story). But it's my opinion that, more than new features, what would help EL most is for you guys to sit down and play more. Play all the way through to the fourth tech era more often, play the same faction over and over, play the same strategy and see what it absolutely beats the tar out of (the AI, of course, but what else?) and see if there's any legitimate way to keep up with that strategy without having to duplicate it precisely.



You guys have mentioned in another thread that you don't have instrumentation built in to monitor player behaviors for balancing feedback. Well, that ship has sailed, but if I were you I would solicit explicit feedback about balance issues, rather than waiting for players to post problems and propose solutions of their own. Because if there's one thing I've noticed about my fellow participants on the forum it's that they're really good about posting things they don't like and awful at proposing solutions to those pain points. Tons of people are bothered by this perception that there are very few units, and almost universally the proposals they make would badly hurt the game for me and other subsets of players. People aren't good at saying what's really wrong (perceived lack of unit variety) and so they're not good at identifying balanced, game@-improving solutions (make the actual, massive unit variety more clear and perceptible) (balance the massive amount of unit combinations so most of them will see play, rather than the 10% that t2 glass steel units comprise).



So put out forms. Make a very basic, ugly web interface just to enter what units you had, how many, what equipment they wore, what enemies they fought, and how they did (objectively, how much health each friend and foe lost). Ask what turn they were on. Watch the results of different battles throughout the game. Know what equipment people are using, when, and how much it helps them.



Make a form for people to track how many cities they have, how much population, how many districts, and what they're building. Track when your city grows, when it builds/buys out buildings or units, and what turn they're on.



Etc., although I think even just getting lots of feedback on those two things will give a lot of good data for balancing. So iterate. Take the data, adjust stats, push a branch at the end of the sprint, repeat. Gets lots of data from lots of people and polish the sweet, beautiful, everliving daylight out of the game. Polishing is about fixing bugs, yes, but also about making the game fair to all factions, playstyles, and victory types and you make a game more balanced with data.



Anyhow, that's what I'd like to see be the priority from a product management point of view. Balance is by far what I think EL needs most.

I'm rather disappointed in either the random map generator or the start placement generator, I can't quite decide. I think mostly the latter; the map itself shouldn't necessarily have a good spot for a city in every region; having one would not be very realistic and it's not necessary for balance. But where you start *is* necessary for balance and realism, and most often starting in terrible spots is both unrealistic and unbalanced. In reality, civilizations did not grow up--start the world's first cities--in the middle of the great plains or in barren tundra. It started in fertile river valleys, where resources were abundant rather than scarce. I don't care how hard it is to implement, why do start locations occur in the middle of a region with just grassland and forest, no river and no anomalies? I've tried building cities there, and they're awful. I always scout my region before settling, but I usually find only a mediocre spot that's in range before my maintenance costs scrap my units (better than the bad start, far worse than I ever use in any subsequent city I build in surrounding regions that I scout fully). I haven't played the beta enough to know this isn't fixed, but it was by far the most bothersome, most immersion-breaking aspect of the games I did start (and, 66% of the time, restart to reroll my start location). And half the time I'll start in a region that is just poor, and find the same is true of the immediate neighboring regions. Poor being relative to the one in five games where I get beautifully bountiful starts.

I like how Civilization handles this by giving you so many options to control how random certain components are. I think they have an option under resource spawning called "strategic start." It guarantees that if you build your city on or near where the game starts you, you will end up with access to horses and iron and I believe one luxury resource. I don't play Civ multiplayer, but I believe most players choose that start to make sure that everybody at least has access to the important initial stuff, though you can still end up with better or worse starting tile yields depending on luck and randomness. So you can end up with a less than stellar start, but you won't be completely boned and helpless compared to the other players.



I think for the sake of multiplayer balance, they might want to create such an option that the starting region will have a certain varied percentage of yields (unless the players deliberately choose to change the base climate), a guaranteed strategic resource (but maybe not both), a guaranteed luxury resource (randomized) and maybe a guaranteed +approval anomaly.

Larcent wrote:
I like how Civilization handles this by giving you so many options to control how random certain components are. I think they have an option under resource spawning called "strategic start." It guarantees that if you build your city on or near where the game starts you, you will end up with access to horses and iron and I believe one luxury resource. I don't play Civ multiplayer, but I believe most players choose that start to make sure that everybody at least has access to the important initial stuff, though you can still end up with better or worse starting tile yields depending on luck and randomness. So you can end up with a less than stellar start, but you won't be completely boned and helpless compared to the other players.

In my Civ 5 experience strategic start mostly means "shower you with everything." I've only done it once, and only then because I very foolishly allowed my friend to create the game instead of me. I feel like Civ 5's map options are pretty awesome, but mostly because they let you play on a lot of different worlds. I--and my friends, who regularly multiplay with me--am convinced that Civ 5's start-position-finding-algorithm is horribly unbalanced. The maps themselves are nicely variegated...but where you start doesn't seem to be very fair. I suppose the "give you all the resources" strategic start option makes it more fair, it just also makes the map feel unreasonably lush and forgiving to me.



I like where you're going with your suggestion, but I'd probably extend that to *all* regions so the ones surrounding your start aren't unbalanced either.



I'm not sure if I've played a game yet in which a region fails to have at least one strategic resource--or luxury, for that matter--but they could certainly be balanced better. As it is I feel I often need to expand just to meet my game needs, even though my personal game style preference is for tall empires.

Been a while, but played another game today after the new build. I had tried one soon-ish after the Roving Clans hit and quickly found that I don't like the Roving Clans. Fair enough, not my game style--btw, are trade routes supposed to be implemented yet? It seems like RC needs them, but I have no idea how to use them.



Anyhow, as of the *new* build from yesterday or whenever I'm even happier with the game. I feel like the balance isn't quite there yet, but the new equipment stats and modifiers takes it a long way. Steel items remain worthwhile, titanium is now balanced-ish vs glassteel. The minor faction units seem buffed--everyone (meaning both me and AI) seems to struggle with them, which I think is a good thing because I like a nice hostile environment (as opposed to a minor annoyance that was whipped past turn 80). Also means they might actually be worth incorporating into player armies.



I was playing as Ardent Mages, and their hero and ranged units seem significantly debuffed, which I also understand to be a good thing as their range was considered OP. Playing with them now with their damage penalty they seem fairly reasonably balanced for the effects they come up with, although I did end up considering their ranged unit useless and enjoying the new Orc unit as a more powerful alternative.



I definitely like the map customization choices. This particular time my start position seemed less abysmal, although 15-20 turns in to the game I found what was probably *supposed* to be the city founding location in my start region with a clump of four anomalies (far from where I had started and actually settled). I resigned myself to playing the way it was probably meant to be played and expanded, and was able to settle in several good other city locations. I'm guessing it was the increased potency of the minor factions which kept the AI from gobbling them all up before I could get to them, so good job there.



I do like the tech tree changes I've noticed as well, especially the fact that plow factory isn't t2 anymore, because that was just obscene. Also, for the first time ever I ended up wondering if I wouldn't have had an advantage if I'd actually researched T1 titanium/glassteel armor and weaponry, so that was kind of nice.



I didn't end up interacting with an AI much to see if it was more effective at diplomacy or anything. Only one was on my continent, and apparently someone at some point joined the game and took over that AI. I never got messages about a new player joining when he did, and he sent five or six that didn't show up immediately. Sometime I ended up taking over his empire, thinking it was just an AI's, and it might've been because he left at some point. Later another player joined, and I got messages about that and opened the chat and saw the earlier player whose empire I'd inadvertently wiped out with no response to his communications. Anyhow, long story short I didn't interact with an AI much, so no feedback there.



I can't remember whether I put the resources on sparse, but they did seem sparser. Maybe that's just because I'd played Civ 5 recently and it's a relative thing, because I played Civ with sparse resources on and resources were absolutely everywhere; EL didn't have that problem, it was refreshing.