Unlike many 4X games where you are either required or incentivized to research pretty much all technologies, in Endless Legend the costs and prerequisites are set up to encourage you to pick and choose which technologies you get and skip over any that aren't essential to your plan.



That's cool, but it makes it very hard to justify researching a technology when its benefits are unclear or uncertain.



For example, research that unlocks new unit models: you can't see the cost of the new units or the effects of their unique capacities until you actually get them, so if you don't happen to have used them before, it's hard to know when (or even whether) they best fit into your tech progression. In my current game, I wished I had researched my first faction unit earlier because its ability turned out to be very useful, while I wished I hadn't bothered researching the second one at all because it's too expensive to fit my strategy. But I had no way (within the game) of anticipating either of those outcomes unless I'd played this particular faction before.



Or the "better search results" technology--even if you've used it in multiple previous games, it's still extremely hard to know how much that's helping you. How is the player supposed to decide whether that's more or less valuable than (say) geomic labs? That uncertainty is going to tend to push players away from relying on these techs, which in turn makes it even harder to learn how valuable (or not) they actually are.



I'd like to see the previews for these technologies reworked in such a way that a non-expert player could make some sort of quantitative estimation of their value. For example, if "better search results" were replaced with something like "doubles the average payout from searching ruins", then after playing a few turns and getting a rough idea of how common ruins are and what sorts of rewards they give, a player could at least make an educated guess about whether that technology is worth it. Right now, I bet there are players who have played dozens of games who still can't do that.

The Stockpiles technologies in particular are poorly explained. I still don't know the exact extra bonus provided by the "Skilled Labor" tech.



I think an in-game encyclopedia would have solved all these player information problems.

Civ 5 had an in-game Civilopedia (and an extensive wiki online). Fallen Enchantress had a similar thing, but less extensive.

Warlock and Age of Wonders have detailed unit display for all units and heroes (I think AOW3 also had an encyclopedia function with all the faction details, buildings etc...)



Although we should keep in mind these franchises are much older than EL, at some point we're gonna need them here as well as the game gets bigger...

If I'm not wrong:



Recycling faction trait = +120 food stock to be used for one turn (queueable) on any city, one stock per eight cadavers - cadavers are gained through dead units (own or enemies) in won battles

Weapons of the Enemy faction trait = +20 industry stock to be used for one turn (queueable) on any city, one stock per population of razed city

Unskilled Labor = +175 food/industry/science stock to be used for one turn (queueable) on any city (except science which is empire based), to be BUILT at a cost of 600 industry on a city with idle production, and then ACTIVATED on a city through the empire screen

Organized Labor = +875 food/industry/science stock to be used for one turn (queueable) on any city, to be BUILT at a cost of 1250 industry on a city with idle production, and then ACTIVATED on a city through the empire screen



It could be possible to skip straight to Organized Labor, but I haven't tried it. I'm fairly certain that Organized Labor simply supersedes Unskilled Labor, and not simply adds food/industry/science.



However, there's a trade-off, because the interesting thing is that if you build Unskilled Labor stocks, then research Organized Labor, they are automatically upgraded to Organized Labor*. So you can effectively get them more cheaply (600 industry) if you stock them up before you research Organized Labor (1250 industry). The same applies to the Weapons of the Enemy faction trait. Even though it's only +20 industry stock per razed city population, they get upgraded to +175 freely, or +875 freely, when you research the appropriate tech. I find the stockpile skills pretty useful now, but still haven't won a Cultists game... For other factions, they're great at founding new cities (which I guess is what they're designed for) and effectively re-cycling unused industry from other cities to food/industry for the target city. Recycling faction trait is its own unique stockpile though, so it doesn't gain the food bonuses from the Labor techs.

*The unusual thing is that if you've got a bunch of +175 stocks queued up on a city, and then apply a +875 stock on that city, it doesn't apply as +875 for a single turn following the +175 stocks, but +175 for five additional turns. Possibly a bug?



This kind of information needs to be there.



Also, you need the ability to see the effects of capacities without equipping the item to a unit design (and then unequipping when you decide you don't want it). It's a bit of a pain.

Weapon of the enemy is actually +25 industry and also come with a T2 technology for Cultists "Destructive analyse" (abreviated in "Destructive anal..." when you research it !) for +25 science.

And those crates are actually worth something like 250 dust on the market.