I played through the Ardent Mages quest line yesterday and thought it'd be worth posting some feedback on how it went.



There will be *spoilers*.



Ardent Mages Faction Quests

----------------------------------



The AM quest line story is nice and compelling. The quests themselves are a bit, well out of whack is the first phrase that jumps to mind, out of balance is probably a better phrase. Some quests pass quickly, one or two completed instantly for me and others take a long time, longer still because I didn't really understand what needed to be done.



Going through the quests (the order may be a little off, I didn't take notes as playing).



The first quest is fine, do a little exploring, look for your brother, make some discoveries. Nothing particularly exciting but a nice, compelling start. The only issue is being able to parley with pacified villages and it not being obvious you can do that from the unit panel when you can't do it by clicking on the village. It'd be nice if clicking on a pacified village brought up the attack/bribe/parley screen, even if all the options were grayed out.



The second quest! Yeesh! Eight pacified villages within my empire? Man that is a killer. It forces expansion to at least two other regions, more likely three or four depending on the random map generation. This is a long quest that puts expansion pressure on the Mages. That means everything else has to slow down because of the expansion. That brings with it happiness problems which brings population increase problems which slows down everything even more. Not sure what I'd suggest as a "fix" for this. Lowering the number of villages would make the quest painful certainly, but perhaps removing the need for the villages to be in your empire would be better. Let the player pacify villages in regions that they haven't settled. Maybe even a mix of the two if that is possible, something like "pacify ten villages, at least five of them within your empire", that would make for some interesting choices.



Quest three (I think) build a research city that generates at least ten research. Should be a fast, simple little quest but I didn't realise that it meant build a city that generates ten research *at the moment it is built* so I spent ages wondering why my new city didn't meet the quest requirements. At the very least this quest needs rewording to make that obvious. That aside this quest is just kinda boring. Make a new city in a location chosen entirely for the resources available in its immeadiate area even if those resources aren't able to support a city in any other way. The quest asks you to build a research center but you end up building a city that provides far less research that the cities you already have. So, even allowing for the confusing text, this quest just doesn't really work thematically. I think a better fix than simply clarifying the text would be to change it to something along the lines of "Build a new city dedicated to research. Once that city has generated a total of X research you will discover more about your brother." X could wither be a target for research generated each turn or a total cumulative amount of research generated in the city. Better still, and more sound thematically, would be for the quest itself to give a different type of settler that can build a different type of city (it need be no more different than in name) which when built will act as a trigger for the research. Once built the goal will be to generate X amount of research across your empire. Or instead of a unique city allow for a unique building that can only be built in a city founded after the quest starts. Give that building some fluff about being the Brother Institute that gathers together all the research. Either of those options would work better thematically and also give purpose to/follow up on the previous expansion.



As it stands the quest is confusingly worded, is either far too easy or far too difficult based entirely on the random map generation, and doesn't really work very well as part of the story.



Quest four was, I think, the search for the brother. It was mostly okay. The only thing that tripped me up a bit was the need to use the magic weapon from one of the earlier quests. The random map god was against me here again. I didn't have the resource available to make the weapon and had to explore a bit to find it. I found one area with it in and proceeded to settle there. Unfortunately I kept getting besieged which slowed production down and needing sixty of the resource with only one per turn meant the quest line slowed to a snail's pace. Now I was in a position to be able to change my research focus, open up resources in the market and buy the resource there so it wasn't too painful but I can imagine that sixty plus turn wait here could be incredibly frustrating. Perhaps the cost could be lowered and access to the magic weapon be given later in the game? Maybe even be the result of the research from the previous quest?



Once you've got the weapon things just kinda plod on. Find brother, kill brother, keep one city happy for ten turns to make up for the fratricide, fend off an invasion, build an altar. The happiness task was trivially easy for me, just a ten round waiting period really. The invasion was supposed to be four armies heading for a single city but ended up being one army heading for the city and three others kinda wandering around neighbouring regions waiting to be picked off by the defenders of those regions. An actual invasion of one region would've been more fun. Four armies appearing over a period of time, each one bigger than the last would have given a little tension and excitement rather than frustration at having to chase down the armies across your empire. The final step of building an altar was a real anti-climax. It was also open to a bug. I received the ability to make the altar before the quest to make it so by the time I got the quest I'd already built it and had to destroy and rebuild it. Not a big problem given the resources I had at that point but an annoying little "bug" nonetheless.



Ardent Mage Units

---------------------



Warlocks - kinda meh, infantry units that do their job, I'm sure they'll be fine when you work out how to make the infantry units work in this game :-)



Zealots - wow! Fun to play with but massively overpowered in a game where ranged units are already far too powerful. My recommendation would be to reduce the damage they do so that they are weaker than normal ranged units but since they have the area effect that is acceptable. It makes how you position and use the zealots a nice tactical exercise.



Thingy-wings - ubeqa-wing or something like that? Flying units. Seemed really nice, possibly overpowered but they were more a tag on for me with the zealots doing all the real work.



I didn't try the remaining units and never bothered with any faction units, the zealots were simply that good.



General Thoughts

--------------------------



The Ardent Mages are a fun faction. The pillars are an interesting mechanic even though I forgot about them most of the time. The units are gorgeous, the cities too. The spells are an interesting addition to the combat system but need to be more obvious, I don't think I'd even have noticed the option was there if it wasn't for PANCZASU's videos. I think this is an issue in a number of places. Parleying with pacified villages as mentioned above is one.



Being able to upgrade units is another. I stumbled across being able to upgrade the weapons/armour of units, I had wondered why there was no customisation option when the ability to design ships is such a big part of Endless Space. I'd like to see more customisation still - the ability to choose between light, medium and heavy armour with differing affects on protection and movement speed, the ability to choose between different types of weapons with different weapons having different ranges, speeds, attack/defence balance. Really I'd like the unit customisation to be as varied as the ship building in ES. I can see why it might never be, the range of options is unlikely to ever be that big but being able to choose between (or even have a mixture of) light fast infantry and heavy slow infantry would be nice.



The game is getting more and more stable, better and better. Really enjoying it, really looking forward to whatever comes along.

I think the unit's initiative and whatnot represent their light/medium/heavy armor. Though it could be fun to have a choice between light/medium and medium/heavy depending on the unit, it would make for an interesting choice and a good way of making armor more than a choice between materials and tiers while still keeping the concept of the unit intact.

Adding on to the feedback:



Appearance-wise, the Ardent Mages obviously look awesome--but what is with those things over the zealots' eyes? They almost look like the wild walker ears...growing out of their eye sockets...



I do like the persian feel though. Wasn't there something about a Saoshyant in one of the quest screens?

Ardent mages need tweaking!

Ardent mages are really, really weak early on. The science rush to era 2 is great but facing races like necrophage and cultists really doesn't give you any edge whatsoever. Your units drop too quickly and their spells are bad except for that stun. Stun spell fails 50% of the time level 1 then starts to actually be useful at arcana 2++. Why put ardent mages into era 2 if they need 30 turns to research stuff to be even slightly competant early game?



Also why the hell is winterized pillars exclusive to the story quests? that arcana +2 pillar and spell is exclusive to story quests too. Vaulters get a huge edge over ardent mages until the mages can get pillars with 2x the radius and effect through quests that can be impossible to do. RNG plays too much a factor on this races success or fail.



However the ardent mages with a perfect start and everything else is easily the most powerful military faction endgame with their ardent flame skill and AoE ranged units. This does not justify their early game and midgame incompetance though.



P.S this is through 100+ hours of playing the game and most of it in multiplayer, i've only won a few games as ardent mages.