Endless Legend
- Thread starter Grimsark
- Start date
This looks really really good. I am still on the fence about ES after all this time, I love the music and atmosphere, but it's hard to get attached to the game, it just feels so remote/distant/i dont know how to describe it. I want to like it because they've done a fantastic job supporting it, but there's some core parts of it I have always disliked that ruined the experience.
Gask
Bronze Baron of the Realm
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I really liked Endless Space at first but it suffered from most of the same flaws of other 4x games like unbalanced heroes, token complexity, lackluster combat and incredibly samey gameplay. As far as "divergent" content usually goes the first hour or two are mostly great until you figure out that you'll be seeing this "quest" a lot and usually in the same circumstances each game and that most of the differences available are fairly token and superficial. Look at AoW3 or Warlock2 for recent examples.
I have always had an affinity for the genre but in recent years it seems far more sensible to wait until the first expansion or raft of DLC before bothering with most of them.
I have always had an affinity for the genre but in recent years it seems far more sensible to wait until the first expansion or raft of DLC before bothering with most of them.
It's actually pretty hard to recommend any 4x to anyone if they aren't already fans of the genre. I grew up hot seat multiplaying those games with some friends. The KOEI games way back on the NES through the SimTex Moo and MoM games, etc. Endless Space is actually great on many levels, it just doesn't scratch all the itches that liking those old games have ingrained in my brain. Now that is far from a bad thing, much like the EQ white knighting that goes on, in the "modern era" of game design it's very hard to justify multiplayer games that can quite easily run into 30 hours for a win condition. Amplitude showed an extreme amount of support to endless space and i am very happy to have paid into that early and gotten the various perks that went along with it. The soundtrack alone is amazing. I will say how the combat was handled was a personal letdown, but the alternatives would have slowed the gameplay down to a crawl and i wouldn't have played nearly as many games if I had to commit to a Moo2 length game for that.
That said, 4x games are pretty amazing, if initially overwhelming with the sliders and percents to foo all over the place. Moo2 is still my gold standard for a 4x, busted as it is. If you can track down a copy, it is reasonably doable to get it working in dosbox. Even multiplayer, tho that was only stable-ish on ipx, and even worse on other protocols, so save often.
Have you played Aow3? I was a huge fan of that series, just haven't pulled the trigger on the latest.Gask_sl said:
Gask
Bronze Baron of the Realm
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I gave my impressions in the AoW3 thread, check out the most recent page of that thread if you are interested in a rundown of its issues. Basically its a case of wait till the expansion/DLC and see if they can flesh it out enough by then to make it worth playing more than once or twice.
This game is confusing, and the controls are frustrating, and it's shiny, and I am 8 hours into a game before I looked up. It is all going to depend on how the end game plays out.
After playing it through the night and beating it once, I don't think I will be putting the time in for another play through for awhile. The differences between the races you can choose is nice, but past that the game is a little bland. Pretty, but bland. And the combat is infuriating at times with how they deal with turns. Almost a great game, just not worth cash at full price At the moment.
I bought into the early alpha access and have put in about 30 hours. Right now the art of what is implemented is there and it looks impressive. Learning the game and each race you should feel pretty good and it definitely has more to do than AoW3 even at this early stage. However, once you put in the time and you figure out a good build order and expansion balance, this game will quickly be very easy and boring to play. Right now by the time you get into the 2nd tech tree, you can create two armies and just go rampage the AI.
When this goes live, or as it develops, however some things are going to have to happen to make this even worthy of comparing it to Civ 5. The aggressive AI is admittedly not implemented yet, but it will need to consistently challenge the player. Currently there are no victory conditions other than military dominations, something that will change. Currently there are no settings that increase the difficulty at all. You can barely get through the middle of the tech tree before the game ends on turns.
Another problem that good players will struggle with is the differences between the races. When you first start they are huge differences. Broken lords do not use food at all and rely on dust. Necrophages have to kill to get food. Others get science bonuses. However, when you get to the point where you are good at this game, the differences between the races merely alter where you focus your population at each stage of the game. The differences are really minor at best. The quests and goodie huts get stale and repetitive as you play a lot of this game as well. Hoping that the minor factions play a bigger role as time goes on.
If you are used to a Civ 5 type game, where you use the terrain, leader and terrain type to gauge what victory condition you're going to go for..... this is going to be disappointing to you at this stage and the potential is still probably going to fall short. However, some things are going to be much better than Civ 5, such as the ability to create custom units using any of the basic (or assimilated) unit types. There are some terrible balance issues right now (i.e. ranged units dominate currently), but you can equip your units with serious fire power (at a cost, however). The map turns into your battlefield and the manual combat, when implemented properly, has the potential to make the strategy of moving about the map just as important as the battle itself. In civ 5 the game is won or lost in the first two eras. This game, however, picks up steam and has a lot of better late game potential if it didn't end so early.
Micromanagement is a 4x "flaw." In civ 5 worker and population management can be a downside for some. The same is true for this game. Standard exploits are present already where if a building/research project is one turn away, you literally have to go into the city and move population from production to another area so you can take advantage of the 1 turn bonus in that other area from moving them. THEN, once the project is completed, you have to move the population back. This gets tiresome when you have over 5 cities, and this game (unlike civ 5) benefits from as many cities as you can manage without going into rebellion.
I can definitively say this is already better than AoW3. But I can also say that it will never have the depth of Civ 5. Time will tell whether they get close enough to make it worth a fraction of the 1000+ hours I've already put into Civ.
When this goes live, or as it develops, however some things are going to have to happen to make this even worthy of comparing it to Civ 5. The aggressive AI is admittedly not implemented yet, but it will need to consistently challenge the player. Currently there are no victory conditions other than military dominations, something that will change. Currently there are no settings that increase the difficulty at all. You can barely get through the middle of the tech tree before the game ends on turns.
Another problem that good players will struggle with is the differences between the races. When you first start they are huge differences. Broken lords do not use food at all and rely on dust. Necrophages have to kill to get food. Others get science bonuses. However, when you get to the point where you are good at this game, the differences between the races merely alter where you focus your population at each stage of the game. The differences are really minor at best. The quests and goodie huts get stale and repetitive as you play a lot of this game as well. Hoping that the minor factions play a bigger role as time goes on.
If you are used to a Civ 5 type game, where you use the terrain, leader and terrain type to gauge what victory condition you're going to go for..... this is going to be disappointing to you at this stage and the potential is still probably going to fall short. However, some things are going to be much better than Civ 5, such as the ability to create custom units using any of the basic (or assimilated) unit types. There are some terrible balance issues right now (i.e. ranged units dominate currently), but you can equip your units with serious fire power (at a cost, however). The map turns into your battlefield and the manual combat, when implemented properly, has the potential to make the strategy of moving about the map just as important as the battle itself. In civ 5 the game is won or lost in the first two eras. This game, however, picks up steam and has a lot of better late game potential if it didn't end so early.
Micromanagement is a 4x "flaw." In civ 5 worker and population management can be a downside for some. The same is true for this game. Standard exploits are present already where if a building/research project is one turn away, you literally have to go into the city and move population from production to another area so you can take advantage of the 1 turn bonus in that other area from moving them. THEN, once the project is completed, you have to move the population back. This gets tiresome when you have over 5 cities, and this game (unlike civ 5) benefits from as many cities as you can manage without going into rebellion.
I can definitively say this is already better than AoW3. But I can also say that it will never have the depth of Civ 5. Time will tell whether they get close enough to make it worth a fraction of the 1000+ hours I've already put into Civ.
Yeah, I'm also curious about this game. I'm a big fan of Endless Space, and this looks good but I heard it had problems in beta. Is it worthwhile to purchase now?