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 (it is a game, you should play it) What is this Legend and why is it so Endless Endless Legend is a Civ-style fantasy-themed turn-based strategy empire builder by Amplitude Games, a company known for making the Civ-style space-themed turn-based strategy empire builder Endless Space, as well as the real-time RPG-ish tower defense door-kicker Dungeons of the Endless. Despite having the last two games in Early Access at the same time, they manage to continuously work on all three at once, having put out simultaneous free expansions for Space and Legend about a week ago, as of this writing. They're also pretty good at getting the community involved, through their forums and a feature voting platform for all their games known as Games2Gether. Though the naming convention could cleverly reference the high level of replayability in each of these games, it also refers to a galactic precursor race, known as the Endless, whose leftovers tend to shape events throughout the series. Their ruins are scattered all over the place, and a mysterious resource known as Dust functions as the 'gold' of each game, a powerful nanotechnology/spice melange type of powder that is naturally sufficiently advanced enough to work like magic. Who is this joker and why is he posting this crap in my special place Hi, my name is Mazo! You might know me from absolutely nothing in particular. I like video games, and I like to tell people I know about video games that I like at great length. You might just say that I like talking about video games far more than I actually like playing them! Recently, I started getting back into Endless Legend, figuring out some of the more complex bits of empire building and learning all the subtle nuances of the different factions as I tooled about on my own. One thing Amplitude is terrible at is tutorials, and the tutorial in Endless Legend will most likely not teach you anything about what makes it a fun game to play. Also recently, James Portnow of Extra Credits fame posted a video recommending this and the new Civilization as solid strategy games. In that video he also mentions the difficulty in figuring out what to do inherent in setting your game in a fantasy/alien world, so I figured I might package some of the knowledge I have up and maybe entertain a few people. Who knows! What is your plan, mysterious nerd gently caress rivals, get Dust, in the classic Civ traditions. As you may have guessed from the title, I'm going to be playing as the Mezari faction. I'll try to explain things as best as I can as I go along, but feel free to ask questions or throw out advice if I am a terrible gamer and doing everything wrong.  You are here to be entertained after all, and I will do my damnedest to deliver the goods!Ideally, I'd like to run through as some of the more esoteric factions in the future, but who knows what the future holds?  At the very least, I'll throw out some little sidebar posts about different factions and other interesting tidbits as we go along on this mysterious journey. As far as update frequency, I'll post proper updates as often as I can be arsed to wake up before 4 PM, so long as mom remembers to buy enough pizza rolls and Mountain Dews to give me the energy to play videogames all night long.Table of Malcontents Phase 1: Raid on Antabb Phase 2: Ding Dong! It's the Police Tutorial: Resources, Empire Plans, Boosters Mazo Panku fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Dec 27, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 22:49
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Phase One: Raid on Antabb I took a bit of thinking to figure out which faction to play as. I wanted to pick something fairly straightforward, but nearly every faction has some sort of amazing trait that changes how large portions of the game work, you know? I mean, hell, one of my favorite factions can pack whole cities up on the backs of giant scarabs and move them around. That's uncommon, at least. In the end, though, I decided on the Mezari.  Pretty cool, right? All those traits that mean absolutely nothing to me at this point in time. Also interesting is that these guys are basically the same as another faction...  The Vaulters. The Mezari are essentially reskins of the Vaulters that you get for owning a copy of Dungeons of the Endless, which is a pretty fun game in its own right. Why did I pick Mezari and not just the Vaulters? To be confusing, of course! And also it was hard to make a Vaulter-centric joke for the title, so. The Mezari (and thus the Vaulters) are specialists when it comes to the Science resource, and get a +1 to any Science gathered from a tile with Science on it. They also have the unique ability to declare any of the 'strategic' resources as Holy Resources, which give any equipment made with that resource a boost, increase that resource's production, and allow your armies to teleport from one of your cities to another... among other things.  This is the world generation panel, if you're curious. There's a lot of options here, but I tend not to mess with them too much. Oh, I did change one thing...  The default for this is Pangaea. Pangea is cool and all, but it's so gauché, you know?  I didn't change a lot here, outside of increasing the speed scale and unchecking Score Victory. Score victories are over in like 150 turns and not nearly as cool as crushing everyone with SCIENCE! or a bunch of heavily-armed goons. There are also five random AI factions out there, so let's hope we don't end up right next to bug people or something. When you start the game, there's an introduction video that plays, telling you about your faction and their philosophies and whatnot. For the Mezari, the Vaulter's video plays, so look that up online if you're curious. No, don't even bother with that, I looked it up for you. But come on, the Vaulters are ancient underground people that have finally decided to come up to the surface. I'm playing a race of space colonists who ran out of fuel and ended up on the surface of the mythical planet Auriga with very little in the way of resources, so I took some artistic liberties and bashed together my own intro. Enjoy!  Hello there everybody, it's MezariMC! And I'm TheLimeOpsicle! We're going to go colonize Auriga! I should mention that I messed up and accidentally hit the 'Eject Cargo' button before we started recording, so all of our laser pistols and advanced terraforming equipment and most of our fuel ended up orbiting a planet in another galaxy! Some day a million years from now, some random... random space explorer will find all of those supplies, and they'll make their own colony somewhere! Bake sale! Fortunately, we still have a couple crossbows and a settler unit, so let's try to colonize the planet anyway! Who needs laser guns and advanced terraforming equipment anyway? Get it? Bake sale? Because Deceased Crab... I am so done with you.Okay, enough of that. Let's go see that planet!  Not a bad start, actually! Plenty of fertile land and a weird anomaly (the green spheres) as well as some ruins (the yellow glowing ruins) and a mineral deposit! But gently caress all of that, because I'm putting this city on the river.  There we go. There's a button on the bottom right corner of the button that is also in the bottom-right corner that will bring up the resources display. The resources are referred to as FIDS, by the way, which stands for Food, Industry, Dust, and Science. Um, there's also Influence, so maybe it's actually FIDSI, but that's a little bit harder to market so let's stick with FIDS. The armies in this game move in stacks, with the maximum being whatever army limit you've researched so far. At the start of the game your army limit is a lowly four, but luckily that goes for the other factions and roaming enemies as well. Each army can also be led by a powerful hero unit, which can have all sorts of useful benefits. We've started with a hero leading an army of two crossbow-wielding Marines and the Settler we used to make our city. Let's take a look at that hero for a sec.  Kind of wimpy, honestly. Both our hero and our Marines are equipped with one-handed crossbows, which do extra damage in melee range, but we could switch them both to two-handed bows to do extra damage to flying units if we really wanted to. Coincidentally, the region we've landed in is inhabited by flying demon people! That's awfully convenient. Now, let's deal with the rest of the bureaucratic nonsense that comes along with starting your own empire.  This is the science screen! See all that science? It's all ours, ours for the taking. Um, except the ones in blue over there. We already took those.   The other factions will actually have to research these two, but we start off with them.  I could start with some technology to help get my infrastructure down, but I said screw it and went for the 'get better stuff from ancient ruins' tech. They're all over the place and I could certainly use all that loot. Like most good games these days, you can queue up multiple technologies for research, one after the other, so I've gone ahead and set up my tech list for these first few turns. Behold!    Should be good for a while. That one in the middle is also why I posted up on the river, by the way. Now, when you search a ruin with one of your armies, a couple of things could happen: you could come out empty-handed, you could get some valuable resources, or you could end up with a quest that may lead to advanced technology, or even more resources or whatever. In my case I got this:  Repeat that five times and you're good.  Here's our humble city and the region surrounding it from up high. The lands in this game are broken up into predetermined regions, and only one player city can inhabit a region at a time. Each region can also have one to three minor faction villages, which I'll get to as soon as my 'welcoming party' is finished building in Antabb... you know, Antabb is really kind of a dumb name for a city. Anyone have any suggestions for a better name?  I sent our small army up north to take a peek around. Sondir might be a good place to plant our next city; that blue spot there is Titanium, and we can use that to make some powerful gear in the future. Plus we could use it right away as our Holy Resource! While peeking around I also ran into these guys.  Filthy, stinking orcs. Also pretty decent archers, but I'd rather not give them a chance to arch me. Before I head back home I also have a chat with this guy!  This is the leader of another one of the major factions, the Wind Walkers. They're... well, they're weird-looking elves, to say the least. When you meet any new player, you are automatically set in Cold War. This means that you can attack each other in neutral territory with no penalty, and if you're in their territory they can attack you while you can't attack them, and vice versa. I'd rather not have people I don't know snooping around my business, so this might happen soon! Another thing of interest was this little popup at turn 14:  Empire plans, goody. I'll explain this when it comes up next time, but to prepare for it I head off to our burgeoning little town and shift a few things around.  This is another cool thing you can do in Endless Legend. Your city automatically produces all the resources on the tiles that it is exploiting, but you can also move your population to different areas to have them produce a little more. I'm already close to getting another citizen so I'll go ahead and have one build me up some more of that tasty purp. Er, that's Influence by the way. It will be incredibly important later on.  With all of that exploring that we've been doing, our hero has gained a level! When heroes gain levels, they also get skill points that you can assign to the skill tree.  This tree, right here. The way it's set up is that class-specific stuff is on the left, race-specific stuff is on the right, and right down the middle is some basic stuff that most heroes share. You can find all sorts of useful perks all throughout the tree, but I decide to start right in the middle with this:  Yes, I realize that the text on anything relating to searching is incredibly vague, but I also want more loot. There's still plenty of land to explore, plenty more chances for ruins to poke around in, so why not start early on those lucky loot rolls? Now, he we are at turn 19:  Still tabula rasa here. Building up basics, working out a plan, considering the angles, meeting the neighbors. Speaking of meeting the neighbors, I'll have another Marine ready in ten turns. Perhaps I should go say hi to ours soon? Next Time: Empire Plans, Questing, Epic Games of Ding-Dong-Ditch Mazo Panku fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Dec 6, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 22:49
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Is this video or screenshot?
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Dec 5, 2014 23:32
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Why would you post a thread before you have any content ready?
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Dec 5, 2014 23:33
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Also I'm pretty sure this game hasn't been out for three months.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:44
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Release was September 18, so yeah, just shy of the 3-month limit there.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:52
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I said count to ten thousand. Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention, it's screenshot. I thought about video but I don't think videos of strategy games are all that great. At least not when I do 'em. Double apologies for being a couple minutes for the first proper post and for being so close to the moratorium. I've just been really hyped about this game is all, and the last update added a lot of cool new stuff. It's just taking me a little longer than I figured to finish typing everything up! Yet another Edit: Okay, there we go. Finally done with that. I know it's horribly unprofessional to make your OP without having your first update right there and ready to go, but I'm far from professional~ Mazo Panku fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Dec 6, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 23:59
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Do you want to maybe shrink down some of your screenshots? Anything wider than about 1000px tends to mess with most browsers.
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Dec 6, 2014 15:22
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inflatablefish posted:Do you want to maybe shrink down some of your screenshots? Anything wider than about 1000px tends to mess with most browsers. I've got a tiny 1280x1024 monitor, and I can read it comfortably without needing to scroll back and forth, so it's probably fine. Any smaller and the text will become illegible anyway.
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Dec 6, 2014 18:33
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That was btw. a non optimal starting location choice. 1 NE of the stone circle thing would have given you three anomalies, at least one with a happiness bonus, 1 green title and 3 rivered forst tiles. Bonus points for easy and rewarding expansion into even more forest.
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Dec 6, 2014 18:38
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Heatwizard posted:Any smaller and the text will become illegible anyway. That's what I was thinking. I do apologize to folks negatively affected but I figure being able to read everything should come first! And also hitting the Big Picture Mode UI button is too harrrrrrd  Mightypeon posted:That was btw. a non optimal starting location choice. drat it, you're entirely right! I certainly wasn't considering all of the variables when planting my capitol down. Hell, I think the only variable I was looking at was 'has river, beautiful view of countryside'. The general rule is that I'm going to roll with my many and varied mistakes, so take this as a learning experience, class!
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Dec 6, 2014 19:11
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I started an LP! Then I let my schedule slip for a while, great job! Sorry if anyone was curious about this thing and annoyed about the lack of updates. No excuse, but I've been a tad bit busy with life poo poo. I'll continue the thrilling(?) action soon, but for now I wanted to address some gameplay stuff. Gather around, class! They call me FIDSI Cent Honestly, if you've played Civilization you probably understand the concept behind the resources in this game already. I just really like saying FIDSI out loud, bear with me.  Food: People need food to eat! Any food you make beyond that goes towards making more people, and the amount you need to make more people increases with the total population of a city. You need a certain number of people in a city to build additional Borough Streets, which increase the physical size of your city (and thus the amount of resources you get). Keep in mind that a city can't expand or exploit any tiles outside of the region it's in, for some reason. Industry: This is put immediately towards the current building project at the top of the building queue. Nothing really interesting there! Dust: Is it advanced nanotechnology, spice melange, stem cells??? Just call it currency with a sufficiently advanced backstory and we're good. You can immediately build units or buildings, trade for stuff in the Marketplace, fill up a gigantic safe full of the stuff and roll around in it, whatever. Make a lot of it no matter what and you should be good. Science Is pretty neat! Influence, the bastard child of the main resources. This one's a little bit harder to obtain and represents the political clout of your empire. Call it the social currency of the game. You'll need a bucket of Influence to conduct diplomacy with the other empires you meet, and wheelbarrows full of the stuff to mess around with your Empire Plan.I Should Talk About Empire Plans Now Every twenty turns, you'll get the chance to influence the entire breadth of your empire with this thing.  This thing. As you can see, it's pretty useful! if you think you'll need more units soon, or you want to scout around for a bit, or you just want to pump your science for a while, there's an empire plan for YOU! Two things before you go hog wild and max out all of the charts, though. When you start off in the first era, you only have access to the bottom-tier bonuses in the Empire Plan. You unlock the higher tiers as you research farther and go up through the Eras. Also? Rolling out an Empire Plan costs a LOT of Influence. The higher tiers are exponentially more expensive, and the cost also increases with the size of your empire. So between this and dealing with your shithead neighbor empires, you should plan ahead. Resources - Buy A Pack For $4.99! We've got two different varieties of special resource in Endless Legend, strategic and luxury. They come in a couple different tiers that unlock as you progress through different eras on the science track, and you'll need specific technologies to build the extractors for each tier of resource. Each extractor will give you one of the resource per turn, though you can squeeze out more with certain buildings and hero skills.  Strategic resources are used to make powerful weapons and armor for your troops and heroes, as well as some higher-level buildings in your cities. Special equipment is significantly stronger than the regular stuff, and each resource will increase different stats. For example, Titanium weapons and armor will have incredibly high attack and defense power, while Glassteel equipment will exchange some of that for initiative bonuses. Make your army your own! Or just make huge doom-stacks of impenetrable tanks. Whatever.     Luxury resources can be consumed to apply a bonus to your empire for ten turns. The bonus is typically a small (+5) approval boost, plus.... something. There's a lot of resources so there are a lot of somethings. You can increase your FIDSI output, augment the combat potential of your armies, even double XP gain. Wine is just there to give you a huge boost to your approval, so it's almost always useful. Like Influence, you can use luxuries to shape the development of your empire, but just like Influence, the amount of a resource needed to apply the boost will increase as you expand.  Oh yeah, and the Vaulters have a special ability specific to their resource use. You can burn them just like luxury resources, only without the happiness boost. You can only have one strategic resource boost in effect at a time, and that resource is considered the Holy Resource of your empire. Holy Resources are used instead of other strategics in making certain buildings, and any equipment made with the Holy Resource is quite a bit more powerful. And if that weren't enough, as long as you've got a Holy Resource named, you can teleport entire armies between your cities for free. You can even teleport a modest horde into a city under siege! Here's hoping this information is useful to folks just getting into the game. I'll get back to the playthrough proper soon-ish, so if you guys have any questions or suggestions for that, maybe a couple death threats to toss this way, throw them out there. See you on Auriga!
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Dec 20, 2014 23:53
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So in order to make something a Holy Resource first you have to burn some of it for the bonus, huh? Must make timing the crafting interesting.
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Dec 21, 2014 05:17
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Glazius posted:So in order to make something a Holy Resource first you have to burn some of it for the bonus, huh? Must make timing the crafting interesting. When something has been declared a Holy resource, you mine double of it for the duration. This tends to pay for itself and then some.
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Dec 21, 2014 06:46
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Can you switch the holy resource, or does it stay holy once you've named it, even if you start eating titanium instead of glass?
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Dec 21, 2014 12:13
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Niggurath posted:Also I'm pretty sure this game hasn't been out for three months. Grizzwold posted:Release was September 18, so yeah, just shy of the 3-month limit there. Geop posted:The three month rule has been removed! But low-effort threads are subject to being gassed if they are outright bad threads. I am so glad that everyone reads the sticky'd threads before posting on the forum.  IT'S IN THE FREAKING THREAD TITLE. Fuckin' Goons man. They are literally the worst. Ahem. Now that I'm not backseat moderating/borderline white knighting, I can go Huzzah! An LP of this. I had heard good things about it, but my few playthrough attempts had ended...poorly. It'll be nice to see someone competent play this so I can see how the game is meant to be played! Mazo Panku posted:drat it, you're entirely right! I certainly wasn't considering all of the variables when planting my capitol down. Hell, I think the only variable I was looking at was 'has river, beautiful view of countryside'. The general rule is that I'm going to roll with my many and varied mistakes, so take this as a learning experience, class! Oh.
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Dec 21, 2014 12:51
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Veloxyll posted:I am so glad that everyone reads the sticky'd threads before posting on the forum. This thread was posted on Dec. 5th, the Three Month Rule was abolished on Dec. 15th. So for a little while this LP was rushing things but now it doesn't matter anymore.
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Dec 21, 2014 19:07
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Veloxyll posted:I am so glad that everyone reads the sticky'd threads before posting on the forum. True, goons ARE the worst, but to put all that in context, there was about 45 minutes between my OP and the first post. Still would have loved to hear more "Why are you so bad at this game" than "Why are you skirting forum rules you nerd" Thanks for the enthusiasm by the way. I still consider myself a huge scrub in the ways of Endless Legend, but I'm at least competent enough to be able to recover from my mistakes and plan ahead. We're taking this planet over whether it wants taken over or not!  Heatwizard posted:Can you switch the holy resource, or does it stay holy once you've named it, even if you start eating titanium instead of glass? Holy Resources follow the same rules as luxuries: they're active (and thus holy) for ten turns. During those ten turns, any equipment made with that resource has an extra 50% effectiveness. After that booster has ended, you can burn a pack of another resource and then that will be the holy resource; if I start eating Titanium, all of the troops that I've given shiny Glassteel armor will lose that bonus, so I'll either need to suck it up or retrofit them with Titanium gear. Switching up the gear on your army like that can be costly though, so it might be wiser to create a new unit type and produce some of those instead. I'll get into unit creation, retrofitting, skills and the like later, but it's pretty simple honestly. You put equipment onto a unit, all units produced will have that equipment, special equipment costs strategic resources and is thus quite valuable. Clarste posted:When something has been declared a Holy resource, you mine double of it for the duration. This tends to pay for itself and then some. Certainly true! I'll amend the Holy Resource explanation to explain this at some point. That said, if you burn your last ten Glassteel to get that bonus, you won't be able to start producing your powerful new Glassteel Marines until you have enough resources for each individual one, so timing is still important. If it's going to take five turns to train one Marine anyway, you might as well get one or two in the queue before you activate the bonus, ya dig?
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Dec 21, 2014 19:24
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I purchased this game while it was still in early access but found it endlessly bewildering rather than legendary. Criticisms levelled at it's tutorial are well deserved. Interesting and pretty enough though, hopefully with your insight (and possibly by learning from your mistakes) I'll be able to decipher it somewhat. Dechra' da, ser Panku - a fine start!
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Dec 21, 2014 22:07
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While I am not really capable of doing an LP myself, I find beating the game on the highest difficulties to be not trivial but quite doable, so dont hesitate to ask for questions. I will start with a low level effort post concerning city managment and expansion as far as it pertains to the current game. First, the following guide is a must read and explains to you what the tutorial totally failed to explain: http://forums.amplitude-studios.com/showthread.php?28694-Building-Big-Efficient-Cities-Borough-Streets-amp-Leveling-Districts In a condensed version, Endless Legend has some pretty serious drawbacks for overexpansion, both in individual cities and globally. Globally, each city other than the capital generates -10 expansion disapproval. This stuff stacks. Approval is of considerable importance, since the drawbacks from low approval on your FIDS output are pretty severe. As a rule of thumb, try to have a approval increasing anomaly in your immidiate hexagons around you when placing early cities. Globally, as long as all of my cities have more happiness than 50, I will keep founding new ones. There are other things to consider in terms of how precisly you are expanding an individual city. Expansion in this cases is done via building districts. Each district expands the area from which the city draws resources, which would normally mean that one would seek to draw from as many areas as possible, and thus have some kind of spiderweb or snowflake outlay for districts. However, each district also reduces this cities approval by 10. This is pretty huge, and acts as a large counterincentive for building lots of districts. However, each level 1 district that borders 4 other level 1 districts levels up. It now generates approval, and gets some pretty serious science. Districts bordered by more higher level districts will upgrade into even higher levels. I generally prefer the 2 layers deep stick approach (shown in far more improved ways in the first guide linked, which is imho a must read). It minimizes negative approval and gives me pretty large areas from which resources are drawn. The stick is also quite adaptable to other situatons, and you can pretty easily have it turn around a bit in pursuit of special city building goals. I find quadratic, hexagonal or triangular version to be less adaptable, and less productive in the early game. Sticking to "build cities in a 2 layer deep stick way" pretty instantenously takes you up 1 difficulty level from what you were playing before in my experience, once you manage to get from experience when and where to ditch that (temporarily) you gain another boost.
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Dec 25, 2014 22:12
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Mightypeon posted:I will start with a low level effort post concerning city managment and expansion as far as it pertains to the current game. This post is a definite must-read if you want to know a bit more about strategy in this game. Good low-effort high-knowledge post there, Mightypeon! You bring up some pretty good points that I haven't quite covered just yet, as far as city design goes. Like you say, low approval can really stifle your FIDS production. Even without tech advancements to further boost the positive effects of a high approval rating, the extra Dust you get from a Fervent rating is worth doing what you can to keep that bar as high as you can get it. Personally, I haven't paid a lot of attention to anomalies that can increase approval, and instead focus on building up luxuries to offset my spurts of expansionist rhetoric. Of course, I've started in a region without ready access to any luxuries and I still dropped my city in a weak spot, so you may think I'm screwed! Personally, I just see myself as needing to put more effort in when I get my next couple cities down. Now, since you're asking for questions, do you think you could explain what added hardships to expect on higher difficulties? I'm playing on the normal difficuly level, a fairly baseline game, because I want to explain some of the basics as I go along, but I certainly would like people to keep in mind how their strategies will need to change as they move up the difficulty ladder. A few nights ago I loaded up a fresh game and spent a couple hundred turns explaining strategies and extra things on my Twitch channel. It was a good teaching experience, and I'll definitely try to stream some more Endless Legend whenever I can stand to play a solid block of it. If anyone's interested, I tend to let people know on the Let's Stream thread when I'm going live, and my Twitch channel is right here. Expect more variety and discussion about the various factions over there, but I tend to play a bunch of other games and keep a very chaotic schedule (which should explain why I'm so laid-back as far as updates go here) Now the reason I brought all that up is because I'm working on the next update right now, and while everything's going according to plan so far, my opening moves are way slower than the Vaulters I had running on stream. I'll have a couple opportunities to explain how combat works in this next update, so look forward to that!
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Dec 26, 2014 02:14
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As far as I know: - Below Hard, the AI plays a bit more retarded - At hard and above, the AI gets progressively more boni to FIDS, Approval, and I think also to the ratings of their troops. -I do not think that the AI becomes more likely to gang up on you, while some players claim that, I think this is more because at higher difficulties your military score will look puny in comparison, thus inviting attacks from opportunistic AIs. -Some players reported that the AI gets "freespawn", I for one think that the AIs runaway boni to economy just allow it to buy lots and lots of units -Imho, the key military technology for Vaulters or custom Vaulter likes are the first tier of mithril/glasteel weapons (pick what you want to use as a holy resource) and the first troop size upgrade. This result in an army that can usually go and splat some nearby (not forrester, these guys get just vicious on higher levels because they spamm a metric crapton of long range shooty elfs, and those are really difficult to kill without getting attrited to death) before he manages to truely utilize his huge FIDS advantadge. I strongly suggest to go for a range heavy army on higher difficulties. Ranged units often allow you to defeat "equal" enemies without taking losses or even wounds. I think I once managed to kill a total of 60 or so harvester mellee dudes with a single army of comparibly well optimised marines + 1 Zeratan. Since the enemy was on the same tech level, it would have been pretty impossible to that with mellee units. And even a technologically outclassed ranged unit can still do some damage to a powerfull mellee fighter, while technologically outclassed mellee fighters are pretty useless. Ranged armies become a lot more powerfull once their leader gets the +1 Range upgrade. This is something you should go for with laser like precision on your own hero. With Range 4, you can effectivly run from movement 2 enemies and still shoot at them, (and deny them from ever reaching you in 6 turns unless the map seriously restrains you) which is pretty drat huge. Will propably do a low level effort post on combat soon.
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Dec 26, 2014 02:53
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Not only that but glassteel equipment for range unit not only give damage but also a ton of initiative. Which help to reduce casualty.
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Dec 26, 2014 03:07
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Phase Two: Ding Dong! It's The Police When we last left off, I was a turn away from finishing some research, training another group of Marines, and setting up the Empire Plan for my little trash kingdom. Not a bad place to start this round! I went ahead and put the Influence we banked up towards Dust production and unit cost reduction. It's good to plan ahead, friends, and what I'm planning for is a mid-scale military curbstomp. All in the name of security, of course.  As if on cue, a group of Daemons form near the Kazanji village to the south of our city. Great! I was looking for an excuse to explain how combat works, and a couple flying units should be no problem for my Hero-led stack of crossbowmen. When you move in to attack a unit, this screen appears.  This one, right here. This gives you all the useful information you'll need before the battle starts, such as who the main combatants are, which reinforcements if any can join the fight, and whether or not a Hero is leading each army. You can minimize this window and mess around with the rest of your empire if you want, but the units involved in the fight are locked in until you actually resolve the combat, so keep that in mind. You can also hit the checkmark next to a reinforcement to exclude it from the fight, which you probably won't have to do much unless, say, there's a Settler unit in the area that you don't want to lose. The circle in the center is a general indicator of combat power, and... what the poo poo? I'm at a disadvantage, even with my numbers? Even with the crap Militia units from my capitol? Lucky for us, a disadvantage can be offset with superior tactics, and as Mightypeon has noted in his posts, ranged units are worth their weight in Dust due to their ability to dish out damage while keeping clear of retaliatory attacks.  Once you've made your preperations, your units will take their places on the map and you'll have a chance to set their starting positions. This box here is the combat area, and nothing can leave the combat area until the battle is resolved. The terrain in the combat area simplifies a little, making it easy to tell whether a hex is considered clear or rough terrain. Also take note of the flags on either end of the area; those are reinforcement points, color coded by army. Each round, one of your reinforcements will spawn on an open point, and unless you have some higher-level Hero perks, you'll usually be limited to two a round. This, and the limitations to army size, greatly curb the effectiveness of a zerg rush strategy. Considering my weakness on paper during this fight, I go ahead and keep all of my units in the forest to start. As you can see by the timeline up top, my guys are going last, so I'll need all the defense I can muster so that I can mount a decent counterattack.  One thing I really enjoy about this game is that most of the mechanics are designed with simultaneous movement in mind. If you're like me, this combat model probably seemed a little strange when you first loaded up Endless Legend, but trust me, it works pretty well! Since you don't know what your opponent is planning, you either select a target for each unit, of a movement destination. When it's your turn, you'll maneuver towards the enemy or hex you've selected, but if that's unavailable (the enemy is already dead, or the hex has been occupied) your unit will fall back on its general strategy which you can change underneath its stat block. You'll usually just set targets and leave it be, unless you have reason to get crafty.  See this bar down here? This is my favorite thing added in recent updates, the attack odds. Based on your stats vs. your enemies' stats, this shows the percentage chance of your attack either being a critical hit, a regular hit, a blocked attack, or a critical block, as well as the damage you'll be doing with each. As you can see here, the Daemon units have a pretty decent defense in the woods, so if I were to shoot them right now there's a good chance it'd be blocked and do little to no damage. As a bonus, these Daemon are carrying greataxes, which give them Ranged Slayer 2. I'm expecting casualties. Once you hit the Launch button, turns will be executed based on initiative. As I mentioned before, these Daemon have me beat there, so they'll move first. While commands are played out, the center of the screen will show the relative strength of each army as well as which combat round you're in. A fight will last six combat rounds, and if there's still a unit on both sides standing it's considered a draw.  We managed to take down one of the Daemon, but we've taken a decent amount of damage and lost one of our Marines. As a general rule of thumb, the AI will play it smart and go after your proper units before taking out any weak-rear end militia, and it certainly did not help that Daemon use their Chain Lightning ability to damage extra targets every round. We've got this last one surrounded and mostly dead, though, so let's just finish it.  Almost lost two units, but I lucked out! The experience points were definitely worth it, though, for our Marines and for our Hero. Oh yeah, you can rename your armies, too, so I went ahead and named our main fighting force in honor of Mightypeon for his contributions to helping us all get good at the game:  Thanks for Putin in the work, fella. Now seems like a good time to cover something I didn't even bother mentioning before: the main quest line! Hence the bold text Yeah, this is a Civ-style game with quests, what of it? Each faction has its own unique main quest line, a fantastic wall of text that explains the hardships they face in their ongoing expansion throughout Auriga, as well as your place in resolving those issues. These quests will get more and more difficult, but in the end you'll be rewarded with a special building that, once built, will net you a Wonder Victory and win the whole game. Even if you're not planning on building the Wonder, working on the main quest line is still a good idea, as the rewards include special buildings, weaponry, technology, and extra resources. I was going to type up another MezariMC and LimeOpSicle skit to explain the first quest, but I've spent too much time typing up actually useful information so I'm going to skip it. The first goal in our main quest line is to pacify a Minor Faction village and assimilate it into our empire. I would do that right away, but that last fight took a lot out of our army, so instead I'm resting a bit and sending them to the south to do some recon.  A few regions away, I found an Urces village. Their Rumbler units are slow and powerful, able to tank hits like a pro and counterattack multiple units at once. Having a few on your side makes for a decent defensive wall, but I'd rather not fight any right now. We also got a message from our old buddy Orange, the Wind Walker leader. I wonder what it is?  He obviously doesn't know me too well. You'll get messages like this from time to time, giving you a broad measure of how the AI sees you. At the moment we're still pretty far from each other on the map, so he doesn't give a poo poo, but he's at least glad I'm not picking fights. We have more important things to pick fights with, anyway! Speaking of, I should mention one of the major reasons I got bodied so hard in that last fight. See, when you first gain a unit type you get a default build, which is usually just a weapon and a shield. You can change that up in the unit menu, but I didn't bother to do that before sending my guys out into combat. This is The Fashion  Here, I have my Marines decked out in Tier 1 iron armor, the weakest stuff in the game but enough to tip the scales against the uncultured hordes that call this part of the world home. I also went ahead and replaced their default crossbow and shield combo with a longbow; while the crossbow is great in close combat, the bow has better overall damage and a bonus against flying creatures like the Daemon. KNOCK KNOCK  IT'S THE COPS  That's better. I still took a ton of damage to their axes, but we didn't lose anyone so go us! And what's this?  It looks like the one Marine that didn't die so far gained a level! Level-ups increase stats and hit points, so I'm pretty loathe to let any of my troops die if I can help it. Since we're dangerously low on HP all across the board, I'm moving our troops back towards the capitol to heal up.  While their village is still on fire, we'll go ahead and take the opportunity to assimilate the Kazanji into our empire. Assimilation takes a bit of Influence to do, but as you can see the benefits are worth it. For each village of the assimilated race in your empire, you get a decent bonus towards your entire empire; with the Kazanji here, that's an extra five percent influence, but other Minor Factions might also give out bonuses to unit stats. As an added kicker, we can also make Daemon units.  Seen here: the Daemon. These guys could be better classified as hybrid Flying/Support units, as their attacks inflict Slow status and do extra damage to nearby enemies. Flying units ignore terrain difficulties, so mountainous terrain does little to keep them out. They can equip two-handed axes or claws, so you can't expect much in the way of defense. Since there aren't many ranged units around for us to exploit the Ranged Slayer trait on the axe, I went with the claws, giving our little Daemons the ability to hit any units next to it on a counterattack.  Quest complete! 30 units of Glassteel is a decent reward. I could burn 20 of it right now to increase our Dust production by 20%, but I'm holding off for now. I can't make more so this stuff is a bit precious.  Our new quest is to build two Strategic Resource extractors. Good thing I've got a spot picked out up north! However, I'm currently a bit too busy to squeeze in a Settler on my build queue; since I took the Kazanji village by force, I'll need to rebuild it before I can recieve the bonus worker you get for every pacified village in the region. Might really only makes right if you're willing to wait a little longer to up your production.  I also built an extra district to eke a few extra resources out of the land. Borough Streets are great investments that pay for themselves quickly, but as was mentioned before, they will cause your approval to take a bit of a hit. It's good to offset the approval hit with luxuries, certain anomalies, or buildings like the Central Market. Another Borough-specific PROTIP: If you pop a Borough Street (or a city) on top of a resource deposit, it functions as a free resource extractor! Why wait until later when you can get your resources today? There's been a bit of conflict this time around, so I haven't had much time to talk about research developments. There really isn't too much to say. I got all the important stuff right off the bat, so the last few techs are just filling out the circle until-  Until this! Crazy loud fanfare announces your advancement to a new research era and you get all sorts of wonderful bonuses. Having our units start out a level higher and improving their arsenal will certainly help keep those wandering hordes off our backs, and the watchtowers... well, I'll talk about those later.  Here's our second Era tech wheel. As you can see there are two faction-specific techs: our third unit type, and the powerful Deep Generator building. I'm going to skip them both for now and go for this:  With this, we should be able to get a great deal more Industry out of the forested lands around our city. More Industry, more buildings, more units. I put a lot of thought into this one, at least, and now we can start to expand northward. I don't really like to talk about myself too much, but I have to admit, the bright greenery of this game is a fantastic contrast to the frozen waste that Colorado has turned into this winter. The color palette is a feast for the eyes, a bright beacon amidst a game development world that thinks that shades of brown and grey are super-realistic. I could stare at these beautiful maps for hours -  Oh. Wait. Never mind, it's Winter in-game too! Next time: gently caress my life, it's the Dark Season.
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Dec 27, 2014 21:50
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How many turns do seasons usually last?
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Dec 28, 2014 06:34
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At the start of the game, summer lasts about 25-30 turns and winter 4-10, but as the game goes on the numbers start to flip. If you actually hit the turn limit you'll be in more or less permawinter. There's another wrinkle to the seasons, too, but I'll let the OP discuss that.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:20
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Glazius posted:How many turns do seasons usually last? If you look at the "End Turn" button on the bottom right, on the upper right side of that, between the screwdriver-and-wrench option menu and the actual End Turn button itself, there's a snowflake or sunburst followed by a range of numbers (like, in the last picture, "1-16"). The season change will happen sometime in that range.
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Dec 28, 2014 07:48
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This update was pretty great. How decisive is the tier 2 equipment compared to the tier 1?
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Dec 28, 2014 07:55
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I would highly suggest anyone who is a bit bored with Civ5 to pick up this game at some point during the steam sale. I really feel like the devs put a lot of love into the game and the unique units you get in this game make Civ feel laughable.
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Dec 28, 2014 08:14
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Mazo Panku posted:Since you don't know what your opponent is planning, you either select a target for each unit, of a movement destination. When it's your turn, you'll maneuver towards the enemy or hex you've selected, but if that's unavailable (the enemy is already dead, or the hex has been occupied) your unit will fall back on its general strategy which you can change underneath its stat block. Actually, if you right click a hex and then ctrl-right click an enemy, you can set both a move and an attack target. Very relevant for ranged units, such as marines.
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Dec 28, 2014 20:40
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Yes, good, someone else is doing an Endless Legend LP so I don't have to. Nice work, so far.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:06
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Heatwizard posted:Actually, if you right click a hex and then ctrl-right click an enemy, you can set both a move and an attack target. Very relevant for ranged units, such as marines.  I... I didn't know this! It certainly fits in with the usual control scheme of hitting control to queue up extra things. Beamed posted:This update was pretty great. How decisive is the tier 2 equipment compared to the tier 1? There's a wiki page for all that here. In my opinion, if you're doing a straight upgrade to a higher tier of Iron equipment then absolutely nothing should stop you from doing it as soon as possible. Keep the availablility of strategic resources in mind while figuring out which special equipment you want to slap on your army; as a loose rule of thumb, I usually don't bother with tier 1 Titanium and Glassteel unless I have an amazing reason to do so. It's a good little boost early on, but the tier 2 versions stack up fairly well even against tier 3 Iron gear, with extra bonuses besides. Tier 2 Titanium weaponry is fantastic when you need to do a lot of damage, and its Glassteel counterpart will make sure you're usually going first in a brawl. Speedball posted:Yes, good, someone else is doing an Endless Legend LP so I don't have to. Aren't you usually doing fifty high-quality LPs all at once? Sit back, I've got this 
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Dec 28, 2014 23:12
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No Questing For Villages unlocked? Too bad, they can give you nice benefits too. Just wrecking villages is kind of pyrric.
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Dec 29, 2014 00:00
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Another way to set a move and attack is to right click where you want to go and drag to who you want them to shoot.
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Dec 29, 2014 02:56
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Could I make another reccomendation? Enable "BIG SCREEN UI". It makes all the menus proportionally bigger so your screenshots don't make the UI illegibly small.
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Dec 29, 2014 03:59
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Speedball posted:Could I make another reccomendation? Enable "BIG SCREEN UI". It makes all the menus proportionally bigger so your screenshots don't make the UI illegibly small. Yes, please do this. I'm having to squint a bit to make out UI details on some of your screenshots.
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Dec 29, 2014 04:28
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Speedball posted:No Questing For Villages unlocked? Too bad, they can give you nice benefits too. Just wrecking villages is kind of pyrric. Eh my games tend to go better when i wreck villages than when i try to pacify them. For one thing the AIs are so good at scorched earth that it typically only saves me like 2 villages.
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Dec 29, 2014 13:56
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Is there any unique Tech you can obtain through Village/Ruin quests or are they always just Tech you'd obtain at a later research tier?
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Dec 29, 2014 14:11
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Unlocking the Parley option is for people who have too much Science and not enough Production for all the stuff they unlock. For example, it's almost always good on Vaulters and Ardent Mages. If you wreck a village, you have to rebuild it; if you Parley them down you can get up to 3 extra pop for free. Also, sometimes the rewards are really nice. Notably, I'm pretty sure you can get the tier 3 glassteel/titanium equipment from them, which is approximately on par with tier 1 palladian/adamantium, uses resources you will already have a big pile of, and can't be deliberately researched. The armor may seem less exciting but it lets you make "+4 dust/science per worker" accessories for your governors. Armor techs are secretly boss as hell. Glidergun fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Dec 29, 2014 |
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Dec 29, 2014 14:18
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KazigluBey posted:Is there any unique Tech you can obtain through Village/Ruin quests or are they always just Tech you'd obtain at a later research tier? Several, and they are all awesome, like extractors that give you doubke yields or tier 3 titanium and glassteel weapons.
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Dec 29, 2014 14:44
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