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I'm gonna necro this thread, gently caress it all. Has anyone tried out the Improved AI mod, and how does it compare to the community patch? I keep meaning to get around to playing the game again and am wondering if the newer mod is more seamless and just as effective?
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Oct 30, 2022 11:38
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I feel like from what I remember reading that ELCP addresses a lot of the AI not knowing how to play the game. Not sure if the AI patch is needed or if they're compatible.
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Oct 30, 2022 12:57
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There’s a community patch? I also just started playing this again and didn’t realize there was a patch. What’s it do/add/fix/change?
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Oct 30, 2022 13:20
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Let me rephrase that, I am very lazy and never gave ELCP a proper chance due to them fiddling with a lot of balance stuff like stockpiles. Was just looking for a patch that made the AI... functional against bad players on normal or normal+1 difficulty settings. edit: That's honestly the biggest thing holding back EL and ES2, is the AI not being strong enough to be a decent foil. (well, that and crazy ES2 dlc balance issues, but those can be opted out of)
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Oct 30, 2022 13:29
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Serephina posted:Let me rephrase that, I am very lazy and never gave ELCP a proper chance due to them fiddling with a lot of balance stuff like stockpiles. Was just looking for a patch that made the AI... functional against bad players on normal or normal+1 difficulty settings. Use ELCP. Trust.
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Oct 30, 2022 13:39
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When you put it like "AI is not strong enough" you probably provoke people into rolling their eyes and talking about how AIs can't effectively play such big and complex games. But I know what you really mean by this: AI provides less challenge than 90s TBS AIs who only new how to cheat a big army and send it your way. Especially ES2 AI just doesn't do anything to stop your from winning no matter what difficulty you're playing on. Even Civ6 and other gentle games have higher difficulties where AI at least tries to ruin your day. In ES2 you have all those beautiful mechanics and they're all pointless.
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Oct 30, 2022 13:42
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ilitarist posted:When you put it like "AI is not strong enough" you probably provoke people into rolling their eyes and talking about how AIs can't effectively play such big and complex games. But I know what you really mean by this: AI provides less challenge than 90s TBS AIs who only new how to cheat a big army and send it your way. Especially ES2 AI just doesn't do anything to stop your from winning no matter what difficulty you're playing on. Even Civ6 and other gentle games have higher difficulties where AI at least tries to ruin your day. In ES2 you have all those beautiful mechanics and they're all pointless. There's a couple balance mods for ES2 I was curious about. ELCP is by far the only way to play Endless Legend, but there isn't as much documentation out there about the ES2 balance mods.
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Oct 30, 2022 14:12
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Serephina posted:I'm gonna necro this thread, gently caress it all. Gonna answer my own question here! Turns out ELCP actually includes this by default. Also, ELCP is kicking my rear end on normal which is a bit of a wake up call. I guess not expanding as the Allayi (sic) and just whoring wonders is actually super terrible? I might actually have to learn how to play the game?!
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Nov 2, 2022 04:54
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Maybe devs wisely kept you from learning the game so that you never realize it doesn't work as a strategy game?
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Nov 2, 2022 08:31
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I dunno, there's still decisions on where and when to dump industry into expansion vs army. I suppose in tech choices and stuff there might not be a lot of nuance in multiplayer when a player is "going X strat" and the corresponding counterplay, but for the perpetual short game that is single player the AI improvements in ELCP are instantly noticeable; the AI keeps spending industry on upgraded stacks to shark around hunting my poo poo, and I'm kinda perturbed by it. I did get a very big laugh when an faction who'd been ruthlessly hunting my scouts parked a stack next to my capital then acted quite outraged when I gleefully nuked it, complaining loudly about cold war aggression. The audacity! I play[ed] a lot of RTS games and so if I ever need my knife fight 1v1's with mapped out tech builds I know where to go, 4X games aren't for that imo.
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Nov 2, 2022 10:59
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Still posting as I'm binging EL; Why the hell does strategic resource equipment compare so poorly to the generic equivilent? The most egregious example is the Tier2 titanium/glassteel armours vs Teir3 generic iron stuff. The titanium stuff gives worse stats, has higher industry cost (lol?), AND needs the exotic strategics and tech etc etc. There's maybe the narrowest window where you're mining/bought new strategics and so can get the armour tech asap as you enter a new era, but honestly it seems so poorly balanced in a lot of spots.
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Nov 7, 2022 04:10
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The real reason to research this tech is accessories for heroes giving specific bonuses. Also I might be misremembering it but I think this equipment has a slightly different bonus so if you want a specific stat it can be more useful than generic tier 3 thing?.. But yeah, both in El and ES it pays to have a generic vanilla template for troops. Strategic resources are the bottleneck in the end game, even if your vanilla troops are much weaker you can probably produce 10 times as many of them. ES2 handles this better, I think, as in EL you eventually get dust equipment that IIRC is on par with any resource-based one.
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Nov 7, 2022 09:19
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Finally properly played Endless Legend Community Patch. I played on Hard as a Drakken and it quickly become clear that I should have played on Normal instead. I don't see a lot of changes in terms of balance, just the updated UI, but the AI difference is night and day. They do expand and fight, they're active. In most 4X games nowadays you see AIs stumble after the initial expansion phase, you have to play some semi-4X games like Age of Wonders to witness proper conquerors. In EL it often meant that the game pushed me into a lazy playstyle. I can lose most of early and mid-game Legendary Deeds and be in the bottom of score list, but later AI just doesn't know what to do with their economy, the initial boost from difficulty no longer helps - and you can swarm them or even just sit there waiting for an economic/science/wonder victory. And here it was cool! By the end game only 2 empires existed apart from me, and Mykara was in the lead. I was the third by far, I've only conquered a single city from another empire, and this was because they were greedy and expanded overseas close to me. By the time I've reached Era V they've already researched 1 of the science victory techs! I've started researching alliances thinking I can steal allied victory by concentrating on Influence and forcing them into an alliance. But then as soon as I've researched it Mykara proposed an alliance themselves. And, like, the game let me win. So the AI is more vicious but still feels off. I was prepared to face a glorious obvious loss and I was robbed of the experience! I have to note that I didn't actually see more intelligent decisions from AI. Their army composition and city placement was meh. They were probably better at expansion and resource management, but maybe it was just a matter of luck - I was starved for luxuries throughout the game, only having access to 4 deposits of 3 types, and by the time my cities weren't on the verge of rebelling (even with sewers and the market) I could only expand by conquest. And after all, if the AI was just better in general they'd all survive till the endgame like they usually do, right? So it felt more like AIs were balanced to be more risky and opportunistic. It certainly makes for more interesting games. It feels to me like Humankind's AI is more like that, but it's also willing to just go win the game instead of proposing an alliance that saves the player.
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Jan 13, 2023 12:49
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Hah, I thought I was reading my own post at first, my impressions of ELCP where similar. The AI is much more consistently aggressive through the mid and late game, with whole allied power blocks getting gulped up while I'm watching from the sidelines with large eyes. It was a total breeze to install and touches on a lot of different areas/techs in the game, really does inject a lot of new life into the game.
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Jan 13, 2023 12:56
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ELCP is a great addition. I am usually skeptical of mods cause they're often kitchensink garbage, but this indeed feels like a patch. A lot of new useful options. I'm playing on Steam Deck with low resolution so an option to switch to a schematic view at a lower altitude is very useful. But in a way better AI exposes issues with the game. I've heard people describe Endless Legend "a great game, not sure if it's a good strategy game" and less forgiving AI makes me less willing to experiment. This research tree is great but now I'm too scared to research anything apart from old reliable techs. Fiddly parts like juggling heroes make me afraid I'm losing value by not revising hero placement - most bonuses they provide are small but are still important in the grand scheme of things. It constantly feels like I'm playing the game wrong, like it's multiplayer game and others know the meta. And I've played the game from the time of release from time to time. Humankind is a similar but much more tame game in the possibilities it presents to you, but it's certainly a much more boring experience as a whole.
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Jan 13, 2023 14:05
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Humankind has the big sin of being dead loving boring which is kind of sad. I think it's their first miss.
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Jan 13, 2023 14:12
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Flipswitch posted:Humankind has the big sin of being dead loving boring which is kind of sad. I think it's their first miss.
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Jan 13, 2023 16:56
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AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:This thread is mostly dead so I'm going to go ahead and ask here since the Humankind was made by the same developer as the Endless games - what made it a flop? I liked the concept when first reading about it but when I playtested the beta, the combat sucked something fierce so I never even looked at the game on release. I think one key factor that makes it loving boring is that in a historical-based game, people don't want to play as a mishmash create-your-own-custom-culture, they want to play a known culture and guide them through alt-history. Treating all the cultures in the game as a weird grab bag of units/buildings/techs that you mix and matched based on the game was a terrible design concept. There's a lot less personal engagement in Humankind, IMO. People telling stories about Civ like telling stories about Montezuma being a crazy rear end in a top hat or the famous nuke-happy Gandhi. Nobody cares about recounting the story of their epic struggle against the Nameless Purple AI Faction.
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Jan 13, 2023 17:15
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Sadly this is very true. I play this game and I tell myself I'm supposed to like it. The number juggling is fun. I like historical immersive games, and here there's a lot of art and music to fill you with feels. But it's all off, you're playing a game of green hexes combining to give bigger green number, and bigger number shooters firing at smaller number tank units to get an advantage. It's board game in the worst sense of the comparison. And it deliberately calls for this comparison with opponents who kind of play the same board game with you.
ilitarist fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 17:40
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A major problem for Humankind, and why I didn't even bother picking it up, is that Amplitude's strength is above all else worldbuilding. The Cultists and Cravers and Riftborn and such are just so characterful, and even with some pretty cringe writing there's some real sense of...something difficult to capture in the various factions and the universe. It's great. Humankind doesn't even attempt to leverage this strength.
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Jan 13, 2023 20:01
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Tulip posted:A major problem for Humankind, and why I didn't even bother picking it up, is that Amplitude's strength is above all else worldbuilding. The Cultists and Cravers and Riftborn and such are just so characterful, and even with some pretty cringe writing there's some real sense of...something difficult to capture in the various factions and the universe. It's great. Humankind doesn't even attempt to leverage this strength. And there's a wide spread from familiar and relatable to downright alien. The Endless universe is its own thing hung on the scaffolding of a 4X game, which is how it stands out in the market. Humankind is just... well, I didn't buy it because I looked at it and was like, "This is just a Civilization clone with a few more bells and whistles." And there's plenty of games in the related Grand Strategy genre that do what Civilization does for me (the whole alt history shape-the-fate-of-the-world poo poo) better. Overall I'm just not super enchanted with the 4X genre anymore, but I do keep going back to Endless Space 2 and Endless Legend because the fluff is compelling.
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Jan 14, 2023 00:49
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For me, the issue with Humankind is that the culture-switching system made the game less varied, not more. Like yeah, occasionally you'll pick a war civ to supercharge your planned invasion, but in many eras there are just one or two civs that stand above the rest. Maybe they should have cut out the Production-focused civs.
Kazzah fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Jan 14, 2023 |
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Jan 14, 2023 00:53
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For all the flak Civ 6 gets, I truly enjoy the district setups and pulling crazy numbers from adjacency bonuses. Meanwhile, Humankind just had me repeatedly building the next district in the hex that pulls the most resource, and planning ahead for cool setups wasn't worth the opportunity cost most of the time. It felt very bland. And gently caress the combat, way more complicated than it had to be, as usual from Amplitude. It's not as catastrophically ineffable like Endless Legend's but I don't get any real satisfaction from it. Civ 6 still pulls ahead of it for me; I know people rag on the AI and 1UPT all the time but at least it didn't take substantial effort to just even get through a single battle. Humankind was a real loving bust, very disappointing. Especially considering how a lot of it felt like they were confident that they would be The Civ Killer; the results were laughably disappointing in hindsight. I'll still go back to Civ 6 when I feel the need, but if I wanted an Amplitude game Humankind is dead bottom on the list for replays.
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Jan 14, 2023 01:01
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toasterwarrior posted:Humankind was a real loving bust, very disappointing. Especially considering how a lot of it felt like they were confident that they would be The Civ Killer; the results were laughably disappointing in hindsight. I'll still go back to Civ 6 when I feel the need, but if I wanted an Amplitude game Humankind is dead bottom on the list for replays. Here's what I learned from my time obsessed with the MMO genre from 2007 to 2014: If something positions itself as a "______ killer" at any point, it's going to immediately nutshot itself on launch and the only reason we'll be talking about it 5 years later is to dunk on it for overpromising and underdelivering. Looking at you, every MMO that tried to position itself as a WoW killer.
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Jan 14, 2023 08:42
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Agreed that Humankind's biggest failing is that no matter what combination of civs you picked it just felt boring and samey. There was no sense that you were playing a unique combination culture, you're just whatever you picked last, I think.
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Jan 17, 2023 15:32
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It's a real loss cause mechanically it's really good. Every culture you take really changes the playstyle. I think they've tried to solve the issue of previous games with every faction just playing their own game and thus it's all very predictable. If you play as a scientific faction then you go for scientific victory no matter what hand you were dealt, and then if you see that someone approaches economic victory you just have to do science more and/or conquer the contender. Humankind really does feel like you select a mode for a stage and your relations with the map and other players change. But it all falls apart in the actual game. You are likely only to remember your first and your last culture choices. The first defines a lot of early important things when you don't yet have a fundament to build upon, and the last will likely spend for half of the game because of how everything is balanced. It's so bizarre that Amplitude of all people drops a ball on the feels side of the game. It's not even that the fundamental idea is bad. Maybe if there were just 3 or 4 eras it would work better. Even the UI doesn't help. AFAIK there's no way to see past cultures and thus abilities of other factions, and it's easy to forget yours. Do these guys have Roman combat bonus? I dunno!
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Jan 17, 2023 15:47
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ilitarist posted:Do these guys have Roman combat bonus? I dunno! Actually yeah, that's a huge one too. You can easily get an idea of what it's like in Civ to fight the English or the Russians or whatever, but gently caress knows what this guy next to me does or is.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:00
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This is a general issue with 4X games. They usually have very complex internal management, but the fantasy you're playing is a geopolitical simulation. So you're supposed to be a puppetmaster, prepare for the fights against a specific enemy, predict their actions, know who's who. And Amplitude was better than most at it. I've mentioned how it's boring for you to play as a very specialized faction but it also means that everyone you meet in Endless Legend or Endless Space are real characters. Here you have good AI personas. But what is their strategy and situation? What is their build? I know who they are now but it's a very small part of it all. I know their "values" but not their policies which are much more important. They all become a blur like a randomly generated empire from Stellaris or something.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:22
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I thought the civ blending was really fun but building industry districts became like 90% of gameplay
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Jan 18, 2023 00:12
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The way culture blending works atm is just a bit goofy to me. Nations globally don't wholesale lurch from one architectural aesthetic to one originating from a culture thousands of miles away unless they get totally conquered by them, or dominated by a nearby empire with borders or origin in those distant places. They could at least have made it so your architecture styles blended as time went by. Maybe have ruined examples of the old one hanging around crumbling away
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Jan 18, 2023 00:43
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I guess I'd rather take the "predictable but characterful" route as opposed to "fluid gameplan" thing. Which is weird because the latter totally has merit in a 4x because one game lasts for quite a while compared to like an RTS match or whatever but it is what it is.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:39
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Probably should've had less transitions, like 1-2 at most, and focused more on making each combination feel unique.
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Jan 18, 2023 05:32
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The culture switching would work very well in a physical board game, where you are interacting and outsmarting human opponents right next to you. But 4x games aren't actual board games. In 4x games the fun comes from fighting the rules more than the opponent. The fun comes from mastering the rules and then applying small tweak to them for enough result to overcome all of the other rules. That's why it's fun to play a maritime empire that gets an advantage to ship speed and also fun to play a maritime empire that gets an advantage to trade. Being able to switch which rule you are tweaking in mid game basically takes away the game part of the game.
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Jan 18, 2023 06:53
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Note that the other (better) recent 4X, Old World, has a similar approach with strategy switching. And their design goal was too making the player strategy less set in stone from turn 1 to 500. But there the ruler switches while the culture remains the same. Which is more how it works in reality and it feels natural. It's not just Crusader Kings thing cause there aren't that many characters to interact with and ruler stats are more important. As in only ruler with a Diplomat trait can propose alliances, basic stuff like that.
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Jan 18, 2023 09:26
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toasterwarrior posted:
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Jan 18, 2023 22:09
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ilitarist posted:Note that the other (better) recent 4X, Old World, has a similar approach with strategy switching. And their design goal was too making the player strategy less set in stone from turn 1 to 500. But there the ruler switches while the culture remains the same. Which is more how it works in reality and it feels natural. It's not just Crusader Kings thing cause there aren't that many characters to interact with and ruler stats are more important. As in only ruler with a Diplomat trait can propose alliances, basic stuff like that. How is Old World, by the way? I've basically heard nothing but praise for it.
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Jan 19, 2023 12:00
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Rhjamiz posted:How is Old World, by the way? I've basically heard nothing but praise for it. I really like it. If you liked Civ 4 (I don't think there has been a really good tbs since) then you'll like Old World. Made by the same dude. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3920273&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
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Jan 19, 2023 13:55
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Node posted:I really like it. If you liked Civ 4 (I don't think there has been a really good tbs since) then you'll like Old World. Made by the same dude. Ooh, now that's a recommendation alright. Now if only there was a Fall From Heaven mod for Old World! 
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Jan 19, 2023 17:35
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it doesn't seem to have a ton of reach or stickiness, that's for sure - dunno if it's the setting or the deluge of double nested tooltips on 20 different effects affecting layered systems
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Jan 19, 2023 17:45
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ilitarist posted:They all become a blur like a randomly generated empire from Stellaris or something. In all honesty I've never had a problem looking at a Stellaris empire and knowing what they are. Humankind is weirdly way worse at that.
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Jan 21, 2023 07:53
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