Cythereal posted:

I like the Sowers, but one of the existing minor races is the Sowers in all but name with the backstory changed slightly.

Lichtenstein posted:

How do you spec Allayi heroes?

Gwyrgyn Blood posted:

Hope the release being so close to Civ6 doesn't hurt sales, that's a week prior. Looking forward to it, Friday release dates

HundredBears posted:

I do something similar with most factions. Language Square is usually the best choice for your first tech and something that every (non-Necrophage) faction should have before turn 10: the economic boost of settling a region with two or three pacified and intact villages is very strong. The extra quests and reduced need to burn villages makes splitting the obvious choice. Sometimes you want to delay splitting or recombine early in order to complete quests (Broken Lords in particular might want to build a Stalwart as their second or third thing in their starting city and then bring everything together to advance their faction quest), but my default is to split on turn 1 for scouting and have everyone start heading home by turn 20.

For the Dust/Industry, question, the usual time to switch to a Dust economy is turn 40: at that point you have both the era II plan and Prisoners, Slaves and Volunteers to reduce buyout cost. Most of the multipliers in the game stack additively and I don't think that buyout cost is an exception. Two 25% reductions become a 50% reduction, bringing the Dust cost of buildings down to between the same and around 50% more than their Industry cost and thus making the 7 Dust that you get per worker more valuable than 4 Industry. It can be tough to scrape together enough Influence for both the buyout cost reduction and the building cost reduction plan by turn 40, especially on the higher difficulties where it's smart to make getting peace with your neighbors as soon as possible, but it's worth it.

If you manage to get the +3 Dust/worker plan at turn 20, you might want to put workers on Dust either to afford a Hero or in the last few turns before 40 to stockpile some to spend on buildings on turn 41, but yeah, the bulk of your workers should be on Industry until then.

Tulip posted:

I play on Fast, so the timing is going to be a little off. Are you expanding at a rate of 1 city per empire plan while also getting that tier two bonus? Does that require like 2 pop per city on influence?

Tulip posted:

So I'm fairly seriously considering doing an LP of EL (there's technically an ongoing LP, but it hasn't had a post since July).

HundredBears posted:

I'll usually put down two cities per empire plan, stopping once I have 4-7 cities (depending on faction, luxuries, good regions, etc.), and yeah, that averages out to two workers per turn per city on influence, in addition to the four influence per city per turn to get the 33% building cost reduction that's crucial to all peaceful strategies. It's one of the reasons that it's so nice to have the extra workers from Language Square. On Fast, it might not be worth going for the second empire plan switch to Dust unless you have a good start, dye or the +Influence on anomalies event that was added in the DLC, though. I haven't played on Fast, but I suspect that your economy will be weaker than on Normal, making it too slow to use the strategy of rushing Glory of Empire in one or two cities and then running all Influence there.

As to Era I techs, it varies from game to game. I'll often grab Topology while skipping the T1 unit most of the time, skipping Open-Pit Mining if I don't have good luxuries and delaying Mercenary Market if I'm low on Dust. I'll also go back and get another few Era I techs after picking up the key Era II techs in many games. As Broken Lords, you're getting 12 Era I techs for the faction quest regardless, but things are trickier for some of the other factions. Ardent Mages in particular have a good T1 unit and start with two faction-specific techs, which makes picking the remaining seven especially painful. It's thematically appropriate, at least. The thing to remember about Language Square, though, is that two villages are about as good as a free Mill Foundry and three are even better. Get three villages and a hero with Slavery or Industry Efficiency 2 and it's more like two free Mill Foundries. That's worth delaying even a key economic tech until you can go back and pick it up partway through Era II.

Speedball posted:

The other thing is that a lot of Era 1 techs are really really useful while later ones are more specialized. You don't have enough science or time to get *everything* but you can do well to get a lot of early stuff.

I usually don't go for the Pillaging tech that was added in Shadows, but I went for it during a recent Necrophage game, when I wanted to take out some pacified villages a bigger empire had and get myself some resources in the bargain. The pillaging tech also lets you add camoflage-while-in-trees accessories for your armies, but I've never actually tried that out. The spyglass that lets you detect invisible enemies would probably be pretty useful against Forgotten.

Speedball posted:

*cough* Sorry.... I was gonna start it up again once I started feeling better, then we got the news of the next expansion coming out...

Tulip posted:

Has there been a completed EL LP? It seems like it would be timely for one to start now or soon-ish. I'd volunteer but I'm really bad (I used to be able to beat the game consistently through Serious but I fired up last night and was struggling on Normal); also I only have Frozen Fangs.

HundredBears posted:

I'll usually put down two cities per empire plan, stopping once I have 4-7 cities (depending on faction, luxuries, good regions, etc.),

IAmUnaware posted:

Conspiratiorist posted:

Courtesy of some french dude on steam, this guide explains how to break the game over your knee, no skill required: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=635764665

HTH your LP.

Like with Endless Space, the AI is moronic and falls over dead if you pay more attention to how the game mechanics work than the cursory glance the devs give it.

Mokinokaro posted:

ES2 pricing and other info

Tulip posted:

1800 hours

This is a really in depth guide. Didn't know about the settle & salt trick.

Some of that's stuff that's outside how I was thinking - I tend(ed) to think that food was good for starting cities, so that they can recover back to two pop in time to pump out additional settlers. It's a little long for me to read all in one go but I'll definitely try to get through it.

Tulip posted:

Oof, did this last night and I wound up empire wide happiness of 9. I managed to recover but man did that hurt. I'm just not managing to cram this timeline all together into a cohesive whole.

Tulip posted:

So, double post so I can see what people think of my LP efforts so far (I'll be posting this to the sand castle as well).

Conspiratiorist posted:

Oh yeah, leave it to competitive players to show you that everything you thought you knew is wrong. I had a similar experience with Civ V and MoO2 after reading up on multiplayer tactics and watching competitive matches.

HundredBears posted:

You might be overbuilding districts. Things vary by faction as always with this game, but the general rule is that the first Borough Streets is a good return on investment but not so good that you can't skip it to save on approval. Thus you end up with Sewer Systems cancelling out the -20 approval from the first wave of expansions, leaving you Content at worst (and Happy if you have +approval anomalies or can run any luxuries at all) and Central Markets more than cancelling out the approval penalty from the second. At that point, you're already at 5 cities (and may have stopped one earlier if, for instance, you're getting exactly 2 of a valuable luxury per turn and can't eke out any more from the market/quests).

The last round of expansion only happens if you're either in a position to take the approval hit and increased booster costs or you really, really want the resources in those regions. You should hit Era III at least a bit before your third empire plan, plus you'll have finished the key infrastructure in most of your cities, so you have enough spare economic output to get your approval up. The main options to do that are the +approval empire plan, the Era II -expansion disapproval tech and Era III luxuries. Between those and limiting yourself to 5-6 cites instead of 7, you should have enough approval to get up to Fervent and start thinking about building a few more districts.

The transitions right after settling might be rough (especially with the weaker economy on Fast) because it's not always possible to get the +approval buildings up quickly. It's ok to spend some time at Content in order to claim important regions and get the economic benefits of more cities. If you're Unhappy, aside from a few turns in your second and third round cities while they get their sewers and markets up, it means that you're overbuilding districts or underinvesting in approval.

Sometimes you get a strong supply of wine or Eyeless Ones villages and expansion becomes much simpler. Sometimes you're stuck getting Central Market.

quote:

It looks good. I'd like to see a more in-dpeth overview of the surrounding regions when it comes time to expand (which maybe you were planning for the actual LP anyway), but it was a smart choice to skip over the minutia of exploration. It's easy for 4X LPs to overload readers with details that are important to know when playing the game but that they aren't going to remember across the days in between updates. One detail that I do have to quibble with is your description of the village destruction quest as a bad one. Titan Bones are amazing for the +50% Industry and it's well worth giving up some exploration to be able to activate them before settling on turn 10.

HundredBears posted:

Sometimes you get a strong supply of wine or Eyeless Ones villages and expansion becomes much simpler. Sometimes you're stuck getting Central Market.

quote:

- Very important and ignored by noobs : In Endless Legend, you can unset a city without penalty, and get back your settler. This broken ability (In my opinion) is very useful. You can while moving to the point you select, settle your settler each turn, and using the pacified villages and the Fidsi. Learn to exploit it at maximum.

Blooming Brilliant posted:

Reading the EL steam guide posted a small way back and curious about this bit:


Anyone mind going into more detail on this? Is it as simple as settling a city, making some quick gold/science then next turn salting the earth and moving your settler on?

quote:

Ships: The vast Unfallen ships, with their twisted and gnarled appearance incorporate inorganic materials such as stone, metal and built structures throughout the living wood superstructure. Powered by large solar sails rather than conventional engines that serve both to sustain the living ship and push it through the void of space.

Civilian: "Unfallen posses 5 glowing eyes, a unifying feature among them. Their growth is limitless to some extent, while some prefer to remain small, tens of metres high; others will swell into immense beings hundreds of metres high with as many appendages, leg(s) and limbs as they see fit."

Military: "Many older and certainly larger Unfallen cloak themselves in a “mane of leaves” and develop natural clothing, serving as a symbol of status, appeal and role. They tend to fuse gems, ores, metals and parts of Endless ruins into their frame which lends both to aesthetic value and protective purposes."

Riso posted:

Gotta say the people came up with a pretty neat concept there. I am kind of excited.