Endless Legend Playthrough

[Bobchillingworth]

Thanks for doing this- it'll inform my decision whether to purchase the game or not.


The menus are astonishingly well-crafted. Just beautiful to look at. Glad to see they carried over the Endless Space aesthetic.


The land looks awfully cluttered, however. This is a pet obsession of mine, but it appears there isn't a minimap either?

[Jkaen]

When I am back home on Tuesday I will take shots of the map at the extreme zooms. Not seen a minimap in the corner, but the map intelligently scrolls out quite well

[Serdoa]

The land looks awfully cluttered, however. This is a pet obsession of mine, but it appears there isn't a minimap either?

You can turn off the resource-indicators which makes it better looking and less "cluttered" (I feel). As for the minimap, you really don't need one due to the scrolling-out resulting in a kind of "paper-map" that gives all the information you'd ever look for (ruin indicators, indicators of the region-borders, indicators for the luxury and strategic resources).

As a general statement: Imo it is a well-crafted game that does make certain aspects of the 4X-genre easier accessible but at the same time gives up depth of mechanics for it. For example you can only build one city per region. It still has some impact where within the region you build it, as you can only slowly grow its radius, but it makes the whole aspect of city-locations much easier. At the same time it defeats any kind of ICS, as that is simply not possible. Which takes away options. Furthermore the AI of course expands to other regions as well, so getting a considerable lead in land is not really a possibility, as the regions will be settled quicker than you can expand. You might still get more than your fair share, but together with the travel time inherent to actually reach the next region (and the one after that even more so) it becomes rather unlikely. And if you are unlucky or slow you might get boxed in from all sides quickly.

Another example is the research: You do choose between a nice assortment of techs. These are split up in Eras and you can only research in the next Era after researching a certain amount of techs in your current era. That's a neat concept I feel, but due to the amount of techs within an Era and the threshold to proceed to the next one, you have to research 3/4 or more of each era in any case (and you can of course research all if you so desire). That defeats any strategy-idea of "deep beelines". And while giving options it ultimately makes the decisions which tech to research much easier but also less impactful.

Interestingly this does not seem to hold true for the city-buildings/improvements part of the game. Here it does make a difference which buildings you build and there are enough (+maintenance) that you might not want to build all of them in every city. At least I think that might be the case, as it should be possible to build cities that specialize in military or research. But due to the low amount of cities in total, it might actually not matter, as ultimately you might want to build everything everywhere, just to get the most out of every city.

Nonetheless I think - especially with the quest-system - that Endless Legend is fun for a time and the different races do add different options how to play. And beyond that, I might simply not have understood the finer layers of the strategic options in the game.

[Dp101]

In fact having checked you can actually complete 2 builds in 1 turn

Actually, there is no limit for how many things you can build in a turn.

[Jkaen]

In fact having checked you can actually complete 2 builds in 1 turn

Actually, there is no limit for how many things you can build in a turn.

I guessed that would be the case, thanks for confirming.

[NobleHelium]

How are map regions defined? Is it just those borders that I see visible? It's not really easy to determine at a glance.

[Dp101]

How are map regions defined? Is it just those borders that I see visible? It's not really easy to determine at a glance.

They are defined by the visible borders, yes.

[Jkaen]

Again when you zoom out the borders, resources etc become much clearer, I will include shots of that in the next batch of play

[Lewwyn]

Thanks for this. I agree with Bob that the menus look great but the map looks cluttered. Can we see a screen shot of the land without the resource indicators?

[Serdoa]

Few screenies of map from different zooms:

Zoomed out fully:



Closer Look (that's how I play most of the time):



Zoomed out but with terrain still visible:



With Terrain and Resource indicators: