Endless Legend - Fantasy 4X TBS from Endless Space devs

As anyone been playing this recently? Has their been any notable AI improvements?

well the cultists declared war on me, and then sneak attacked and razed my city the following turn. disgruntled by human AI behaviours, I started a new game and the drakken suddenly took two of my cities in a wtf moment, and when I took them back, they took them back, and currently won’t give me the peace I need to rebuild.

this is on ‘serious’

Ooh, the expansion is out now. And the base game has a big patch too.

Woo, nice. Looking forward to checking it out.

This was a nice video overview of the expansion features.

As this was my GOTY for 2014 I couldn’t let the expansion go. So far it’s offers some new stuff, but isn’t game changing in the way the expansions for AoW are.

Now when a player (any player) unlocks a new age in the tech tree, 3 Legendary Events become available to all players. 2 are similar to the Empire Quests in AoW - be the first to kill 10 units, the first to amass 20 Dust through trade, and so forth, each coming with a factional bonus. The third is the ability to build the equivalent of a Wonder in Civ. Only one can be built per game.

I haven’t played far enough in yet to encounter any of the new events or the Guardians themselves (who I take to be some sort of uber-unit).

In short, if you don’t like the base game, this isn’t going to change your mind. If you do, I’m not convinced yet that it adds enough to it to justify the $10 price, so y’all might want to wait for a sale.

Thanks for taking the dive for the rest of us, tgb. Sale, it is.

While this is completely subjective to each individual, for me so far it’s definitely worth the $9.99 asking price, after my initial game.

I don’t know if this occurred in patches or if it came with the expansion, but I saw the Roving Clans AI pull a pretty cool move. For those unfamiliar, Roving Clans is a trade faction that is unable to declare war on other empires but has an ability to block other empires from accessing the global market. This can be a big deal, since the market offers access to resources, units, and is the primary source of Heroes.

Well, (seemingly) out of the blue, the Roving Clans banned me from the market. I was pretty annoyed by this since I was just a few turns away from having enough Dust to purchase the hero I was eyeballing. I also wondered why on earth he decided to ban me, since I was hardly a front runner or anything like that.

The reasons for the ban became apparent a couple turns later, when the Roving Clans send me another communique offering me a deal: declare war on his neighbor/enemy, and he would lift the market ban. Clever! He can’t declare war directly, but it doesn’t mean that he can’t try to coerce others into doing his dirty work.

In any case, I thought that was pretty damn cool.

The AI updates are with the patch, actually, but that is pretty damn cool!

That is very cool. Since I’m playing as the Roving Clan, it gives me a couple of ideas.

Really hoping this goes on sale soon. It would be the first new game I’ve purchased in probably six months or so, but it has been out for too long (and is admittedly, from what I hear, not a perfect game in terms of balance, AI, etc.) for me to be willing to go near full price.

I still have yet to play a perfect game, especially in this genre. IMO this is totally worth the price.

I don’t mind paying that price for it. And remember the free weekend recently? Enough people played to unlock some cool knickknacks for everyone (an item pack, custom traits pack, guardian killer unit). I guess those are coming sometime this year. http://g2g.amplitude-studios.com/Free-Weekend

Yes, part of me is admittedly pissed that I missed the recent sale. It does not seem to go on sale nearly as often as other games on Steam, but missing a very recent sale just makes me that much more reluctant to pay $45.

Of course, that is obviously my problem - I’m not complaining, just musing.

I really enjoy the Drakken in this game. Their units are built like tanks and I just love the ability to force diplomatic actions on other factions. I just had a Necrophage launch a nasty surprise attack on me where my armies were completely out of position, but I was easily able to force a Truce on him. That gave me time to shore up the border and when hostilities resumed, I crushed the armies he had on the border and was able to seize a pretty nice city of his as well.

Of course, that’s when I noticed that he’s marching ANOTHER army that has some of the new Guardian units in it towards another flank. I had to save it there because I looked at the time and realized it was 1:00am, but when I get back to the time I’ll have to figure out if the force truce action has a cooldown or not. If it doesn’t I may be in trouble. :)

I also have to say that I really like what they’ve done with the economy since I last played (shortly after release). I can never get my hands on enough Titanium and Glassteel, whereas before I felt like I was swimming in those resources in the later stages of the game.

So apparently you get like 1/2 of the expansion free? Because firing up the game for a couple turns I saw there were many new buildings and changes to the tech tree.

I’m not sure what came free with the patch, Enidigm. That’d be pretty nice if you get a lot of the goodies for free.

I just lost my Drakken campaign today, but I learned a lot. Even knowing where their strengths lie (diplomacy), I still undervalued Influence. I can do a lot better next game, as I realized as long as I have sufficient Influence I can basically ignore military techs. By the end, I had every faction in the game allied with me (minus the Necros, who can’t ally) and was simultaneously racing towards Diplomatic and Scientific victory conditions but at the end of the day I just couldn’t catch the Roving Clans player. I spent too much time experimenting with different approaches to catch up to the lead he had built.

It was a great game though. I ended with a population 50 metropolis for a capital as well as several cities in the ~30 range. Each level 2 district in those cities was cranking out an enormous amount of resources, it was quite impressive to see. Can’t wait to start my next Drakken game, this time a little more focused on how I’m going to achieve victory instead of faffing around with the various buttons and levers to see what effect they have.

They just a multiplayer game over at somethingawful that was won by the Roving Clans player! Interesting that they are competitive now.

I keep getting shafted as Broken Lords. I’d like to move through their faction quest storyline, but one of the requests is that I conquer a seemingly randomly-selected city in each game. The city objectives that I’m being assigned are typically on the ass end of an actively hostile empire, meaning I have to trigger a world war in order to Xenophon that city. Very annoying.

I had the same issue in my Drakken game. I had to conquer some province yet even at the end of the game I had no idea where it was. Just seemed silly.