Endless Legend - Fantasy 4X TBS from Endless Space devs

Will buy day one knowing nothing about it. Heck, they could have called it “No Content, Give Us Money Please” and I still would have bought it. What a wonderful game, this Endless Legend.

Endless Legend was my GOTY last year, and if not for the fact that 3 other highly anticipated games have come out in the last two days I’d be all over this like stink on a chimpanzee. However, since XCOM 2 has been delayed, I can wait until the end of October and give this my support.

I don’t have time for this, NO TIME!

Hey, so I’m giving this another shot with the new DLC because for whatever reason it never clicked with me, and by all rights it should be right in my wheelhouse.

Couple questions:

  1. Is there any way to speed up the battle animations? My god.
  2. Am I missing something, or is city approval a giant pile of butts? Is this a “dude, seriously, spend your Influence on approval” mechanic or do I need to prioritize some different tech/buildings or expand less or what?
  3. Boroughs: Is it ever worth it to build these before getting to pop 8 so you can level a district to level 2?

More questions:

  1. Is Dust as crazy-important as it seems? Heroes, y’all!
  2. Growing your cities via food doesn’t seem to be as critical as in e.g. Civ. Still important, but not all-consuming. True/false?
  3. Advancing eras is just by number of techs researched?
  4. Is there a way for heroes to level reasonably quickly while governing, or is that pretty much always going to be real slow?

Can’t remember on battle animations, but city approval isn’t that bad, it’s simply a matter of prioritizing it and not expanding too quickly in the very beginning. There are techs in almost if not every era that provide bonuses and then luxury goods to top it off.

A sewer system and central market in every city + the bread and circuses tech or whatever it’s called that provides -25% expansion disapproval is generally enough to allow me to expand away, just make sure you’re hooking up and using those luxuries. I do almost always use the influence for 25% approval setup though.

It can definitely be worth expanding boroughs early if there are juicy anomalies near you or you settled near a happiness providing anomaly and so can afford the happiness penalty. The first borough is pretty quick to build so I’ll often build it even just to pick up generic tiles, and if you’re picking up good food tiles it’ll speed you along to the population necessary for that first level 2.

edit as more questions posted while i was typing: I would agree that dust is crazy important, and food is frequently an after thought for me other than in the very beginning. Era advancement is indeed based solely on the total number of techs researched. And I believe governors advance more quickly if they have a full garrison, but that’s just something I read somewhere that I can’t verify. They do seem to gain xp when you finish buildings, so I’d say a good production city to get them xp before moving them to the city you want them in longterm might be beneficial.

Heroes get +1xp/turn for each unit in their army, or each unit in their garrison if they’re a governor. So that helps some but obviously it tapers off later in the game.

Good to know, thanks guys!

Another one: Units seem really slow to heal. Does parking them in a city or having a support unit or something help?

Unit healing is definitely slow, intentionally I’m sure. Support units can certainly help, but then you’re reducing your overall offensive potential. I’m pretty sure that being in a city gets them better healing, and I know that once you have watchtower techs being on a watchtower helps (near? can’t remember but I think as watchtower techs go up so does their radius for faster recovery, not sure if at the first tech level you have to be right on it or within a tile).

Sitting still (especially in a city) helps. Assimilating one of the minor factions (Sisters of Mercy) helps. Necrophage heroes have some regen abilities. But yes, it is slow.

oh, and re the earlier questions: Your first borough (and your second, but probably not your third) add three hexes to the city income, so that can be worth quite a lot depending on the map. Depending on the resources nearby, it can be as good as building most of the early +output buildings at once.

Expanding less is correct at lower difficulty levels, but at higher levels you really have to just suck it up or else everyone around you will steal all the available land before you can afford to expand without taking an approval hit. It’s not that painful, and you can always stick your influence points there as you said. There are buildings in each of the first couple ages that help a lot too, and heavily prioritizing the +10 approval anomalies in deciding your city locations can make it slightly less painful (those are good things to be near anyway of course). Also the luxury resources all give +5 or +10 to approval, except for wine which is +30, so you probably have some booster you can use and you can always turn dust into luxuries into approval if you want.

Yes, dust is really important. Growing your city via food is more relevant if you have a faction quest that requires you to get level 2 districts or if you have the time and resources to get the things that make your workers produce 7 instead of 4 (some buildings, some empire policies).

Well, I’ve now gotten stomped as forgotten twice in a row, I definitely haven’t yet grokked their gameplay. I also haven’t had the greatest starting spots and maybe the AI has gotten more competitive with the patches since I last played, might have to step down one from serious.

Any tips on beating the AI on the hardest difficulty setting? Is the AI cheating or what?

I know I’ve beaten it with Drakken just (ab)using diplomacy. That was disgustingly easy to be honest.

I’ve won science as well but you’ve got to cheese it. As soon as one of the AIs gets to the final era, trade your techs with them for as many techs as you can get to help advance your own science, then gift it every other tech you have. That’ll increase the cost of it researching the final era techs. Now trade your techs away to any other faction for whatever other techs you can get until you’ve got enough researched that you can start the final era techs, but not a single extra one. Go back and gift any others you picked up to the first AI. If any other AIs reach the final era, gift them all your junk as well (not including of course any final era techs you’ve gotten). Now your research cost is much less for those final techs than the other AIs and if you’ve managed to not get completely obliterated in research capacity just go for the final science tech first then win.

I’ve never come close to winning by conquest; peaceful relations and diplomatic trickery was always required.

  1. This is coming from someone who generally likes tactical battles, but my best advice for speeding up the battle animations is to skip the battles. Tactical combat is the weakest part of Endless Legend, IMO, and I enjoy the game more if I bypass them completely. Maybe someday they’ll be fleshed out, but for right now I find it mostly a bland distraction from the excellent strategic layer.

  2. It’s not that bad. If you’re looking to expand a lot, you just need to plan for it. Make sure to prioritize the techs that give Approval (sewers, the market, etc), they will go a long way. Also look to settle near Anomalies that provide happiness or zones that provide luxury resources that give approval (there are several).

  3. I build them all the time and do not wait until pop 8. They can provide a pretty significant boost to the output of a city, but only do so if you’re not already struggling with happiness problems.

  1. It’s very important, yes.

  2. Hmmm. It really depends on how you’re playing. With the right Governor/techs/terrain/empire plan choices, having a large population (and a large city) can be very, very nice. I would say smaller cities can perform better than a typical Civ game, however.

  3. Yeah, 8 techs of the previous era to advance to the next, if I remember correctly.

  4. Constructing buildings in a city provides a large chunk of XP to the governor. This includes buildings that are rushed via Dust!

<3

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Not too much said about either expansion. Anyone been playing much with either expansion? What do you think about them?

The second expansion kind of slipped through the cracks for me, since it coincided with a bunch of new game releases I was very interested in. I plan to get to it eventually! The first expansion I enjoyed.

Planning on getting all the DLC during the winter sale. :)

I can’t imagine needing the DLC unless you have about 200 hours with this game and want more. It doesn’t look like it adds much other than a little more variation.