It releases tomorrow, so right right now it’s a special pre-order deal (which expires at 1PM EST, tomorrow)
As gingerturtle said, Tempest is live now. My Steam page says it is not installed, but I loaded it up and it is. Can start a game with the new race and everything.
Quite weird, but go for it!
I think the Tempest expansion is amazing. I’m playing as the new race, with 8 islands, but only ~30’% of the map is land. Huge is really huge in this game, so the Islands are still pretty large. I’m also playing with Huge Regions, but they still will have a few regions per island on average.
I started off on a long penninsula, so you might think the growth may be retarded, but the Morgwar love the water and get all sorts of bonuses from it. They also start off with Shipyard, so I immediately set sail and began exploring. The first thing you notice in the expansion, after the new race, is the weather at sea. You have Turbulence, which actually increases your speed. You have Fog, which you can see out of, but enemies can’t see into. It also provides a defensive bonus in battle, as Forests do on land. You have Rain, which on Auriga is pretty violent, so it actually increases upkeep and lowers morale. Finally, you have lightning, which will lower health by 45% if you are foolish enough to end your turn in it, or just 15% if a storm brews up on you at the start of the turn. I’m not sure if you lose 60% if you end and begin your turn in a storm. Weather is only factored onto the sea, and if any of you have weathered a storm at sea, or even on a large river or lake know, that is is reasonable. There’s no where to take cover, as there is on land.
They’ve added sunken ruins in the ocean for you to search and the new Minor Faction, the Fomorians, are only found at sea. They inhabit Bastions, Manufactoriums and Listening posts. All may have one or two resources associated with them. Control the Fomorian outpost and you control the resources. Like the other Minor Factions you can either conquer them, or run quests for them. They’ve added a ton of new quests. They are much like the land quests, but I enjoy Amplitude’s writing and I continue to enjoy these quests and all the flavor it adds to the game world. One quibble I have, is that the Morgwar were enslaved by the Fomorians, but seem more than willing to run some errands for them.
Another quibble, is that they only heroes I’ve seen for Morgwar so far, have been Amphibious, but they still rely on a transport at sea. While you can boost your abilities as you gain level, I would have liked to see a true amphibian, or even an aquatic only Hero. Maybe there is and I just haven’t seen it yet. However, I’m not even sure if the different races have multiple heroes, or if you need to hire different species to get different hero types?
Amphibian simply means you are able to travel along rivers at 3 times the speed of land. I may try my next game with more land, but keep lots of rivers and lakes. It might make it fairer for the other species. With this water world, and only playing on Normal because it had been a while since I last played, I find myself outpacing everyone else.
In the First Era, you have your Amphbious support unit and a very fast, but somewhat weak Boarding Vessel that you can research. You are relatively safe however, as the wandering Fomorian units only seem to attack you after you initiate hostilities. So, you are free to run some quests for the Fomorians and gain some of their aquatic outposts peacefully. The Faction Quest will eventually lead you to start fighting them, but that isn’t until the Second Era.
Unlike other Minor Factions, you don’t assimilate the Fomorians, you merely take control of their holdings. Also, they need to be garrisoned, because any wandering unit can simply waltz in if they are unguarded. The only bonus your receive is a variety of different FIDSI depending on the holding and the associated resources. The resources themselves being the main reward. At first, many of the holdings will have an unknown resource, as you need to wait until someone in the game reaches the Era appropriate to reveal the resource.
The Morgwar were genetically designed to rule the sea, but they were also given psychic abilities. They can mind control wandering units. They spend a decent amount of influence to initiate the mind control, and then pay a generous dust upkeep to maintain control. The roleplaying is strong here, as it is pleasing for me to imagine the formerly enslaved mind controlling the ex-masters.
So, Amplitude has taken this wonderful world of Auriga, with it’s multitude of Anomalies and varied terrain and now added weather to the oceans, so they too feel alive. They’ve added another flavorful Major facton and a new Minor Faction which brings the total to around 20 Factions. I really can’t think of too many game worlds that are this diverse. I remember being very impressed when this game was released in Early Access, and since then they’ve added so much stuff that I’m truly impressed.
The only bad thing will be going from this game back to ES2. I think it will still be a great game, but I’ll really miss my time on the Surface of Auriga, to only see it replaced with an orbital view of a blue marble in the vastness of space.
This is a great expansion: the level of detail is just ‘japanese’: why search when you can dive? A lovely take on the sea graphics first broached, from my experience, by Pandora. A whole new world.
Thanks for the impressions, guys. I can’t wait to dive in!
I picked up everything but Tempest on sale. I like it so far (playing with expansions off on easy). I played about 10 turns then realized I didn’t like a coule things I had done so far, then restarted and played another 20 or so. I was playing pretty slowly trying to figure stuff out, so that took awhile. But I love the look. I like the smaller number of cities. Like the quests.
I’d love some input on how to use the economic plans in the early game.
I rushed a settler to grab the region next to my starting one before my neighbor could, then remembered…yeah…cultists…they only have one city. d’oh!
They can take over minor races I have pacified, right? What do I do with villages they have converted? Will attacking those villages make them mad? Other options?
Is the marketplace the only way to get more heroes? How quickly should I be looking to get more (I know they are expensive to maintain).
the cost of those economic plans scales with the number of cities you have, so it’s always good to time the plan just prior to grabbing a new settlement becasue you will get more bang for you buck. I tend to, in the early game, target dust and science.
if your minors are being converted by the Cultists, then the only option, apart from toleration, is to attack them, I believe. The Cultists will be annoyed, but then that is their schtick. You could preempt them by closing your borders.
You can get heroes via quests occesionally, but the marketplace is the main place. I tend to look for them in the mid to late game, when things gets dicey.
hope this helps.
steve
Plan for them! Typically the 20% science or +3 dust per pop will be the first plan you get early. But later there are some very powerful ones. Influence is an important resource. The cost increases per city, so it’s really important to plan - a very simple expansion plan is once every 20 turns, just after selecting the empire plan.
The converted villages are lost - they have to be put to the sword to free them from the Cult. It won’t make pacified villages mad.
Not the only way, but the primary one (I think quests is the only other way). Heroes are great, but expensive. You want them as early as possible, one for each city at best. But like all things in EL, you typically don’t have enough resources for everything. The investment can sometimes be better spent on units or buildings, or buying a luxury from the market, or whatever. It just depends what heroes are available, what you need/want, and how much dust you can produce versus other things.
Thanks for the input, gang.
I don’t know how far I will get, or if I will get bogged down in the later game as I usually do, but enjoying my time with it early on.
I will say I’m reading a lot of reports regarding bugs - specifically movement, quests, and something to do with the global effects of fortresses. Nothing too bad, but disappointing.
Amplitude seem pretty fast with hotfixes so I’d expect something soon.
So does this game have a “game over” screen? I tried my damned hardest to ‘officially’ lose the game after I got stomped on by the AI - I gave away all my cities but one, then I “Salted the Earth” then suicided my settler on a roaming army. The game then threw an exception and then happily let me press “end turn” even though I had absolutely nothing left on the map.
I also encountered a diplomacy bug - the Forgotten AI player was happy to give away all his techs and anything else in exchange for just one of my technologies!
Finally got into this game… wish they could have redid the UI, this was the BIGGEST barrier to entry for me with this game. Plus the color scheme on the map and the art, while generally nice, looked and felt sloppy/messy, until you play it awhile these issues go away as you get used to it all. Otherwise, it takes at least 100 turns of playing more than one faction to GET the feel and pace of the game. After that its really good. I love how the empire focus can be BIG gamechangers. The last tier turned my losing game to a win as i finally got a few guardian units (holy crap they are good with 2500+hp). I like the factions as well, the best implement of npc citys in a 4x game. I’ve played like 4 factions so far, and I love how they all feel different and some have very big gamechanging aspects (ie broken lords using dust for almost everything).
I played this heavily over the holidays and am seriously hooked. It’s a great game.
New to 4X and just started playing this last night. It’s been gathering dust /snort/ since I picked up the Amplitude Endless Pack ages ago.
Only got through the tutorial last night so just started a fresh campaign with pretty much everything set to normal. I bought all the DLC the other day and have gone for the Wild Walkers for a first punt. I love the Endless UI and art direction; it’s so clean and refreshing, contrary to what @mtkafka said above!
My only other 4X experiences have been… Age of Wonders 3, some Civ V multiplayer and… AI War, I guess. I really enjoyed Age of Wonders 3 but didn’t want to sideline this for much longer so figured I’d check it out now. I’m a Dungeon of the Endless veteran so this should be quite interesting as far as Auriga, its races and resources go.
I’ve played this game for only 3 hours (mainly the tutorial and reading stuff within the game), but purchased the latest expansion during its most recent sale. So I’m planning on replaying the tutorial and actually playing a SP game this time before something else distracts me!
I would actually encourage disabling some of the expansions (the big ones - Tempest particularly) before launching into learning the game. There is a lot to figure out, and I think it will be a bit overwhelming all at once.
Ah okay, will look into it, thanks!
So I played some 20+ turns last night. Really enjoying it. It’s weird to say, but it kind of reminds me of Reus in the sense that I’ve got all these unusual resources on my patch of land and I’ve got to work out which technologies will synergise with them properly to maximise my yield so I can keep climbing the tech tree and building more stuff, all before a timed event comes (winter in this case). I love that there’s a winter, and it reminds me why I miss seasons in these kinds of games; it’s something to fear and try and prepare for.
I’m sure this aspect is essentially the same as a lot of other 4X games, but it seems a lot clearer and more satisfying to me here, whether that’s as a result of the game design itself and the elegant UI; the familiar food, industry, science and dust resources; my limited experience with Civ V and Age of Wonders 3; or, I suspect, a combination of all these things. Either way, it’s really clicking. Some tough decision making too, which I’m always a fan of.
I also lost track of time last night while playing it, which… is rare for me.