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Rob Zacny

Episode 279: Teenage Zombie Insects

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Fraser Brown and Rowan Kaiser join Troy "Restart" Goodfellow to talk about Endless Legend. Most of them agree that Endless Space was good... but not great. Does Endless Legend pick up the slack and become a game for the ages? One thing is certain: it sure is purty.

 
 
 

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Endless Legend is a rare case of game you call "potentially great" as a good thing. There were dozens of "potentionally great" games called so cause they were bad games with good ideas that could be made great with extensive work. Empire Total War was like that and become decent with Napoleon standalone expansion. Civilization 5 was like that and become great after 2 expansions. Many others never became good. Spore, numerous space 4x's - they all had potential.

 

Endless Legend is not like that. It's good here and now. But we know that Amplitude will support the game for a year or two and create numerous free additions that will make the game even better. EL is already better then Endless Space - and it's a compliment on it's own - and there's no doubt it'll become even better. It's the game you have to get if you have any interest in strategy games.

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Well this episode has put Endless Legend from a 'when it's really cheap in a steam sale' purchase to 'possible Beyond Earth replacement' if it turns out the previews are right and CIV:BE isn't quite there yet (aren't we due a show on that very soon?)

I also have the same issues wih Endless Space being just a little too bland and soulless to be a really great game so having it sound like Endless Legend solves a lot of those problems chalks it down as very interesting indeed.

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I also have the same issues wih Endless Space being just a little too bland and soulless to be a really great game so having it sound like Endless Legend solves a lot of those problems chalks it down as very interesting indeed.

 

My main issue, and one that the podcast kind of dances around, is that the endgame is almost nonexistent. As you reach the last fifty turns or so, you're occasionally and diffidently informed of whatever victory conditions you're near, but you have to dig through several menus in order to find out what those conditions exactly are. They're a flat list of percentages, of course: the amount of land held, the amount of top-tier techs researched, the amount of time spent at peace. The AI seems unaware of these conditions and of everything else, which is almost a mercy compared to Civilization V's sometimes illogical and always annoying meta-aggression, but it does mean that you can coast into an easy victory whenever you feel like it without there being much of a gotterdammerung with any of the major players. Over a half-dozen full games, I've never felt hard-pressed to win before my opponents do. My most recent game, there were still several provinces that my resource-starved opponents had left unoccupied while I bumbled towards the tech victory. The one before, I conquered the entire world with a single army without any of my opponents making an effort to counter my rapid expansion. Both were on Hard but weren't hard.

 

I'm not asking for an endgame dogpile, because those are invariably awful, but Endless Legend often comes off as though it's more surprised than you that the game ended when it did. I expect this is something they'll improve for their next effort as much as they've improved the factions from Endless Space.

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Yeah I was excited about this game, but a friend of mine that played it issued similar complaints to Gormongous, so for now I'm holding off until the next big Steam sale, or if I hear about some major reworks.

 

Kinda sad that in spite of all that I'm still more excited about this than Beyond Earth.

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I've got both Endless Legend and Endless Space.  I remain unsure what to think about Legend, since I haven't yet played it for very long, but there were definitely parts of it that reminded me of Space.  I've a strong suspicion I'm going to wind up disliking Legend for the same reasons.

 

I've seen a lot of people complain that Endless Space is devoid of personality, but I don't think that's really the problem with it.  The factions aren't particularly interesting, admittedly (various nearly interchangeable races with different positions on the Hippie/Warmonger/Scientist triangle, plus lightly airbrushed Tyranids...), but the same can be said for many other 4X games.

 

The problem with Endless Space is that it's a terrible strategy game with a really slick user interface.

 

I played the game a fair amount, partly out of curiosity and partly out of professional interest, and the conclusion I've come to is that whereas it seems like there are a lot of decisions in the game, they all fall into one of two categories; either they don't matter, or there's a clear best answer.  There's a clearly visible optimal path through the game, and it's the same path on every play.

 

For example, consider research.  Sure, there are lots of things to research, but in order to expand you need the various colonization technologies and the casimir drive as quickly as possible, which means you're going to be tackling the bottom quadrant of the research graph first.  The order will depend on the planets you encounter, but there will be a clear best order.  After that, you'll be having happiness problems, so it'll be the left quadrant with the occasional thing from the right when your planets run out of things to build, and then you'll storm through all the military tech in the top quadrant because it'll all be less than one turn per tech by the time you need it.

 

You could do it in a different order, but if you do you'll miss the land grab phase in a game where systems have hard limits to growth.

 

There are heroes.  You could choose not to buy them as soon as you can afford them, but they're so powerful that there's no reason not to get them unless you're deliberately handicapping yourself.

 

Everything in Endless Space funnels you down the optimal path.  That's why the game feels like it has no personality; there's only one way to play it "right", and you aren't making any interesting decisions on the way.  If you veer off the optimal path, it just means it takes longer to win, and you do so by getting back on the optimal path again.  Under Sid Meier's definition of a game as "a series of interesting choices", Endless Space doesn't qualify as a game.

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Everything in Endless Space funnels you down the optimal path.  That's why the game feels like it has no personality; there's only one way to play it "right", and you aren't making any interesting decisions on the way.  If you veer off the optimal path, it just means it takes longer to win, and you do so by getting back on the optimal path again.  Under Sid Meier's definition of a game as "a series of interesting choices", Endless Space doesn't qualify as a game.

 

Not sure yet if this the case for Endless Legend, but! Big strategy games are like that: you have to play 100h to understand if mechanics are balanced or not. And they don't usually cost much. So most people won't be offended if the game only gets them for 100h, especially with many games costing much more and having only 10h of gameplay.

 

Endless Legend has at the very minimum very distinct races with unique quests so you are at least getting 8 games where you learn something new. If after those 8 games you see that mechanics lack choice you still had a good time. And by that time you'll probably get free expansions.

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I am really curious for this game, I haven´t made my mind between Endless Legend or Beyond Earth.

- About Techs: In the beginning of the cast, it was said how vague/confusing the Endless Space tech tree is, and I had to agree - there is two reasons I believe: one is the naming of each tech due the use of technobabble that often mean nothing and fell really vague. This appear to be a very trick thing to use/write, I have seen works which used fake words to great effect, but I wonder if the volume of names that might cause a problem. I can´t avoid to remember old crpg that instead having descriptive names on the spells (like "fireball"),  they got things like "halito" or whatever is. Because of the number you couldn´t avoid to get really confused. The other is the often their position which can helps confusion - it take me a while to figure the large ship hulls are in the exploration/expansion part of the tree and not in the military. Still is a lot less confusing that the Galatic Civ II tree which I still have no idea where medium hull are or what unlock it XD (later I did find it). also I got to agree with hexgird about the "optimal path" issue on techs on Endless Space.

I cannot avoid but wonder, while sometimes civ got criticised by use of concept such "great man", "barbarians", ect.... it uses does use it in way that make it the game really intuitive and acessive, more that others of its genre. I wonder too how Beyond Earth will deal with that.

- I got to admit, at first Endless Legend Factions didn´t no catch me (looking some screenshots), I am a bit suspicious of games try to have "too different" factions/races/ect ... as it often it feel flat, but after I watched some of their video intros for the factions they got me a bit more.

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Good show, but you never got onto the Elemental v Endless Space discussion that you hinted at! Surely there's a really interesting, informative comparison. Maybe a topic for a future show (could include any other recent fantasy 4x games). There are surely some useful lessons to be learnt. 

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Good show, but you never got onto the Elemental v Endless Space discussion that you hinted at! Surely there's a really interesting, informative comparison. Maybe a topic for a future show (could include any other recent fantasy 4x games). There are surely some useful lessons to be learnt. 

 

   I was more surprised by the lack of mention of Sorcerer King under the circumstances, but I'm not sure how the timing of the podcast recording lined up with the timing of the release.

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Hem hem.

Rob, are we ever going to get that Endless Legend revisit we all voted for a couple of months ago? This isn't a complaint as such, just a query! I would love everyone's take on where that game is now, and also with Endless Space 2's early access lumbering up on the horizon I get the impression many of that game's cues are coming from EL.

I know you are busy, have just moved from one side of America to the other but you know, I thought I'd ask :D

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> couple of months ago

 

You mean in April, more than 4 months ago.

 

Not that I want EL episode that much, I'm more concerned about repeating gaps in 3MA schedule. Do they have some problems?

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