Joe mentioned Endless Legend in his review. It is made by the folks that made Endless Space.
My questions: Is Endless Legend good? Is it more complete than Endless Space? And are they still working on Endless Space? They were moving slowly the last time I played.
Endless legend is great but it does come with its own problems.
It really takes the civ formula and cuts out all the dumb ****, and then adds more cool stuff.
For example, there are provinces that divide the world. And you can only have 1 city per province.
If you claim a province, you can take advantage of all the resources in that province. And you don't just have workers build farms everywhere, instead you expand the city itself as it grows larger.
This prevents a whole lot of messy busywork and also prevents AI's and players from spamming towns every 2 tiles. It's very well executed.
It also feels like you're more in control of what you're doing.For example, all researches have very clear immediate influence on your empire, and there is no research tree.
At first I thought I wouldn't want the tree to be gone, but being able to pick any research of your age/tier means you get to focus on what you want your empire to be, rather than going down roughly the same path as everyone else. To unlock the next age/tier of research, you simply need 9 of the tier you are in to go to the next.
You can also outfit all of your unit types with equipment, with a lot of different gear focusing on different stats or playstyles. And then there are also hero's that you can level up.
Oh and quests that give you neat rewards. And you are pretty much exploring the whole game rather than just the start of the game. Oh and each race has a completely different playstyle, instead of just a small bonus. Oh and the game looks great, it looks like a big colorful game board. So yeah, plenty of stuff to be excited about.
Now for the bad though. People complained a lot about the AI when this launched, they made a lot of improvements since then, but they are still kind of lacking. I still have to play a game at way higher difficulties, and maybe that's where they really shine, but in my experience they haven't really done much of anything and lag behind really quickly.
Also, the combat is really neat, but at a certain point one civ is going to be stronger than another. Because they either focused more on getting better gear, or their units are just much higher level. And then combat will get very one sided. At that point you will always click auto resolve instead of doing the combat yourself. Oh and the game crashes for me, a lot.
