Ashbery76 wrote:

diakon wrote:

I am very much looking forward to trying out the Morgawr! Once question relating to some of faction description, specifically the conversion of biospheres:

Tainted by organisms and experiments in the laboratories, whatever these beings were originally (there are clues they may not be originally from Auriga) they are now telepathic monsters who adapt easily to severe conditions. Part of that process is adapting the conditions to them; as they take over areas under the sea or on land aquatic bacteria and organisms grow from their mucus–rich skins and begin to feed on any existing local forms of life. Over time, regions are slowly converted to biospheres that are more agreeable to the Morgawr.

Will there be actual game play features that allow for changing the biome of regions?

Indeed.It seems a strange thing to put in the lore if not ingame.

Seems they are akin to some kind of Zerg force (the creep corrupting the land around them). I wonder if the changes are permanent or only so long as they hold the region.

Mered4 wrote:

wilbefast wrote:

Could you describe precisely in what way Guardians are miss-used? 

Yeah.  The AI does a few things with guardians that makes no sense:

First, it prioritizes their construction, only to have them wander between friendly cities forever. (Builds fast, but with no purpose)

If you go to war with the AI, it sends the guardian at your cities, not your armies.  And it usually sends it alone or with a tiny army and one hero.  Picking off AI guardians is cake.

It uses the thing to scout new territory by itself.  Doesn't make much sense :D

That is my experience almost exactly with them. In games where the AI gets them before I do and we're hostile, I should be crapping my pants. Instead, I can just breathe easy because they can't use them well anyway.

Well that's a bummer that nothing can be done in time for the expansion.

Id like to maybe suggest a couple things:

The three possible behaviours don't seem that efficient for what a Guardian really is: An incredibly powerful force multiplier for armies.

If I have a guardian, I'm going to either want it defending my key cities or accompanying a specific army to wage war. I would strongly discourage behaviour where I send a guardian into combat alone so roaming and harrass missions I would remove from the list. Replacing them with things like:

Augment: Choose an attacking army and follow it closely to its target always coming in as a reserve unit when the battle starts.

Destroy: Attack a specific target while having a supporting army in tow. If no army is available, only attack if the enemy strength is well below a certain threshold.

My other suggestion is to possibly uncouple the Guardians themselves from the Guardian DLC in such a way that the the other content of the expansion can be played without any empire getting access to them. This would be a stop-gap measure until some attention can be given to them.

Slashman wrote:

If I have a guardian, I'm going to either want it defending my key cities or accompanying a specific army to wage war. I would strongly discourage behaviour where I send a guardian into combat alone so roaming and harrass missions I would remove from the list. 

Replacing them with things like:

Augment: Choose an attacking army and follow it closely to its target always coming in as a reserve unit when the battle starts.

This is by and large what Army Support does, at least in theory.

Destroy: Attack a specific target while having a supporting army in tow. If no army is available, only attack if the enemy strength is well below a certain threshold.

Interception is another tricky AI problem - humans are good at figuring out how to get between a target and where that target wants to go while keeping strategic locations in need of protection at their armies' backs. Most game AI on the other hand will make a bee-line for their target. If their target is faster this is a problem. Note too that the AI which manages ground forces in EL executes at the beginning of the turn rather than throughout the turn (like in ES2), meaning that it can't react to changes in player army trajectories. As such it's dangerous to have a mission where the primary target is an army: players can exploit this to lead the "aggro" Guardian astray (quest armies have can often be tricked in this manner). Regions, cities and POIs can't run away, which makes them better targets.

Fun fact: the AI that manages naval forces does execute mid-turn - we need that extra wiggle room to deal with the more open spaces.

I've taken note of these suggestions for Guardian AI - we'll look into what might be changed to improve their behaviour along these lines.

My other suggestion is to possibly uncouple the Guardians themselves from the Guardian DLC in such a way that the the other content of the expansion can be played without any empire getting access to them. This would be a stop-gap measure until some attention can be given to them.

Hmm... we've heard the same suggestion for Deeds and various other Guardians content, but the option to disable the Guardians themselves is not a common request. I guess Guardians is a bit of a mixed bag as far as expansions go, whereas recent DLCs have parts which more closely interlock. We do already have an option to disable Global Events, an option to disable other content is certainly not impossible.

Anyhow - much as I love talking about AI we should probably get back on topic - so, feedback on the Morgawr faction?

I am very much looking forward to trying out the Morgawr! Once question relating to some of faction description, specifically the conversion of biospheres:

Tainted by organisms and experiments in the laboratories, whatever these beings were originally (there are clues they may not be originally from Auriga) they are now telepathic monsters who adapt easily to severe conditions. Part of that process is adapting the conditions to them; as they take over areas under the sea or on land aquatic bacteria and organisms grow from their mucus–rich skins and begin to feed on any existing local forms of life. Over time, regions are slowly converted to biospheres that are more agreeable to the Morgawr.

Will there be actual game play features that allow for changing the biome of regions?

Use every possible "exploit" that you like, cry when someone uses ones you don´t like, restarts games when placing is unconvenient, plays competitively against people playing for the kicks, complains the game is too easy.

on an unrelated note, I do wish the Morgawr was there from the beginning, they do seem to balance things out.

diakon wrote:

I am very much looking forward to trying out the Morgawr! Once question relating to some of faction description, specifically the conversion of biospheres:

Tainted by organisms and experiments in the laboratories, whatever these beings were originally (there are clues they may not be originally from Auriga) they are now telepathic monsters who adapt easily to severe conditions. Part of that process is adapting the conditions to them; as they take over areas under the sea or on land aquatic bacteria and organisms grow from their mucus–rich skins and begin to feed on any existing local forms of life. Over time, regions are slowly converted to biospheres that are more agreeable to the Morgawr.

Will there be actual game play features that allow for changing the biome of regions?

Indeed.It seems a strange thing to put in the lore if not ingame.

wilbefast wrote:

Could you describe precisely in what way Guardians are miss-used? 

Yeah.  The AI does a few things with guardians that makes no sense:

First, it prioritizes their construction, only to have them wander between friendly cities forever. (Builds fast, but with no purpose)

If you go to war with the AI, it sends the guardian at your cities, not your armies.  And it usually sends it alone or with a tiny army and one hero.  Picking off AI guardians is cake.

It uses the thing to scout new territory by itself.  Doesn't make much sense :D

I don't think he was addressing you in particular, but rather people constantly going on about balance even in completely unrelated threads.

For example, Propbuddha went to the trouble of setting up a tracking website for competitive matches, but the only two players who keep asking for balance and actually post their savegames to the site that come to my mind are PropBuddha, Bruno, and BigBalls.

At least I don't often come across comparisons to Civilization V when it comes to balancing, since I am sick and tired of people upholding Civilization V as some kind of gold standard, completely disregarding its flaws (like AI building settlers when there is literally nowhere to found a city, or the community feeling the need to create their own massive balancing patch) or the fact that Firaxis have many times the money and manpower Amplitude does.

As far as balance is concerned, I figure the best way to prove your suggestions would be creating a mod that implements some of them to test balance with them. Unfortunately, many solutions Jojo has suggested require scripting capabilities modders do not have access to.

If you have any particular concerns, feel free to send me a PM listing them. Once Tempest comes out, I want to restart my big modding project (as the new expansion has inspired some solutions to goals I had struggled with before), and anything that can be altered purely through xml has a chance of being added to the mod, so it could be tested.

I am confused about one thing. Are the "Morgawr" faction only getting 3 units? Or am I reading it wrong? It seems the other units are getting 6 units now, their base 3 ground units and 3 sea units, while the "Morgawr" only get 1 half land unit and 2 sea units? Could someone clarify this for me? Thanks

The Morgawr also have access to the 4 Fomorian naval units that everyone else gets. 2 of which fill roles that the 2 Morgawr naval units can't.

Can't wait the next week ! The naval options will promise some nice games !

Also there is still the exploit that you can retreat from battle with the settler, settle down, salt the earth and get back a fully healed settler in just one turn back. This really should be fixed.

If it comes to balance, the Ardent mages stun-spell seems still kinda OP. The rest of balance issues got mentioned in previous posts.

I hope there will be a new balance update after the new dlc because the new sea mechanics will bring a lot of changes and it would be a good idea to do some balancing between the factions again.

 Let's look at the balance thing in comparison to Firaxis's Civ. 

 After 6 years Civ 6 is coming out. That's a pretty good length of time for a sequel. It took them how many updates to get everything that was needed in Civ 5? Balance is still a thing in Civ 5 after all this time though over the 6 years it has gotten better. 

 Amplitude released Endless Legend how long ago? With the Tempest update they've now reached what is a logical conclusion point. They don't need to add content they can now address balance more consistently. This is how it's usually done. Glaring OPness is slapped around and obvious game altering tricks are drowned after release but the subtle tricks and traps invariably, are put on hold to fill out content.

 I'm confident that balancing the game will be looked at more critically and worked on more diligently in the future.

Most probably, althought now they are more focused on getting the ES2. :) But I duob they will leave EL.

Slashman wrote:

ojaguar wrote:

More balance between factions would make the game more fun, versatile and interesting.

9 out of 10 times balance for multiplayer makes unique factions more generic. Honestly I would prefer to see effort go toward making single player games more interesting via more capable and aggressive AI.

When a bunch of humans sit down to play together, there is a very different dynamic taking place than when someone sits down to a single player game against AI factions. I don't want more genericness leaking into the single player game (where the majority of players are) just to make multiplayer marginally better to remain unplayed by the majority of players anyway.

"9 out of 10 times balance for multiplayer games makes unit factions more generic etc."

This is a dogmatic idea. What is important it's the bringed suggestions, listed and analysed one by one.

Personnaly I would never propose ideas which increase the balance BUT decrease the versatility, the diversity of each factions, of each games. I love the diversity and creativity of Endless Legend.

To take just one exemple : Pillage is (nearly) never used in multiplayer, because it's useless, very expansive to bring units, for a small reward (in early eras especially). If small changes are made to the Pillage which make it interesting, it will make multiplayer more interesting, but too the soloplaying.

So much interesting content.

This seems like a very interesting and probably difficult faction to play.