I won without really understanding wtf I was doing or knowing anything about mechanics, just moved stuff around :|
Comments here are much more negative than on Steam, but I haven't played it yet.
The biggest positive sounds like the art, though.
I found the same thing. It's certainly not a bad game, but it really is slow going. After 70-100 turns I felt I'd achieved the same as what I had in 30-50 turns in other games. And that was on "fast"! One reviewer said "It's like playing Civ at 1/4 speed". I liked Endless Space too, but one thing both Endless games suffer from is the slow pacing & repetition of AI combat can be slow and "samey" enough that after the first half dozen manual tactical combat rounds, you get the urge to hit "Auto Complete" all the time just to stop the game grinding to a halt (in terms of pacing). There's also no pop-up warning about units with unused turns, cities in revolt or a stalled production queue, etc, which drives up the level of micro-management if you have to click on absolutely everything every turn to avoid overlooking something. Some of the mechanics I liked (the effect of seasons on units, etc), but they really need to add an "extra fast" option and tweak the variation of the AI.Yeah I played it for about 10 hours....it's ok. The ability to design units is wonderful but I find there's way too much just "hit end turn 5 times to progress the game" going on, much more so than Civ. I also find the combat gets annoying.
Just to check, do you know you can direct where your troops go in the tactical map? It's mentioned somewhere in the tutorial but easy to miss. I think you can give two orders to a unit, a move and an attack, so you can tell a unit to move to a certain hex and attack a certain unit, specially useful for ranged units and units that attack better from forest, or if a unit attacks AoE in a beam so you want to position them where they can hit several enemies.The battle system is different in this than Civ, but actually makes alot more sense to me. Int his game, troops travel around together as an Army, and fight in groups. When armies are near others that are in battle, they fight together. Battles take place in a quasi-mini-game, but not in a stupid mini game kind of way. They exist on a separate turn-based map in which there are six rounds of tactical moves and battle. The only downside of this is you don't have a ton of control over where your dudes move to once the battle begins. Im a fan of this version over Civ's style. But I do understand it isn't a perfect system.
I have the game but only did the tutorial. The game look good and have some great elements in it. I played a lot of Fallen Enchantress/Legendary Heroes and I loved it, EL look similar.
I also want to try Age of Wonder 3 which, after reading some comments, is better in many ways.
But EL is a pretty cool game in this genre.
Just to check, do you know you can direct where your troops go in the tactical map? It's mentioned somewhere in the tutorial but easy to miss. I think you can give two orders to a unit, a move and an attack, so you can tell a unit to move to a certain hex and attack a certain unit, specially useful for ranged units and units that attack better from forest, or if a unit attacks AoE in a beam so you want to position them where they can hit several enemies.
I played a bit of it, and I really wanted to like it because I find the graphic design to be great........but....in the end it got boring over the long term for me. That said, I still recommend buying it if the price is good. I think AoW3 is the better game.