ENDLESS Legend™

Endless Legend is a 4X made by Amplitude Studios and is set in the same Endless Universe all their other games take place in. Despite this, the game feels more like a fantasy setting, mainly because the conflict is concentrated on a single planet and most of the factions on the planet don't have access to higher technology. The core concept of a 4X stays the same, explore the world, exploit its resources, expand your empire and exterminate all rivals. The game uses the so called "FIDSI" system which defines the main resources of the game. Food, which is required to grow population in cities, Industry, which speeds up production of buildings and units in cities, Dust, which is the currency of the game, Science, the resource that speeds up research and lastly Influence, the diplomatic resource to make deals with other empires and shape your own empire. The game world is divided into multiple regions and settling a city in a region claims it for your empire. No other city may settle there, which puts pressure on players to claim territories with important resources faster before their rivals can. Cities will slowly expand inside their territory. Every two population gained you can add a district to your city that expands its reach and therefore the amount of tiles it can use. These tiles contain yields from the FIDSI resources and are added to your city. A larger city therefor has more access to more FIDSI yields and will do overall better. You can assign your population to each of the five FIDSI resources to produce more of those. but more population requires more Food to maintain. A good balance is important but you also want to focus on specific aspects depending on your goal. The city can also develop a variety of improvements, these are placed directly inside the city center and therefor don't take up space on the map. Each improvement and each district placed will cost Dust as upkeep, so it's important to have a steady economy. You also need to maintain approval which reduces with more population, higher approval improves your FIDSI yields but lower approval could lead to rebellions Besides the main FIDSI resources you also have luxuries and strategic resources. Luxuries can be activated to gain a tempory approval boost in your city as well as a passive effect depending on the type of luxury. These boosts are active for all cities but also cost more for each city. Strategic resources on the other hand are used to equip your units with new wepaons, armor and accessories. This is one of the strengths of the game, each unit can be individualized with various items to specialize them for various tasks. This way you have more control over your strategy instead of relying solely on what fixed stats and abilites the unit provides. It does require however more micro management from the player because you have to refit your units manually. Combat is done on a seperate battle screen instead of directly done on the map. Your units travel in armies of various size and when you encounter an enemy, your troops get placed on a copy of the world map terraion you are currently in. Combat is done in a semi-turn based fashion. You first decide what each of your units shall do, attacking, moving, etc. The enemy does the same and once both of you are done, the combat plays out for this turn. This is done until one winner is decided. This approach... isn't the best in my opinion, especially since the AI of units adjusts to changes that happen. You could target one unit of your enemies but said enemy is not in range, so your unit decides to attack someone else. This is whsy I rely more on auto-resolve or selse it gets too frustrating to see. What makes Endles Legend so unique compared to other 4X games are the factions. Factiosn in 4X usually have a lot of overlapping structures and will feel similiar, EL tries its best to make them unique with completely unique gameplay mechnics. Here are some examples: The Broken Lords are my personal favorite faction, they are essentially "Dust vampires". They don't eat food and need Dust to sustain themselves, this means in practise you have to buyout population with Dust and also can only heal your units through Dust. But their units can leech life from their enemies, which fits their vampiric design. The Vaulters are space dwarves. They can use strategic resources like luxury resources and also can teleport between their cities while doing so. They are also able to build shelters that provide immunity to some of the negative effects of winter, a seasonal event that happens periodically throughout a match. The Necrophages are a swarm of insects that see other factiosn only as food. As such they can stock up on food by just killing enemies. They also can turn dead enemies into zombie units for their own army which even ignores the usual unit limit that is imposed on armies. That way you can snowball and swarm enemies quickly. The last faction I want to mention are the Roving Clans. EL has a very well designed marketplace in which every faction can buy and sell units, resources, stockpiles and heroes. The Roving Clans control the market and get a cut from every sale on it. True to their name they are also nomadic, which means they can pack up their cities and move them to a different location. This allows players to move to other regions if they discovered better resources to exploit. They cannot declare war because that is bad for business, but they can hire mercenaries that harass other empires for them. A strong focus of the game is story telling which is also reflected in the gameplay. Each faction has their own questline that will give the player various goals and rewards. These can unlock new abilities for your faction and therefor are more than just lore bits. The art of this game is also impressive, every resource, every technology, every building has a handcrafted artwork. This gives everything more identity. Last point I want to address, the game also has modding support and custom factions. Custom factions can be designed from various traits that the regular factions use. A custom faction is of course not balanced for the main game but fun for players who want to live out their fantasy. I think EL is a great game for players that want a unique experience that differs from other 4X games, namely Civilization.