Hey everybody,
We’ve already shown you two of the factions of Endless Legend 2 (the militaristic Kin of Sheredyn and the diplomatic Aspects), but right now it might be tricky to understand their abilities as we haven’t talked much about many of the core systems of the game. That changes today, starting with perhaps the backbone of the gameplay: Your economy.
Managing Your Cities
Like in our previous 4X games (and many other 4X titles), the economic power of your empire revolves around your cities. These cities develop mostly in two ways: Population and Districts.
In many ways, Population in Endless Legend 2 is an evolution of the population systems in both Endless Legend and Endless Space 2.
Much like in Endless Legend 1, you can freely assign your population to work in different categories in your city, independent of the tile types the city is working. However, like planets in Endless Space 2, these categories offer a mix of yields and have a limited number of slots.
And much like in Endless Space 2, your population will hail from a specific faction with unique yield bonuses. As your population of a given faction grows, you may even unlock additional benefits like higher yield bonuses, unique improvements to build in your cities, or heroes of that faction.
But of course, your population needs to live and work somewhere, and that means construction: Like in Endless Legend, Humankind, and many other 4X games of the recent years, in Endless Legend 2 you develop your cities by building Districts and Improvements.
The first step in expanding your cities is to lay new Foundations. This is done by claiming a tile adjacent to your city by spending some influence. These Foundations will exploit the FIDSI of the tiles they are placed on (including anomalies) and serve as a place to construct new Districts.
These Districts specialize in a particular resource or purpose (like defense, trade, or housing), and often receive bonuses based on their position to encourage adapting your city to its surrounding terrain.
Districts also provide you with slots to build Improvements. These structures generally offer powerful city-wide bonuses but will require some investment of Strategic Resources to construct.
1) Foundations
2) Districts
3) Improvements
This covers the basics of how you manage your empire in Endless Legend 2, though of course there are other aspects to it, like Luxury Resources or trade for example, that we will leave for you to discover when you play the game.
Working with the Community
Given how crucial to the experience the economic gameplay is, we really wanted to work with our players to refine it. And their feedback has proven crucial, as the current system is in fact quite different than what we started out with.
Version 1
In the earliest versions of the game’s economy, there were several types of Foundation that would only exploit specific yields, for example Food and Industry on an Exploitation type Foundation. Districts could also hold several Improvements of the appropriate type each, but these improvements would only affect the District in which they were built, not the whole city. With this, we wanted to encourage a very terrain-based city development.
Sheredyn City - Concept Art
Early UI Mockup
However, based on the feedback our VIPs gave us, we realized that it quickly became very difficult to keep track of the Improvements you had built and your future development plans for your city. So, we decided to try a different approach:
Version 2
In the second iteration, we made the effects of Improvements global. This made them more appealing compared to building another new district, and also removed the need to plan the upgrade of a bunch of individual districts. At the same time, we reduced the number of Improvements per district to one, so you could not rely entirely on Improvements.
At this time, we also introduced an immediate influence cost for placing Foundations instead of slowly constructing them with Industry. This ties Influence to all forms of expansion, both globally and locally, and helps to curb the tendency of Industry to help itself grow.
Version 3
[Current version]
When we shared the second version with our alpha testers, we their feedback showed us we had another problem to address:
With multiple types of Foundations and half a dozen Districts unlocked from the start and Improvements beckoning in the research tree, it was difficult to take in and weigh your options when you started a new game. This also diluted faction asymmetry, as all factions had access to the same build options in the early game.
To give our players clearer, faction-specific starting options, we delayed access to Improvements and Districts a bit. The first Improvements can now be found as part of Era 2 technologies, while most Districts have to be researched in Era 1, which means all factions start the game with access to only one or two district types. We also unified the different Foundation types into a single Foundation type, so cities could automatically create foundations to exploit all resources on the tiles around the city center when they are founded to boost early yields.
What’s in the Future?
Now that our Insiders have been picking the new version apart for a while, they have given us tons of feedback, and there are several key points we are looking to tackle:
- Rebalancing costs to improve overall pacing
- Rebalancing District bonuses to encourage more varied city building
- Adjusting the city UI for a more intuitive construction flow
- And more.
We will keep working with our VIPs and Insiders to get their feedback and adjust the city building gameplay of Endless Legend 2 accordingly, so we can provide you with a great experience once we launch in Early Access this summer.
Stay tuned for more sneak peeks at game features and factions, including some old friends (or maybe foes).
📡 INSIDERS PROGRAM 📡
We are including more and more people from the community to get early feedback and improve the game based on your feedback. If it is something you're interested in, please sign up for the program (you will require an Amplifier's account + Steam Link).
