Played 100 turns, hitting medieval at exactly turn 100.
The good:
- The game is an almost straight Civ clone; the initial turns are indistinguishable from a Civ game. That scores low points for originality, but it does allow them to iterate on what's already there rather than just produce a historical-themed Endless Legend, which was what I'd feared (as popular as it is and as well-written the narrative events, it was extraordinarily shallow as an actual strategy game - basically an RPG in 4x clothing).
- The city development and outpost system I like a lot. It keeps the EL 'one city a territory' rule (though it's hard to see on the main map where territorial boundaries are) while allowing you to directly access areas you can develop from a central hub - big pile of rocks out of the city radius? Build an outpost to justify building Stonemasons.
- While it makes diplomacy even less relevant than it is in Civ games, I like the less binary nature of conflict - as long as you aren't invading you can attack anyone you want. Borders not being 'hard' as in Civ V/VI but working more like Civ IV and earlier is welcome.
- The warscore system similarly seems an improvement.
The not-so-good:
- It has Amplitude AI, so basically take all the flaws of Civ VI AI and imagine they're about an order of magnitude worse. Hopefully some of this is difficulty-related (I didn't see a difficulty level option so just went with whatever the default is for a first game), but enemies not building armies and attacking larger forces with single units is a consistent pattern in all the Endless games that recurs here, so I expect it to be general. There seems no rhyme or reason to which civ AIs evolve into - the Nubians became the Persians, an expansionist civ, after I'd reduced them to one city and they had nowhere to expand.
- It seems very min-max with an optimal path through the game which is basically going to be the same for everyone, and with score victory the only outcome: balanced to maximise the 'stars' acquired through as many routes as possible. I've seen reviews that gush about the fact that if you over-focus on science or whatever you run out of options for stars too soon, interpreting it as a clever balancing mechanism. Except that you can still min-max without maximising a single resource - you're maximising star acquisition - and
3. this game has inherited the rather poor district system of Endless Legend that allows you to pretty much go infinite with buffs of all types with very marginal trade-offs. That latter is further hampered by money being a nearly useless resource for anything other than rush-buying things (and you can rush buy multiples a turn rather than having the production complete the following turn). The outpost system, while I like it as a design, makes this issue even more pronounced - basically you don't have meaningfully limited resources, most resources can be pretty directly substituted for others, and all the caps the game provides can be circumvented (city caps? Just attach lots of outposts - at this point I'm not even fully clear what you want excess cities for. Population? Not actually very important for resource generation with all the buff buildings available), another problem inherited from EL and possibly exacerbated here.
4. It may just be the setup I'm on on my map (a big island with only one rival), but it's hard to get much real sense of an ebb and flow of competing factions on a map as you do with Civ.
5. The UI is pretty rather than functional. Excessive numbers of clicks and box popups are needed to do anything, and it seems more insistent even than Civ VI in pressuring you to take trivial actions just to allow the turn to end. It's still rather opaque to me how faith works, and it isn't given a value on the main UI as other resources are. A lot of things trigger on having X districts of type Y, but so far I haven't found a Civ-style city screen summary of all the buildings and districts I have in a given city to allow planning - basically I just see what my resource needs are at the time (usually food) and click buttons accordingly.
6. Either some tech progression is a bit weird or things aren't explained well enough - for instance you can get harbours, which provide bonuses to emarkation, before you can embark anyone, and I only learned through trial and error that a maritime trade tech allows you to embark (described as allowing the construction of transport ships - a status icon 'units can now embark' a la Civ would have been less flavourful, but more useful.
7. City states are an area where they should have borrowed from EL, or at least Civ VI. This implementation is bewilderingly bad - basically you just gradually pay to buy a city and it gives you ... something? ... in the meantime. Nothing that warrants letting it stay independent, at least.
In all this I haven't mentioned the Civ-switching, which is just a set of mostly additive bonuses (every so often you lose a unit type or building but you've ideally already built all the ones you want). It's closer to Civ V civic selection than anything profoundly new, and there are nice synergies to choose from but generally I suspect what you've already taken will narrow down what you want to two or three options - and perhaps partly due to passive AI but I suspect mostly because functionally they're usually so similar the unique units seem to be an irrelevance.
The big decision is going to be what style you want in that era - Expansionist, Agrarian etc. - and this is one that works well with the system. I started Expansionist only to learn as the game goes on that this is probably better chosen when you can accrue those stars more quickly. The problem cones in that, again, some seem mostly useless, and some civs are a bit too strongly-themed to their mechanic to be of interest. If you conclude, as I have, that money is mostly useless, Merchant is worthless - but all the Merchant civs do basically the same thing, and that's generate money. There should perhaps be more interesting trade-offs: maybe there's an ability I would strongly benefit from but I'd have to weigh that against taking a suboptimal era perk. Instead, it's a bit too much 'rich get richer' for the good options and 'I wasn't going to bother anyway' for the rest. Also, as with every other system most of the advantages to each choice are straight resource buffs - like Endless games before it, it's the most banal form of bucket-filling exercise with minimal elaboration.
All that said I'm enjoying it enough to play straight through to turn 100 in a session, but that's quite common when I start a new 4x. As it stands I don't expect it to have any kind of staying power, and the expansion trajectory of past Endless games doesn't give me confidence that anything more sophisticated is planned - it's old-fashioned in its remorseless '4x as bucket-filling' way, but I expect it to have the same problem that it lacks depth of Amplitude's earlier games.
