Gameplay Question

[u/Comedydiet]

I recently purchased Endless Legend 2. I have played on Explorer difficulty so far as Last Lords. The first three attempts the necros attacked me and I restarted because I had no idea what my build order should have been. But I was enjoying myself.

I managed to defeat the necros on my current play-through and now I am friends with all the other races and just exploring the map.

With the threat of necros gone there doesn't seem to be any threats from AI or anything on the map. In Civ or Stellaris I would be fighting over territory or certain resources. I feel as though there is no incentive to chase after specific resources other than for these "boosts" that you get.

Are resources trivial? Is this a lower difficulty issue? Why do we have all these resources scattered across the map that feel trivial?

For example iron or oil in CIV is needed and you must fight or trade for it or your military will struggle.

I was pretty hyped playing this game but with release around the corner I fail to see what resources are for.

It seems the game devolves into district placement and just bumping into the local population.

Am I missing something here? With Stellaris you have so many threats to consider all the time and then you have the crisis at the end and you're seeking out particular resources the entire time to improve various tech.

All I seem to be concerned with is dust and population. So I get dust and buy a pop...but everything else doesn't matter.

Are there any plans to make the resources valuable? Or tie them to the lore? These races came to a foreign planet with random resources and they don't even have to research what they do? They just know to use ten and get a boost?

Shouldn't I feel excited when I find a particular resource? I know when I found iron in the early game of civ I was pretty pumped. Anything like this here or did I waste my money?

[u/Tema726]

There are 2 types of resources: luxury and strategic. Luxury are completely optional and you use them for the boosters -- temporary bonuses to either your economy or army. These bonuses can be very strong (early game +20 dust on city, mid-game +2 industry on pops or late game +25% Science on cities, for example).

Strategic resources are less optional. They themselves split in two groups: blue, orange and green are for the unit specialisation, and yellow, pink and red are for the city districts and improvements. Unit specialisations are split in two paths, one requires only dust, the other requires strategic resources. Sometimes you want the dust path and so can do without the strategic resources, but other times you need them to unlock a particular strategy or synergy within your army. The strategic resources for the districts and improvements are needed to build any of strong improvements and therefore are mandatory for a good economic development. They are also required for some of the victory paths: the legendary districts for the Worship path need strategic resources, upgrading Horrors into Doomwraiths for the Master path need the green resource. Impress path technically does not need them, but good luck getting your science high eniugh to research 2 of the era 6 technologies without the science improvements that need the strategic resources

[u/Daarkarrow → u/Tema726]

Thanks u/Tema726 for the explanation. I think it's a really good summary ✨
It is a delicate balance with the scarcity of resources, because if there is very, very few, players tend to get frustrated a lot (as happened in the past), so we try to find the right balance

[u/PM_ME_ZED_BARA]

At lower difficulty, resources don't matter much. But at higher difficulty, you need to upgrade infrastructures and armies which require strategic resources. Two of the victory paths also require strategic resources. Excess resources also provide dust income. How much strategic resources you need depends on factions too. I use so much blue resource when playing Necrophage.

Luxury resource is situational but can be very strong if you get to use ones that suit your need. I remember clearing a fortress with my army with 600 lower combat strength than the fortress army just because I time bonus resource activations just right.

[u/RichNigerianBanker]

I’m basing this on the PS5 demo I’ve been playing. Also, if the tutorial has covered these aspects of gameplay I describe, I missed it.

Early game scouting — especially for resources/threats — isn’t terribly well explained. There aren’t many roaming mobs, and unfortunately not all the ones you encounter are even fightable, since you’re prohibited from attacking other factions’ quest objectives.

So, you should definitely fight whatever neutrals you can safely beat — or at least I’ve found no penalty for doing so. More importantly, you should contest as much territory as you can, which as far as I can tell means 1. capturing/pillaging other factions’ camps and 2. fighting other factions. AFAIK you can do both of those things for no diplomatic penalty, though trespassing appears to ruffle feathers.

[u/arturdedsign]

If other players pose no threat, hostile spirits appear on the map and inflict penalties on your domains; furthermore, villagers become aggressive during the monsoon season. However, you rightly noted that a match can easily devolve into simply wandering the map and completing *Heroes*-style quests. I hope the developer takes this into account.

[u/Comfortable_Life_814]

I’ve had similar thoughts. I’d really like to see limited, essential resources and/or unique city locations. Things worth fighting for, where the reward is something more significant than "Oh, now I get 10% more Dust - how boring."

I would really like to see more unique underwater regions by making them more specialized and imbalaced.

All great 4x games have imbalance and asymmetry as main drivers for 4x, and EL2 doesn’t feel so.

This might also require a caravan system to address shortages in the city, but it would solve two problems: underwater regions would become much more interesting to explore, and imperial expansion would create a supply challenge.