Man, I am just blazing through this thing. Last night was another example of me getting so sucked into a game that the world narrowed around me and everything outside the tunnel of my attention blurred into irrelevance. I kind of like it when that happens, but it can be disorienting to glance at a clock and suddenly realize that two hours have mysteriously vanished.
I won my first game last night. It was a technological victory, and thus I got a chance to see most of the tech tree, buildings, and units, and my initial impression is favorable. There is something satisfying about spreading out your cities to occupy most of their region, and there is a delicate trade-off between researching certain powerful buildings and having the resources necessary to build them. The domestic game in Endless Legend is potentially pretty interesting (I can't be entirely sure, because I played the game on "newbie" difficulty).
I am not entirely sold on the combat system, though I like it in theory. The problem I have with it is that the UI is not very informative. Getting into a fight sucks you into this turn-based tactical combat mini-game, which is cool (I loved the combat in Fallen Enchantress, for example), but I can't figure out how to direct my units or make use of their special abilities, so I just wound up automating it. It worked out, because I was so far ahead technologically that my units were unassailable, but it's going to be real trouble when I play on a higher difficulty.
And Endless Legend definitely feels like the sort of game that's responsible for the fact that I have dozens of unplayed games in my Steam library. If I were still playing games haphazardly, I would probably try out all of the factions (like Endless Space, the different civilization types have abilities which can alter the playing experience dramatically - for example, there's a golem race that doesn't use food at all, but requires massive amounts of currency to heal and upgrade), and go after the different victory conditions (I'm unsure of what exactly victory entails, obviously there's technological, and domination, and I'm certain that there's a diplomatic victory, but the game doesn't really go out of its way to teach you how to win).
What would inevitably wind up happening is that I'd spend a hundred hours exploring the nuances of the game, probably by playing it both at work and at home, thereby allowing every one of my other interests to whither on the vine while I worked out my obsession, and by the time I got back to what I was doing before, the long period of neglect would have caused me to lose interest, and thus I would abandon it for something new.
This time, I will resist the urge. I will play this game for twenty hours, and then put it on the back burner, to potentially come back only after I've finished my entire library. I'm choosing to view this as a species of growth (although true growth would involve me getting my magpie sensibility under control, so I could play the games I like as much as I want and not face these kinds of dilemmas.)
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