The theme for this post is to round up some of the more popular 4X titles that we all know and love, and break down how they represent the players population and growth and how that fits into the game’s mechanics.

This theme will be broken up into a few different posts, some to examine games that where the player is managing population in scales of cities or single worlds. Others will examine games where the populations are on a larger scale of planets or galaxies. Some of the specific characteristics of these systems that I will look closely at are how they are graphically represented, how they scale over time, and how the player interacts with the system on micro and macro levels.

Next up in the series of case studies on popular 4X games as they related to 4X game concepts and mechanics is Endless Legend from Amplitude Studios. This game got tons of praise in the 4X community for adding fresh concepts to the genre, along with a beautiful art direction and varied clans to experiment with.

I wrote about the excellent Research mechanics in Endless Legend here. As I outlined in that article, Endless Legend shines brightly in areas where the games consistent attention to detail and outstanding design are front and center. It gets bonus points as a game that carves out lots of new wrinkles into the tried and true genre standards and is able to do so while keeping the game a tightly packaged experience.

This trait applies for the Population and Growth systems as well. The FIDS (Food, Industry, Dust, Science) production system is back, and works just as well in the galaxy as it does on Auriga. It’s a system that was originally founded in Amplitudes sister title, Endless Space. The core concepts are very similar between the two games, but Legend adds some interesting components which round out the Pop and Growth system on macro levels into a key aspect of the game.

Unlike AoW3, the Food output of your empire, which relates directly to how quickly your cities grow, is something that you can see and manage more directly with FIDS. Each hex tile has some output of FIDS values, and as you would expect, grasslands, rivers and some special tiles are the best places to find large Food output.

The calculations system is actually pretty straightforward to start out, and although it can become more complex as the player develops new technologies and improvements, it remains consistent. Each city will have a per unit of population value for each of the FIDS values that they add to the pool. This value can be improved in many ways, such as having a hero govern the city, or developing improvements such as a Granary or City Hall. The surrounding city tiles FIDS outputs are added into the total, along with any modifiers a city or empire has access to such as special resources or alliances. In the case below you’ll see for food each unit population also consumes some food to sustain itself. Any excess is used to add to the food stock, eventually growing another unit of population. Each unit of population can be directed to ‘work’ one of the FIDS outputs directly, allowing the player to specialize his city for various purposes throughout the game.

Over time, as in Endless Space, managing the FIDS output, and most importantly growth of a city becomes a game within the game. The micro required to ‘min/max’ the system especially at higher levels can become a bit cumbersome and time consuming, but overall the mechanic is intuitive, interesting and challenging.

At a macro level, the Endless Legend growth system introduces some new concepts which shake up the 4X conventions a bit more than the FIDS system. There’s three key components we will touch on here as they related to growth.

Cities all start with a City Center, which once you settle the city becomes a special tile modifier for your location. A player can expand the territory of his city to gather up tiles that aren’t yet adjacent to the City Center by building districts. These are produced like other improvements, and once placed expand your border and add some disapproval to the city. As a city expands, its center and districts can level up when built next to one another, and before you know it you’re managing a fantasy metropolis. The game does a gorgeous job representing this growth visually, giving the player a true sense of scale and progression.

As the city outgrows it’s starting area and as the player explores around the map you come across the next key concept in Endless Legends growth system; Regions. Regions break up the game world into distinct zones, each with various inhabitants, resources and geography. Most importantly, each region only allows one city to be built in it. This creates a unique sense of strategic choice for the player when considering expansion. Settling a city in a desert may be a great place for your empire to do research, but it will be some time before the city is a bustling giant without massive infrastructure investments or a capable governor hero. Often times tradeoffs must be made when considering which regions are the most lucrative to bring into your domain, depending on what type of game you’re playing. Even trying to consider how defensible each region is becomes important.

One of the other unique core game play mechanics is the change of seasons in the game world. In the summer food production, vision and movement are relatively easy. But when the season changes to winter, many of this activities grind to a halt. Food specifically is much harder to produce in the winter months, especially as the game progresses and the winters become more harsh. Fortunately there are many skills and technologies that will allow the player to offset these penalties and even create potential opportunities for offense against less prepared enemies.

All in all, Endless Legend is an excellent contribution to the 4X genre and just like it’s Research system the Growth, Cities, and Population systems all gel nicely with the games functions. The system is rewarding, straightforward with a growing learning curve, and gives the player loads of opportunity for choice and interaction. Having whole systems such as these is what gives a game depth and re-playability, so the next time you load up a new instance of Auriga consider how Population Food and Growth can be at the center of your strategy.

Endless Legend a 10/10 score for its Pop and Growth systems for the following reasons:

Well integrated to almost every other game mechanic

Allows for varied strategies and playstyles

Gives the player a sense of progression and scale, becoming almost a game within itself

Interesting new mechanics some of which may end up becoming the next standards in the genre