Well, when Civ:BE failed to grab me, what I reached for instead was a different 4x game that was recommended to me: Endless Legend. This is a Civ-like set in a fantasy universe, similar to a Masters of Magic. And man, does it scratch the Civ itch in ways I find new and different for a Civ-like.

Endless Legend’s fantasy setting means that the game still has emotional resonance, even though the tech trees still have magic and other non-realistic advances. They lean on fantasy tropes quite a bit, but manage to stretch the lore in some new and interesting ways, particularly in the creation of their alternate races, many of which play almost entirely different games due to the nature of their mechanics. The exploration aspect of the game is ramped up – similar to what you see in CBE. Military is both viable (i.e. it doesn’t drag the game too much) and (in many games) somewhat dodgeable if you prefer to turtle and just build a great society.

Rather than freeform city placement, the map is divided into a series of states or territories, each of which can hold one city in it. This makes for a much nicer, cleaner political map, and also creates a much more interesting race to snag resources – first one to build a city in a territory will control all resources in that territory, no matter how large or misshapen the territory is. This has the nice benefit of allowing players to not let resource placement force them to build a godforsaken desert city that will always struggle, for example. The city can always be built on the best squares in the territory.

And for what it’s worth, the city placement and expansion part of the game is what I love the most. It’s something I felt I didn’t pay much attention to in Civs 4 and 5, but in Endless Legend, I’m back to fanatically comparing where the ideal hex to place a dude is, and identifying where expansion can go. Unlike recent Civs, city shape expansion is done manually by the player (with the ‘create boroughs’ action), and the designers did a good job of putting in competing desires – you can spread like a virus if you want to grab better resource tiles, but you also get rewarded with greater reputation and glory if you build a compact city. Basically, any city hex that borders 4 other city hexes ‘levels up’ to be more profitable – this is a very neat feature that is also criminally underdocumented.

The game is not perfect – it is, to be blunt, very indie in its levels and production values. Major systems are undocumented: I’ve played the game for hours, and am still not sure how trade works, or how about half of the victory conditions are initiated. The game could desperately use some GUI love – the game would be massively more approachable if you could mouseover data that currently only exists in tooltips, for example. The game does have some bugs that are inexplicable, and crashes enough to make you appreciate the annual autosave. Some oft-used functions that really should have hotkeys simply do not seem to.

There are also some design ideas that are undercooked. About a third of the time, the game will plunge into winter months, which stalls out production and slows movement. This is a neat idea, but in practice is mostly just miserable gameplay time. Of particular frustration is that winter pretty much hoses any time-limited quests the game may grant you, making them impossible to complete for reasons utterly outside of your control.

The art is WAY too busy – you’ll find yourself zooming out a lot to look at the purely tactical map to be able to easily find units that otherwise get lost in the busy landscape. Unit customization is somewhat TOO fiddly. And lastly, the tactical combat just mostly sucks. I could go into the litany of details I found frustrating here, but suffice it to say – if the summary of combat shows that you’ll likely win in autocombat, just do it, you’ll thank me later.

None of these derail the fact that this is a tidy new entry into the Civlike genre that, in my opinion, cements the dev team as serious contenders in the genre. The game is fun, constantly brings back that ‘one more turn’ vibe from the old Civs, and at the same time, breathes some new life into the format, largely by the virtue of a solid and fun city building model. If you like Civlikes, give this one a try.

(Note: I’m not alone. Rock Paper Shotgun just gave Endless Legend Bestest Best Game of 2014).