Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Thanks to deep discounts for a few days and a lack of other entertainments on my plate, I picked up Endless Legend a couple weeks back. It's a reasonably-solid fantasy 4X strategy game. It definitely manages the (cliche, but true) one-more-turn feel to things. On the up side, I like the variety of races. Some of them feel pretty standard, but some really shake up fundamental gameplay elements like eschewing the food resource for buying population and unit healing or only being able to settle one city or "infesting" locations beyond normal borders. I also like the quest system. Most of the actual quests boil down to completing a certain research or going to a location with a specific unit(s) in your army, but they help add some flavor and each race has a different (if slightly in some cases) quest chain that eventually leads to a possible victory condition. On the down side, the quests sometimes seem prone to breakage. I think I messed one up by killing a roaming army on

I browse on Amazon looking for things to read from time to time. It's unfortunate that I find my recommendations often filled with entire series whether I'm interested or not. Even more frustrating are the "new releases" that are not out yet. Grrr. I'd rather see a broader variety of first books... or at least first book in a series that I haven't read? I my latest pass, I picked up Kingdoms at War (first of the Dragon Gate series, apparently). It was kind of a mixed bag. There are interesting fantasy concepts here. It's a fantasy world where dragons are legend and mage-kings are reality. "Terrene" humans live under this magocracy under fear of mind-reading mages killing them  for stray, treasonous thoughts. Power certainly corrupts, though there is at least one example of a mage-warrior "zidarr" who seems to adhere to austere principles rather than bask in power and decadence. The story largely centers around a mother-son pair of arc