Let’s eXplore | Endless Legend 2 – the demo

Developed by Amplitude and published by strategy juggernaut Hooded Horse (seriously, are they primed for world domination? If so, I look forward to our new overlords,) Endless Legend 2 looks to build on the much lauded original, with several significant changes.

Those changes, in brief:

• A new planet, called Saidha
• Winter came and went, Jon Snow probably still knows nothing, and now we have “tidefalls”
• These tidefalls occur periodically after monsoons, and they uncover more of the map
• There are new and returning factions (Necrophage confirmed, rumours of certain others!)
• Minor factions make a return
• City management is different
• Combat now features full tactical control
• The quest system has changed
• Unit upgrades follow a very different system

Amplitude were kind enough to send us a time/turn limited demo, in which we could get to 125 turns, and experience 2 tidefalls. So, all impressions are subject to the caveat that a full game is going to be far longer. There are 6 research eras, and by turn 125 I was experiencing the very first technologies from era 3.

The demo featured 2 races, the Kin of Sheredyn, and the more enigmatic Aspect.

In this Let’s eXplore, I hope to go over the game in brief. This is not an indepth eXamination or anything like a review (we should probably wait for the actual game!)

Graphics ^{If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.(Anatole France)}

Graphics wise, I think the new game is an improvement, as you might well expect.
I think these graphics definitely qualify as “good graphics” by which I mean they convey the world, are not too cluttered, and the visibility of the principle artefacts is good (meaning you can see the map, your units, your cities etc quite well).

The palette is generally quite colourful, and sets the tone, of an ocean world that is vibrant and full of wonder. I got some slight Avatar vibes. I think it best to let the world speak for itself:

eXplore ^{Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts,…tap the ocean depths(JFK)}

When I started the game, the first thing I noticed was that the anomalies are back. The next things were the lack of a settler unit, and also something called a “prepared turn bonus” – which increases the longer you wait to found your first settlement. I thought that was a beneficial thing, and it certainly had the effect of making me want to explore.

At the start of the game, your initial lands available to explore are, I think, a bit too few in number. If you follow along in the YouTube Let’s eXplore, you get a better sense of what I mean.

With each monsoon and then tidefall, the game map expands, and new mechanics come online, such as selecting your council.

As you start exploring, your initial quests begin.

In the original game, your quests were presented in the form of a lore dump, they were sequential and formed a victory choice. You had one main quest line and you could win by going through it faster than everyone else. I thought that approach had merit.

The new quests are both more and less.

Less, in that they are less interesting overall, and involve considerable clicking, mostly because the presentation is now in the form of a dialogue, for every quest (there are also events, which are one off decisions with bonuses and maluses).

More in that there is even some light roleplaying going on with your heroes.

This hero got married:

and as a reward, you get a free district:

More, in that it seems Amplitude are planning on making the quests more central to the game, specifically the victory conditions:

Overall, in the current form, the quests feel a bit lacking, but I am fully aware that it is very early days, and to be honest, adding a bit of pizzazz and flavour is probably easy enough to do.

I do think at the moment that the quests are the weakest part of the game.

Except, perhaps, the UI? Now, I found the UI easy enough to navigate, because near everything is right click to exit, left click to select. Hold shift to fix a tooltip. But the rest of the team (on the podcast!) did mention there was a lack of information, a lack of explanation. Again, I think this can be excused at this early stage.

eXpansion ^{Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.(C.Northcote Parkinson)}

Fans of the first game will probably find either this, or the unit system, to be the biggest change.

You don’t need a coloniser to found a city, you just click on the unit bar and voila, a city!

Cities follow a hub and spoke design. The hub is your city centre, your townhall if you like. The spokes are the hexes around. You start with the immediate 6 hexes (excepting anomalies – so there is an element of using the anomaly for an early game bonus, versus exploiting the tiles instead) available to build one.

The basic loop is create a foundation (which costs influence) and on that foundation, build a district. Later (with research, and this really gets interesting in era 2) you can upgrade those districts. There are adjacency bonuses and maluses.

You can see how your cities start here.

Now, your city centre starts at level 1, and to upgrade it, you need to research the appropriate tech. You get various bonuses, but the most important thing is you open up the number of provinces you can attach to your city.

Yeah, provinces! To annex a province, you need to spend influence to put down a camp (Aspects spend dust I think.) When that camp is built, you then have the option of attaching it to a city (small influence cost) or founding a new city (larger influence cost). You can see me doing this in the YouTube Let’s eXplore.

eXploitation ^{There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we’ve created ourselves.(Tim Winton)}

Because of the length of the demo, there was not much time to really see the effects of eXploitation, but as mentioned above, from era 2, your district specialisations ramp up in complexity, and they all need those juicy strategic resources.

You can see a selection of that research and those improvements below:

These resources also play a key role in the development of your units, which I write about below.

In my playtime, I reliably uncovered titanium and glass steel deposits, and their existence was a key factor in determining where to eXpand. I think the game very nicely ties together the tidefalls (unlock new lands) with the appearance of new resources and threats, and there is a nice tension, certainly after the first monsoon and tidefall, of juggling competing interests. I think it will be unlikely that you are swimming in strategic resources, so smart choices will have to be made regarding upgrading your cities or your units.

You can see your unlocked/discovered resources at the top right of the screen:

However, I cannot really say the same for dust and influence. At the start of the game, you are of course quite broke, but in every one of my playthroughs, I soon found myself floating dust, and towards the later game floating influence. At one point I rush bought an entire army in one turn.

I also don’t recall paying any attention to food, but I did think about science a bit more, because I wanted to see the effects of different research.

This is really a balance/tweaking issue, so I have faith in Amplitude, because I think the system, even at this early stage, is actually fun.

eXtermination ^{What if he isn’t evil? What if he isn’t wrong? What if he’s just… hungry?(Wheel of Time, Season One)}

So, about that unit system I mentioned earlier.

When you start the game, you are limited to 3 or 4 units that you can recruit, and there is little you can do with them. Based on the demo, none of them have any active abilities, and few passive abilities. Some would call this simple, but I quite like it, as it feels like an understated elegance to me.

From what I can tell, you are only ever able to directly recruit 4 unit types (plus whatever you incorporate from the minor factions), and you never directly recruit advanced units. If I am correct with this, that is quite the departure from genre conventions, and I think I like it!

The complexity, utility and customisation of your units kicks up a gear when you get to Era 2, as this is when you unlock the research to build mines, and thus eXploit resources, which are familiar from the first game, such as titanium or glass steel.

Those resources, and the correct research, are required to upgrade your units.

Once researched, you click on your units, and choose one of the two available upgrades.

You can expect to repeat this for each era, so there will, in effect, be a sort of arms race.


If you recall the first game, you designed your units, unlocking things like glass steel bows. The system had great flexibility, but it did require alot of clicking around. The new system arguably has a bit less flexibility, but I think it is quite smart, as it effectively means there will always be a place for lower tier units, as the number of higher tier units will be sharply constrained (by the amount of strategic resources).

The number of unit you have will also be limited by your cities, which is pretty normal, but as mentioned above, I did not see a hard limit on cities, just soft limited by escalating influence costs.

But you really came here to smash things right?

Well, the combat system has one key difference to the first game. The first game was a kind of half way system between the player just giving orders (like Dominions – by the by, I think that system has huge potential) and full tactical combat.

The new combat system is fully tactical. Because of that, it invites immediate comparison to other tactical systems, such as the little known Age of Wonders 4, or Conquest of Eo. I think that is an unfair comparison, but it is an inevitable one, and Endless Legend 2 does not come off too well here.

The combat is basic, and the battle arenas/maps are small. You have a limited deployment zone, and from what I could see, there was no zone of control or flanking bonuses, and also no damage reduction. There are also no active abilities on your units. So, taken together, the best approach is just to focus down a unit, and then the next. There are tactical map modifiers, like high ground, but the effects here seem slight.

That said, I did notice that my Cavalry units were sometimes able to push enemy units out of position. That could come in handy…

I didn’t mind this too much because I didn’t have high expectations. I never played Humankind but alot of the eXplorminate community have, and It is a consistent opinion here that Amplitude have not quite nailed the combat in any of their games.

I think the combat is perfectly serviceable, but I am hoping that later tech unlocks more stuff.

If you watch the YT Let’s eXplore you’ll see me often just auto-battling, and you get a sense of the battlefield space.

Closing thoughts ^{End? No, the journey doesn’t end here(Lord of the Rings)}

Overall, considering this is just a demo, I had quite a bit of fun. There are ofcourse rough edges, but the core systems are in place and I think I like all of them, with one notable exception.

Your factions will always start with just the one leader and one hero, and the lore is carefully curated around them, so it is quite jarring when you are the Kin of Sheredyn and you meet your identical twin. It also does not bode too well for replayability, starting with a faction and always having the same starting quests. My major concern is that what I considered a weakness of the first game will be repeated, namely that each faction will be fun at first as you figure out how to break things, but once that puzzle is solved there won’t be much need to revisit that faction. So the fun will really hinge on the number of factions in the game and also how different they are from each other. I thought the first games factions were very shiny, but also quite one dimensional. I am happy to say I am having more fun with the demo Kin of Sheredyn and the Aspect than I did with any of the first game factions, except the Cultists, because they were just bonkers fun. I hope they return in some fashion.

I would like to emphasise that although I might sound downbeat about this game, I actually quite enjoyed the demo and I am looking forward to the full game. Yes there might be an aspect of solve-the-puzzle-and-be-done, but I for one anticipate a great deal of joy (and clicks) in this endeavour.

One more turn? ^yay – Racing an army across my empire to grab some titanium. Turning a Legionary into a Defender.

One more turn? _ugh – Clicking through the quest dialogues and auto battling the many minor factions

Follow me as I blunder my way across Saidha.
Find out what the gang thought in our podcast – coming soon.

Andy

Also known as BBB in many places, Andy is well known for his love of strategy games of all types, especially the Age of Wonders series.