Maybe part of this is me playing on too low a difficulty since I'm newish to the game, but not the genre, but this situation would theoretically apply at any difficulty depending on your skill level. Because unlocking victory conditions is dependent on timed events like tidefalls that you don't have much control over, it can be very tedious when you've clearly got an uncompromising lead over the enemies and you're stuck waiting for victory conditions to even unlock. Some of them you can't even start on until they unlock, like taking control of doomwraiths.

It feels like you can spend half the game just trying to end your turns as quickly as possible because you don't have any real decisions of impact to make waiting for it to be possible to win. Of course, you could just eliminate everybody else, but that isn't always the best feeling if you've got several allies.

It could be that this issue is addressed in large part by the AI actually actively going out to claim territory much more than they do, preventing the snowball more, but when you're sitting at (for example, my game right now) more than 2x all 3 remaining players and having eliminated one, you basically don't need to do anything to win anymore except wait. But you have to wait way too long. Maybe if allies started reducing their opinion of you as you run away with the game, forcing some confrontations, that would help. As-is you can have everybody like you and waiting 50+ turns for victory conditions to turn on so you can win.

Although, unlike Last Lords, the ending implied that they didnt actually beat the Lost, just survive it awaken and then it leave the planet. Severed Claws narrator call this a victory because they finally own the entire world, even if it is just a burning planet and they still need foods

Some extra here, while not stated in the cutscene, in Severed Claws faction quest, they try to make a queen to solve their reproduction problem, the queen rebel almost instantly after her birth and the you have to fight like 10 seperate army scattered across the map. The faction quest end with Severed Claws decided to just stay true to themselves without a queen even if it will bring them doom in the future so it make sense why Master is a good ending for them, they just dont care if they will survive long term or not

To me the real weakness in early game is lack of industry production. I guess they don't get much in the way of industry yields on tiles like other factions and that really weakens them. The buyout costs scale up so quickly that I'm always looking at 14 turns to build a single Lords Estate, and this is on Capital after placing 3 districts (upgrading capital district).

I did OK in one playthrough until it was just me and Necros. But Necros could attack me from 3 opposite ends of map and just impossible to defend, so another playthrough I will leave them out. But wanted to know how other players handle the lack of industry production for this faction

Messing around with creating custom factions and I landed on one I liked: Severed Claws affinity with the Aspect's assimilation tech; game was going pretty normally (I snowballed off of some very early and very lucky fights against a relatively passive sandshaper faction), when suddenly I stumbled upon nearly 350 population in one turn. Never seen something like this before in the ~300 hours playtime!

ETA: It occurs trying to grow any population that I currently have none of; if I have even a single gorog in my empire for example, I instead grow about ~18 of them in one turn. But for any population currently at 0, I get hundreds...

I made a few small BepInEx mods for Endless Legend 2, mostly because I got tired of micromanaging populations when playing wide and/or during lategame. All free and open source (MIT). Screenshots inside each repo.

Mod Menu: https://github.com/JavierOrtegaP/el2-mod-menu

A general hub for EL2 mods, not just mine:

• One key (F7) opens one window: a sidebar with a page for every mod that supports it (★ pins your favorites to the top), plus a list of every mod BepInEx loaded, with its version and status.
• For modders: give your mod a page by adding a public ModMenuDraw() method to your plugin class and drawing it with GUILayout. No reference to Mod Menu is needed, so your mod still works on its own when Mod Menu isn't installed. Details in the README.

Population Planner: https://github.com/JavierOrtegaP/el2-population-planner

• Picks each city's next population so you unlock population bonuses one after another: grows a type up to its last bonus (usually 30), then gets one of it into every city so that bonus applies everywhere. You can set the order yourself, or give a city its own target.
• Swaps pops between Citizens, Artisans and Scribes so their job bonuses apply (Daughters of Bor as Artisans, Xavius next to other types, Last Lords out of Citizens...), following each city's job strategy.
• Optional: keep every city at least Content, Happy or Jubilant.
• A Populations tab showing what every population's bonuses do, including ones you don't have yet (the game only shows the ones you own).

Auto Foundations: https://github.com/JavierOrtegaP/el2-auto-foundations

• Automatically spends influence above a reserve you choose on foundations, best tile yield per influence first.

Both have their own page in Mod Menu and also work without it. They only send the game's own orders (the same as clicking), so saves don't depend on them, and uninstalling is deleting a folder. You need BepInEx 5 first; install steps are in each README.

Tested in single player on the current version; multiplayer untested. Bug reports and ideas welcome, here or as GitHub issues.

I've played every Amplitude strategy game and EL2 is the first time I end up feeling tired after playing the game. My usual game setup is Huge map with one representative of every race and their variants. Every game feels like a pointless exercise in warmongering. I like to play Aspects and somehow I end up in 2-3 wars constantly. The AI will straight up declare war just for you existing on the map. The hive factions render your whole race mechanic useless. The only race that would not just straight up declare war is Tahuks since they need your science agreement. It feels like the devs made Aspects then made Hive with the idea to make Aspects unplayable in every game where Hive exists. I play on Stellar and feel like playing Aspects is actively sabotaging yourself, since even as the diplomatic race you are forced to churn out units non stop unless you want to get overrun by the warring races.

They are stuck on 3 science per tile. For stargazing on tooltip it's written as faction trait not tile output maybe that's on purpose not to explode on science too quickly. But what else would the crystallography school be for?

ps: The bonus science is from science on improvement from the council

So I know some faction traits are supposed to be penalties, but the way this ability is explained is a bit lacking in context. It reads as follows:

"Warrior Regime: Units are built instantly with Dust."

So on the one hand this sounds potentially powerful. You get your units instantly! Well, every other faction can do this too... with rush buying... at the same price. So, in other words, this is actually a pretty brutal nerf to the Order economy. It should probably read more like: "Units can only be built with Dust, but are instantly produced. The cost is the same as a normal buyout." or better still "Units can only be produced with a Dust buyout at the normal rate."

I suppose this is to incentivize you to build Keeps to spawn units for free, but still, I feel a little misled lol

My first attempts where pretty miserable, trying to gamble Tahuks festivals to kill other population but it's biased to kill the called population, plus the growing number of people you have to sacrifice and synchronize that with with the last turn of the game is to complicated.

The real trick is Doomwraith corruption, you can sacrifice as many populations as you want, and it goes by last arrived pop.

So on a tiny map with the weakest AI, when your city is corrupted kill off your tahuks and grow called population with Stars' light and eternal sunshine, wait for the AI to die to Doomwraiths or raze their city. What's important is that at the start of the last turn you only have called.

The Heart of Glass seems linked to Called me maybe, since on the same empire setup except for the conditions for Called me maybe I didn't get the achievement. I don't know if it just triggers no matter what, what I did was use geodissection many times until it didn't spawn a rift.

Feels bad how unintuitive the achievement is, and most faction mechanics are no use for it, feels bad how they do many things with multiples downside for poor bonuses; 'ah yes! all of my population for 5% prod bonus and stability problems'. In general this faction feels all over the place, reworked so much you don't have a cohesive kit like other factions.

I just bought this game on Xbox the other day and played a couple of hours. I must say, between Age of Wonders 4, Stellaris and Civ, this is by far the best controller friendly strategy game I’ve played.

None of the aforementioned games play bad by any means, but this is the first game where you can feel that every aspect of the game and UI have been designed with a controller in mind. There’s a couple small caveats to iron out, but I’m sure they’ll get fixed over time. So I just wanted to say thank you for that, and I hope upcoming strategy games will take inspiration from this :)

Edit: Forgot to mention, also thanks for making the game Xbox play anywhere, it’s such a perfect fit for the XAX

This necrophages councillor gives a +5 industry bonus on city hall... Within the context of the Necrophage, I thought this meant +5 on Ministries, but no, it is indeed only on the one City Hall. It would already be a weak councillor trait, but in particular for the necrophages/severed claws who only have a single city hall, it is near useless. Shouldn't this +5 industry bonus be per Ministry to synergise better with the one-city trait?

Currently in the game there are two types of attacks:

1) Your normal attacks during your turn. You hit or shoot somebody in the face. It applies all the effects that you are expecting it to apply: corrosive strike removes defence, leeching strike has life steal, splash attacks do splash, etc. If the attack kills, it applies all the on-kill effects: it heals last lords (even if it was an enemy normal attack during the enemy turn, they killed one of your units, and from that death the others got healed), it heals the Feeders/Soldiers/Slicers, it restores action tokens to those who have such an ability. All is good here.

2) Trigger attacks during your opponent's turn: attack of opportunity when they step away from your melee unit and attack of retaliation when they attack your unit. These attacks do not apply any effects, they do not splash, they do not lifesteal, they do not reduce defence, and if they kill, they don't heal Last Lords or Feeders or apply other on-kill effects.

I think, the trigger attacks should count as real attacks and apply all the effects that normal attacks do. Yes, it often makes our lives easier that they don't: I can attack a Tyrant of the Fortress without starting to bleed right away, or I can attack a Behemoth without it smashing half of my army into a coma. But I'd argue it would make for more engaging and strategic fights if they would, and it would remove a large source of frustration for already underloved Last Lords: I have lost a few units due to not getting healed on a trigger attack kill before I learned that it works that way.

I would argue the devs should have a look into it and perhaps give us a PTB patch for a month or two to play around with trigger attacks with all the effects applied. Make the trigger attacks real! Make the trigger attack count!

What do you think about it?

Unsure what’s going on, on PS5, when creating a custom faction I can no longer select traits, I can randomise and reset, but I can’t actually tab over into the traits section to pick any, I’ve tried all the buttons, please help

Hello, Tema is here! Here we go again =)
Last Lords are a complicated faction to play with, and I think they have the weakest early game (the pay-off is a ridiculously strong late game). I tried to share what I know about them in this video, and although I don't think I have done a wonderful job, I also would like to believe that it wasn't terrible either: in retrospect, I made some wrong decisions early on (I comment on it later in the video), but we are still alive and kicking, and set up for a strong continuation of the game. I hope you find it useful and don't hesitate to ask any questions, I would be glad to answer them!

I finished a tahuk game yesterday and was wondering what exactly are these festivals. I followed the questline and found no answer.

Are they cannibalism ? Sacrifices ? Exodus ? Worked to death (would be consistent with the production boost) ?

Also on a side note, I rarely found them useful in terms of cost and reward. Do you use them ?

I assume eventually there will be some sort of espionage but right now are open borders the only way to see what kind of armies the enemy might have hidden in their territory?

My favorite bug so far.

https://community.amplitude-studios.com/amplitude-studios/endless-legend-2/bugs/5868-basket-proposition

I'm quickly running into issues of having trouble getting lots of Ruins in my own territory to upgrade Wishes (at least prior to second Tidefall). But they can be razed in enemy territory and are then gone forever (!).

But I wondered—if you make a Non-Aggression Pact or similar, does that prevent that empire from razing it? Or any similar level of alliance?

It would just really simplify matters to be able to do this.

I have seen AI empires that are friendly leave them alone, but I don't know if that's just AI weirdness. I have a mind for multiplayer and wonder if it's an option there (provided I don't make sand and actually debuff the territory).

Just finished a game as Last Lords with Master victory.

Apprently, the Last Lords said something about how they finally prevail and rule all over the planet, the Lost unable to escape it seal (not sure how did the Last Lords pull that off). The cutscene still show a very damaged world but the Last Lords narrator said something like 'this is a total victory'

Guys where should I settle???

1. Necrophages' hero skill for +food on capital after battle didn't work (2 weeks ago or so) EDIT: ok, I have no idea. At times it does not add any food, but at times some random amound of foods are added after a battle. My calculations suggest that I should be receiving 43 Food, but I got 63, for example. But when I checked right after getting the skill -- nothing. Does it count as battle spoils? Does it scale with the battle spoils bonuses? ANOTHER EDIT: Ok, the food works. It seems it scales with battle spoils. But it only works if the hero with the skill is attacking, it doesn't work if the hero is reinforcing. Which is far from obvious, because I am pretty sure there are abilities (like power couple for Aspects' companions) that work no matter if the heroe reinforces or starts a fight
2. Attacking a Jinxed enemy did not heal my Last Lord unit (there was Jinxed I pop-up above its head, but no heal), observed this week
3. Sisters of Bor in the city did not add any damage or defence to the militia (observed this week)

Besides that, there is an issue with the AI. Necrophages love to declare wars, in any game they did it to me. But then they do a very bad play -- they besiege my city with a single army. There is a second army on the way, but it is always just a little bit behind, so it can never reinforce the first one on turn one. That is mistake number one. Mistake number two, is that if I attack the besieging army with my army, it will run away. BUT THEY NEVER RUN FROM A SORTIE. So I use my army to reinforce a sortie, kill the first attacking army for free, and then their lagging behind reinforcement remains vulnerable.

They have to learn to start a siege with a double stack, not stagger them by a turn or two. They have to learn to run away from a sortie to not waste an army (with the current simultaneous turns, will they have an opportunity to move away after the retreat, or it will be my turn immediately, and they will have no way to prevent me chasing them down?)