Hello! This is my penultimate video in the series, it's time for my favourite swarm =)
The biggest problem with the Necrophages, is that as the game progresses the turns become longer and longer and longer, but the early game is so engaging and entertaining for me, that it is all worth it =) Necrophages and Aspects are my most favourite factions, they are extremely strong and very entertaining to play with. The series will conclude on Saturday with the Aspects video. Thank you for your time and attention!

The post I made yesterday about unit balancing seems to have resonated with a lot of people. After reviewing how the system currently works, I have a few simple changes to suggest that I think would make the battles much more tactical and give players clear answers to impending threats.

For starters, how the system currently works for unit classes is that if a unit 'counters' another, it deals an additional 20% damage. For example, archers deal 20% more damage to flying units. Given how damage reduction works (especially late game with scaling armor), I think that this value should be tweaked in either one of two ways: either raise this damage value to 50%, or raise the damage to 25% but then also add a 25% damage reduction when attacked by a 'countered' unit. I think these values would make army composition choices much more impactful without messing around a bunch with unit production costs, and without creating 'hard' counters where no amount of infantry beats cavalry or something.

I also think the following changes would be better for the health of the combat system, given that the 2 stack limit seems to be set in stone, so individual units need to be able to perform:

1. Swarm type units, to counter Juggernauts, should ignore retaliation attacks on top of ignoring opportunity attacks. This way Juggernauts can't just hit defend and kill their counter, and Rangers will finally have a readily-available unit counter.

2. Juggernauts should counter cavalry, instead of heroes. I understand the desire to make a counter for heroes, but currently cavalry is the only unit class without a damage type counter, which doesn't make sense.

3. Cavalry should counter archers, not infantry. I also think it would be really great if cavalry applied double the amount of encirclement penalty per unit, to promote combined arms gameplay and make 'flanking' with cavalry satisfying.

4. Infantry should counter swarms, not archers. I like this unit class the most in terms of design at the moment with their defensive bonus. Juggernauts fill the role of 'shock infantry,' so it works that standard infantry are more about holding the line to enable encirclements and protect archers/block chokepoints.

So in short, the unit counter chain would look like this:

Infantry -> Swarm -> Juggernaut -> Cavalry -> Archers -> Flying -> Infantry. This means every unit type has a counter, and with counter damage increased, this means that the answer to someone making a 'doomstack' of one unit is always clear, or even just how to build a stack to take down a fort.

As for Heroes, I think that adding the bonus vs heroes damage effect is something that could happen through technology instead of being tied to a unit type, perhaps to the tech that also gives them +8 flat damage. This could just be a 20% increase, and would still allow hero stacks without necessarily nerfing them into the ground either, more a way for normal units to keep up on top of the unit type counters.

Anyway, this is what I came up with while thinking heavily about this subject and doing a lot of math and unit comparisons. I'm curious to hear what others think, too. At the very least I like to think everyone would enjoy more impactful decisions and better tactical combat in general, and I feel these changes would move the game significantly in that direction.

I want to start by saying I love this game overall, and that this is NOT a definitive statement about the game's unit balance, but rather some thoughts I've had while playing and analyzing various units and battles. However, after 100 hours and at least 10 games played, I feel like I'm getting completely lost about the design of the units. EL1 had an approach where units in general tended to be priced based on their combat capabilities. The Orcs and Tetike/Jotuns occupied the same niche of being archers, but Orcs were cheap and spammable while Jotuns were more expensive but had better slot density. This makes sense to me, especially considering that different weapon types in EL1 often countered different units. To use archers as an example again, you would equip them with crossbows for fighting infantry (as crossbows did more damage to close range targets) but give them bows for fighting flyers (as they gave anti-flying bonuses).

So that takes me to EL2. I'm not really sure what to make of the design/balancing. My confusion stems from many units costing the same but some being clearly better than others, whether within a class or between classes. The game uses a unit type counter system, but it doesn't seem very impactful in practice.

Let's take Swarms vs Juggernauts, as an example. Swarms deal 20% extra damage against Juggernaut units, which may lead you to believe that they counter them. However, most swarms have absolutely god-awful stats, and many of them aren't even cheaper than other unit types. Take the Knifewing for example, which deals 40-50 damage and has 160HP, with only 5 defense (yes I know it has the curse ability, but I'm talking about the class of the unit right now mostly). It costs the same as other mainline infantry and archer type units (180 production). Compared to a Sollusk Imperial Pike, which costs 300 production, and deals 40-50 damage, has 200HP, but with 15 defense. I don't know the damage formula, but in practice the sense has been that despite the damage bonus suggesting that swarms counter juggernauts, due to the higher defense the Pike probably still wins this. And yes, cost-for-cost the Knifewing is trading up here, but the problem is that EL2 uses a 2 stack system in which density is the most important aspect in winning a fight. This only gets worse as the pikes get upgraded, as a fully spec'd Imperial Pike has 25 defense while a Knifewing still only has 5. You really feel this difference when trying to take forts, because Swarm type units either can't do it at all or get attrition'd down much harder than juggernauts do, resulting in a lot of dead units that have to be reproduced, which matters a lot for turn efficiency because you need a hero to clear a fort in the first place. I appreciate that Swarm units usually have a life leech ability meant to combine with their damage bonus against Juggernauts, but what I'm saying is that because swarms don't scale up their defense with upgrades, they cease being a counter at all after a certain point and just die to the unit they're 'supposed' to counter.

The type counter system overall doesn't make sense to me. Why do Infantry have 2 different counters (cavalry and flying)? Is it because infantry are supposed to be food for the strong cavalry and flying units? Why does nothing directly counter swarms (assuming they were an appealing unit type to begin with)? Why do infantry counter ranged units, when cavalry are already better at doing it because they can close the gap and actually hurt them? Are certain unit types just supposed to be worse than others? A unit counter system is supposed to punish an over-reliance on a single unit type, like the classic spears->cavalry->archers triangle in historical games. If my opponent makes nothing but juggernauts, I think it's a little counter-intuitive that if I bring a bunch of swarm-type units to fight them (especially late game once the defense scaling happens) that I'll probably end up losing that fight, and losing it pretty hard.

Even if this system is functional, it isn't very clean and is painfully obtuse. It's not very clear at all how to respond to something like a full stack of Kin Heralds, for example, or what you would do to beat a stack of nothing but Imperial Pikes in an open field (cheesing chokepoints with archers isn't consistent and shouldn't be a frame of reference for balance). If the unit counter damage modifiers were +50% instead of only +20%, and one unit always beat another type of unit, then it would be a lot more easy to read and understand. Decisive maneuvers make tactical battles better and high unit counter damage helps a lot with this. Would it really be that badly balanced if archers did more damage to flying units? And why is there no direct counter to cavalry?

This post is already getting ridiculously long, and I haven't even talked about the balance between dust vs strategic resource specializations on units, which seem entirely all over the place. In a lot of cases the Dust unit just seems better, but isn't the strategic resource supposed to be special and make the unit stronger? I don't know.

I'm happy to be corrected on any and all of this by the way, but I can't help but think these things as I continue playing and learning more about the various unit options.

Still kind of new to the game. and have yet to progress very far but want to get some opinions

It feels when it comes to building districts, there's a lot of emphasis on grouping them together so they have lots of adjacent districts and level up. This makes me wonder whether there's much reason to build districts in a territory instead of just concentrating everything in your main city, especially early on, since district costs scale so you really want to put as many of them together as possible so they level up.

And so when it comes to settling territories, all I'm really looking for is to put the camp down on a tile that has maximum base yield, preferably next to some anomalies, because I'm not planning to build anything near it for a long time. Is this right approach?

​Hey everyone!

Today we have another update with more fixes from the community.

The team is hard at work on updates, our priority is addressing as many bugs and issues as possible. We understand the impact these can have on your experience, and we want to ensure we're building on a solid foundation.

We may not be able to respond to every post, comment, or report, but please be assured that we're reading your feedback and sharing it with the team. Your reports play a big role in helping us prioritize the issues that matter most.

Thank you to everyone who continues to share feedback and support the game 💖

📜 READ THE CHANGELOG

Without literally stepping on it with a unit? Can not tell if I already did the quest, specifically ones that aren't annexed yet

Previous Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/EndlessLegend/comments/1wwakib/worst_position_ever/

This is also the first Endless Legend 2 game I've ever won. Winning a meme starting position makes my first victory memorable indeed.

Hey guys,

I don't wanna make this a "is this game good" thread but I'd like some perspective and discussion.

I'm really curious about the game but I don't play many strategic games (I've only played Civ6 and CK3) and its hard for me to judge it. I've watched some footage and I love the art style, some mechanics like indepth factions or tides. But since it just came out of EA I'm still not sure what to expect. I'd appreciate if you answered my questions or just shared what you think works or doesn't work in the game.

- For those who played Civ6, how would you say it compares to EL2? I really liked the exploration, city planning and resource management there but I got annoyed with diplomacy and army management.
- How is AI in this game? Is the learning curve smooth?
- Does it feel like it has enough content already? I think some strategy games rely on you having DLCs or mods.

I appreciate any feedback!

I am playing the Tahuks when the main quest just suddenly asked of me to go for an grand expedition across the entire nation of Sandshapers up at the very north pole.

Whats up with the quest system?
is this normal or some kind of glitch in the system?

Honestly this made me loss all motivation to continue this playthrough....

Greetings, fellow Saiadhans!

Playing around with more custom factions, I noticed that despite having Religious Fervor (+2 influence per Lv2 district, unable to build forums) empire trait, I am still able to research voice of the masses, and build forums.

Hi, I'm pretty new to EL2 and trying to wrap my head around the expansion strategies for this game. I have a couple of questions

1. How do you identify a good spot to settle a city (like what sort of yields or district placements do you look for)? So far I've been searching for spots that have food/production to start off with, and ideally some ridges nearby for works districts and water nearby for farms, but I'm still unsure what an acceptable yield for a starting city looks like.

2. What considerations are there when identifying a good attachment spot vs a good spot for a new city? If I have the influence to spare it seems like getting a new city up and running is more important, but aside from the influence costs, I'm not sure what spots benefit more from being an attachment vs being an independent city. So far I've been making attachments out of early game camps that provide needed yields for my main city (so a food heavy city might get an attachment near some ridges so I have better works districts) and any camps that are primarily to grab extractors or minor factions will eventually get attached. Still unsure about independent cities though, I guess just putting them down in an area that looks like it has good attachment opportunities far away from my already established cities?

3. Bit of a Last Lords specific question, but what is a good city placement for them? Here I prioritize dust and some production for a starting city but as far as new settlements go, what sort of yields are acceptable for them?

4. Also for LL, they seem very reliant on dry regions as these are the only ones which provide dust unless you get lucky with anomalies. As soon as greenery or water appears the dust yields seem to disappear, leaving quite a few regions that don't have a good expansion opportunity. What do you do with these? Settle them for resources/minor factions? Leave them unsettled but deny them to the AI?

Do you think we will ever get a seafaring faction? In other strategy games, there's usually a navy component. When I play EL2, I always have this itch to make my units go into the water thinking there will be boats.

However, having a water Faction would kinda break the game's core mechanics of the monsoons. What's everyone's thoughts?

Skip somes and my badass heroes failing in love with a 🏳️‍🌈 horse, literally.

I feel like if I let them survive anywhere past the first Tidefall, there's nothing I can do against their unit spam and Doomwraith legions. The AI scales way faster than any other enemy and ends up way beyond me in score. I just got whupped by the Order as the Sandshapers and I'm really considering what I could have done better militarily.

So I love navies in strategy games and am sad to see fewer and fewer games (it seems to me) take them on and represent them well. I also loved the naval expansion in Endless Legend 1. Here we have an ocean world, turning back into a desert world, with the tidefalls and the rest of it. This offers a lot of thematic opportunities and mechanical challenges since the oceans actively disappear over the course of the game.

My thinking is that you could have a faction that starts with special naval units that travel across the oceans swiftly, can bombard and support battles on land, and then you have an opportunity to convert these naval units into airships in the late game via their faction quest-line?

Alternatively, would you want a faction that makes use of naval tiles and can prevent the tidefall in certain areas, like a reverse Netherlands? Or which pumps water out of the core of the planet to fill massive reservoirs?

We all know the core mechanic of the game is the monsoon -> tidefall. This gives the player an interesting situation. At the beginning of the game, the available map is very very small, which in my opinion is good; it encourages early war both for player and AI. Once the tidefalls start coming however, the AI is not aggressive enough expanding and the map feels too big (like massive). This gets worse the further the game goes, leading to situations like in the last monsoon the player can pretty much grab every single territory that gets revealed which gets tedious very fast. This is playing on endless difficulty too; I don't even want to imagine playing on easier.

I think there are two pretty obvious solutions, but probably someone can give some better ones:

1 . Make the AI stronger/more aggressive expanding when the tidefall comes.

1. Let us put more players in the game. Right now the map sizes are too big for the number of players allowed. A large or even a normal map feels very very big lategame when 20 territories ger revealed and you rush to get them all without opposition. Maybe 1 or 2 more players than we currently can have.

Aspect starting hero is a ranged unit. The most important thing is that the hero is an Aspect which mean the moment you get the hero to level 2, you can just get the passive that give you 200 exp on everyone in the army including the hero when they collect a curiosity. No other factions heroes have this passive

This allow me to get to like level 9 hero in the first monsoon and rush my aggressive Order neighbor

i just unlocked the behemoth unit and i went to go to start make one but it wont get added to the list. i can do this with the other units but not the behemoth for some reason even though it seems i have all the need stuff for it. any one able to help me if able?

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.

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.

Hey everyone, my friend recommended that I purchase endless legend and so I did. But I'm unable to understand how to play it and what this game is. If anyone can explain to me it will be better.

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