As the ravening shitbeetles of the Edwinphage overran the coral fortifications of the neighbouring Aspect kingdom, filling the air with the moist crunch of mandible on polyp, it occurred to me that I don’t feel as much like a horrible doomsday cockroach as I should. We’ll circle back to that feeling. Endless Legend 2 launches into early access on 22nd September, and I’ve now spent around 20 hours with it. I’ve previously praised its new/reborn factions and retreating ocean mechanic, and I plan to carry on praising, but there are definitely some more comprehensive issues I’d love Amplitude to address as this splendid scarab of a turn-based strategy game rumbles toward 1.0.
First, the Good Stuff, and if you’ll forgive me, something of an overview, because with a game this fiddly it helps to get your legs under you. Endless Legend 2 sees a bunch of different species vying for control of a flooded world that is mysteriously draining dry. Broadly, it works like this: you start with one city and slowly expand it, while sending out named heroes and generic units to explore, gather resources, and complete itty-bitty quests in return for more resources.
The hexagonal map consists of regions that can be painted your colour by building a settlement, and there are plentiful villages of minor factions that can be wrecked or pacified to get rid of inconvenient roaming armies and add new unit types to your roster. There are five basic resources. Production is for building, and Food is for population growth (which then lets you generate other resources faster). Influence is primarily for expanding cities, bringing new hexagons inside the curtain wall for development. Science is for research, and Dust is magic money used to instantly complete construction projects, among other things.
These basics unfold according to a gently regimented tech tree of unlockable ages, encompassing maybe 10 techs each, with the option to circle back to earlier ages and polish off any techs you skipped. For higher-tech units, you’ll also need rare goods like Titanium, which have to be tracked down and mined or traded for. It’s a statelier, more concise progression structure than you’ll find in a lot of 4X strategy sims. Combine this focus with the emphasis on questing heroes, and Endless Legend 2 at times resembles an RPG with a town-building component.
Each army has a unit cap, which makes military victory less about stacking up units, and more about levelling them up and (in the case of heroes) bolstering their stats with gear and new abilities. Your forces generally feel more like a loose collection of Final Fantasy parties than an army. The turn-based battle system, meanwhile, is both a welcome advance on the original game’s awkward pseudo real-time approach, and quite routine in itself. It plays out on the world map, rather than distinct battle maps, and is governed by rock-paper-scissors relationships and rudimentary terrain tactics such as occupying forests for increased defence, or locking down chokepoints.
Little of the above will shock you if you’ve played the first Endless Legend. Tidefalls, on the other hand, might catch you out. At semi-predictable intervals, the ocean retreats and the playable map expands, joining up islands into continents while exposing sunken treasures, fresh villages of minor factions (have they been holding their breath?) and dungeons that harbour the choicest relics. One benefit of the Tidefall mechanic is that you have regular incentives to change your strategy: this peninsula is now a land bridge and whoops, there’s a load of mad science lizards on the other side.
An associated thrill is trying to anticipate what might be exposed by the next tidefall, and plan for that contingency by, say, popping a settlement on an initially barren coastline. The presentation of the flooded world is crafty, a real demonstration of what a glossy technical makeover can do for a sequel: you can make out structures below the waves, and gauge the possibility of an emerging shortcut to a rival power’s heartlands.
Speaking of rival powers, the flooded world helps ensure that you won’t encounter too many opposing civilisations early on. I can’t give you an exact overview, and there’s a clear element of chance, but in all the games I’ve played, the majority of enemy civs have started out on different islands. In this way, Endless Legend 2 keeps a relatively firm grip on the transition between periods of exploration and discovery and periods of trade, diplomatic jockeying and open war.
Tidefalls aside, there are the monsoons, which reduce unit viewing range, but also spawn a fresh batch of collectible resources and some Dust-riddled megafauna who can be slain for juicy trophies. Monsoons sort of rewild your territories to initiate a second gold rush. As with Tidefalls, they bring a little unpredictability to the midgame, though you soon learn to exploit them by, for example, appointing city councillors with passive traits that kick in during the rainy season.
As the campaign unfolds, each faction’s initial spread of quests knit together into a core storyline that produces a set of possible ending goals, in addition to the usual 4X staples of murdering everybody, outproducing everybody, etcetera. I won’t spoil these, but suffice to say it’s another way of jolting you out of your rut after you’ve established an empire.
Now, how does choice of faction flesh out this already rather meaty skeleton? Endless Legend 2 starts in early access with a leaner selection than its predecessor, and perhaps a less chaotic one: the opening five (with one more to come before 1.0) are essentially tailored towards one of the generic 4X victory types. Within those broad strokes, however, each faction is an intoxicating abberation.
If you’re a Necrophage, for example, you won’t be engaging in much diplomacy, because you are an apocalypse ant. You’re geared to roll over the land unstoppably: each battle you win spawns a free handful of megamaggots, which can then be fed corpses to evolve them into hornets, acid-spitting mantids and behemothic centipedes. You don’t build cities in other regions, but sneaky burrows for fast travel that can be expanded into nests, extending the reach of your core city. The downside is that if your core city falls, you’ll find it very hard to recover.
By contrast, if you’re one of those mad science lizards, the Tahuk, you’ll be hyper-accelerating your research by transforming whole regions into glass, so as to very rapidly get hold of your snazziest ranged units and promptly splattergun your pushy bug neighbours. You can also build cute little Sauron towers on impassable ridges for either bonus boffin points or defensive death-ray purposes. And you can send your most embarrassing nerd-zealots, the Called, to labour for other empires while spying on their cities and generating extra influence abroad.
There’s loads to pluck and pick at here. So many different methods of topping the civ score table. So many ways of bursting through the woodwork of the generic victory conditions. I’ve been having a blast as the Necrophage, and am looking forward to getting to grips with the Tahuk and their hysterical labcoat nonsense. Nonetheless, I do find Endless Legend 2 a little disappointing in places.
Probably the most important one, from the perspective of a 4X regular, is that I don’t think the AI has ever shown me a good fight as yet. Take the grim fate of my Aspect neighbours in the scenario from my first paragraph. A blithe and spiteful seapeople, the Aspect are Endless Legend 2’s diplomacy faction, able to field some resilient armies but better suited to wooing other civs by seeding their territories with Dust-rich coral, which acts as a surveillance network.
If you are an Aspect player, and you are parked next door to a burgeoning Necrophage hive, you need a plan B in the highly likely event that the creepy-crawlies aren’t up for talking things out – a sturdy military, powerful alliances, seriously ample bribes. My Aspect chums did not have a plan B, which is why they are now calcium carbonate soup in the bellies of some very large weevils. After declaring war – which requires the approval of your populace, and is much easier when your populace consists of ravenous insects – it took me fewer than 10 turns to annihilate them completely.
That could just be luck of the draw, rather than weak-kneed AI. I haven’t played nearly enough games to call it. I’m more comfortable making judgements about Endless Legend 2’s RPG quest elements and associated writing. Again, the factions are wonderfully dissimilar, but the shared 4X mechanics do poke through in places, and the quests and dialogue especially make me think of how most Star Trek aliens are just humans with dodgy tans and avant garde nosejobs.
As in Star Trek, much of that is likely a question of production cost. Amplitude are not a vast studio and have just gone independent, so it’s no surprise to run into some efficiences. Many of the Endless Legend 2 questlines are written vaguely enough that they could apply to any faction, give or take a proper noun. The factions also share many unexciting “+5%” technologies with interchangeable art and flavour text. You know the kind of thing: “Wheels Turn Better Than Squares” – Wheely McWheelson, Head Wheelwright of Wheelsville in the Epoch Of Wheeling And Dealing.
I don’t think it’s just about saving development resources, however. In general, the writing seems trapped both by a limp quest format that is basically about choosing between three reward payouts, and by the fact that every faction has a core storyline and a government structure consisting of named rulers, generals and heroes.
The Necrophage are supposed to be a heedless force of devastation, chewing through the map with no regard for both the individuals that comprise their horde and the cultural and biological nuance of their foes. In conversation, however, they are oddly… human. In one quest, my Necrophage queen praised the troops for masking up and wielding wooden batons to minimise the odds of contamination while visiting a burial site.
Wooden batons! I realise ants have surprisingly intricate quarantine protocols, but this doesn’t seem very Necrophagey to me. These aren’t UN peacekeepers. I thought the golden rule was to eat everything and make sense of it afterwards. On a similar note, I love that the Aspect are essentially a sentient ocean reef, with units that resemble bouncing barnacles and tufts of renegade seagrass. So why, then, do they partake in traditional character-based dialogue at all? They should be communicating by means of electrochemistry, dang it.
You could argue that these are necessary compromises in a game that doesn’t, in fact, want to be five wholly different strategy games devised by five different species, attempting to coexist. But imagine how interesting life would be if the writing pushed properly into New Weird territory, and discarded some of these tepid characterisations and frameworks in its pursuit of bizarre varieties of 4Xing.
I don’t think the Necrophage should have named characters at all. Or what if the Aspect didn’t have units, as such, and were instead a kind of encroaching terrain formation who flourish by attracting other lifeforms to serve as an indirect standing army? I suspect I’m succumbing to the kind of blue-sky thinking that leads to endless release delays, and prodding past what is desired or feasible in a 4X strategy game. Still, it’s early days for Endless Legend 2 and there is yet time to at least revisit the quest writing and tease out some of that moderately stifled strangeness.
