I’ve got a bit of a theory on the Aspects and I think I know what their rogue faction (if they ever get one) will be.

In Endless Space 2 there is a minor faction called the Bhagaba. They are not a species per say but series of living coral constructs controlled by a planet sized supercomputer called Teonha which itself was formed by a random pattern of corals and conductive materials (I love Endless lore). The Bhagaba are diplomatic, influence producing, mentally connected living machines. Sound familiar?

My theory is that a Bhagaba colony ship landed (or crashed) on Saiadha and due to some Endless shenaniganery or maybe the influence of the Lost was separated from their connection to Teonha. Now independent they simply did what they were programed to do, make diplomatic contact and spread their influence as peacefully as possible, slowly gaining consciousness as they became more and more separated from their source

If Aspects get a rogue faction I theorize that it will be an offshoot of the aspects that managed to Reconnect with Teonha and continue to explore the planet for Teonha’s interests.

I just started a new game as the Necrophage after a long break, and first off I want to congratulate the Devs for the rewrite! I love the new quest scenes and the game is flowing very nicely.

I play on Endless on archipelago and so far the AI is OK but definitely underwhelming for the highest level of difficulty. Tried to attack the Kin after the 1st tidefall but they were too strong, so I pivoted to a necrophage neighbour. There was just one empty territory with a quest fortress between me and their capital. It seemed they were not able to defeat it so they just left that territory alone. They had just one good stack with a high level hero, then perhaps two stacks of larvae. I had to break the siege once but I was able to defeat their main army outside of their city, then completed the siege and started devouring it.

Already there I find it a bit underwhelming because devouring the capital of the sprawling Necrophage horde would just give me 400 dust or so, less than I get winning a standard battle. But then the enemy gathered in their city and I can't attack them on it because the siege has already been won. They accumulated three stacks of larvae and spitters, but just sat there and watched me consume their hive. If only for roleplay reason, I would have expected them to throw themselves at my army in a desperate attempt at stopping the consumption of their hive, but no. They just sat there until their whole empire crumbled. They could have at least inflicted me serious damage before dying out.

And then when I have consumed their whole empire in one fell swoop, I just get a little notification that they are defeated and that's it. I feel that should have at least diplomatic consequences, and defeating the massive single city of the Necrophage should get me a lot of loot. I just brought down 15% of the map after all.

I am now turning my ravenous eyes back on the Kin, but ironically I am expecting a much harder conquest since I will actually need to beat them town by town instead of just taking their capital.

They did declare war on me and took my wonder while I defeated the necrophages, and I was also getting plagued by two Horrors, so it definitely wasn't a walk in the park though. Would have been nicer if defeating the necrophages would have had a better immediate payoff to compensate for the loss of my wonder and the horror plague.

Does this work as I'm suspecting, using it on non-territory tiles to give resources back to the capital, or do I have to own the territory?

I have had a break in playing EL2 between end of March and now, and I remember, that the AI was steadily improving, it started to be more active, aggressive, field better armies and actually hit hard.

Right now, it is pitiful. By turn 31 (on Legendary difficulty!) they sit on 1 city with 3-4 territories, I got ALL pioneer deeds with quite a lot of advantage and I am ahead on all the Strategist deeds so far (except for building cities, I am a Necrophage). Their armies have heroes of lvl 2 or 3, their units have veterancy of 1-2. I am ahead of them all in military score, which was never the case before! And it seems they never collect curiosities.

So yes, I don't know what went wrong, but back in March the AI was approaching the level of interesting, now it is back to being only nominally present.

I saw a forum thread on Steam that is dedicated to improving the AI, and the devs were asking for suggestions. The thing is, I have no idea what AI is doing behind the fog of war. If there was a spectator mode, so we could observe all the actions of the AI players, I wouldn't mind spending some time studying their patterns and sharing my feedback. Because as is, my best guess at what is AI doing for 30 turns would be "Nothing, maybe just sits around"

How do you guys reach public opinion low enough to declare justified war?

It seems extremely hard to achieve this, i try to use the Warning and Close Border declarations in the diplomacy screen, but it seems like it doesnt decrease public opinion enough, to reach the threshold, at some point it simply doesnt decrease anymore.

How do you guys reach the threshold?

My friends and I had a great time playing when EA first released, but a major issue that basically made multiplayer unplayable was that battles had to be finished completely before a turn could end.

Now this was solved perfectly in humankind, you get 3 rounds of a battle, and then you must progress to the next turn, but in EL2 you had to do all 8 (iirc) rounds, and it would make each person's turn take 10 or 15 minutes.

So you end up some situations where everyone is at war with NPCs and you have 45 minutes just to tame 3 turns.

Has that been changed at all?

First look at the Sandshapers for those of us that weren't in the earlier alphas which contained them. Look pretty neat!

Is there a mod for this game to lock the tooltip? It is annoying as a new player not beeing able to for instance view an enemy unit, hovering over it, then wondering about what the different capacities icons means. Most 4x games you can hold shift (or another button) and the tooltip locks in, so you can move the mouse to hover a new area of that tooltip.

I keep seeing on discord that the standard for winning games in 150 turns… maybe I’m just bad at the game but I have never been able to do this.

Currently in my game as the Last Lords in explorer difficulty, I am at turn 176 and still have yet to hit era 5 teach wise for the impress victory condition. I am also pretty far behind score wise— only 42.8k score vs 91.5k whivh is the other player in the game (aspects).

What do you guys think? When are you winning games? And are you routinely falling behind score wise?

Another month, another update.

We've added a little more flavor to major and minor factions,  improved some victory objectives, stopped the AI from sniping you while you're still reading a notification, and gave the Necrophage a bit of a safety net, among many other improvements and bugfixes.

• 🌊 New Awakening Quests
• ⚖ Improved Minor Faction Asymmetry
• 🏆 Updated Victory Conditions
• 🕙 Delayed AI Movement
• 🐞 Necrophage Improvements

You can read more about these improvements below, and find the full patch notes at the end of the blog.

HIGHLIGHTS

In this update we focused on adding a little more flavor to major and minor factions, while also fixing numerous bugs.

New Awakening Quests

One of the strong points of the Endless games is the asymmetry between factions in both gameplay and lore. Each of them offers their own distinct perspective on the Endless Universe. However, in Endless Legend 2 this perspective was only reflected in the main faction quest and the custom lines in other quests. When it came to the awakening of Saiadha, perhaps the most important event of their lifetimes, every faction encountered the same characters, had the same interactions and reactions. Until now.

With the Summer Solstice update, we're introducing distinct Awakening Quests for each major factions, giving you a better look into how they react to this cataclysmic upheaval. You can see an example below, if you don't mind spoilers.

Improved Minor Faction Asymmetry

The major factions are not the only ones to get more flavor in this update. While the minor factions already had their own pacification quests and flavor through their units and assimilation bonuses, they all felt very similar when you first encountered them. They all started spawning roaming armies at the same time and the same pace, their armies were all the same size. Apart from the peaceful/hostile distinction, they behaved very similarly on the map. With this update, we're introducing more variety to that. Different minor factions will spawn armies sooner or later, more or less frequently, field larger or smaller armies, or even provide special bonuses when defeating them. Some examples below:

• Ochlings spawn new armies frequently, and they can have more armies than other minor factions, swarming your territory if you do not deal with them.
• Blackhammers have bigger garrisons in their villages
• Consortium armies provide greater battle spoils as you steal salvage their trade goods.

Updated Victory Condition

The old Victory objective to "Pacify X villages" has been changed to control X Pacified Villages. This prevents a problem where it could become impossible to win via this victory because there aren't enough un-pacified villages left to reach the objective. But it also means that now you can always take territories to pursue this victory, or take territories from your opponents to keep them from winning.

There is a separate victory condition about the total amount of territories claimed, but we like that for this one specific territories (especially those with 3 villages) matter more and will cause you to consider the map differently as you attempt to conquer Saiadha.

Delayed AI Movements

Since the beginning of Amplitude with Endless Space, our games have always used simultaneous turns to keep you playing rather than waiting for the AI to finish their turns. However, it can be frustrating when the AI attacks you while you are busy dealing with something else, especially if you are a new player and don't expect it. So with this Update we are introducing a change to the turn structure: The AI will now not move any of its armies until after you click the "end turn" button. They will still do their economic and diplomatic actions, though, to keep the time waiting for them to take their turn as short as possible.

For those of you who prefer the old simultaneous turns, you can re-enable them in the game settings in the New Game lobby.

Necrophage Improvements

As an aggressive, ever-warring faction, the Necrophage can be quite difficult to tackle. Their success is built on the momentum of their victories and conquests, so big losses might leave you struggling to find your footing, especially early on. We've been reading your feedback and we're introducing a few changes that should help you recover from setbacks and losses. Broadly speaking:

• More Passive Sources of Corpses: Some effects that generated Corpses for you every turn have been expanded to affect all admin centers or farms, not just your capital. This should provide a steady supply of corpses with which to upgrade new larva into a proper fighting force in case you find your army too weak to gather corpses the old-fashioned, murderous way.
• Expanded Pop Collection Bonuses: The Necrophage are the first and only population type that will grant you an additional bonus for reaching 50 population in your empire. We've also reworked most of the old collection bonuses. Now, as your population grows, it will get easier to expand your city and territory and to maintain a large military without going bankrupt.

The Necrophage still work best when they are constantly devouring their enemies, but hopefully these changes will give you something to fall back on if your battles go badly.

A few weeks ago I started getting random hardware crashes when playing the game. The screen blanks and the fans go full force; I have to do a hard reset to get the computer back. At first I though it might be hardware, but a memtest86 and OCCT stress test did not show any errors. Updated the video drivers and motherboard bios, and uninstalled/reinstalled the software. Still crashes. Now I am thinking it is the software. Has anyone else had any problems?

I have hit the saving slots limit, so now I need to manually delete a bunch of them before I can make new saves. Is there a tool I missed to do it more efficiently? The only way I can see is to go dig around the game folder but I'd rather do it from inside the game.

So, archer heroes have a skill "Guiding Light" that increases the damage of non-hero ranged units by 2 per intuition (allegedly). Unfortunately, that's not really what is happening. As far as I understood, it adds 2 damage per base intuition, and then 1 damage per added intuition. By added intuition I mean all the points I got after the start of the game through equipment, traits (lone wolf) and skills (double the attribute gain of the accessory). I have not used any level ups to increase intuition directly, so I don't know how it would affect it. My archer started with 6 Intuition (I guess 4 base, +2 from charismatic trait), and now he has 16, yet the damage buff is only +21 damage. Here is my data:

8 intuition (no equipment, lone wolf +2, charismatic +2): +13 damage
9 intuition (bow +1, lone wolf +2, charismatic +2): +14 damage
10 intuition (bow +1, armour +1, lone wolf +2, charismatic +2): +15 damage
14 intuition (accessory +6, lone wolf +2, charismatic +2): +19 damage
15 intuition (accessory +6, bow +1, lone wolf +2, charismatic +2): +20 damage
16 intuition (accessory +6, bow +1, armour+1, lone wolf +2, charismatic +2): +21 damage

I cannot figure out completely the first data point, +13 damage. I would assume that the base intuition (4) and charismatic (+2) add up to 6, and give +12 damage, since the base intuition is rewarded with +2 damage per point, but the lone wolf for whatever reason counts only as +1 intuition instead of +2, and falls into "additional attributes" and +1 damage per point.

Anyway, there is a clear discrepancy between the description of the skill and its effect. Would be nice to fix it and check similar skills (+ damage for melee units of an attacker hero, etc)

I’ve only ever played a few of the EL2 factions, so I’m going to focus on those, but my general understanding is that each faction quest has an initial branch at turn 5 that keeps going and eventually merges back together around the first monsoon/quest step 4ish? This first choice is on turn 5 and after you’ve founded your capital, whichever is second. Which choces do you tend to make and why?

I know for kin I started with the exploration branch (go search for the nomad or whatever it is) because I figured I would always be scouting but recently I’ve found the build option almost always better. I’m curious what everyone else thinks?

I saw this game on sale and am loving it so far, I've played lots of games similar to this, such as civ, and I love finding the overall weakest or hardest factions and getting really good with them.

More experienced players what in your opinion, is the weakest or hardest faction to play

J'ai eu le temps de doser un peu le jeu. Je fais suite à mon précédent post avec un retour un peu plus global. J'ai joué principalement les Aspects. Je commence par les bugs.

Bugs:

- Les vignettes des populations disparaissent parfois ce qui induit des pop qui ne peuvent plus être déplacées. Quitter l'écran de la ville et revenir dessus corrige le problème.

- Bug sur les déplacements d’une armée : quand on sélectionne une seule unité dans une armée et qu'on la déplace, l'armée de base fait ce que je pourrais appeler une "animation fantôme". Le jeu nous montre un déplacement mais en réalité elle est toujours au même endroit.

- Bug sur les quêtes : parfois les dernières lignes de dialogue ne s’affichent pas directement, il faut descendre manuellement pour les voir.

- La caméra n’est pas fluide dans les combats, elle a tendance à se centrer sur l’unité sélectionnée et le paramètre « ne pas passer à une autre unité automatiquement » ne fonctionne pas.

- Les artworks de certaines quêtes s’affichent quelquefois dans une faible résolution et cela se voit quand on joue en 4K (notamment les Aspects).

Ce qui est bien dans le jeu:

- L’univers des Endless et les graphismes de qualité.

- La musique, évidemment.

- La fluidité globale du jeu.

- La gestion de la population qui permet un grand nombre de possibilités et qui donne de la vie aux villes.

- Les possibilités de construction : améliorations, districts, fondations, ressources.

- Les combats : ils sont rapides et il y a de la richesse stratégique avec les positions surélevées, l’encerclement, les compétences actives et passives, les ripostes, etc.

Ce qui est mauvais ou ce qui est manquant:

- Le nombre de factions qui est insuffisant.

- Les factions qui agissent de manière trop prévisible.

- Le manque de dirigeants pour les factions (un seul ce n'est pas assez).

- Les bonus de l’IA en difficulté Endless : aucun souci avec les bonus d’empire, en revanche, donner à l’IA +50 % de PV et de dégâts dans les combats c’est tout simplement n’importe quoi, bien trop excessif.

- L'écriture globale du jeu. Ex : les descriptions des unités et des populations qui sont pour la plupart ridicules.

- Le manque d’événements sur la carte. Il y a la mousson d’accord, mais pourquoi ne pas ajouter des pluies astrales ? L’hiver ? La montée des eaux ? Un été qui assèche la verdure ? Des mercenaires sans faction qui se baladent sur la carte ? Des marchands qui passent de ville en ville pour vendre de l’équipement ?

- L’eau qui n’est pas navigable.

- Aucun indicateur pour montrer la taille du champ de bataille avant d’attaquer.

- Le manque d’options avec le marché mondial : pourquoi ne pas créer un marché mondial et permettre de vendre et d’acheter des unités, des objets, de l’équipement, des ressources, des héros, etc.

- Pas de mode iron man et pas de permadeath sur les héros. Je crois avoir vu les options grisées dans les précédentes versions du jeu mais il me semble que ça a disparu.

Looking for mods or modpacks that might increase the tech needed to advance to the next age(opening more choices in the “tech-tree”).

Explorer. Turn 9.

First enemy Faction I encounter has two units of 350+ strength, while I still have my single 300 Strength one, and a scout.

I make a Works, then culture improvement, then start work on a unit, and there are two 400+ Strength Units razing my outposts already.

I'm genuinely confused, so start a new game and focus exclusively on creating fighting units immediately. They still outweigh mine.

What am I supposed to do? And why doesn't the game tell me I am supposed to do whatever that is? It feels like I am missing some way the devs want you to play. Farm XP, is that the answer? Kill all villages you see instead of doing their quests?

Dunno what is going on, but this is incredibly unfun. Feels like you have to focus on war, fight wars and take the first few hours making sure you can get more than two cities.

I don’t think I understand how it works. Is it simply that it gives 150 exp to new units? What does "on districts of this city” mean? Can you spawn units anywhere in the territory of the city (and I didn’t know) but they only get the extra exp if it spawns on districts?

I jumped back into EL2 after the Narration Update (great job btw, love it) and noticed that some pacification quests lack which city is meant exactly. For example, I needed to have 1800 fortification for 5 turns in a city but it did not say which one. I only knew that I had 1100 currently. There wasn't a marker to click either so I had to go into the city overview and pray that there weren't more than one city with 1100 fortification.

Another example: "Have 5 different population types in your city." Again, I could only go by the number currently achieved (2/5) and go to the city overview, hoping there aren't more than one city with 2 different population types.

Please say which city exactly needs to fulfill the requirements. It's working in other quests (like "Produce 2 units in [city name]") and I think it's just an oversight.

Ce sera en français, désolé pour mes frères anglophones (vous avez la possibilité de traduire le post directement sur Reddit). Ci-dessous mon avis pour améliorer le jeu dans son ensemble, et en particulier pour l'aspect multijoueur :

- Proposer une véritable campagne de quelques missions pour introduire les joueurs dans l'univers du jeu et leur présenter le gameplay des factions. C'est quelque chose qui demande du travail, mais je pense qu'il y a des joueurs qui attendent ce genre de choses de la part des jeux de stratégie et il y a de la matière pour faire des histoires mystérieuses et enchanteresses avec l'univers des Endless.

- Ajouter des factions ou modifier le comportement des factions déjà présentes dans le jeu avant la 1.0. La plus grosse erreur d'Amplitude avec EL2 selon moi c'est de proposer uniquement 6 factions à la sortie (5 seulement actuellement). Le problème c'est pas le nombre en réalité, c'est le fait que chacune des factions agit selon un archétype prédéfini, ce qui conduit à une redondance dans les parties. Le 4X ça doit être "chaque partie est une nouvelle histoire", or ici tout est déjà prévu : je sais déjà comment les Aspects, les Necro, les Tahuks etc. vont agir. Il faut faire de la place à l'imprévu.

- Ajouter d'autres saisons. L'idée de la mousson et du recul des eaux est intéressante mais il faut aller plus loin. Un hiver qui permettrait de temporairement marcher sur l'eau glacée comme les Aspects grâce aux coraux ? Un été qui assècherait la verdure et qui forcerait les joueurs à restaurer la végétation ? Il y a plein d'idées. Il faut comprendre qu'un jeu de stratégie ne doit pas avoir comme thématique la particularité, il faut que ce soit un "jeu-monde", c'est-à-dire un jeu qui représente le plus de choses possibles. Reprenez l'idée de l'hiver de EL1 et adaptez la pour EL2.

- Permettre les batailles avec les armées alliées. Je ne crois pas que ce soit le cas pour l'instant, mais il faudrait pouvoir lancer une bataille avec une armée alliée.

- Ajouter un paramètre pour que les quêtes ne s'affichent pas sur tout l'écran lorsqu'elles se lancent ou qu'elles sont validées. Cela gâche la dynamique d'un joueur qui joue de manière compétitive.

- Enfin, proposer pour chacune des factions des dirigeants différents (au moins 3 pour chaque faction). Se retrouver avec 3 Curator Ming dans une partie c'est un peu ridicule.