📅 2025
It was a big year for Amplitude Studios.
We went independent. Going independent is terrifying, so it was great to see the response and excitement from the Amplified event in January of 2025 (the most viewed one in Amplitude’s history) where ENDLESS Legend 2 was announced.
After the announcement we held an Insider’s Program and went into Early Access! Thank you for joining us for this journey. The steam reviews and words of support are very appreciated. As are the ideas, bugs reports, feedback, hot sauces and strange Brazilian moonshine (I’m not sure how the player got that through customs and into France. It was a bottle of booze with no label on it, but it was good).
Strategy gamers have also seen the release of Demos, Early Access or full versions of Civilization VII, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, Elemental: Reforged, Europa Universalis V, Anno 117: Pax Romana, and many more in 2025. It is a good time to be a strategy gamer.
But our focus is on ENDLESS Legend 2 and next update. It is currently available on PTB, which you can access on Steam in the public-test-build-new branch. Let’s talk about the goals for the update.
🎭 Creating Midgame Friction
We want to increase the friction between players. The early game feels good, but then you fall into this balanced state where there is little external pressure to react to. The player is left to pursue his own goals freely. We want more conflict here. Players should want to pursue their own goals but be pushed off their strategy (fairly) by the actions of the world and other players.
There are four large changes happening in this update to help with this:
Increased Territory Size
There are now about 30% less territories in the world. Bigger, more interesting territories now create more borders between nations and more strategic placement. It also reduces the number of Minor Factions in the world so they become more important.
Improved Empire Placement
Along with the larger territories we have also changed the way empires are placed. Now, after we generate the map, we separate players, so you are much less likely to end up with another empire a territory or two away. Allowing each player to settle and establish itself leads to more interesting interactions when you encounter them.
Diplomacy Improvements
A big part of the static nature of the midgame was that relations with the AI tend to be created in the early game and never change throughout. Treaties last forever so any signed in the first 50 turns can last for the entire game. Because of that, you have less interactions after you accept them (“Yes Aspects, we know you want to share your Coral with us!”) and failing to reward maintaining diplomacy because there isn’t much more to gain from it.
We have two changes to improve that. First, some treaties have durations. Since they expire you need to decide if you want to reestablish them or let them go. Reestablishing them costs Influence and that cost is modified by Public Opinion. Which brings us to the other change, we have added the ability to Compliment and Insult other players to allow you to manipulate public opinion and invest in relationships you want to grow, or sow seeds for future war.
The risk here is that having to reestablish treaties may feel tedious.
We need feedback on the change to help set the durations. Are they too short? Do you find compliments and insults handy in helping to manage the diplomatic game? Does the AI feel more involved in your game?
Camp Rebalance
All camps provide Dust income, and we halved the Influence scaling cost to build new camps. The goal here is to make sure that you always want more territory. Prior to this change players would grow to a size where they have the production and resources they wanted and then stop. The Influence cost became prohibitive, and they didn’t want to expend resources defending the extra territories. The AI comes to the same conclusion and stops expanding as well.
With this change players should always want more territory. It’s more worthwhile to invest in and defend territories, and more rewarding to take them. At least, that’s the concept.
Let us know if it changes your behavior or if more is needed.
👷♂️ New Construction Flow
Previously you selected a place in the world to place a district and then pick the district. That is being changed in this month’s update to allow you to select the district first and then decide where to place it.
This more closely matches the player’s internal decision process. Players don’t typically think “I want something here, what is the best district to put there?”. They think “I want to build a lab, where is the best place to put it?”
Since you pick the district first, you get to see all available districts. This helps highlight special districts like Extractors or upgrades to Minor Faction villages that players may miss because they aren’t in the immediate viewing area.
Even more importantly we can now recommend district placement since the game knows which district you are considering. In this screenshot there are three available locations for the Keep, but only 1 is recommended (the game thinks its best on the most southern locations with the thumbs up icon). It is recommended there because it will boost the yields on the adjacent Influence district. By looking around you can review other options and make your own choice. You can even see an arrow pointing from the tile being considered to the tile it will upgrade with the changed yields shown on the upgraded tile so it is so more clear than the prior version.
It’s a lot of information. But it’s very useful for easily seeing where you should seriously consider placing districts and gives a feel for adjacency and upgrade bonuses without requiring mental math.
We also know that players with a lot of hours may be a little frustrated that clicking on the terrain to place a district doesn’t work anymore. It’s an ingrained habit that we also had to break internally. We talked about allowing it to work both ways, but that quickly revolved into complexity and confusing flow. We are planning to add pins to un-upgraded resources to help it clearer that you can upgrade them, and when you click the pin we will auto-queue the extractor.
🤼♂️ Multiplayer
Thank you to everyone who played multiplayer games on the last updates PTB (except for those of you that played and destroyed me!). We were able to find and catch a lot of bugs and have now added it to the main game, though still with a Beta label on it. We will continue to monitor and fix issues that come up and we’ve added some additional logging for issues that have been difficult to track down.
Here you see the percentage of games that have a desync somewhere during the game. In almost all cases these have been easy enough to reconnect, but still frustrating. And seeing it as high as it was last month (~80% of games would desync once during play) was why we kept it on the test build and didn’t add it to main. Now our desyncs are much rarer with most games never desyncing. But it still isn’t good enough, so we are working on improving it to get those numbers down.
🥩 Necrophage Improvements + Rebalance
The Necrophage have been revamped to emphasize their strange, organic city and to provide more interesting city decisions. As well as adding more options for gaining and using corpses (not a sentence I ever thought I would type).
You can read more about it here 👇
Lichenid: “Man, the new PTB Nectos are super fun – I have no idea if the new feedholes make devour the land worthwhile now, but I love eating my "allies" anomalies too much to stop (It does feel a little unfair that I can access Savage Behemoths and Infestors so early though 😅)”
Amberhawk: “Also, I love now just setting up an outpost early game by an enemies capital and building two tails side by side to kill any aiding army's while I siege the city down.”
We fully expected the Necrophage to be the least played faction. They are in the game primarily to be fun to play against. But players are having fun trying the latest changes and they are our most played faction on EA3.
🐱🏍 Game Speeds
Game speeds have been added so you are welcome to adjust to your personal preference. Please let us know if it’s too slow, or too fast at the extreme settings. We will be adjusting them based on feedback but we wanted to get them out for testing and so you could use them in multiplayer.
🖋 Writing
Pacification Quests
All of the pacification quests have been redone. These are the most common events/quests you encounter and previously they required 7-9 clicks to get through. That may be okay the first time you go through them, but it got very old, very quick on replays.
So we switched to a more ENDLESS Legend 1 style with a large narrator block describing the scene and the situation. Then you get one comment from the minor faction elder and one from your character before presenting the quest and objective.
We have also gone through all of these quests and changed up the dialog based on which faction you are playing so it’s not exactly the same if you do it as the Aspects, compared to the Last Lords, etc. The world knows who you are and reacts to it.
Filtered Quests and Events
We also found that some events just don’t make sense for some factions to get. The Last Lords shouldn’t care about famine, and the Necrophage don’t care about building a memorial to a lost elder. They have all been reviewed and factions are blocked from receiving events that don’t make sense. It may not be perfect so please let us know if you see an event that doesn’t seem to fit the faction you are playing as.
Less Frequent Quests and Events
In general we are reducing the amount of event popups. I did some playtesting on ENDLESS Legend 1 and had 3 events in the first 20 turns. ENDLESS Legend 2 has a lot more events going on, and it can be distracting. Our goal is that the narrative be a reward, that it feels like a special moment, but that’s hard to do when it is so frequent.
Disable Optional Events
For players who truly dislike quests and events we have added a setting to Disable Option Events and Quests. This won’t disable your faction quest, victory events or pacification quests. But it will disable any optional content like companion events and councilor events.
🤖 AI Progress
We are going to explore some analytics. It’s important to remember that these are from real player games. Because of that, there is a survivor bias in these results. If players are losing badly they tend to quit their game, but the AI can’t do that. The longer the game goes on, the more Human player dominated games tend to last, which makes the AI look less effective than it actually is.
That understood, hello my fellow strategy nerds. Let’s view some charts!
[Score per Turn by the AI in different Builds]
The first shows the difference between the original September EA build (Red), October build (Blue), November build (brown) and the December PTB in Green comparing Score for the AI. It’s good to see steady improvement here.
[Score per Turn by the AI on different Difficulitie[/i]s]
Here we are comparing the AI on score for each difficulty level where the lowest line is the easiest difficulty and the top is ENDLESS, exactly as you would expect. Again, it’s nice to see that the difficulty levels are working.
Which leads us into the details of why the AI is losing to Humans, or at least understanding how they are approaching the game differently. Pulling the Dust income per turn they are fairly similar in the early to mid- game, and Influence income is also similar.
But there are differences.
The Difference between AI and Humans
[AI vs Huma0 in Science generated per Turn across the first 100 Turns]
Humans love Science 💡
This chart shows the amount of Research being generated per turn for Humans (Tiel line) and the AI (Gray lines). Issac Asmov lied to us, the AI doesn’t care for technology that much. It’s having an issue valuing the long-term gains of techs vs the short-term gains of other investments.
Humans do not have that problem and they are all about long term investment until its time to switch gears and crush their enemies. I also think this is why AI Dust and Influence production are inline with Humans until the midgame where humans begin to outpace the AI. I don’t think it’s because Humans are investing more in Dust and Influence, I think it’s because the Humans have a tech advantage that is beginning to payoff in other areas.
[AI vs Human in the Number of Units across the first 100 Turns]
The AI has its preferred area of investment too. And it turns out the Terminator is the correct predictor. The AI really likes making units. This is a good short term investment, but fills production queues and takes Dust maintenance.
If the AI were more aggressive with these units, or used them to explore (which it does better than Humans) and claim territories (now that there is better reward for doing that) it may payoff. Or at least force the player to consider the consequences of long term investments that leave him vulnerable to Necrophage teeth, Kin glowing swords and Aspect… paint brushes? Colorful sashes? Whatever the Aspects fight with.
🤹♂️ What’s Next?
This is our last major update of 2025. We are excited to start fresh in 2026 with new and updated features. Some of the ones I’m most excited for:
Public Opinion Rebalance
This may sound small, but it is an important and impactful change. In this month’s update we added Insults and Compliments to allow players to start playing with Public Opinion. The next step is to put a lot more pressure on changing opinions. Relationships that sour over time if they aren’t maintained. Growing pressure from borders, threat, tensions and victory paths. Different faction personalities with different source s of diplomatic conflict. Essentially a host of game specific diplomacy pressure to reward players who are able to maintain good relationships, and systems to make sure that isn’t always easy. What some people relate as an “AI” issue is that the diplomatic system isn’t providing enough pressure to make the AI like or dislike you so they feel too static. Our goal is to change that.
Militia from Empire to City Level
I know this sounds like such a small change. Currently your technologies decide what militia are in your cities. Which means all your cities, ministries, outhouses, etc all have the same general defensive strength. As a defender you aren’t having to make hard choices between investing in yield improvements or defenses (fortifications are nice, but they just delay) and as an attacker you don’t have a variety of soft and hard targets, all targets are generally the same difficulty. So you might as well attack the capital, because it’s about the same difficulty as the outpost that was built last turn.
Instead, Militia will be determined by the fortification level of the city. So be aware of where you want to build military districts. And when you see a city with only a meager timber palisade around it, you know it’s ripe for conquest. You will now be able to go to war with enemies and weaken them by sacking cities and outposts, even if you don’t have the strength to take their capital. And you will need to make sure to protect your borders from enemy attacks if you haven’t invested in defense. Which is difficult in a world where the world changes as the game goes on.
Retaliation
Otherwise known as counterattack or riposte. The fact that units get to do some damage back to the first enemy that strikes them with a melee attack. I was anti-retaliation for a long time. To me it felt like a special ability that would help make some units feel different than others. But, we needed a way to apply some attrition damage from battles. It was too easy for armies to win without suffering any damage and therefor be able to steamroll through multiple battles. The player wasn’t offered an interesting risk/reward (we want the player to see his army getting weaker and have to make hard decisions about pulling back or pressing on) and would simply drive forward. This is one part toward fixing that.
Custom Factions
We are anxious to get custom factions into your hands and implementing lots of new traits that you can use to make the strange, broken faction of your dreams. In this area we care more about fun than balance. We will try to make sure the options are balanced as we can, but we aren’t removing a fun idea just because it causes a balance issue when paired with something else. That’s part of the fun, and we want to leave those extreme traits in for everyone to play with.
Endgame and ENDLESS Monsoon
There is a big change coming to the endgame and victory conditions. We are changing the way choosing your path works, so that it means more. You will always see some changes with the traits you gain as you select victory quest options in the December update. We will also be requiring you to achieve all of the objectives for a path to win instead of just one of them to make approaching them more interesting. And we are adding the ENDLESS Monsoon as an Armageddon type event the world falls into when the end of the game nears. A powerful creature will be unleashed, diplomacy becomes difficult and the world changes. It’s our way of saying, the end is here, time to win.
-- Derek Paxton,
Game Director
Do not hesitate to try all the changes that will arrive on the next Update!
Have a nice weekend 😊