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Beginning of an Endless Legend

Taking a look at the 4X genre today, we are beginning to see a move away from the same tried and true approach pioneered by The Civilization series. With a slew of innovative 4X games coming up, it’s easy to think that this was inevitable. But the modern trend of innovation started with Endless Legend. 

Endless Legend is set in a sci-fi/fantasy universe shared by Amplitude Studios other games: Endless Space, Endless Space 2, and Dungeons of the Endless. 

Endless Legend is a unique take on the 4X genre which innovated on the traditional formula in several key ways.

Building off the fundamentals laid down by the Civilization series Endless Legend retains the core gameplay loop of: building cities, exploring a randomly generated world, and exploiting resources.

Where Endless Legend differs from others is in its combat and the factions. Both of these changes Endless Legend does well. 

It can most easily be compared to games like Thea: The Awakening, Fallen Enchantress, or Age Of Wonders. Although with Endless Legend’s tie into the larger Endless universe this game features sci-fi elements far more than those games. 

Setting of Endless Legend

Endless Legend is set on the planet Auriga, which is about to undergo a freaking ice age. This ever-looming threat adds a core tension to the whole experience.

Yes, you’re trying to expand and dominate the other factions but you also have to prepare for an inevitable long winter.

Don’t worry though I’m sure everyone will survive just fine!

Long ago there was an ancient race called the Endless who used Auriga as a massive biological lab.

So some of the factions in Endless Legend are literally lab experiments. All the Endless on the planet were eventually destroyed in a war.

Winters are slowly becoming harsher and you’ll have to prepare for them since unit movement and production are reduced.

For most factions in Endless Legend, you don’t know exactly when winter will come but you do know a range of turns which gives you some idea how long you have to prepare. 

Each faction has a storyline with quests to complete as you advance in Endless Legend.

Gameplay

If you’ve played Civilization before you’ll understand what you’ll be doing here.

You’ll harvest four resources: Food, Industry, Science, and Dust.

Food will give you more workers to assign to work a city, more food means the faster the city grows.

Industry represents the level of production your city makes. The more production that you have the faster you can build units and buildings, which is pretty standard.

Science is for researching new technologies, more science means thee faster you will advance in tech but we’ll talk more about technologies later. 

Dust is something unique to the Endless series, it acts as a sort of currency for Endless Legend, allowing you to speed up production or buying things off the world market. 

You also accrue influence which affects how you conduct diplomacy with other factions.

You can negotiate trade deals, convince minor factions to join your benevolent empire, or plan your expansion.

Influence works well as a mechanic. Regulating the “empire-management” and diplomatic components of your empire in an interesting way.

The Empire Planning feature is also an important feature. Here you can set the “character” of your empire, giving it a definite focus.

The way it works is that you’ll spend influence to pull your empire in a certain direction. You will reap the associated bonuses with that particular “plan”.

This can dovetail nicely with the faction-specific bonuses and abilities. This system rewards you for planning ahead and thinking: what will my empire truly benefit from in the next ten turns.

Like most 4X games, you’ll collect these resources from the tiles surrounding your cities. So choosing a good spot before you settle down is important.

Cities grow to encompass more tiles as you build more buildings, increasing your overall production. An innovation that Civilization VI would later take from this game.

Cities cannot be built wherever you want but are limited to one per region. This is how Endless Legend avoids the annoying city-clustering of the Civilization series. This mechanic deeply influenced later 4X games like Age of Wonders: Planetfall, which is great to see.

It also means that when you settle in a specific region you have to choose your location carefully to best maximize its output and strategic value.

This could mean setting up your city on a choke point or so that you can take advantage of terrain.

In Endless Legend, each region also has Special Resources that are unique to it and can either grant new technologies, new weapons, or buffs to your empire.

You don’t necessarily need to extract the special resources to get them since each region is also populated by one to three minor faction’s villages.

You can complete a quest or subjugate them to get these resources. Then, you can attempt to assimilate them which will give your empire some passive buffs and allow you access to their unit roster. 

All this makes exploring in Endless Legend rewarding and challenging. Those minor factions can attack your explorers before you get a chance to parlay with them, or you could discover that new resource you needed.

It also constantly forces you to expand and interact with the other players in the world. If you turtle too hard you’ll be missing out on all those sweet resources and bonus troops.

Factions

Factions are one of the best aspects of Endless Legend. Each has its own completely unique units, style, and mechanics (well except for the Mezari who are just a reskin).

What makes it stand out is not just their uniqueness but how weird and different each faction is. Let’s go through what each faction brings to the table.

The Vaulters are the most vanilla brand of human and they’re also the faction that most people will choose first. They’re overall aesthetic makes them look like Fantasy space marines which turned me off at first.

Until I found out they were actually Space prisoners who had crash-landed on this plant and were forced to live underground. Some very Warhammer-ish vibes here.

The Wild Walkers are another great faction for new players, they’re basically wood elves who love trees and nature. When they settle on or near a forest tile they get a massive boost to production. Units stationed in forests will also get a boost to their defense in combat.

Their ability to spawn a lot of units using the production bonuses can be annoying when playing against them. But makes them a good faction for those just learning how to play.

The Ardent Mages are a group of near-immortal sorcerers who use magic to buff their cities with magical pillars and such gizmos.

They can use their magic to increase troop movement or cast spells in battle (Combat in Endless Legend is interesting, we’ll talk about it later). 

The Broken Lords are a group of Dust vampires who don’t consume any food, instead, their buildings and buffs focus almost entirely on producing as much Dust as possible.

This is balanced out by having to buy workers with Dust instead of them being spawned through food production. You need to spend Dust for almost everything which makes acquiring it your main priority throughout Endless Legend.

Even healing units can’t be done without paying for Dust. 

This means the Broken Lords are all about scale. You won’t need to wait to build up your settlements if you have the money on hand. You also are less affected by the winter since you don’t need any food.  

One drawback of these Dust lovers is that if you get a map without huge quantities of Dust you can be screwed out of a good game. Whereas if you find huge Dust reserves just near you Endless Legend becomes insanely easy. 

The Roving Clan are the bankers, money traders, and financiers of the world’s market. Anytime someone buys something off the market you get a cut.

It’s great to see that Amplitude thought about how these factions would actually live together in the world. Most games would just have a generic abstract world market but, no, they thought about this. These are the actual merchants doing all the trading, it’s great.

All their troops are mounted since they’re supposed to be nomadic traders. They can also choose to ban any faction from the market-crushing that faction’s economy.

Beyond just controlling the markets they also can’t declare war on anyone, as that would be bad for business. But don’t worry there are strategies to get around this.

The really interesting part here is their ability to pack their cities up and move them around on massive beetles. This allows you to be extremely mobile and strategically relocate when necessary. 

The Cultists of the Eternal End, which are a group of robot-like fanatics obsessed with destroying the relics of the endless. Their design is so unique that they only are allowed to build one city for the whole game.

That city becomes massive over the course of the game. This does make you choose to settle down your most important choice during the game.

The Cultists expand by converting minor settlements to their faction. Allowing them to spawn units from that village and exploit the resources around it.

This makes their armies feel very Roman. With a core of infantry surrounded by various auxiliary forces drawn from your minor subjects. 

The Necrophages are a swarm of locust-like creatures who are the most warlike faction in Endless Legend. So much so that they can’t even use diplomacy.

These guys are pretty metal, you don’t get food from food tiles you get it from killing your enemies. This means you want to start raiding your neighbors as quickly as possible. 

Their design is so creepy and unique its amazing, they’re 100% my favorite faction aesthetically.

The Drakken are a diplomatic faction of dragons. They will know where all other nations start off on the map.

The Drakken don’t like going to war and other factions can spend influence to make peace with you and vice versa.

This can be overpowered if you rush an enemy city the turn you declare war then force them to make peace. 

The Mezari are space settlers who crash-landed on the planet. They share all the same units with the Vaulters so there’s not much to talk about there.

The DLCs for Endless Legend introduced 5 new factions, they are: 

Shadows DLC

The Forgotten are descendants of Vaulters who were abandoned out in the wastes and focus on sneaky manipulation and spying.

Every unit of the Forgotten is completely invisible to the enemy unless they have towers. This means that you can run circles around your foes. Instead of researching technology you either buy or steal it from other factions. 

You can spy on enemies by placing a hero inside the enemy city. Once you place the spy you can see everything going on within the city.

Then when your spy has been there for a few turns they can start sabotaging buildings or nearby units. 

Shifters DLC

The Allayi are a group of bat-people who are incredibly mobile. They are the natives of Auriga and will be incredibly proficient at using the terrain to their advantage.

They’re highly mobile units allow for swift assaults on the enemy, especially since they get massive buffs during the winter.

They can’t expand their cities like most other factions. Instead, they can only with a new resource called Pearls. These can be found in ruins around the map or anywhere during the winter. 

Tempest DLC

The Morgawr are an underwater race of telepathic squids. Their expansion features new ocean features such as the oceans being divided up into regions like the land is.

You can control these sea regions by taking over their respective fortresses, which act as minor villages. They can telepathically control neutral units which gives them a huge advantage since they only have one land unit. 

Playing them is really dependent on the map you get, since they are so water based. A map with weirdly shaped oceans or few oceans will not be good for them.

Inferno DLC

The Kapaku are lava goblins who come from a different planet and would like to burn down all of Auriga.

They thrive in magma and slowly try and terraform the planet to be more volcano-like. Their expansion added Dust eclipses and they can exploit these with their shamans in various ways. 

The Mykara are subterranean fungal warriors who are in an ancient battle with the Urkan who are stone beasts.

They can build fungal blooms on nearby resources that they don’t need to own. Your goal throughout Endless Legend will be to gain control of the Urkan which grants you the ability to cause targeted earthquakes throughout the map.   

Note that this is not all the DLC just the ones that introduced new factions. You can purchase all the DLC bundled with the base game in the Emperor Edition.

Combat in Endless Legend

Oh boy here we go, battles happen right on the map but are confined to an arena-like area. Unlike in Civilization, you’ll zoom into a tactical portion of the map where armies duke it out.

This makes combat an absolute chore to deal with. While deployment is somewhat tactical the rest of the combat system falls flat. 

Unit upgrades and items are an interesting part of Endless Legend that gives each unit its own unique flavor. You can use resources to craft new weapons or find them while exploring.

Beyond normal combat units are hero units that can also be equipped with different gear but have their own skill trees. Each hero class and faction have their own skill trees which vary up the combinations which you can have. 

Skill trees focus on more than just combat, allowing you to spec your heroes into being a good regional governor or powerful support unit.

It’s too bad that all of the skill tree buffs are passive which is so disappointing since the unit designs themselves are so interesting, and adding something to do could have made combat more interesting. 

The auto-resolve feature is pretty generous with its results which meant I was inclined to use the quick solution instead of enduring the combat system. 

Conclusions for Endless Legend

Endless Legend is a great 4X game. Besides the lackluster combat, the look and feel of this game is impressive and they made Auriga a place that’s both alive and realistic.

The factions make sense living in a world together and they’re unique enough in their playstyle that you’ll want to try them all out. The game’s quest system also adds a sense of narrative weight to the whole experience.

With all the DLCs Endless Legend is expansive in the amount of mechanics you can play around with and the way they all interact is great.

Endless Legend has been without a doubt one of the most influential 4X games of the last decade. The combat and regions in Age of Wonders: Planetfall, the city expanding mechanics of Civ VI and more were directly influenced by this great game.

This was our StrategyFront review of Endless Legend in 2020. Let us know what you think of both the review and the game down in the comments.