State of the game - January 2026

[p][/p][h2]Holiday sale and New Players [/h2][p]The Steam Holiday sale and Hooded Horse’s Publisher sale brought in a lot of new players. Which is perfect timing to have more people available to play multiplayer. In terms of player demographics, many had never played an Amplitude game before, so it was great to see them in with truly fresh eyes. [/p][p]Which leads to the next point...
[/p][h2]New Bugs Have Spawned [/h2][p]We had a huge number of updates in the December build. And because of the holidays we were on vacation for 2 weeks. But we wanted to squeeze in as much as we could before we went on break, and that may have been a risky idea. [/p][p]We like putting builds out quickly so we can get feedback from you. If there is an issue, we can patch it and move on. We have had 2 bigger issues that got out into player builds, but we patched them both the next day. We would rather live with the risk of an issue and move quickly, than slow down the whole process. [/p][p][/p][p]Which is great, except when you go on holiday for 2 weeks. [/p][p]So, we had 2 issues in the December build. First, there were bugs. This is normal when large changes are made, but instead of fixing the bug in a day, the community needed to wait for 2 weeks to get them. Also, the balance was off. Both in difficulty in the early game (minor factions had access to more armies and the AI was getting better at using them) and heroes were too powerful. [/p][p]Both of these issues hitting with a bunch of new players that have never played an Amplitude game left many frustrated or confused. I’m glad for the changes. The December build is definitely more fun than the November build, but in hindsight we should have put less in it and released it a week earlier. We are still learning the lessons of Icarus. [/p][p]
[/p][h2]📊 Player Feedback [/h2][p]But, we did get a ton of feedback and we love pouring through all the reviews, surveys, analytics and singing telegrams. Anything that leads to being able to improve the game. My Christmas present was getting back into the office with lots of data to pour through (yeah I know… I’m a nerd). [/p][p]We made a long list of bug fixes, balance changes, and AI improvements in the December build. As well as four major changes: [/p]

[p]Multiplayer [/p]
[p]City Construction Flow [/p]
[p]EL1 style Pacification Quests [/p]
[p]Necrophage update [/p]

[p][/p][p]I was especially interested to see feedback in these areas. I compare feedback by evaluating the number of critical comments in the category compared to prior versions. For example, we saw 90% less critical feedback about victory conditions than we did in initial Early Access release. [/p][p][/p][p]> Overall, we saw big improvements in: [/p]

[p]Dislike Victory Conditions -90% [/p]
[p]No Mulitplayer -78% (you would think this would be -100%?!?) [/p]

[p]> About the same percentage of critical feedback in: [/p]

[p]Dislike Writing [/p]
[p]Bad AI [/p]
[p]Dislike UI [/p]

[p]> And increased complaints for: [/p]

[p]Bugs +127% [/p]
[p]Poor Balance +141% [/p]

[p][/p][p]It is worth noting that the player base for the December update is significantly different than the Early Access player base. They are much more likely to be new to Amplitude games and more likely to want “release level” polish on the game than the Early Access players. Which is all fine, but is important to remember when you see the numbers change. For example, I know the AI is much better in the December update than it was in September, even if that isn’t reflected in the reviews. [/p][p]
[/p][p]I had hoped to see more improvement in UI because of the city construction flow change. When I asked directly for player feedback about it, it is very positive (there are some that prefer the old way, but they are a small percent). [/p][p]Evaluating the Pacification quest change is difficult. Generally, when asked, players report liking the change. But we always like matching analytics with reported opinions. Sometimes what people say is very different than what they do (I know how many people say they completed the tutorial and how many actually have!) [/p][p]So, the best metric I could find is comparing what percentage of people click the “skip” button during pacification quests. Thankfully we see a nice drop after the change. [/p][p]
[/p][p]EA 0 is the first build that came out in September and EA3 is how we label the December build. So, there was good progress here, less people are skipping the dialog in their first, 5th and 10th games. Still a lot more work to be done on Writing, but it’s moving in the right direction. [/p][p][/p][h2]AI[/h2][p][/p][p]On the AI side it got too hard, with the AI winning about 50% of the games. This is just finished games. It doesn’t even count games the human stops playing because they know they are going to lose. So, the reality is even worse (if you are pro-human, if you are a sentient toaster then congrats!).
[/p][p][/p][p]Also, the AI win rate is even better at Normal and Easy difficulty. Not that the AI is better, but that new players are really struggling. More advanced players, those more likely to increase the difficulty, are doing okay. [/p][p]In the January update we will be adjusting the difficulty to make it easier on the lower difficulty levels and watching closely to see if we need to make it harder on the tougher difficulty levels. [/p][p][/p][h2]Multiplayer [/h2][p]Multiplayer came to the main build in December, and I was happy to see lots of players enjoying it and it was great to read your feedback:
[/p]

[p]“Multiplayer seems way more stable than EL or even big competitors like Civ.” [/p][p]“I wish there was an easier way to ally and trade resources.” [/p][p]“It’s really smooth, how fluid it is to load games is impressive.” [/p][p]“It would be nice to have teams in the game.” [/p][p]“The map sizes are too large for multiplayer games.” [/p][p]“Manual combat can take a long time.” [/p][p]“I’m very impressed, especially considering this is a beta.” [/p]

[p][/p][p]Desyncs are still higher than we would like. They were terrible for a while and we had planned to add multiplayer to the public build in November, but pushed it to December because of this. Getting Multiplayer into the public build and supporting the sale in December did what it was supposed to do, we got lots of players. And even though the desync numbers are better, they still aren’t good enough. We are working on it. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We also asked the community why they haven’t tried multiplayer yet, and this is what they said: [/p][p][/p][p]To the 52% that don’t have any friends to play with… you are not alone. It may be worth checking out our forums or discord to find other looking for games if you’d like to try a multiplayer game. [/p][p][/p]

Amplified and the January Update

[p]Every January we hold our Amplified streaming event. This was the event we announced ENDLESS Legend 2 at last year. We will be releasing our January update at about the same time. At a high level it includes: [/p]

[p]Updated Victory Conditions - We switched to requiring multiple objectives to win and we have rebalanced those objectives to make it more fun and interesting. We are excited to get your thoughts on it. [/p]

[p]Militia Update - Previously the amount of militia in your cities was determined by your tech. So every city from your capital to your newest settlement had exactly the same default defenses. Since a capital was about as well defended as your new settlement, players learned to just attack capitals. Even worse players weren’t able to wage partial wars against each other. Maybe they weren’t powerful enough to take your capital, but they should be able to weaken you a bit by taking smaller settlements. It made war either impossible or steamroller, there was no in between.
In this update the militia is determined by the fortification level of your city. You now have a reason to build military districts and improvements, especially in locations you feel might be at risk, and the basic walls of your enemies should indicate ripe targets ready to join your empire. [/p]

[p]Hero Skills Update - In December we made a big change to heroes and equipment so that there is a lot more stat variation and stats mean more. What used to be 0/0/0/2 in a hero’s starting stats can now be 7/3/5/8. This makes them a lot more varied and interesting. Our next step is to rebalance all the skills in the game for the new levels. Without the rebalance they are all WAY overpowered. Enjoy it while it lasts, balance is coming (maybe this is what the Aspects are always yammering about). [/p]

[p]Writing improvements - We did an editor pass on all the major faction and pacification quests in the game to make sure the tone is right. We found a few areas where the tone isn’t quite right, especially with the necrophage. We don’t want the Necrophage to be wild beasts, they are intelligent, they are not a hive mind. But they should be direct, aggressive and certain. [/p]
- [p]Before: “They are such weak specimens. During this lull, we should strengthen our own weakest!” [/p]
- [p]After: “They are weaklings. We must strengthen our own!” [/p]

[p][/p][p]We also continue to dd nested tooltips to objectives and in other places to better explain what players need to do and what things are. These are small changes, but they are important steps toward improving writing. [/p][p][/p][p]And of course, like all of our updates, we will have tons of: [/p]

[p]Bug fixes [/p]
[p]Balance Improvements [/p]
[p]AI Improvements[/p][p][/p]

[hr][/hr][h2]Check the PTB![/h2][p]You can test this update right now by opting into public-test-branch beta branch for Endless Legend 2 on Steam. [/p][p]You can checkout the full changelog here 👇[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]If you’d like to watch a cool video about Stoffle the Honeybadger check here: [/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p]Tomorrow we will share the schedule for Amplified! Stay tuned 🔮[/p][p][/p][p] -- Derek Paxton,[/p][p]Game Director[/p]