Amplitude is revealing another playable faction vying for power in Endless Legend 2, and it’s a familiar one with a different name: The Last Lords.
While The Necrophage shares its name with its Endless Legend 1 counterpart despite the Saiadhan Necrophage being a different variant, The Last Lords are literally were part of the Broken Lords, who fled from Auriga (the setting of Endless Legend 1) and ended up here in Saiadha.
Just like the Broken Lords, the Last Lords are cursed to feed on others to survive and their souls are trapped in suits of armour without a body. And just like the Broken Lords, the Last Lords inherit that faction’s big assymetrical gimmick: They don’t use food to grow, they can’t even see Food yields on map even. But what they need in abundance as a result is Dust, which in the world of Endless is basically the universal currency. You spend money to add pop to a city or invite the minor factions to work on the tiles of the Lords’ city.
The latter is done through establish special estates at minor faction villages. You do have a choice of either exploiting their population to work in your cities, or tax them. And taxing means getting Dust. And Dust is used to create more Last Lords population (you can sacrifice a minor population’s pop to create a Primordial Last Lord pop, that produces more yields than a regular Last Lord pop), or heal units. Though any enemy unit that dies near a Last Lord, which turns to Dust… will heal them. The Lords are vampires in that regard.
The Last Lords will take some time to get going, by design. With no gradual healing on units and no natural growth for cities, you will need to get a strong economy going to really do anything. But once you’ve built a warchest’s worth of Dust in your coffers, the insta-heals and instant growth of cities by spending Dust will make these cursed knights a force to be reckoned with.
The Lords, along with the Necrophage, is an example of the Endless series’ most unique feature: asymmetrical factions that radically changes the way you play the 4X strategy game by removing a certain feature altogether to enhance its qualities. These aren’t just stat bonuses or debuffs either.
There will be one more playable faction reveal ahead of Endless Legend 2’s Early Access release. The game launches in Early Access on August 7 with five playable factions.