Endless Legend 2 Beginner's Guide: Your First Faction and the Tidefalls Ahead

ENDLESS Legend 2 left early access and launched into version 1.0 on September 17, closing out a year of testing that began on Steam in September 2025. Developer Amplitude Studios used the milestone to add a sixth major faction, two new faction variants and a new minor faction, and the studio is running a 50% launch discount on the $49.99 game through September 30. For anyone starting their first campaign on Saiadha this week, here is what the game itself and its developers say you actually need to know.

Choosing Your First Faction

Endless Legend 2 now ships with six major factions, and each one steers a new player toward a different opening plan. The Kin of Sheredyn, introduced first during early access, are a defensive military order built around fortifying cities and earning Chosen Warriors and Commandments for reinforcing their own holdings. The Necrophage lean hardest into war, built to chase a Military or Elimination victory rather than out-build rivals peacefully. The Aspects play the opposite role, spreading coral across the map that links vision between cities, heals units and opens safe passage across water on a game board that is mostly ocean.

The Last Lords are Dust-reborn nobles who cannot grow Food at all and instead consume population to survive, while the Tahuks balance research against religious zealotry. The newest of the six, the Sandshapers, are Amplitude's dedicated terraformer faction: they convert territory into Sand tiles, cannot harvest Food anywhere else, and cannot build bridges, trading flexibility for the ability to invoke powerful Wishes at ancient ruins and regenerate their armies from scattered sand. None of that is a good pick for a first game; save the Sandshapers for a second campaign once camp expansion and Wishes make sense, and start instead with a faction whose economy does not depend on reshaping the map around you.

From Camp to City

However you pick, the early turns work the same way. Every faction starts with a Camp rather than a full city, and camps only become cities once you have generated enough Influence to found one, so the first real decision each game is where to send your starting hero and army to scout viable city sites before a rival claims them. Combat is also more hands-on than in the original Endless Legend: battles play out on the map itself, and you manually position units and issue orders rather than letting an autoresolve screen decide the outcome, a system Amplitude carried over from its 2021 game Humankind.

Reading the Tidefalls Before They Hit

The mechanic that defines Endless Legend 2 is the Tidefall, and it is worth understanding before your first game rather than after you are caught by one. Saiadha is an oceanic world, and three times over the course of a campaign the water recedes dramatically, exposing new land, minor faction villages and dangerous lairs that were previously underwater. Each Tidefall is preceded by a Monsoon, a storm that cuts vision and scatters collectible resources and dangerous creatures across the map, so the safest approach is to hold your army back during the storm and move in once the water has actually dropped. Amplitude's own Tidefalls write-up also flags Deeds, timed objectives tied to each Tidefall that hand out empire-wide bonuses to whichever player completes them first, so it pays to check the event screen the moment a Tidefall starts rather than waiting until you have finished exploring.

Game Director Derek Paxton has described why the later Tidefalls escalate the way they do.

“What started as a peaceful oceanic world quickly turns into a world full of disappearing oceans, ravenous necrophage and punishing storms.”Derek Paxton, Game Director, Amplitude Studios

Commit Early: Worship, Impress or Master

Saiadha's oceans exist to imprison a world spirit the game calls the Lost, and by the midgame you are asked to choose one of three stances toward it: Worship it, Impress it, or Master it. That choice is not cosmetic. Each path unlocks its own set of the game's seven narrative victory conditions, on top of the more familiar Score and Domination victories, and the game only lets you win on the path you picked, so it is worth deciding early rather than drifting toward whichever option looks appealing at the time. The choice also shapes diplomacy, since factions that pick incompatible paths have less reason to stay friendly as the campaign wears on.

The final Monsoon is different from the others and marks the arrival of the Keeper of the Depths, the guardian unit the Endless leave behind to contain the Lost once the last Tidefall hits. It is, by Amplitude's own description, the single most powerful unit in the game, and it will not spare anyone still standing between it and its objective. Whatever victory path you have committed to, treat the final stretch of Tidefalls as a hard deadline rather than a suggestion.

Quick Tips for Turn One

A few habits carry over no matter which faction you start with, and they matter more in the first ten turns than anything else on this list:

• Move your starting hero and army toward the nearest unclaimed land mass before founding your first city, since a cramped starting position limits how many camps you can grow into cities later.
• Keep at least one unit near your capital during the early Monsoons; the storms themselves rarely threaten a garrisoned city, but the creatures a Monsoon scatters across the map can catch an undefended camp off guard.
• Check the Deeds tied to the very first Tidefall as soon as it appears rather than after exploring the new land it reveals, since several Deeds reward whichever empire reaches a location first.
• Decide your stance toward the Lost as soon as the option becomes available rather than waiting; committing late still locks you out of the narrative victories tied to the other two paths.

What's New for Returning Players

Players who spent early access with the four original factions have three new reasons to load the game back up. The Sandshapers add the terraforming playstyle described above, and Amplitude has also introduced Rogue Factions, variant versions of existing factions with their own story and playstyle twist: the Order of Zelevas is a more conquest-driven take on the Kin of Sheredyn, while the Severed Claw replaces the Necrophage's usual population growth with the ability to enslave losses from other factions instead. A new minor faction, the Mangrove of Harmony, was designed with community input on Amplitude's own forums and brings its own hero, questline and recruitable units to any game it appears in, major or minor faction alike.

All of that content, including the Sandshapers and both Rogue Factions, is also available piece by piece in the Custom Faction creator, so players who want the terraforming trait without full commitment to the Sandshapers' desert economy can mix it into a faction of their own design rather than adopting the whole package.

Amplitude Studios' official Launch Trailer for Endless Legend 2, posted the same day as the version 1.0 release.