Strategy Guide
Introduction
The following is a guide to winning against Endless Difficulty opponents with ELCP enabled. This is much harder than vanilla Endless difficulty, or even Serious and Impossible difficulty with ELCP. However, it is quite consistently doable with efficient play. The guide assumes moderate familiarity with the game, so basic mechanics will not be explained.
Status
The guide is currently about half finished, and will be expanded over time.
Game Settings
- All DLCs will be enabled.
- ELCP installed: At this point ELCP is essentially the vanilla version of the game, since it fixes a lot of bugs and makes some significant improvements to game balance, while maintaining the spirit of the original design.
- 70% land: This is Jojo's suggestion to balance land vs ocean resources.
- Endless Difficulty
- Normal Speed: Slower speeds benefit the player much more.
- All other settings are default. At least this is suggested for the first few playthroughs. The principles discussed in this guide are general enough to deal with many different settings, however.
Overview
The most important priority when playing against Endless difficulty is a strong military; the Endless AI gets so many economic bonuses that it's nearly impossible to outscale them without warfare. In warfare, however, the human player has many advantages, like better planning and tactics. Having a strong military allows the player to conquer already well-developed cities and boost their overall 
economic output, enabling the faction to snowball towards victory.
This guide will cover all aspects and stages of the game, with special emphasis on the early-and mid-game. This is most difficult part of the game, when the player faction must survive early aggression and fight (and win) their first war. Once this is done, the player will have a strong basis for continued expansion and the game becomes much easier.
Most pages are written for a generic faction, and some factions will have extremely different mechanics and development (
Cultists and 
Mykara, for example). These will be covered in the faction-specific pages below.
Chapters
- /Goals and Timings
- /FIDSI
- /Other Resources
- /Diplomacy and War
- /Combat
- /Heroes
- /City Development
- /Research
- /Minor Factions
- /Legendary Deeds
- /Naval Strategy
- /Victory
Faction-Specific Guides
/Wild Walkers
/Broken Lords
/Vaulters (and 
Mezari)
/Necrophages
/Ardent Mages
/Roving Clans
/Drakken- /Cultists
/Forgotten
/Allayi
/Morgawr
/Kapaku- /Mykara
What about multiplayer?
Most of the ideas in this guide are also important in multiplayer (or what remains of the Endless Legend multiplayer scene these days). However, there are several notable differences:
- Aggressive wars are much more common in early game (Era I and early Era II) because unlike Endless AI, human opponents will not have a huge economic and military advantage relative to the player. A player that expands too much and does not build enough units can easily be defeated.
- The game rarely reaches Era IV or later, so late-game wide expansion is not relevant. This is for several reasons:
- Early- and mid-game wars tend to be decisive, and players may resign after losing a major city. This leaves fewer players in the mid game. At this point, a few battles between the big players can decide the winner of the game.
- Human players have fewer and less developed cities than Endless AI, so aggressive expansion does not generate the same extreme economic hyper-growth as when conquering the AI.
- Because there are fewer cities, empire-unique buildings like the Dust Transmuter become much more useful.
- Because extreme expansion is less relevant,
Approval, 
Influence, 
Luxury Resources, and 
Trade Routes (which must be aggressively increased when playing against Endless AI) become less valuable compared to short-term military benefits.
Credits and Acknowledgements
This guide was written by User:md143rbh7f. If you wish to reproduce parts of this guide, linking/attribution is required per the licence of this wiki.
I would also like to thank:
- Amplitude for making a great game.
- Babutz AKA LeaderEnemyBoss for ELCP.
- Jojo for his strategy guide, though it should be noted that the guide hasn't been updated for ELCP, not to mention there are quite a few inaccuracies.
- User:Blakfyre77 for greatly improving the wiki (with almost 6000 edits), especially rewriting many old articles and adding content for later DLCs.
- HeliumPrime for strategy discussions about Endless difficulty.