Factions. Here are the factions: the aggressive conquest Klingon guys. The evil insectoid hive mind who build stuff and/or have loads of cheap soldiers. The researchers who are probably robots and you usually pick because they can be competitive at anything. The diplomacy/espionage ones (humans, or The Greys).
You know what I’m talking about. You may well have thought of a recent exception too, since we’ve had a fair few 4Xeses experimenting with some of the standard formulae these last few years. It’s been a while though since I read through every word of every faction’s description and wanted to play all of them. Zephon captured my interest immediately.
Despite the strength of their flavour text, Proxy Studios were thoughtful enough to put the factions’ innate effects and abilities above it, one of those small but outsized annoyances when it’s mishandled. It’s also a hint at why those factions are intriguing – their descriptions and histories aren’t just well written, but a supplement to the designs and how they operate. The selection screen isn’t about picking a bonus; it’s an invitation to inhabit these characters. You technically only pick a “leader”, and play out their story as the personification of their people.
Take the Heartless Artificer. The closest to an outright evil leader, her whole thing is “perfection” – cold, accurate, uniform structure in everything, and the eradication of anything that doesn’t serve that. So you’d think, what, she’d get maybe research bonus, or production bonus from clean unfeeling machines? Nope. She gets a population bonus, as she has the excellently evocative, yet unspecific “no fear of abhorrent sciences”. So alright, she’s the reflavoured growth option. Except that her downside is lower production… unless you sacrifice that population. You could be reductive and say it’s just extra steps, but those steps are key to what Zephon is trying to do. If you pick the nasty faction, you can’t just go “alright I’m Chairman Yang, I build fast”, waving away as innate whatever monstrous thing happens to provide that, then never thinking about it again. It makes you do it. To choose to kill those people. To play the part.
Better still, you get to define that part, not just go through its motions. I’d be amazed if Alpha Centauri wasn’t a major influence, but instead of philosophy or an ideology, Zephon’s leaders are about their history and circumstance. SMAC’s Deirdre and Endless Legend’s Roving Clans were already committed to an ideal, set on a specific path. Zephon’s are characters starting at a crossroads. They’re more like vault dwellers, with preconceived ideas, facing a fight to survive that could lead them several ways.
Some literally are, in fact. Like the Furtive Tribunal, a trio of women who entered an apocalypse bunker as strangers, and emerged as its only survivors, blind and two mute, the other speaking of impossible alien knowledge. A man who discovered his immortality after his execution, whose soldiers carry a piece of his flesh, constantly regenerating their health. Is he a champion sharing his luck, or a monster using his elite army to rule forever? One human-machine hybrid fends off an attempted assimilation by a genocidal AI, and now runs a side limited to one city, but gaining extra resources from capturing special hexes, like Endless Legend‘s cult. Her starting point? “She has survived cancer. She has survived ZEPHON. And she will survive this.”
They nearly all cry out to be played whenever I start a new game, and some replayed because I realised their potential too late. The scavenging faction take extra morale damage as their leader’s compassion gives them higher hopes to dash, take resources from defeated enemies, and can convert units back into production and resources. I realised what the first two meant – you won’t lose morale if you’re the attacker, and victory pays for reinforcements. I underrated the third, which offers flexibility – you can spam lots of meat shield infantry in a siege, then quickly convert them into a counter-attacking tank force. Each leader gets research options to mitigate their problems too – the scavengers’ reduce the morale penalties. Does that make his story a fall from grace, his nobility worn away by compromises and rationalisations?
Everyone gets their own subplots too, with multiple choices revealing secrets or testing your character’s beliefs. I didn’t even think of second-guessing what the game outcomes would be from those decisions. Even for its main plot event, I made the mad reckless decision to defy both superpowers, only for one’s world-ending forces to rise up directly in the middle of my army, while the former ally there with me threw in with the other superpower. I started my final war for humanity by shooting my own backup to clear a retreat, hoping the giant horrors would attack them while I figured out what the hell to do now that everyone else picked a side, the turncoat cowards.
That’s Zephon’s other big thing: it’s a hybrid not just of 4X and light narrative roleplaying, but it’s absolutely a wargame too. Dramatically less so than Shadow Empire, with which it shares a sense of the evocative, prompting imagination to embellish where the reality is familiar hexes and hit points. You will do lots of fighting, as this is Earth after two competing invaders have attempted a full apocalypse, making terrain swampy or desert at best. But you can even ally with either, supporting the void aliens or AI (the titular ZEPHON), potentially both until things come to a head and it’s time to choose.
Which leaders pick which side can suddenly change everything, and even your subplot decisions hours earlier can have consequences. Your own choice might be to side with the inscrutable aliens because they seem the lesser evil, or a subplot hinted that they weren’t the aggressor, or just because your territory is between the two and you’d never survive alone. Maybe you’ll support the machines out of transhumanist adaptation to the new world, or have to go it alone because you angered both while fending off a rival. Even winning might not be a victory: treachery or moral dereliction, or perhaps even defeating both superpowers was a failure to become more than a semi-evolved ape.
It is unfortunately more lacking in diplomacy than I’d hoped. Dialogue is specific to each combination of leaders, but interactions feel more limited than in SMAC (a high bar, to be fair), especially when it comes to expressing opinions. I appreciate, however, that diplomacy feels more like a conversation than ticking and unticking options and balancing pluses and minuses. Diplomacy lacks simulationist elements by design – you make your offers and demands, but you don’t magically know how likely they are to take it. You are told what influenced their decision, but only after they make it. In fact for a while I thought there was no stats/power chart screen at all (and part of me kind of wishes there wasn’t, but that’d probably get old), and only realised I had a good military when a nervous rival unexpectedly backed down.
Its story structure means constant warfare (even exploration is so hostile you might not uncover half the map, nor need to, since higher populations and city counts incur harsh resource penalties), and considering managing armies is usually what puts me off, I’m still way more invested in replaying to see more possibilities and make different decisions. You might pick the side that’s not a natural ally, different technologies, or try a mutator. One of those makes demoralised units switch sides, another penalises uniform armies. One turns dead units into “deformities” hostile to everyone. They’re unlocked at the end of a campaign, which is nice but there really should be some starting ones.
Comebacks are possible too. Cities expand cheaply, and barrackses combine their output to produce fast enough that I’ve bounced back from some surviving losses: one an absolutely brutal, desperate last stand of mankind with just a handful of fighters left as fragile medics and engineers ducked around the city, surrounded by a sea of hostile machines. I thought I’d benefitted from its slightly erratic AI, as its re-prioritising of targets led to less efficient warring than a human probably would. But then that other behemoth of the Voice faction, the one I’d wounded, chasing its retreat into uncharted territory long enough to guess it had circled round to trouble someone else? The bastard came back, partly regenerated, and started hitting me again. Humanity on a tightrope being sawn at both ends, every remaining figure a defiant thread.
Zephon is not without some faults, notably in its Everything Button UI, and some disappointingly undramatic high end research options. Although I love that any techs can be worth researching; even bottom-tier starting ones can become relevant right to the end, and starting units upgraded and levelled up (many levels at once if close to a valuable enemy’s death) to retain some use. If I were reviewing it, I’d stress more that it has its limitations and annoyances, and that my enthusiasm for its narrative is colouring my opinion enough to shrug off the parts where its design is more intriguing than consequential. But I can’t even remember the last time I enjoyed a 4X strategy game, hybrid or not, enough to finish a campaign then go straight to “new game” and consider the same faction again. That sense of character, of premise and story to contextualise your goals as more than “win the game”, and a design that works with it to guide your behaviour are a rare combination, and the genre needs more of them.