How to Play Zephon?? (Very Beginner Guide)

For people who REALLY doesn't know how to play Zephon. (Currently and will always be under construction)

How?

Please follow the following steps!!

• Step One: Open and log onto steam
  
• Step Two: Go to STORE and purchase the game
  
• Step Three: Go to LIBRARY and select the game
  
• Final Step: Click on the green PLAY button

No need to thank me, you are welcome!!

How for reals...

All joking aside, for those of you wanting more of my blinding brilliance, below are some of my thoughts structured in the following sections:

• Resource Economy
  
• Cities
  
• Combat

Zephon has many similarities and differences compared to other 4x games, just like any other 4x games.
But most notably to me that I can think of are:

• Rushing unit is unavailable for all but one factions
  
• Very inefficient market exchange rate
  
• Customizable heroes that has no plot armor and dies for real

Economy

Every 4x gamer is backed econ... So uhh lets talk about econ.

Impacts of No Rushing (Aristocrat excluded)

There are many resources in Zephon, just like any other 4x games.
But what makes Zephon economy diff is that units and buildings cannot be rushed and resources can't be traded efficiently, resulting in a economical priority similar to starcraft:

• If a lot of resources are in your bank, they aren't being used. If they aren't being used, they are not helping you.

Saving up resources, generally gold, can be a valuable thing in most 4x games for reacting to unpredictable situation. This is because the ability to rush units enables the quick exchange of resources into a sizable force for a city in need. The lack of that simply means lack of benefits to saving up large amount of resources.

While a moderate saving can be reasonable to account for potential fluctuations in production (such as outposts being captured in war), resources should be expended and units should be constantly made until upkeep + repeating construction cost approaches income.

However, there are some exceptions:
One partial exception is when you field many units with skills that may cost resources to use (such as Hashmallim Host & engineers), in which case you may want to save some associated resources in times when you want to spam these skills. Regardless, these skills still have cooldown and will still have a limit to your overall expenditure.

Another exception is science, which you can benefit from regardless of how much you over produce. However, while some tech directly impacts your resource gain and combat performance, others doesn't always immediately translate to combat advantages. Science also becomes less useful towards end game when impactful technologies for your strategies are already unlocked.

The last partial exception is influence, where it could be saved up moderately to buy items for heroes, use global skills, as well as exchange for other types of resources. However, the practical expenditure of that per turn is limited, since skills have cool down, heroes can be fully equipped, and resources income and expenditure can be currently in balance.

Overproduction of influence can be unhelpful as well, as the same resources invested into building influence generators to buy the resource needed can be used in building the actual building for the resource you needed. Example: Admin centers give ~6 influences versus Mineral extractor gives ~5 minerals (which would cost 10 influences)

The ratio of influence to resource is:

• 2 influence to 1 for tier 1 resources (food, mineral, etc.)
  
• 4 influence to 1 for tier 2 resources (algae, chips, etc.)
  
• Idk influence to 1 for tier 3 resources (Cores, Echos, etc.)

While influence acts like gold, the lack of ability to practically expend them quickly + poor market rate their limits applications.

However, all of this obvious does not apply to our influential landwhale, who can potentially whale his way to victory.

Impacts of Poor Exchange Rate

Since the market for selling resources is very inefficient, at a ratio of 4 sold to 1 bought. Selling resources should be avoided. A balanced overall production for needed resources is recommended.

This is especially true for our AI friends, who is stuck with a single city for potentially half of the game, unable to specialize their city for specific exports based on terrain. For other factions, however, cities should ideally be specialized based on their terrain.

Resource Uses

Lastly, here is a list describing what each of the first 2 tier resources are for:

• Food => for population upkeep to continue to grow and humanoid infantry production (given sufficient housing)
  
• Mineral => for building buildings and units
  
• Algae => for unleashing inner demons that should be exterminated on sight
  
• Chips => for building your friendly mechanical neighbors
  
• Influence => for buying resources, items, using global skills, and making heroes

You probably don't need much algae or echos but wants a lot of chips/cores if you are a mechanical main like me, and vise versa if you love to summon and unleash your inner demons instead...

Cities and stuff...

Cities can produce because of production. These are "resources" that cannot be stored and are wasted if nothing is queued. Hence the scale of your production should try to match your income, unless you are in a rush to liquidate your resources (you saved too much...)

City's production and resource generations are affected by 3 things:

• Loyalty => -2% per negative loyalty, +1% per positive loyalty
  
• City Center health % => scales accordingly: if it is at 0.1 hp ~= nothing produced
  
• Population => If below number of buildings, ~population/ # of buildings

One of the semi confusing things for beginner may be that their city building production is always 6. This is because the 6 production comes from constructor and you need to build multiple constructor to raise production. This is a research unlocked in the early mid game.

More factories, barrack, etc = faster the units are made, unless you are out of resources to make them...

Loyalty

Basically what makes holo-district a requirement for most. Each additional city you have beyond the first will also create a -6 loyalty I think... The maximum penalty you can get is -50%.

Because of this, theoretically you can ignore loyalty and spam engis/busters, forward settle, and zerg the world. Buildings would be half as effective but who cares if you have twice as many cities than everyone else anyways (as long as you can afford the rising mineral and influence cost of settling cities)... (I never actually tried this so feel free to lmk how it goes..)

City Center HP%

Don't be waaaaay too brave about where you settle your first city. If you run into 69 wild mobs who will roast your city center to low health by the time you finish roasting them, your start will be delayed...
However, due to their high attack, city centers can serve as a bunker and are good for murdering via forward settling.

It is worth noting that a city center's HP scales with the city size/# of buildings.

Population

Cities generally have a set population growth, increased by traits/some technology and the flesh trees you own. Each population has a food upkeep. If you are run out of food or housing, your pop won't grow.

Flesh trees outpost also offers a global skill to give growth, usable on your friends!!!

Outposts

Outposts also produce resources, for free!! Obviously only as long as they belong to you... Outposts that are within city border will also contribute a % bonus for that resource type to the entire city. Hence it is ideal to settle your chip factory next to chip factories...

Combat??

Different types of units can have different strengths and weaknesses. (u: thanks captain obvious)

Some units are tankier, some have skills that can support others, etc. They are also equipped with different weapons, and some can have two weapons that have two different range (but will both fire if both are at range).

Some weapons do extra to large units (non-hero units that are singular), some only fires in melee, some are weaker in melee, etc.

For details, there are small icons above a unit's action explaining all of the unit's traits, and weapon icons above those icons explaining their weapons. It is somewhat mandatory to know if one wants to use any units effectively.

Units earn exp if they are near an enemy unit that died. They also earn extra if they are the murderer. City centers counts as a unit so they get exp too!

Damage

If you check all the weapons, you will notice none of the weapons have accuracy of 100%. While some have higher accuracy than others, they generally hover around 50-67% (6-8 accuracy) . Hence, by accuracy has a direct impact to a unit's damage/dmg recieved.
For example, 17% accuracy boost (2 accuracy) will lead to a 33% increase in damage for a weapon with base accuracy of 50% (50+17% = 1.33*50%).

The same can be use in reverse, decreasing enemy accuracy (such as grav jammer) can greatly nerf their damage, and city centers can be debuffed to make seiges safer.

Attrition Penalties

Taking too much damage can weaken a multi-figure unit's damage, scaled by the number of current existing figures you have in that unit (4/6 figure =66% dmg). Large units (including city center) also gets a multiplicative 33% accuracy debuff when below half hp.

Morale can have an impact on their damage as well, the exact deduction % is described when hovering over it. Morale recover naturally when no damage is taken.

Infantries and Carriers

Starter infantries are generally tankie and have a skill that can heal them. They serve as your front line and tanks. However, they are affected by terrain and are extremely slow. As a result, it is recommended to accompany them with mobile carrier units.

Moreover, carrier can be very important in rescuing your low health infantries in the front line, as entering them makes the infantry unreachable unless the carrier dies.

Some units have the hover status, which is not the same as flying. They are unaffected by the slow of the land features (such as forest, etc.) and can go on water, but still have to go around cliffs. True flying units completely ignores cliffs.

Heroes

All heroes have a predefined skill set and stats, which will determine what they should be doing. However, they can also be equipped with items for more utilities and stats.

All levels & equipment are completely lost when they die. I genuinely recommend fitting your heroes with multiple trauma kit early on (items have separate cd), which can burst heal them in dangerous situation and give them good sustain overall.

While most heroes are considered LARGE, there are a few, especially the tier 1 ones, who are infantry sized and can be rescued/transported by carriers.

Human? Cybernetics? or Voice?

While factions are associated to a specific unit type (can research the associated tech generally 1 stage earlier), there is no reason to limit yourself to 1 type.

Some units of one type are inherently better at some things than equivalent units of another (such as cyborg hovercrafts are generally better at transporting troops than rovers). Feel free to expand your options.

Extra Tips?!?

Here are some extra things worthy of note:

• [Leashed] Some wild mobs have "Leashed" trait => won't come after you & your family if you don't poke them. Their icon turns red when poked. Even when unpoked, they are still territorial and will strike via overwatching or when you are next to them, but you are better off running if you don't want to deal with them.
  
  
• [Tribute] Since tribute scales with total amount of resource you have, it is possible to limit how much and what you give. Simply queue up units prior to reduce total resource in bank and cancel these queues after.
  
  
• [Native Allies] Trading with native factions (Zophons, etc) gives you the option to [ask for support], which gives you the menu to recruit their units for influence.
  
  
• [Cities w/o Engi] Buster have the ability to create cities. Hence Muscle mommie's busters can be converted (as child jesus) or recruited (as her friend) using influence for cities w/o needing engineer tech

Lastly...

Please comment if I made an error on anything. I will come by and fix it.
I can't possibly know everything about this game, so all suggestions/tips welcome!

As always, these are just my opinions of the game so please don't verbally hurt me and my family and my dogs and cats just cus you disagree, we are all very sensitive and will cry ;A;

But please do have a civil debate with me if you disagree with something, and I will make the edit if I am convinced... But if you want to change something here without convincing me, then I suggest you to go write your own guide.

My Discord: Russet3768
Feel free to hit me up and add me so we can play :D

Thanks all again for reading!! Wish you all have a wonderful day?

[GentlemanTech]

Loyalty also affects production, both units and buildings. Getting down to -50% penalty grinds all production down to almost nothing. Units take forever to produce, and building anything takes too long. 1 city at 0 loyalty is more productive (and easier to defend) than 2 cities at -50% loyalty.

I always aim for a small positive loyalty (like all the resources). This means that founding a new city won't collapse my economy, I've got some room to absorb the loyalty hit.

Loyalty is penalised on population, so I only expand city population when I need to (using all the existing pop). Growing idle pop is wasteful (and you can always turn buildings off an on to manage your population use if you're waiting for them to breed)

[Anonymous]

Good note, thanks for the detail
ill add that into the guide

[von Boomslang]

fun fact, city population growth speed is determined by how much free housing there is.

[Спартак здесь?]

if food amount gets into negative, maybe. otherwise as long as you have it available (more than zero) you are absolutely fine.

[Anonymous]

Negative food = no growth
If you dont pay the upkeep then you have 0 pop growth, so having positive food and paying the upkeep is needed for pop growth
Perhaps upkeep is a better word and Ill make the edit for clarification

[Спартак здесь?]

Food => for population growth and humanoid infantry production
what do you mean by that? food has nothing to do with pop growth, its used via pop maintenance. pop growth is pretty much limited by 2 techs and flesh trees buffs

[Eowyn]

There's not a lot of info about Zephon online yet (wiki when), so thank you for this early guide! 13h in, loving it, and what still confuses me a bit is the perks associated with tiles. If I have a +20% food tile, should I have a food building on it, or do I just have to own the tile to get the bonus?

[Anonymous]

Operation is like global map skills
They are like skills you can use anywhere on the map any time at your own discretion once you have "produced" them
So yah stuff like maybe nuclear strike, interference protocol, or your factional skill like baby prophet's conversion skill or emulated mind's data hack

[John_Blackthorne_]

I´v only played 6 hours so far (loving it) but I am a little confused about what the term "Operations" refer to... is it like nuclear strike or such?

[Skybsky]

Playing as Child Prophet and using influence to convert nomads is a very legit strategy to get cities, if you concentrate on Voice tech + anything that gives you influence + you have ton of minerals since Voice units don't use them = eventually you will have ton of minerals and influence to build cities