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FACTIONS The shattered remains of the Order of Ellia, now almost universally despised and marked with the hateful moniker of The Lifestealers, now fight a losing battle to survive the wrath of their brethren in the cosmos as the dying children of a ravaged galaxy cry out for revenge. They have prioritized their own survival as all factions have, and are scrambling to find a solution to the current crisis--some new plan that will correct the damage they have caused and end the gradual death of the majority of the galaxy's citizens. They may even have the resources to succeed, but few are willing to give them the chance to damage their home a second time. From the perspective of most factions, they have proven that their meddling is undesirable at best, and so they aren't prone to listening to the Lifestealer's entreaties of " A new plan to fix the old plan" . They intend to continue regardless. They plan to redeem themselves whether the other factions trust them to or not, but they have encountered more and more resistance as organized military forces begin to assault their laboratories. Seeing no other choice, they have organized a military force of their own, to hold off the other fleets until they can find a solution--or die trying. Strategies: The ubiquitous Lifestealer deck is the Turbo Rift Sealer. Load up your deck with mobility cards like stealth drives and radioactive flak. Alternate between destroying fleets and discarding technologies to seal rifts and save your mobility cards for when you need to get past an enemy who is guarding the last rift or two. Large numbers of cheap ships work best for survivability, along with fighters on intercept orders.
The peaceful denizens of the galaxy's inner planets were loathe to join the slaughter. Though it was clear that the galaxy was dying, they had been living in a society of peace and love for thousands of years--they were not going to turn wolf on one another now, not in what was easily their darkest hour. But black clouds were already thundering down all around them--they knew that if they stayed their hand, they would be slain. The military organization known as the Coreguard had long since been the protective arm of these peaceful worlds, essentially a small, well-equipped and expertly trained group of elites who defended all of these worlds from any hostile force that may have arisen. Now, the whole galaxy has arisen as a hostile force, and the coreguard is pressed from all sides. They have to pick their battles carefully, and many of it's normally pacifistic strategists have begun preaching increased aggression in order to protect their homelands, coming to the conclusion that the only effective defense in this sort of situation is a firm and targeted offense. The Coreguard headquarters is the Elite Naval Command Academy. The Coreguard is an entirely volunteer organization, and the peaceful denizens of the galactic core aren't often predisposed to combat or the harsh lifestyle of a soldier. Thus, they preserve those volunteers they do get, and ensure that they possess only the finest training and equipment. Recent events have seen an increase in recruitment, but the academy still attempts to ensure that it puts out only the most talented starship commanders and admirals. Strategies: Coreguard do very well with high-powered ships like heavy cruisers and battlecruisers. Tactics like Heavy Hitters can form your core power while you support it with secondary tactics like Offensive Formation, Point Blank Assault or even Hit and Run (which means that every ship in your fleet will have a military bonus, regardless of it's relative military). You can also double up on a single formation--two copies of Suppression Wave or Heavy Hitters on a single fleet can make it nearly unstoppable. If you include cards that destroy enemy tactics, Flanking Formation is an excellent card as well. The Command Network technology is a must for any Coreguard deck. Advanced Armor is also excellent for any deck that is going to be using large, expensive ships. Don't use full attacks with your battlegroups; instead, focus on keeping your military so high in each battlegroup that the enemy cannot attack you without taking losses and slowly grind your way towards their headquarters. It is often good to launch fighters with a single carrier, put them on assault to gain the attack die, then play Ram on it before they get a chance to destroy it.
Though the denizens of the galaxy may have become short-lived, they had not become any less ingenuitive or stubborn in their will to survive. With the discovery that psychic energy was required by each being to survive, and that that energy was in increasingly dwindling supply, it was not long before someone came up with a method to steal it. This method, a device called the Cooler (For it's apparent effect on it's targets), stole the psychic energy from targets, hastening their deaths but allowing the wielder to last much longer than he or she may have otherwise. Those who invented it formed a faction of their own called Those Who Shall Survive--an almost cult-like organization dedicated to self-preservation above all other concerns. They mercilessly steal the energies of target ships, drinking their essences and leaving them to die. The technology for Coolers has since been stolen by a number of factions, leading to wholesale soul-piracy throughout the stars. The Survivors mercilessly attack these factions, largely because they constitute competition, but also because they tend to have more essence to steal. The reverse also proves true, meaning the high-stakes winner in any engagement between Survivors and Pirates is ultimately whoever brings the most firepower to the show. Strategies: Survivors decks are best suited to psi or out-lasting victories. Their ability suits hit-and-run tactics particularly well, meaning you can use lots of abilities that USE your ships and not worry too much about it. To gain psi with the Survivors' faction ability you must have higher military than the target, so you should always have at least one heavy cruiser battlegroup in each fleet unless your opponent is running some vulnerable ships like transports or destroyers. Making proper offensive use of their ability is very helpful, and Heavy Hitters is a good tactic because it will give your larger ships the ability to USE out carriers before they get their fighters launched. Hit and Run is also very helpful because it allows your light cruisers to USE theirs. If all else fails, remember that you can USE an enemy that is already USED if that's the only way their military will be low enough.
Piracy was practically an abandoned concept before the shattering. Food and resources were plentiful, and the people were strong, honest, and well-defended. The technologies and societies of their utopian culture made competition for resources a pointless and needless excercise. Now, with people dying from spiritual starvation on a daily basis, the despised and romanticized practice of piracy has resurged with a vengeance. The key to the sudden formation of the now-ubiquitous pirate bands was the Cooler device, invented by a faction called Those Who Shall Survive. Without it, stealing spiritual energy would be impossible, but once the technology for cooler devices was stolen, replicated, and placed in the hands of anyone cunning enough to get one, piracy became a sudden and very plausible way to make a living. Now the spaceways are constantly blocked by throngs of cutthroats seeking to drain the energies away from any who pass through their webs. The Obsidian Bones is one such pirate faction, and easily the largest. They have evaded undue amounts of wrath by carefully picking their targets and never preying on one group too heavily. While this has made them enemies of just about everyone, they aren't a sufficient threat to gain the undivided attention of anyone, especially when enemies are already in ample supply. Nonetheless, preying on the others like mosquitoes will not work forever. Eventually it will come down to the Bones versus whoever else is still alive, and they are stockpiling ships and weapons to ensure they emerge victorious in the end. The Bones approach their work with an almost morbid sense of humor--they are one of the few factions who has accepted their situation and decided to make the best of it. Strategies: The bones have a formidable ability: They can draw a card or un-USE one of their ships every time they destroy an enemy battlegroup. This makes them excellent for decks that rely on attrition, destroyers, fighters, or lots of action cards. To make best use of this, they should use large numbers of destroyers, carriers, and free battle actions, and they should never shy away from the Full Attack Heavy Weapon Assault. Being able to draw cards means you can use all kinds of counter-meta such as Alternate Course, Sensor Jam and Veteran Maneuvers to trip up your opponent's strategy, along with one-off bonuses like Daring Maneuver.
Not every pirate faction has had the luck and resources of the Obsidian Bones. Cooler devices, while easy to obtain by some people in some places, prove nearly impossible to acquire in others. Most of the galaxy finds them in very short supply, but another, more permanent method of attaining spiritual energy is known. The dead have no use for life energy, and thus when a creature dies, it releases it into the world. This can either increase the local supply, or can be taken by a single person if they're quick enough. But if an individual is present at the very moment of death, they can potentially take every drop of living energy as it is released. This required murder--no excuse could be made. However, survival proves to be an insistent need, and it ultimately didn't take long for the starving worlds of the galaxy to find an excuse to use their discovery in daily practice. Even so, these were not beasts just waiting to be unchained--these were kind, benevolent people who found themselves forced to commit the ultimate act of evil in order to maintain themselves. So they did what they could to soften the blow--by introducing wildly powerful narcotics into the mixture. It is accepted that the voidfangs will never harm a person without first giving them " Icedrops" , a wildly powerful liquid narcotic which is also a paralysis agent. They expose their victims to it via various means--injection, inhalation, and sometimes even just biting--and then slowly kill them. This has not been without it's effect on the voidfangs. The newly empathic nature of the galaxy means that they can feel everything they inflict upon their victims, and a bond as close as the one they form when draining a dying person means their death often leaves scars. Their psyches have become fragile, and a few have been driven mad by the acts they are forced to commit. Even the most stable find it takes great self-control to continue in their frightening way of life, and very few enjoy it. The Voidfangs didn't enjoy the public support nor the self-determination of the other factions at first, and indeed they never expected to be a major faction. However, the simplicity of their techniques and the fact that they're usable without a cooler device has seen their numbers swell far beyond what they were prepared for. Their sheer numbers now make them as formidable as any other faction, and they gain converts from starving worlds from all corners of the galaxy. Voidfang leadership is on shaky ground, as not all of them are sure they really want to win this war, but the most determined have risen to the top and intend to make sure their newfound charges do not suffer the same fate as the rest of the galaxy. The Voidfangs are everywhere--their method for gaining life energy is the most basic and accessible technique that exists. As a result, they are practically the default faction to join for unaffiliated individuals who don't want to die. Strategies: Voidfangs soar with heavy attrition decks. Since you can replace your ships with psi and gain extra psi from kills, it doesn't matter how many of your ships you lose so long as you destroy a fair number of enemies in the process. Normally questionable or outright dangerous cards like Stellar Corona and the Attrition tactic become very useful. Since you gain a huge amount of psi with each kill and can replenish your losses with it, you will quickly grind your enemies down, allowing you to go for whichever victory condition you wish. This can be a double-edged sword, however--though you gain twice the psi that other fleets do, your heavy losses mean they will be racking up psi as well. The bane of this deck type is high-military, heavily defensive decks such as Coreguard decks.
Thousands of years have passed since the galaxy's races first delved into artificial intelligence. Computer programs could be engineered to be much more efficient than living beings, given the right hardware and programming. In time, it was an obvious step to attempt to teach a computer to do anything, to learn on it's own how to accomplish a task, and forgo the need for programming forever more. This step was a large one, but from there, the step to actual digital sentience--self-aware machines--was infinitesimal indeed. Once built, the artificially intelligent were regarded with uncertainty. It seemed strange to some; a living mind that could exist in anything that had the hardware to support it. But these intelligences were eloquent, and their arguments potent--in the end, the world decided to err on the side of wisdom, and assume that these machines were, in fact, alive in the same manner as any other creature. They lived and learned for ages, growing into a thousand different types of mind--artists, architects, philosophers, and even lovers were counted among their number. They explored who they were as any race would, and relished their existence perhaps even more. And in the end, when the shattering came, the biological races of the galaxy finally learned the truth--as the loss of spiritual energy saw the deaths of one AI after another. They too now find themselves struggling to defend against the sudden hostility of a dozen different groups. The largest community of AIs is named after it's nature--it is a sea of shifting intelligences, merging and melding into one another in a gigantic computer network. Long ago, they chose to call themselves the Sea--for they were an ocean of beings. These intelligences must now leave their homes and enter into the sterile metal bodies of fighters, battleships and carriers, moving out to defend their homes against intruders. The enigmatic intelligences of the Sea have no eyes nor ears with which to experience the world--they see it through their sensors, their IR imagers, their tactile detection devices and their vibration plates. All the richness of the galaxy is there to see through these devices, and as such the Sea has long since developed sensors superior to those of any other faction. They mount these sensors on every ship they build, giving them numerous advantages in combat. Strategies: The Sea functions best with decks that abuse it's advantage. Being immune to jamming and action stoppers doesn't seem like much until you realize that a lot of jamming cards affect both players. You can run cards like Nebula and Broadband Jamming in your own deck and be immune to the effects. This makes The Sea an excellent defender, making rift victories and steady marches easier than with other factions. Cards like Force Them In can be excellent in driving back enemy fleets--you can dump a nebula on an enemy fleet, forcing them to either fight you using nothing but standard attacks or retreat two whole territories. They also have the highest production in the game.
The secretive yet ever-present Order of Hantelle was once the guardian of secrets and the hunter of that which struck from the shadows. They were the galaxy's shadow police, rooting out threats that could not be seen by the people at large. Intelligence, covert operations and clandestine conspiracies were their hallmarks, and they served their motherworlds well. After the tragedy, however, the majority of planetary governments collapsed in the chaos. Those few that remained could barely survive the strain of keeping order among their own people. They could hardly afford to support the hidden intelligence network that had come to depend on them. Suddenly, the Hantelle found themselves desperately short on the resources that had formerly been provided for them by the galactic government. Though they were a secretive and evasive organization by nature, they gradually realized that most people valued life force more than secrets. With nothing to bargain with and no territory to draw from, they decided the only way their organization would be able to survive, and perhaps unravel the mystery of the galaxy's sickness, would be to venture forth and take the resources they needed by force. After all, the Hantelle was not just a loose organization of spies-they possessed weapons and fleets far beyond what most people realized. Turning these secret fleets to the stars in open combat for the first time, the Hantelle seek to gain a foothold on the galaxy with which to ensure their continued existence. The Hantelle possess the finest covert intelligence equipment in the galaxy, and the most thorough training in the taking and subsequent use of secrets. Though the Hantelle may not have quite the same level of military firepower of the other factions, the military value of covert operations should not be underestimated. The Hantelle have never been used to operating in any one place. When they fortify their borders, they often do so only grudgingly, and will pick up and relocate any time they suspect an enemy is threatening them. Strategies: The ubiquitous strategy with the Hantelle is to put a couple of high military fleets on the Hantelle HQ, then use it's ability to move it next to the enemy HQ and blast away. This is a very risky tactic, but the threat of it is often enough to force enemies to keep at least one fleet at or near their HQ at all times to defend it. This makes it easier to outmaneuver their fleets in the galaxy at large. A fun trick is to move all of your fleets out, wait for them to do the same, then blow up a rift with one of your fleets, purchase a new one at your HQ, move it, and commence the pounding. Cards that counter cards in the enemy's hand like Counter Preparations and Know Thine Enemy work very well with the Hantelle's other ability, ensuring that they can never use cards against you effectively.
With the collapse of galactic civilization, it seemed as though commerce as a whole would collapse, along with those who relied upon it. There were still those foresighted enough, however, to realize that there were still fortunes to be made in the broken stars. The demand had simply changed from luxuries and trade goods to psionic essence and life force. The Rose Cartel was one of the first to realize this. Seeing an opportunity to ensure their own survival by cornering the market on life force, they stepped into the "soul-trade" with an eerie eagerness. Ever the pragmatists, they both buy and sell life energy, trading standard goods for the psionic power they need to sustain themselves. The other factions, eager for military equipment, have reluctantly begun trading their own precious energies to the Roses in exchange for increased firepower. The Roses then sell this essence at a hefty profit to those more desperate for it. In continually trading their own spiritual assets, however, they face the grave risk of being caught short when the sky finally falls. Strategies: The Rose Cartel is one of the only factions that can realistically win by sitting and building up. One of the best tactics for use with the Rose Cartel is to use all of your cash to build up your unique Finance Tokens for the first few turns, then use each token to produce psi after turn 3 or 4. Landgrab with your fleets to increase your production and make liberal use of the Build action when it will help you. Your combat deck should be all defensive actions like Defensive Formation, Advanced Armor, Non-Ablative Shields and Costly Attack. Leave at least one fleet near your HQ to defend it, but don't let the enemy take too much territory or you may be overwhelmed. You should also seal a rift to gain some rift tokens early on to make your victory easier.
Like the Rose Cartel, the rival Orchid Cartel was farsighted enough to see that wealth and resources would still be a factor in the times ahead. Unlike the Roses, however, the Orchids found the gamble of trading with their own psionic energies to be an unappetizing one. They eventually came upon a different, altogether more grisly business plan. They realized that the entire problem with the galaxy's life force was that supply was simply outstripping demand. If they could reduce the demand, therefore, the supply would take care of itself. How, then, do you reduce the demand for living essence? Simple, as the Orchids believe: By reducing the living. Not wanting to risk themselves in combat, they decided instead to become dealers in death, middle-men and marketeers of destruction. They now offer hefty bounties-credits, luxury items, and even warships-in exchange for confirmed kills to anyone who walks in the door. The Orchids don't care who is on the hit list, so long as it isn't another Orchid. And even that requirement may prove to be negotiable... This appalling policy has enraged many of the other factions. However, few can refuse the offer of a free warship after a particularly bloody battle. Strategies: The Orchids are best in multiplayer games where they
can power-broker and stay out of combat directly, but they are still
viable single-player opponents. The best tactic in single player is
to make sure you stock a ship type your enemy does not have and give
that ship to them when they destroy one of your battlegroups. That leaves
a very vulnerable battlegroup with only a single ship that you can counterattack
and wipe out with one action, gaining you psi very quickly. Since you
can only use your psi ability once per round, it's a bit of a waste
to have more than one fleet in combat unless you're gunning for them
the old fashioned way. Other fleets can be outfitted with stealth drives
and used to grab territories to replace your constant ship losses. |
" We must redeem
ourselves, at any cost. Only we can correct the damage we have done."
"
If it is our fate to die, so be it. But we swear it will not be the
killers who survive us."
"
You seek to ensure that the others die first. We seek to ensure that
we will die last."
" Arrrr. Harrrrr. Harrrrr.
Put yer soul in me bag 'o' booty."
"
Pain was once a part of life. Now it's the only thing that preserves
it."
"
You once wondered if we had souls. At last our dead have proven it to
you."
"
Our former employers have turned their backs on us. We must fend for
ourselves."
"
Some things are worth dying for. But only if you pay retail."
"
What manner of creature gives the reaper a receipt..."