ZEPHON – Beginners Tips and Tricks

This guide contains some basic tips for any new player to be able to play this game better.

Tips and Tricks for New Players

By Soul-Delicatessen

Starting Basic Build Order

• Pick a good spot within the 1st or 2nd turn and setup your city.
• Next, use your city to claim a tile or build a barracks or your production facility of your affinity (in any order that you like).
• Then train your T1 units and research for your hero.
• Train hero from HQ.

• Build greenhouse and round that time, research for research lab (or research Specimen Containment)
• After building the greenhouse, then build a research lab and later a power plant and a mineral extractor.
• After that, its up to you where to go from there.

General Tips

• Click F1 to view the Compandium to read more about features (eg: special capturable sites), traits, units, weapon types and more.
• Press Ctrl+Z to Toggle the Resource Yields for the whole map. It helps to see the resources on tiles.
• You may want to increase animation speed in options to save time.

• Pay attention to weapon type and effect. It’s a small tip with huge consequences. For example, the Crusader tank’s Main Cannon or Militant Grenades does more splash damage to enemy squads with many member individuals units rather than a single unit like the Dreameater or Dark Vessel.

Cities, Placement and Terrain

• You can afford to spend 1-2 turns to choose a good spot for your first city. Scout around by using your starting units.
• Starting in the corner is good. Reason being that you have less areas to cover and protect.
• Build more cities when you’re able to especially for your 2nd city. More cities equals more production, more access to resources and map control.
• To maximize your city placement, build cities near resources or important geographical locations / special sites. Both would be best.

Moreover, building your city on that specific starting tile will allow your HQ to benefit from that specific tile’s increased resource percentage too (you can tell by hovering your mouse over a specific resource, and you get see + (value) from “Features”.

Additionally, you can optimize your defense by building your cities near cliffs that have bottlenecks or chokepoints. This will help you defend your cities by reducing the number of enemies that approach it at a time from a direction.

• Do not overclaim tiles without first building some buildings on existing tiles. Claiming new tiles is very draining on influence.
• Haphazard building of structures without optimizing resource production by taking advantage of the percentage bonuses is a huge mistake. If you aren’t smart about building your structures, you will start to suffer major resource shortages and well, attrition and bad planning will kill you faster than any real or AI opponent.
• For cities, each subsequent city you make has problems with loyalty. The only good way to deal with it is to plan Holo Theatres or build other structures that contribute to loyalty. Loyalty drains your resources very badly, so this needs to addressed carefully.
• Roads maximize unit movement on most terrain. Build them, especially when you are connecting them with another city.

Production & Research

Generally, it’s pretty cheap to get the Tier 1 units and heroes. You want a lot of them, and a few units to scout the map.

Try to research the upgrades that give your HQ the ability to generate chips or algae. While you can’t use it immediately, you could sell them for additional influence.

Specimen Containment is an awesome technology, as it gives research pts for killing neutral units.

1-2 research labs is sufficient (at least for the early game), especially with specimen containment.

Attacking and Defending

• Use overwhelming numbers and firepower against a single enemy unit to kill it and gain experience.
• Lead with your heroes to tank, followed by your regular T1 & T2 units at the start.
• Run away if you will lose your units against the enemy / neutrals.
• Your city can defend itself very well against stray enemies. Use it to shield your units.
• Healing your units within city tiles has higher health regeneration.

Some neutral units do not actively seek out to attack. You can avoid triggering them by turning off overwatch and staying about 1 empty hex distance away for safety.

Once you get better units, focus on synergy instead of brute force to ensure maximum optimal outcome.

Exploration

Use some free and available units to explore and capture sites.

Outriders (especially the Fallen Soldier’s starting unit) is amazing for exploring and for seeing threats (use its scan ability to reveal further away tiles). It can also absorb more hits and survive by running away.

Ground units can capture special sites but not flying units, so you can’t use say the Valkyria to capture them for example.

Diplomacy

Choose to ally with one main AI player. They tend to be mutually exclusive, as one side will discourage you from your existing alliance or trade agreement with the other player by asking you to break the alliance or trade agreements.

Even if you disagree to break the alliances or trade agreements, usually nothing happens. They just get very annoying by constantly pinging you to do it.

If you wait, your ally will sometimes give you extra resources as gifts.

Some factions like your hero traits and they will view you more favourably from time to time.

Situational Tips

If you manage to get London Graham, he is like a discount engineer with the ability to clear tiles. Use it to clear bleeds, forest zones etc that you don’t want.

A cheaper way to clear titles is to get a Valkyrie with 5 Gauntlets of Ruins + 1 Akavish Rig, so you can clear some terrain that you don’t want around like bleed or forests.

Advantages of the Missile Teams

The missile teams are 3 range human units, unlockable in Tier 2 research. No matter which route you’re going for, I believe they’ll become a requirement for any playstyle. They deal alot of damage compared to anything else in the research tree up until tier 2. Doesn’t matter whether they’re armored or infantry, they absolutely shred anything.

Militant and Missile Team spam are indeed very good in this demo. Militant grenade spam is also brutally effective against early neutral units.

Missile teams are good and currently the best non-hero unit for base bashing, but they need to be stationary to deal good damage. Plus since you need to build the barracks to produce them, I don’t expect them to be a must have for all builds. In contrast, the commander fits easily into all builds (no extra production building needed) and does good damage to pretty much everything (and seems to be a straight up better damage dealer than the assassin) so I would say he is the only unit that is too good to ignore.

Missile Teams do well on plains without ruins, forests, cliffs, sandstorms etc. They block line of sight and which Missile Teams need. Otherwise, they’re a very solid unit (and also can be repaired by the engineers too).