Phoenix Point: Year One Edition – Anu and you: How to factions

Guide for Phoenix Point: Year One Edition – Anu and you: How to factions.

Foreword/Faction Basics

My last guide, “Fighting Dirty,” seems to have helped many folks out, so I thought I would impart some more wisdom. This time, I’m covering factions. If this guide is helpful to you, let me know in the comments, as I have some other guide ideas for you fine folks!

Each of the three factions of the game has three main tiers of friendship for you to work through.

When you reach first base with a faction, they reveal all their havens; when you reach second base, they give you all the tech they have researched (instantly), and when you reach third base, they let you research their new research projects with them (non-instantly), to hurry them along to the endgame.

The main two hurdles we care about are getting to first base with all the factions and getting to second base with the factions that most compliment your play-style.

The reason for getting to first base with all the factions is SO important is fourfold:

Discovering all the havens takes a LOT of work out of exploring, as you always know that any new location you explore will be something other than a haven.

Acquiring all these travel points makes it a lot easier to travel the world map, which you need to do while following the trail left behind by Randolph Symes across the continents and eventually to the arctic. One thing to bear in mind is that if your flight path would have you stop at a haven that you have a little blue question mark next to, go straight to that haven and stop. The timer stops when your aircraft do, so no time is lost, and sometimes stopping manually at a haven (for the first time) activates an event that can give you more resources and faction rep.

Recruits, while you can acquire them from the recruitment window, come pre-equipped (with guns and armor outside of Hero difficulty, and armor outside of Legend) when recruited from havens, letting you save time and resources on building new kit while also giving you much better equipment to use than the starting Phoenix kit.

Lastly, and most importantly, you want to have an aircraft, empty, flying around as fast as possible all game long, trading as many resources as you can with these havens. It’s a fast, easy, risk-free way of generating resources, as the havens ALWAYS trade more units for the fewer… sort of. Tech trades 10 for 2 and 2 for 12 of either Food or Materials, while Materials trade 4 for 6 with Food, one way round or the other (on average, individual havens may vary. The important thing is that trade generates a profit.)

To explain the next hurdle, we’re going to have to get specific. Let’s start with

The Disciples of Anu: The melee mutant food faction

Anu gives you some much better benefits than the other factions do.

For starters, reaching second base with them gives you the ability to create your own food, both from food-producing facilities in your bases and from harvesting food from captured pandoras.

They also give two cla*ses, the priest and the berserker, while both factions only give one cla*s. The priest comes with some powerful abilities, and the berserker’s melee weapon arsenal is instrumental if you also bring Synedrion into the polycule.

The big one, though, is that Anu is the only faction that cares about mutation. A whole aspect is restricted to people who get the mutation tech, either willing given by, or forcefully taken from, the disciples.

Anu is also a good faction to carry to the endgame because they are the only faction that sends you into the final battle with additional support. Really, they’re just so kind and sweet—a shame you have to commit some morally dubious actions for their faction missions.

Anu, like New Jericho, has 5 core faction missions: The Poison within, the second invitation, the fourth invitation, the sixth invitation, and that one where they have a civil war.

The poison within is really easy (if you aren’t playing on Legend, but then nothing is easy on Legend) as you have some worms to kill, and they drop like flies to gun bashing and grenades.

The second invite is to “kill some human bandits.” Nothing too hard there.

The fourth invite is tough. You’ll be up against New Jericho heavys and snipers, and the heavys have back-mounted rocket launchers. Use a heavy with a war cry to take two action points away from these enemies, to prevent them from using their 3 action point costing weapons for a turn, but watch out for the rockets, as they cost one action point and hold two shots (they can only be fired once a turn.)

The sixth invite is easier; you kill some Synedrion units. An aspida or two maybe there, but if you’re building your team well, it should be little more than a speed-bump for you.

Civil war is also fairly easy. Many psychic enemies there, but mind control only works at close range, so snipe them down. Most of them have fairly low HP (or did the last time I played the mission; they may have re-balanced it since then).

New Jericho: the robotic racist material faction

NJ is the weakest faction, IMO. They give you the worst benefits, but that shouldn’t discourage you from repping up as high as you can with them. They still give GOOD stuff, just not AS GOOD.

Their cla*s is the technician, a vehicle specialist in a game where vehicles are literally worse than worthless; a dedicated healer in a game where there exists no real reason why you can’t have everybody carrying a medkit at all times; a gun turret deployer in a game where… okay, I got nothing bad to say about the gun turrets; they’re actually pretty choice. Still, most of these guys’ abilities are just hot wet garbage, and their go-to gun is just a crappy AR. Easily the weakest cla*s in the game.

Their tech is mostly concerned with robotics, which you can get from either them or Synedrion (NJ gives the worse robotics options). Still, there are some diamonds in the rough. Their fire-based grenade is a FANTASTIC area suppression tool, as the fire it creates damages enemies that try to walk through it, allowing you to use one to pin down a Siren, which can only attack in melee range. They also give you the best heavy weapon in the game, a mighty minigun that Scylla has nightmares about.

You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned the aircraft that each faction gives you, and that’s because they’re all more or less the same. NJ’s has one more crew slot than Phoenix’s and moves slower, and also has more HP (which basically never comes up and is irrelevant), but really, an aircraft is an aircraft.
If you have two, you can send both to one spot, and once both are there, you can deploy troops from both of them into one mission, so even with the 5 troops carrying Synedrion craft, you can still deploy the maximum of 9 for the last mission. Just make sure they both do get there, as the first one will try to start the mission early. I tend to have 2 Phoenix craft for a full campaign, so it makes no difference to me what craft each faction gives since I never use ’em.

Anyway, tangent over; faction missions:

The dreamers awaken the hardest starting faction mission because they shoot you when you shoot them! Yeah, break their right or left arm, and they can neither shoot you on their turn or your own.

The next mission is you VS some pandoras. It shouldn’t be super tricky, but try to go slow and steady if it’s giving you grief.

Same deal with the mission after that, really. Just kill the enemies on the map and then activate the vehicle after they’re all dead.

The FOURTH mission is straight out of Satan’s anus. You have to protect this highly killable NPC from an entire gang of Synedrion bastards, many of whom can apply paralysis. If one of those paralyzes your NPC, they’ll lose all their action points, and you’ll have to WAIT for them to stagger across the finish line, long, long, slow, LONG after all the nerds are dead. It’s nightmarishly boring.

The fifth and final core faction mission is as cool as hell. You have a pitched battle in the main NJ base, and the faction leader, Mr “I don’t HATE mutants, I’m just asking questions!” even shows up and demonstrates why he should never be allowed on a battlefield, with his crappy little handgun and piss poor aim.

Synedrion: The communist scientific tech faction

Synedrion gives lots of fun little bonuses and has some of the coolest techs in the game. They have loads of faction missions.

The cla*s they give you is the infiltrator; by far, the strongest of the four faction cla*ses. These sneaky gits can slink about and wreak havoc on enemies of every shape and size with their bag of tricks, and it’s ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fun to do so. They pair well with most other cla*ses, and if you get one with the “Thief” additional ability, they’re basically permanently invisible. They make great scouts, great dps’s, and you should SEE the hell you can raise with an infiltrator/a*sault that has “ready for action,” “spider pack,” and a backpack chock full of spider pistol ammo.

The tech you get from ‘Ned upgrades your base facilities, increasing your power output and letting you establish a mist-repelling shield around each of your bases (or you could go climate restoration if you’re a DORK.) They also have access to a sniper rifle and a*sault rifle, which are strict, flat upgrades over the stock Phoenix options, as well as paralytic handguns and sniper rifles, which are really, really strong against heavily armored targets and Mind-controlled Phoenix operatives who you can’t un-mind control that turn.

The hard part of the sell for the nerds at ‘Ned is their faction missions:

Enter Synedrion; stage left is a mission that appears easy until you realize that laser pistols cost one action point to fire and have damn good aim. If you play carelessly, you can easily lose an a*sault to this mission on greater difficulties. Fortunately, there’ll always be a building above where your team spawns in and hiding within, forces the frail enemies to run into your overwatch cones if they want to hit you.

The next mission changes based on whether you picked Mist or climate, but either way, it’s a fairly easy “Kill all the pandoras” mission, with one of the two requiring you to plant some seeds after you’re done.

Mission 3.1 is a simple kill ’em all and then interact with the do-hickey mission, but after that’s done, you have the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pirate king mission. Jesus Christ, this mission the last time I played it. I can only hope they’ve patched that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥’s flamethrower since then because if it hits you, you die. You  ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ die, and there ain’t ♥♥♥♥ you can do about it. Break Abbdon’s arm or lose a teammate or seven. Aside from that, this mission is unique in that it’s the only time you gain a base as a faction mission prize.

Mission 4 is fairly easy as far as I recall. Again, take it slow and steady.

5 is a major base defense mission. Lots of danger, lots of carnage, lots of fun. Not a whole lot to say, really. It’s kinda generic in its “semi-final mission” feel.

How to rep up quickly

There are 3 main ways you can gain faction rep:

Save havens from attack by the Pandorans, the Pure, and the Foreskin. (that’s not a typo; they ugly mothers)

Destroy the bases of the Pandoras. (you get 5 for each faction for a level 1, 10 for a level 2, and 15 for a level 3)

Do missions from the diplomacy tab where you attack the factions for the other factions. (Not recommended)

The OTHER way to gain faction rep, which you’ll mostly do in the early game, is adopting their politics when making choices.

Anu like religious freedom, destroying the old world, and preserving weird ♥♥♥♥.

NJ likes people who agree with them, destroying weird ♥♥♥♥, and preserving the old world.

‘Ned like communism, humanity (in the touchy-feely sense, not the two arms, two legs, not a mutant sense) and scientific debate.

You can gain small point gains for each faction by making choices they agree with, and doing so is a good way to make it to first base—bond over shared interests, like any new relationship. Once you’ve got the havens found, though, the main source of point gains is method one. Savin’ Hav’ns is good for trade, good for rep, lets you find enemy bases to destroy for even MORE rep, and comes with very few inherent downsides.

Attacking havens are bad for rep for the faction that you are attacking, and often a lot more dangerous. Yes, it’s slower to go without, but you’ve got plenty of time to win the campaign. I often make it to the final mission with about 55% of the doomsday clock left, and that’s on Hero difficulty. Take it slow and steady, and always put rep above resources where you can.

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