Age of Wonders: Planetfall - NPC Factions Mechanics

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Mechanics

Quests

When expanding you’ll soon run into one of more of the factions. You might decide to approach them in a friendly way, so you perform quests for them and improve relation and influence – which you can then use to ask faction armies to give up important structures for you to use. Each NPC Faction has its own set of quests and narrative flavor.

War

If you decide to remove an army belonging to an NPC faction by force, it means war with the entire faction and a hit on your global reputation. Be careful not to start too many NPC wars as their bases and dwelling will start to spawn invading armies and your colonies might be overrun.

Sector claims

Just as AI Players, NPC factions lay claim to unowned Sectors around their habitats. So even if you try to avoid them, conflicts of interest with your NPC neighbors will soon start to appear: if you settle in sectors next to their dwelling your relations with them will suffer.

Demands

NPC factions will make demands based on their relation with you and based on the stage of the game. Small and early offenses can be made right by payments in one of the key resources. Soon demands will escalate and include demands that you hand over sectors to them. If you decline demands, relations will go further south and you are at risk of attack.

Attack events

As in AoW3 there are stacks garrisoned at NPC dwellings, and ones patrolling territories. This time NPC factions will also launch invasion attacks. This is associated with an event. An extreme version of NPC attack events are Boss events, extra strong armies that have named Boss characters with high level unit mods and henchmen.

Unit rosters and assets

Each NPC Faction has at least 5 unique units, including a Tier IV as well as a set of unique Mods and Operations you can acquire from them. Depending on your relation level you can recruit NPC Units as auxiliary forces. The higher your relation, the higher the level you can recruit. This recruitment costs additional influence.

Dwelling ownership

The ultimate friendly goal is annexing a faction’s Dwelling to your city. These dwellings have resource yields comparable with the Golden Landmarks (the highest-level economic structures in the game), and the units of the faction are unlocked for production.

PvP interaction

This is not all, NPC interaction comes into play with PvP interaction too. You can mess with the NPC relation of other players through Covert Ops and of course they’ll play a role in achieving particular victory conditions.