FACTION BRIEFING

Three factions, three ways to win

Picking a faction in Helion Rift isn't picking a color. The three armies are built differently, they win differently, and which one you're facing changes what you should be doing about it.

Air Power · Precision · Laser Tech

European Helion Coalition

The Coalition fields the smallest army of the three, and the most expensive one. Fewer units, better units, and the air above them.

It can afford that. The Coalition sits on the richest Helion deposits on Earth and has spent seventy years rebuilding everything it owns around them. Nothing in Coalition service burns fuel any more. Its aircraft trail no flame at all, only a column of blue-white light, and its headquarters in Belgium sees no reason the world should change.

What that costs you is margin. Coalition lasers hit where they're pointed and the air is where you're strongest, but every loss is expensive. Trade one for one and you're already behind.

“Command authority granted. Theater feed is yours, Commander.”

  • Air power
  • Laser weapons
  • Long-range defenses
  • Small, elite army

Mass · Heavy Armor · Artillery

Eastern Coalition Authority

The Authority doesn't outshoot anyone. It outweighs them. Heavy armor, artillery, and more of both than the enemy can work through.

It was built to break the Coalition's grip on Helion and it has never had enough Helion of its own, so it makes what can be made in quantity: armor, guns, and older technology that still works because it was never asked to be clever. Its headquarters in Harbin was founded by Russian railway engineers and finished by Chinese industry, and nothing leaves it carrying fewer than two signatures.

That is slow, and the Authority knows it. It's also very hard to stop. You shell a position flat from outside its range, and you replace what you lose faster than the enemy can take it off you.

“Authorization confirmed. The theater is under your command. The Authority expects results.”

  • Heavy armor
  • Artillery
  • Mass production
  • Breaks bases

Stealth · Infiltration · Contamination

United Dominion

The Dominion picks when the fight starts. Its units move without being seen, and the first thing you usually learn about a Dominion attack is that it already happened.

It rose out of what used to be the United States, and it holds no legitimate Helion at all. No great deposits, no licenses, no refineries. What it can't refine it uses raw, which is how contamination stopped being an accident and became a weapon.

A Dominion strike doesn't destroy a position. It makes the ground lethal, and leaves it that way. Its own cyborgs walk through that ground and keep going. Nobody has ever proved a single case, and the Dominion has never admitted one.

“Channel open. Assets released to your control. You were never here.”

  • Stealth
  • Contamination
  • Cyborgs
  • Deniability
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