The campaign: Seeds of Ruin
Thirty-one missions in five acts. Humanity went looking for its makers. Something answered.
The premise
Humanity has spent centuries searching for whoever placed it among the stars. The answer, when it comes, is the Kith: human in body, fused into a hive network, and returning not to fight a war but to collect a harvest. You command the Compact's fleet from a quiet training sector to the heart of the thing that planted us.
That is as much as this page will spoil. The acts below give shape, not plot.
The five acts
| Act | Missions | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| I — Genesis | 7 | A guided tutorial, first contact, and the discovery that the ruins are not ruins. |
| II — Awakening | 6 | The harvest begins in earnest; the Compact learns what it is facing. |
| III — Incursion | 6 | The war turns outward, into Kith space, with supernovae and wormholes as weapons. |
| IV — Crucible | 6 | The hardest fighting of the war, and a betrayal. |
| V — Harvest | 6 | The approach to the Taproot, and a final choice with three authored endings. |
How campaign missions differ
- Objectives, not just conquest. Missions ask you to hold a system for a number of turns, protect a person or place, survive waves, disable something, or take a set number of systems — the briefing states victory and defeat conditions before you start.
- Scripted events. Reinforcements arrive, enemies spawn on cue, stars are marked for harvest, and characters talk to you while you play.
- Progress carries. Resources carry between most missions, and upgrades you unlock stay unlocked; a handful of missions are deliberate hard resets.
- Four difficulties. Easy, Normal, Hard and Brutal shift enemy skill and garrisons. You can change difficulty between missions.
- Three endings. The last mission presents a genuine choice, and each path has its own ending written for it.
How long it takes
Missions run 10–30 minutes each, so the campaign is roughly 8–12 hours depending on difficulty and how carefully you play. Mission 1 is a guided tutorial that teaches the whole game in a few minutes — no prior 4X experience needed.