Varkesh Host

What they are

Heavy-scaled reptilians, dense and deliberate, with long lives and longer memories. They endure heat, cold, thin air, bad water and radiation that would put any other people behind seals, and they eat about a tenth more than anybody else for the privilege.

They breed slowly — two fifths the rate of a Caelari, barely a quarter of a Shoal brood. A Varkesh generation is long and a Varkesh childhood longer, and the practical consequence runs through everything they do: a Host that loses a hundred of its own has lost something it will be decades replacing, and it knows that while the fighting is still going on.

The world that made them

A world of extremes that never settled into a climate. Swings of heat and cold inside a single year, water that had to be read before it was drunk, air that was thin on the highlands and worse in the valleys, and ground that moved.

Every other people in the galaxy would have answered that by engineering their way out of it. The Host did not. They adapted instead — slowly, over a very long time, at the cost of a metabolism that wants feeding and a birth rate that never recovered — until the world stopped being hostile to them in particular.

It is the single most valuable thing any people brought out of prehistory. A hostile world is one rung milder to the Host than it is to anybody else: cheaper to seal, cheaper to build on, less drain on the grid, less wearing to live on. It is a Climate Engine they never have to build, on every rock they ever settle.

The long memory

Varkesh history is recited and inscribed, in lineages, with the obligations attached. A Host remembers who stood and who did not at a particular wall, and remembers it in a form that is still being taught to children four centuries later.

This is not sentiment, it is governance: precedence in the Host is held by lineage and service, so the record of who served is the record of who may speak. It also makes them the slowest people in the galaxy to forgive anything. There is no Varkesh concept corresponding neatly to a lapsed grievance.

They came to space late and with nothing of their own to show for it — no founding science, no inherited technique, not one technology they can claim they brought with them. The Host do not regard this as a deficiency. Their position is that they arrived, that they are still on the worlds they settled, and that several of the peoples who arrived before them are not.

How a Host decides

A host is mustered, not elected. In peace it is a standing order of precedence, consulted rather than debated; in war it is already the command structure, which is part of why the Host are so difficult to surprise politically.

They are proud in a specific and inconvenient way: a Varkesh will keep an agreement that has stopped being in their interest, and will expect the same, and will treat the failure as permanent.

What is theirs alone

Every people has the same buildings and the same technology tree. These are the exceptions — the things only this one has, or has differently.

A world one rung milder

Every hostile environment treats the Host as one step less severe than it is. Cheaper seals, cheaper building, less power drawn, less unrest — a free Climate Engine on every bad world in the galaxy, and nobody else has anything like it.

The best soldiers alive

A third again in strength, a quarter more resistant to wounds, a quarter better at holding ground. A Varkesh soldier is worth three of the Bloom's and very nearly two of the Conclave's.

And the slowest growth

Two fifths the usual rate, with a tenth more appetite. Everything above is paid for here, every turn, for the whole game.

Playing them

The opening

Farms before anything clever. A tenth more appetite with two fifths the growth is a cruel combination early, because your population is both expensive to feed and nearly impossible to replace, and a single famine turn can cost you a decade.

You begin with no technology of your own, so the first laboratory matters more to you than it does to the Brood. You also begin with an extra soldier, which is worth remembering: a garrison keeps a small colony quiet by its presence alone.

The real decision

Your advantage is the map, not the battlefield, and the players who lose with the Host are the ones who never notice. Volcanic waste, toxic flats, ice sheets, airless rock — all of it is a rung cheaper for you to hold than for anybody who has to engineer the severity away. Expand deliberately into ground your neighbours have written off, and let them wonder why you wanted it.

Hostile Seals and the habitation line are still worth having. They are simply worth more to you, because you are buying down a smaller number than everybody else is.

How not to lose them

Do not trade units. Ever. Your combat bonuses are for holding ground and surviving what is thrown at it, not for spending lives to take a world you could have settled beside instead. A Host that wins three offensive wars and loses two hundred of its own doing it has lost the game and will find out around turn ninety.

Fight defensively, fortify what is yours, and let the long memory work for you: an enemy who has learned that a Varkesh wall costs more than it is worth tends to stop testing it.

Everything in the guide applies to all six peoples; the above is what changes for this one.

Against the other five

Caelari Conclave

They will out-think you from the first turn and cannot stop you landing. If it has to come to a war, make it a short one on the ground.

Kharaxi Brood

The only other people who hold a bad world cheaply, and the only one who can out-produce you while doing it. The dangerous neighbour.

Sepharai Shoal

They have to flood a world before they can use it; you can simply walk onto it. Settle the dry ground around their shelf and the argument is already over.

Maketh Assembly

Immune to everything your bonuses punish — no morale to break, no hunger to exploit, no generation to cost them. Hit the works, not the population.

Nemora Bloom

The softest ground in the galaxy, and they know it. Whether that is an opportunity or a dishonour is the one question a Host actually argues about.

All six peoples →