Aegis Force: The Scorian War Beginner Tips - What to Know Before Your First Battle

There is a very specific flavor of tactical RPG that mostly disappeared after the Genesis era, and I have been waiting a long time for someone to build one again. Not the mission-select structure of Fire Emblem, and not the job-system math of Final Fantasy Tactics, but the Shining Force shape: a real world you walk around in, towns you poke at, and then a grid battle that erupts out of the story.

Aegis Force: The Scorian War is swinging directly at that target. It hit Steam Early Access on August 31, 2026 from Zenahive, a debut studio, and it follows three childhood friends (Callon Roth, Orvus Magnaric, and Vedette Kairn) through a century-long war between a nation built on magic and a nation built on technology.

It is also a game that does a mediocre job of explaining itself in the opening hours. Here is what I would want to know going in.

This is a Shining Force game, not a Fire Emblem game

The single biggest adjustment for new players is structural. There is no mission-select screen feeding you battle after battle, because you explore the continent of Ianua and its towns in full, and fights trigger out of that exploration and swap you to a turn-based grid.

That means the overworld is not a hallway between the parts that matter. It is where recruits, secrets, and equipment live, and treating it like a loading screen is the fastest way to end up underpowered.

If you have played Shining Force II, you already have the right instincts. If your tactics background is all Fire Emblem, slow down and get comfortable wandering.

Attacking from behind works, and it works on you too

Positioning is not decoration here. Hitting an enemy from behind gives your unit an attack bonus, which is the sort of thing every tactics veteran immediately starts exploiting.

The catch is that the bonus is symmetrical. Enemies get the same boost when they get behind you, which turns every aggressive push into a real decision instead of a free damage button.

So the habit to build early is simple. Before you confirm a move, ask what is standing behind that tile next turn, and never end a turn with a squishy unit’s back exposed to an open lane.

Where you stand matters more than what you are carrying

Deployment and terrain carry as much weight as raw stats in most encounters. A well-placed unit in a choke point does more work than a better-equipped one standing in the middle of a field.

Look at the map before you commit. Narrow corridors, elevation, and doorways let you fight two enemies at a time instead of five, which matters enormously when your roster is small.

And resist the urge to field your six favorites on every map. Picking the right units for the specific fight in front of you is a real part of the game.

Keep a core squad together to unlock tech attacks

This is the mechanic that gives Aegis Force its own identity. Characters who fight alongside each other build bonds, and those bonds unlock joint tech attacks that hit considerably harder than anything a solo unit is putting out.

The interesting tension is that rotating your roster for tactical coverage costs you bond progress. Every time you bench someone to bring in a specialist, you are trading long-term firepower for short-term flexibility.

My advice for a first run is to commit to a consistent core of four or five units and rotate only around the edges. Spreading your bonds evenly across everyone means you finish the Early Access build with a lot of half-built relationships and no payoff.

Learn what each class is actually for

The full game promises over fifteen recruitable characters spread across warriors, thieves, mages, engineers, and more. The Early Access build gives you seven, which is a small enough force that every role is load-bearing.

Warriors are your wall and your flank protection. Mages give you the reach to punish enemies that clump up, which they will.

Thieves are the ones you send around the side to set up back attacks, and engineers cover the tech side of the magic-versus-machinery divide the story is built on. Do not skip a role because a character’s early stats look unimpressive.

Callon is your win condition, so stop parking him up front

Callon Roth is a Tactimagus, which in practice means he carries the widest spread of spells, attacks, and battlefield tools in your force. His kit also expands as your team grows, so he gets steadily more valuable the deeper you go.

Every early wipe I have read about traces back to the same mistake, which is treating the protagonist like a frontline bruiser because he has good numbers. He does have good numbers, and he is still the unit you cannot afford to lose.

Keep him one tile behind the line, where he can reach targets without eating a counterattack, and let the warriors absorb the opening exchange.

Search everything in town

The environmental interaction here is more generous than it looks. Barrels, chests, and houses are all worth poking at, and players who did the demo consistently called this out as one of the better parts of the exploration loop.

More importantly, recruits are hidden in explorable areas, not handed to you in cutscenes. Walking past a house because you assumed it was scenery is the kind of mistake you do not notice for four hours.

Before you leave any settlement, do a lap. It costs you two minutes and it is how you end up with a full bench instead of a thin one.

Think ahead about promotions

You can promote characters and customize their abilities, which is the main long-term progression lever you have. It is also where beginners tend to spend resources on impulse.

Promote the units in your bonded core first. Investing in a character you are about to bench for the next chapter is wasted value, especially in a build this short.

One caveat worth knowing: branched promotions are not confirmed for the 1.0 release, and players are actively asking the developers about it on the Steam forums. Plan around the systems that exist in the current build rather than the ones you are hoping for.

Turn the difficulty down and stop feeling bad about it

Difficulty is adjustable, and I would use it without a second thought on a first playthrough. This is not a game where the challenge is the point so much as the systems are.

There is a practical reason too. Testers repeatedly flagged how much information the combat throws at you at once, and the UI is not helping yet, with small text and damage numbers that are genuinely hard to read at a glance.

Learn the flanking rules and the bond system on a setting where a misread number does not cost you the map. You can always crank it back up once the systems click.

It is Early Access, so play like it

The current build runs roughly six to ten hours and takes you through Chapter 2, with the full release targeted at 20 to 30 hours sometime in 2027. Zenahive has committed to content updates every four to eight weeks.

It also has the rough edges you would expect from a day-one Early Access launch. Controller movement issues, key rebinding gaps, and combat glitches are all showing up in the Steam discussions right now, so save often and save in multiple slots.

Going in with the right expectations changes the experience completely. You are not buying a finished 30-hour campaign, you are buying the first act of one and a seat at the table while it gets built.

What is here is promising in the ways that matter most. The bond system gives party composition real stakes, the flanking rules make positioning interesting instead of automatic, and the decision to let you actually walk around the world puts it much closer to the Shining Force feel than most modern tactics games get.

Whether that is worth $24.99 right now depends entirely on your tolerance for playing a game in progress. If you want a polished tactical RPG this weekend, wishlist it and check back in six months. If you have been missing this specific subgenre badly enough to sit through some jank, the foundation underneath Aegis Force is worth the patience.

–

Images in this article are from the Aegis Force: The Scorian War page on Steam and used under Fair Use.