Unit roster
The v1 target is roughly 40 units per faction. This page covers the Tier-1 land roster — the units you'll live and die by in the first ten minutes of every match — plus a tour of what waits at higher tiers.
The mirror policy
The two factions are about 85% mirrored. Every core role — constructor, raider, assault, artillery, AA, air scout, and so on — exists on both sides, with different stats and flavor. On top of that shared skeleton, each side has three to five signature units (marked ◆) that have no direct counterpart. This keeps balance tractable while giving each network a real identity.
- Vantage — angular, pale gunmetal with cyan accents. More expensive per unit, slightly longer range, precision weapons. Wins cost-equal fights at range; loses when swarmed.
- Feral — rounded, rust and bronze with red accents. Cheaper, faster to build, more numerous. Wins by raiding, flanking, and drowning you in metal.
Tier-1 land roster
These come from your Bot Lab and Vehicle Plant. Names are shown Vantage / Feral; a dash means the role is a signature with no mirror on that side.
| Role | Vantage | Feral | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Constructor bot | Fabber | Welder | Builds the T1 set, reclaims wreckage, and repairs. Your economy's hands. |
| Scout | Optic | Flea | Very fast, cheap, weak; provides radar-dot vision. Information, not firepower. |
| Raider | Blade | Pup | Fast light attacker; wins early metal-spot skirmishes and hunts constructors. |
| Assault bot | Warden | Brute | The bread-and-butter line unit. Your main battle mass. |
| Rocket bot | Lancer | Fist | Slow projectile that outranges static defense at T1. Siege support. |
| Light tank | Claw | Roller | The Vehicle-Plant alternative line — tougher, faster on open ground. |
| Mobile AA | Spike | Burst | Projectile flak versus aircraft. Travel with your army or it dies to air. |
| Plasma artillery ◆ | — | Lobber | Feral signature: a cheap arcing harass gun that lobs plasma over the front. |
| Sniper skirmisher ◆ | Ray | — | Vantage signature: long thin laser, high range, extremely fragile. Kite or lose it. |
| Crawling bomb ◆ | — | Tick | Feral signature: a cheap suicide unit, devastating against clumped formations. |
Vantage doctrine
Play Vantage like a duelist. Your units cost more but hit harder at range, so you want to fight at the edge of your reach and never let a Feral swarm close the gap. The Ray sniper epitomizes this: a glass cannon that deletes single targets from far away and dies to a stiff breeze. Lean on your superior static defense line to hold ground while your army picks fights on its own terms. Later you unlock the game's strongest defensive tech — mobile shield domes, hover railgun snipers, and the Archon walking fortress.
Feral doctrine
Play Feral like a swarm. Individually your units are worse; collectively they're everywhere at once. Build cheap, build fast, and trade aggressively — every wreck you leave is metal for your Welders to reclaim. Your Pup raiders are the fastest in the game; use them to snipe constructors and starve the enemy economy. The Tick crawling bomb turns any enemy clump into a liability, and the Lobber keeps static positions honest. Feral's mobile artillery is the best in the game — punish anything that stands still.
Beyond Tier 1
Tier 1 is where matches start; here's what the tech tree opens up as you build higher-tier factories.
Tier-2 land
Heavier mirrored assault, artillery, and AA, plus signature specialists:
- Aegis ◆ (Vantage) — a mobile shield generator projecting a projectile-stopping dome; heavy energy drain.
- Lance ◆ (Vantage) — a hover railgun sniper.
- Swarmhost ◆ (Feral) — a carrier that continuously fabricates expendable drones.
- Quake ◆ (Feral) — mobile rolling artillery with massive splash.
Air (T1 / T2)
Scout, fighter, and bomber at T1; gunship, torpedo bomber, transport, and strategic bomber at T2. Aircraft are fast and fragile and never hover-fight — they make passes. Air superiority is about intercept timing, not building a deathball.
Experimentals (T3)
Enormous units, each built from a dedicated Experimental Gantry and costing as much as a whole army:
- Archon ◆ (Vantage) — a walking fortress with layered shields and a beam array.
- Meridian ◆ (Vantage) — an immobile-deploy, ultra-long-range cannon.
- Behemoth ◆ (Feral) — an armored ram-mech that crushes buildings by walking through them.
- Locust Engine ◆ (Feral) — a factory-on-legs that streams free drone swarms.
Static defense & strategic weapons
Static defense scales from T1 laser/ballistic turrets to T2 heavy turrets, long-range plasma, anti-nuke and shield domes, radar/jammers, and minefields. Vantage statics are stronger per cost; Feral statics are cheaper and build faster. Strategic weapons — the nuclear silo (a city-killer, countered by anti-nuke domes), tactical missile launchers, and the Meridian-class long-range cannon — each have a visible, scoutable structure and a specific counter. Nothing wins from the shadows.
How stats work (and why there's no armor table)
Every unit is defined by a compact data schema: metalCost, energyCost, buildTime, maxHealth, speed, turnRate, sightRadius, radarRadius, and per-weapon damage, reloadTime, range, projectileSpeed, arc, aoeRadius, energyPerShot, and accuracyError.
Crucially, damage is uniform — there is no armor-type rock-paper-scissors table. Counters emerge from the physics instead:
- Projectile speed vs target speed — fast raiders simply outrun slow shells, so they beat artillery for free.
- Arc vs walls — arcing weapons lob over terrain that blocks direct fire.
- Splash vs clumps — area weapons punish tight formations; spreading out is a real decision.
- Range vs range — outranging your enemy lets you deal damage you never take.
This is the Total Annihilation / Beyond All Reason lineage: far easier to read and to balance than a hidden damage matrix. All of these numbers live in hot-reloadable JSON data files, so balance can be tuned live in dev mode.