Force Families: The Six Unit Lines Explained

Your army's vocabulary is six force families, unlocked in sequence as the base grows. Published attribute numbers do not exist yet — this page is built from play and the official unlock order, and marked accordingly — but the roles are legible from the game's own design. The main guide covers the loop these families serve; this page is the field manual for each line.

Infantry: The Foundation

First unlocked, first fielded, never irrelevant. Infantry are the cheapest line to bring up and the fastest to field in the numbers that matter early — the correct opening per the how-to-play guide — and they remain the backbone of point-holding throughout the game. Their limitation is the obvious one: soft units with short reach, increasingly outclassed in open pushes as heavier families arrive. Their enduring role: garrison and quantity. Many cheap bodies hold points and absorb attention while the expensive lines do the deciding.

Tanks and Artillery: The Push and the Break

The armor line brings the push. Tanks are the game's breakthrough family — the force that opens contested ground infantry cannot — and the natural second or third unlock as the economy allows. Artillery is the complement: the standoff line that breaks defenses before the push arrives. Together they form the mid-game's combined arms, and the commanders who scale deliberately (per the second-session guidance) learn this pairing before chasing the flashier families.

Helicopters and Vehicles: Mobility and Reach

The mobility tier. Helicopters bring vertical reach — response speed across a map where the outpost tactics game is decided by who arrives first with enough force. Vehicles, the wider ground line beyond tanks, bring the logistics and flexible response that a map of rented points demands. Neither line replaces the armor pairing; they extend it, turning a defended network into a defended, responsive network.

Aircraft: The Ceiling

The last family, the late game's ceiling — the line that exists to be expensive. Aircraft cap the force progression the way the oil economy caps the income progression, and unlocking them marks a commander's transition to endgame map control. The honest note for planners: the aircraft tax on your economy is the game's largest, and every commander who fields them early does so by having scaled income first.

Reading the Families Together

The unlock order tells the design's intent: quantity (infantry), then power (tanks, artillery), then speed (helicopters, vehicles), then sky (aircraft). Armies that respect the order scale smoothly; armies that skip ahead pay the skipped lessons later, usually at a lost point. Field all six, in order, with the outpost tactics doctrine behind them — that is the whole art of command in one sentence.