A NOTE TO THE NEW COMMANDER

If you have never played a real-time strategy game before, you are not behind. You are exactly who this manual was written for.

An RTS looks intimidating from the outside — a hundred buttons, a swarm of little machines, someone on a forum telling you your "build order" is bad. Underneath all of that, an RTS is one simple loop repeated until somebody wins. Learn the loop and everything else is decoration.

Read Parts I through IV before your first game. Play three games badly. Then come back for the rest. That is the intended order and it works.

PrologueChronicle of Iammas

The Twin Eyes of War

High above the blue-green world of Iammas, two pale moons watched in silence. The Iammians called them The Twin Eyes of Loz, named for the goddess of war. Their shifting pull reshaped oceans and continents, forcing tribes together in conflict. From these violent tides, a civilization was forged in blood and steel.

The Iammians, cold-blooded, scaled, and cunning, mastered both sea and land. They fought for gods, for pride, for territory. Bronze gave way to gunpowder, empires rose and fell, and in time, two superpowers emerged: the Northern Coalition and the Southern World Order.

For centuries, they balanced on the knife's edge of annihilation. When the first Iammian stepped onto one of the Twin Eyes, peace collapsed. The Cold War became the Space War.

In orbit, soldiers died among shattered hulls and frozen blood. And from that carnage came two inventions that reshaped history: the K.T. Shield, capable of bending light and energy itself, and the Mass Drive, opening the stars to Iammas in a single leap.

With these, the Southern World Order triumphed, and for the first time in ten thousand years, silence fell over Iammas. But peace never lasts.

The Age of Expansion

The Order turned its gaze to the heavens. Six worlds were found, fertile, rich, and arrayed in a crescent constellation the Iammians named The Arm of Kala, after the goddess of peace. The Outer Colonies were born.

But distance breeds defiance. The colonies, free of Iammas' tides and tyranny, rebelled. The Order's response was swift and brutal... orbital bombardments, martial law, executions. Just as calm returned, fate intervened.

During a rare magnetic shift, Iammas' defenses fell just as its sun unleashed the largest solar flare ever recorded. The planet was bathed in radiation. Systems failed, networks collapsed, and within hours civilization burned. Nuclear fire finished what the storm had begun.

The homeworld descended into a new dark age. The colonies… simply watched.

The Rise of the Federation

For the first time in their history, the Outer Colonies stood alone... and prospered. Trade flourished, cities gleamed, and the Iammians of the Arm of Kala formed a new alliance: the Federation of Kala, dedicated to unity, progress, and expansion.

Then came the discovery of Nu-Gua.

It was a perfect world, oceans, breathable air, and cities glittering below the clouds. But when the Federation ship Celestial Maiden reached orbit and sent its first signal, the inhabitants mistook it for an attack. A nuclear missile (primitive, but deadly) struck from the far side of the planet, vaporizing the vessel.

The Federation declared war.

What followed was swift and merciless. The Xenos of Nu-Gua (hairless, soft-skinned bipeds) fought bravely but were crushed under orbital bombardment. Occupation followed, and so did division among the Iammians themselves.

The Splintering

Half the colonies, led by Rohini and Mot, called for restraint. "Teach them," they argued. "Guide them." The others, Kali, Bi Xiu, Ashiesha, and Pascia, demanded vengeance and extermination. To them, the Xenos were beasts that had murdered Iammian lives.

The debate shattered the Federation.

When Rohini and Mot intervened to protect Nu-Gua's survivors, the Federation branded them traitors. In orbit above the planet, Iammian warships turned their cannons upon their own kin. The Loz Alliance was born in that moment, a coalition of defenders who swore to shield the innocent, even from their own species.

And for the first time, the Xenos fought beside their former conquerors.

The Fire of Nu-Gua

The war for Nu-Gua became legend. Xeno commandos, armed with Iammian technology, sacrificed themselves to cripple the Federation's power grids. The Loz Alliance pushed forward, driving the Federation fleet back. The Xenos (once seen as vermin) became brothers-in-arms.

Back in the core worlds, the Federation was fracturing. Some sought peace; others demanded the total annihilation of the Loz Alliance. As fleets massed around Mot, war spread across the stars once more.

While the Federation built weapons of mass devastation, the Loz Alliance built something greater... hope. On Nu-Gua, Iammians and Xenos shared their science, art, and culture. The Alliance forged energy shields that could regenerate faster than flesh, a living defense born from the fusion of two species' ingenuity. The Federation, obsessed with offense and speed, perfected regenerative hulls and devastating plasma arrays.

And so the galaxy became divided. Two philosophies, two civilizations, forever at odds.

The Splinter War

The Federation of Kala and the Loz Alliance stand as reflections of each other. One ruled by vengeance, the other by conviction. Both born from the ashes of the same world. Both believing their path is salvation.

Now, the long shadow of war falls once again. The Twin Eyes of Loz gleam coldly over a divided sky. And in their light, the Iammians march, not for peace, not for gods, but for the future of every world they've ever touched.

THE FICTION IS THE MECHANICS.

Everything above is load-bearing. The two things each faction invented in the story are the two things you will actually be commanding:

• The Loz Alliance forged energy shields that regenerate faster than flesh — the personal and projected shields that make Loz units so hard to move (§33).
• The Federation, obsessed with offense and speed, perfected regenerative hulls and plasma arrays — the fast walkers whose damage heals itself (§29).

That difference is why Loz protection returns but their wounds never do, while Fed can bleed and walk it off. When §6 explains that Fed damage is a loan and Loz damage is a bill, this is where that comes from.

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Part IGetting Started

1Installing And Launching

Get SplinterFaction from itch.io. (A Steam release is planned but not yet available.)

What you're installing is Coilbox — a launcher that handles the engine, the game files and the maps for you — pre-configured for SplinterFaction. You don't have to set anything up. Download, unpack, run.

On Windows, unpack somewhere other than Program Files. Windows permissions there cause needless trouble.

Your first launch: downloading the game

The download does not include the game itself, or any maps. This is deliberate — it keeps the initial download small and means you're never installing an out-of-date version.

The first screen you see explains this and gives you buttons to fix it. You need two things:

1. The game. One button, one click. Coilbox fetches the current version of SplinterFaction.

2. At least one map. Maps are separate downloads. Grab one from the buttons on the main screen to get started.

Once both have finished, the Singleplayer and Multiplayer buttons on the same screen take you into the game.

Getting more maps

You are not limited to the starter maps. Coilbox's map download section offers map packs — bundles grouped by type, or a pack of whatever's currently most played. This is by far the easiest way to build a decent map library, and worth doing early: playing the same map every game hides half of what strategy is for.

Staying up to date

Coilbox checks for new versions on launch and fetches only what's changed. You never need to reinstall.

Installing via vanilla Coilbox

If you already have a plain Coilbox install and would rather use that: go to Downloads in the left sidebar, select Games, and set the filter to SplinterFaction.

Everything past this point works the same either way. The itch.io package is simply the version where all of this is already pointed at the right place.

TIP: If the game refuses to start, see Appendix C before reinstalling. Ninety percent of launch failures are graphics-driver or antivirus related, not corrupt files.

2Your First Match: Setup

Before you can host a game you need the game files and at least one map downloaded. See §1 if you skipped that step.

From the lobby you will choose:

• A map. Small maps mean fast, violent games. Large maps mean long economic games. For your first match pick a small-to-medium map with a clear separation between start positions.
• Opponents. Add a SimpleAI opponent for a standard skirmish. Add SurvivalAI instead if you want the wave-defense mode (Part IX).
• Teams. Put yourself on one team and the AI on the other. Allies share vision and can share resources.
• Your faction. You pick here in the lobby — and you'll be asked again when the game actually starts. See §3.

Mod options and AI options

The lobby also exposes two sets of settings that are easy to miss and worth knowing about:

Mod options change how the game itself behaves — rules and systems, not just cosmetics. Leave these at default for your first games; you want to learn the standard game before you start altering it.

AI options configure your computer opponents. SimpleAI has a handful. SurvivalAI has a great many — wave pacing, difficulty scaling, beacon behavior and more. This is genuinely useful rather than trivia: if survival mode is too punishing while you're learning, you don't have to grit your teeth through it. Turn the pressure down, learn the systems, turn it back up. See Part IX.

Then start the game. You will not spawn immediately — first comes the faction confirmation, then start placement.

3Choosing A Faction

You are picking between two genuinely different armies, not two colors of the same army.

FEDERATION OF KALA — "Fed" for short. Fast walkers, cloaking, self-repairing hulls, missiles and plasma. Mobile, tricky, punishing to chase.

LOZ ALLIANCE — slow heavy tanks protected by personal energy shields. Durable, direct, unpleasant to stand in front of.

You choose twice

In the lobby, before the match starts. Then again when the game loads, via the in-game faction chooser. The second prompt is your real commitment — it's also your chance to change your mind if the lobby filled up differently than you expected.

Who can see your choice: your allies can see what you picked. Your enemies cannot. This is a real strategic detail, not a technicality. Your opponent doesn't know whether they're facing cloaked walkers or shielded tanks until they scout you — and the same is true in reverse, which is one more reason §39 exists.

Which should a new player pick?

Start with Federation of Kala. Fed units are faster and lighter, which makes them more forgiving to command while you're still learning the interface — you can pull out of a bad fight, reposition after a mistake, and generally undo errors that would be permanent otherwise. Their hull regeneration also softens the game's no-repair rule (§21) considerably.

Loz tanks are slow and heavy. Every commitment is final because you can't outrun anything, and heavy units are simply harder to steer well. That's a skill worth having — just not on game one.

You can switch factions every match. Try both once you're comfortable.

Full faction detail is in Part VII.

4Placing Your Start

After choosing a faction you place your starting position on the map. This is your first real decision of the match and it matters more than it looks.

What to look for:

• Resource locations. Fixed positions where EM Converters can be built — the source of all your metal (§14). They are the map's most important feature. Count them near each candidate position. More locations near you = more income = more army.
• Geothermal vents. Fixed positions supporting geothermal power plants or research centers (§18). Worth having nearby.
• Chokepoints. A narrow pass between you and the enemy is a gift. It means one defensive position covers an entire approach.
• Open flanks. How many directions can an attack come from? Two is manageable. Five is a nightmare.
• Distance to the enemy. Close means early aggression is possible — by both of you. Far means the economic player wins.
• High ground. Elevation gives range and sight advantages (see §25).

What beginners get wrong: placing in the middle of the map because it "looks central and strong." It isn't. It is exposed on every side and you will be attacked from three directions at once. Take a corner or a pocket with a defensible entrance.

Once placed, your Commander (your starting constructor unit) appears.

⚠ THE COMMANDER IS A LOSS CONDITION, NOT JUST A UNIT.

In 1v1: losing your Commander loses you the game. Immediately. It does not matter how good your economy is or how large your army is.

In team games: the game ends when the last Commander on a side is destroyed. So your Commander dying doesn't end things on its own — your team fights on while any ally still has theirs. But every Commander lost brings your side one step closer to defeat, and the player who lost theirs is badly crippled regardless.

Practical consequences:

• It is genuinely dangerous — and that's the trap. Commanders are strong. Yours can walk into a group of enemy units and bully them off ground they thought they held, and it only gets stronger as you tech (§32). This is real and you should use it. But it also means the Commander feels safe long after it isn't, and the game ends the moment it dies. Use it to push, then bring it home.
• Keep it busy. It should always be constructing something (§19). Safe and productive.
• Watch for raiders. Fast enemy units that get into your base are hunting your Commander specifically. This is why a defense structure at your choke is worth the metal.
• In team games, don't get isolated. A Commander alone in a far corner is a free win for anyone who finds it.

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Part IIWhat Is A Real-Time Strategy Game?

5The Loop

Everything in this game reduces to four steps, running continuously and simultaneously:

1. Produce. You generate energy, and convert it into metal at fixed resource locations on the map. 2. Build. You turn those resources into production buildings, then into army. 3. Expand. You use that army to hold more resource locations, which gives you more income. 4. Fight. You use resource advantage to destroy the enemy's ability to do steps 1–3.

That's it. That's the genre. Chess with a clock that never stops and a board you're allowed to build more squares on.

A NOTE ON THE WORD "GATHER." If you've read about RTS games before, you may have seen this loop described as starting with gathering — little workers walking to a mineral patch, picking something up, walking back. SplinterFaction does not work that way, and neither does the engine family it belongs to.

Nothing is collected and carried. You build EM Converters on fixed resource locations, and they turn energy into metal, continuously, forever, until destroyed. Your metal income is a rate, produced by structures, not a stockpile being hauled in by units.

EM Converters are, mechanically, metal makers that are restricted to specific spots on the map. They consume energy to run — which means your metal income and your energy economy are the same problem, not two problems. They also manage themselves to a degree: automatic controls switch them off and on to keep your economy smooth. If your metal storage fills up, for instance, they'll generally shut off so that energy is freed up for something useful.

This matters because it changes what your economy actually is. You don't have workers to protect or a patch that runs dry. You have energy production, converter placement, and map control — and those three things are the whole game. Part IV covers this in detail.

The critical word in the loop is simultaneously. A new player does one thing at a time: builds a bit, then fights a bit, then remembers economy, then fights again. A good player never stops doing all four. Their resources are always being spent, their constructors are always constructing, their army is always somewhere doing something.

6Macro And Micro

Two words you'll hear constantly.

MACRO is everything about your economy and production. Am I spending my income? Am I building enough converters? Am I ahead on supply? Do I have enough power? Is my factory idle? Macro is boring, invisible, and decides roughly 80% of games.

MICRO is the moment-to-moment control of individual units in a fight. Pulling a damaged unit back, focusing fire, using terrain, kiting. Micro is exciting, visible, and decides roughly 20% of games.

New players almost universally over-invest in micro. They watch a battle for forty seconds while their base sits doing nothing, win the battle, and lose the game because the enemy built nine more units during those forty seconds.

The discipline to learn first: every time a fight starts, glance at your base before you start micromanaging. Are you spending? Is something being built? Then go fight.

Damage, and who gets it back

The 80/20 split holds as a general truth and it's the right thing to believe while you're learning. But SplinterFaction leans further toward the micro end than the genre average, and the reason is worth understanding properly, because it works differently for each faction.

Nobody repairs anything. There is no constructor repair in this game (§21). What each faction has instead is its own way of recovering — and they are not the same thing at all.

FED — damage is a loan. Fed hulls regenerate automatically over time, out of combat. Fed also builds the healstation, a tower that repairs friendly Fed units in its radius. So when a Fed unit takes hull damage, that damage comes back. Slowly on its own, faster near a healstation, but it comes back.

LOZ — damage is a bill. Loz units carry personal shields that absorb damage before the hull, and those shields recharge quickly once out of combat. But there is no hull regeneration and no healstation. Once a Loz shield collapses and the hull starts taking hits, that damage is permanent for the rest of the match.

What that means for how you fight

This asymmetry is the most important tactical fact in the game, and it points the two factions in opposite directions.

If you're Loz: your shield is a renewable health bar. Your hull is not.

Fight in bursts. Move in, deal damage, and watch your shield bars. Pull out while the shields are still holding. Everything absorbed by a shield costs you nothing but a little patience — the bar refills and you come back whole. Everything that lands after the shield collapses is subtracted from your army forever.

The skill to build is recognizing the moment before the shield breaks and leaving then, rather than the moment after. A Loz player who disengages at 20% shield has effectively fought for free. A Loz player who stays until the hull is chewed has just paid permanently for the same engagement.

This is also why rotation matters so much (§33). Pulling a depleted unit to the back and pushing a fresh one forward converts a permanent hull loss into a temporary shield loss. Same fight, same units, half the real cost.

If you're Fed: you can afford to press.

Because your damage comes back, a grinding engagement costs you time rather than army. Where Loz must be economical, Fed can push a fight through to the end and rebuild afterwards. Trading hull for position is a loan you repay by standing still for a while.

Use it deliberately: - Press an advantage you'd otherwise have to abandon. A Loz player must break off; you don't. - Rotate wounded units back to a healstation rather than writing them off. Build healstations behind your front, not in it — they're a recovery point, not a battle station. - Skirmish repeatedly. Hit, withdraw, heal, return. Each cycle costs your opponent permanently and costs you almost nothing. Over a long game this is how Fed wins.

The matchup in one line: Loz must make every engagement count, because they only get to pay once. Fed can afford to be wrong, and then come back. Neither faction wants the fight the other one wants — see §31.

⚠ THE TRAP FOR EACH SIDE.

Loz: staying "just a bit longer" after the shields drop. That's the moment the engagement starts costing you real money, and it's exactly when it feels like you're winning.

Fed: assuming regeneration makes you durable. It doesn't. It makes you recoverable — which is only useful if you survive to withdraw. A dead unit regenerates nothing.

So positioning and tactics genuinely matter here. Two things carry most of that weight:

Form a concave, not a clump. A concave is a shallow arc curving toward the enemy.

To be precise about why it works: it isn't about line of fire. Units in this game shoot straight through friendlies, so your back rank is never blocked. The concave wins for two other reasons, and they're the ones that matter:

• Range and positioning. An arc curving toward the enemy puts more of your units within range of theirs, and wraps their flanks. Their bunched force can only reach part of your line while most of your line can reach them.
• Area damage. A clump means every unit is standing in the same artillery blast. Spread along an arc, one shell hits one or two units instead of eight.

A concave beats a clump, always — just not for the reason most players assume.

Use formation lines. SplinterFaction lets you right-click and drag to draw a line, and your selected units will arrange themselves along it. This is the tool that makes concaves practical — drag an arc and your army spreads into it in one gesture instead of dozens of clicks. It's also your defense against area-of-effect weapons: spread units along a line take far less splash than a ball of units on the same spot.

Learn the drag-line early. It is the highest value-per-effort input in the game, and it takes about one second.

7The Snowball

RTS games are systems of compounding advantage. This is the single most important concept in the genre and the one that is least obvious from the outside.

An extra converter built at minute two is not "one converter." It is metal every second for the rest of the game — which becomes an extra unit at minute five, which helps you take an extra piece of map at minute seven, which becomes three more converters, which become an army the enemy cannot match at minute fifteen.

Consequences:

• Small early advantages become enormous. Killing one enemy constructor in the first three minutes is worth more than killing five tanks at minute twenty.
• Doing nothing is expensive. Resources sitting unspent in your bank are resources doing zero work. Idle constructors, idle factories, unspent income — all of it is compound interest you are refusing to collect.
• Being behind gets worse on its own. If you are losing on economy and you do nothing about it, the gap widens by itself. You must actively change something.

Rule of thumb: your income should be roughly zero at all times. Not your income rate — your stored resources. Money in the bank is money not working.

8Why You Lose (And It'S Almost Never Combat)

New commanders think they lose battles. They almost never do. They lose one of these:

Every entry in the left column is fixable by you, permanently, and none of them require fast fingers.

The game is telling you this out loud

SplinterFaction has a voice advisor running throughout the match. It is not flavor. It is a live diagnostic feed on the exact failures in that table, and it will tell you, in plain language:

• that you are excessing metal — you have income you aren't spending
• that you need more supply — you're at or near your unit cap and production is about to stop
• that you need more power plants — your energy can't keep up with your demand
• and other warnings about the state of your economy and base

Listen to it. New players tune it out as background noise, which is a bit like ignoring the fuel light because the radio is on. Nearly every game a beginner loses on macro, the advisor called out the problem — repeatedly — before it became fatal.

If you take one habit from this section: when the advisor says something, do the thing it said, then go back to whatever you were doing. It takes five seconds and it fixes the majority of losses in the table above.

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Part IIIThe Interface

Note: SplinterFaction uses a full custom "Static GUI" widget suite. Panels are consistently styled and can be toggled through the widget selector. Exact default keybinds are listed in Appendix B.

9Camera Control

SplinterFaction uses the Spring camera by default. It's the one to learn — don't go hunting through camera modes, this is the one everything is designed around.

• Move: push the mouse to the screen edge, or use the arrow keys.
• Zoom: mouse wheel.
• Change the camera angle: hold Alt and use the mouse wheel. This tilts your view between a near-overhead strategic look and a low, close-in view.
• Rotate the camera: hold Alt + middle mouse button and drag.
• Jump to location: click on the minimap.
• See the whole map: press Tab. This snaps you out to a strategic overview of the entire battlefield in one keystroke, and back again. It's the fastest way to check the shape of a game, and far quicker than scrolling.
• Camera bookmarks: you can save camera positions and snap back to them instantly. Set one on your main base and one on your front line. This single habit will improve your play more than any amount of unit micro.

Zoom out often. New players play the whole game zoomed in on whatever's exciting. Pulling back to see the full battlefield is how you notice the army heading for your undefended flank.

10Selecting Things

• Single click — select one unit.
• Click and drag — box-select everything in the rectangle.
• Double-click a unit — select all units of that type on screen.
• Shift + click — add a unit to the current selection.
• Ctrl + click — remove a unit from the current selection.
• Control groups — select some units, press Ctrl + [number] to bind them to that number. Press the number to reselect them instantly. Press it twice to also jump the camera there.

Control groups are not optional. Bind your main army to 1. Bind your constructors to 2. Bind your factory to 3. Do this every single game until it is muscle memory. It is the difference between commanding an army and clicking at one.

BIND YOUR COMMANDER TO A GROUP. Ctrl + C selects it, but a dedicated group number is far more convenient — and given that your Commander is a loss condition (§4), being one keystroke away from checking on it is worth a number all by itself.

Auto-grouping — set it once, keep it forever

Alt + a number assigns a unit to that control group automatically and permanently. From then on, units of that type join the group as they're produced — and the setting persists between games.

You do not have to rebuild your control groups every match. Set it up once: assault units to 1, constructors to 2, anti-air to 3, whatever suits you. Every game after that, your army sorts itself into the right groups as it comes out of the factory, with no input from you.

This is one of those features that takes two minutes to configure and pays back for as long as you play the game. Do it before your next match, not after your fiftieth.

11Giving Orders

Right-click is context-sensitive and does the obvious thing:

• Right-click ground → move there
• Right-click enemy → attack it
• Right-click a wreck (with a constructor) → reclaim it
• Right-click a structure under construction (with a constructor) → take over building it, if no other constructor is already on it (§20)

Essential explicit orders:

⚠ IF YOU'VE PLAYED OTHER RTS GAMES: it's called FIGHT, not "attack-move."

FIGHT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ORDER IN THE GAME. A plain Move order sends your units walking past enemies while being shot in the back. Fight sends them out ready to engage anything they run into. If you learn one hotkey, learn this one.

Set Target — the order most people never find

Set Target lets you designate a priority target (or several) for the selected units. From then on, as those units move and fight, they will shoot the designated target whenever it comes into range, in preference to anything else. Cancel Target clears it.

This is enormously powerful and almost nobody discovers it on their own. It solves the single most annoying problem in RTS combat: your army wandering into a fight and spreading its damage across whatever happened to be nearest, instead of killing the thing that actually matters.

Use it to: - Kill enemy constructors and artillery during a fight without babysitting every unit - Focus a defensive structure down while your army is also being shot at - Make an advancing army automatically prioritize the target you care about, hands-free

Combined with Fight, this is most of what "good micro" actually is. Set the target, issue Fight, and your army does the focus-firing for you.

Unit states

Each unit carries two independent state settings. They persist until you change them, and getting them right prevents a lot of unforced errors.

Move states — how far a unit will wander to engage:

Fire states — when a unit will shoot:

Practical uses: put artillery and defensive lines on Hold Position so they don't chase raiders out of position. Put scouts on Hold Fire so they observe without picking fights they'll lose. Put units you want to stay hidden — see cloaking, §34 — on Hold Fire so they don't reveal themselves by opening up on something trivial.

Splitting your army in two

Sometimes you want half your force to go one way and half the other — and you don't want to re-box them by hand every time you switch attention between the two groups.

The two halves are kept as pseudo-groups: after splitting you have one half selected, and Alt + d flips you to the other. You can bounce back and forth freely, giving each half its own orders, without ever reselecting anything.

The pair persists until every unit in them is dead, or until you perform another split. Alt + x puts them back together, provided you haven't split something else in the meantime.

This is ideal for pincers, for peeling a detachment off to chase a raider while the main body keeps advancing, or for splitting a defense across two approaches.

Custom formations — drag a line

Select a group of units and drag to draw a line on the ground. You are drawing freehand — straight, curved, hooked, whatever shape you trace. Your selected units are then distributed along that line at spaced-out positions.

This is the single best input in the game and it takes one gesture:

• Draw an arc curving toward the enemy to form a concave, so more of your units can fire at once (§6).
• Draw a long line to spread out against area-of-effect weapons instead of clumping into one artillery shell.
• Draw along a ridge or choke to occupy terrain exactly the way you want it held.

Most new players move armies as a blob and wonder why they lose fights to equal numbers. This is why.

Tech upgrades in the orders menu

Units that can be upgraded show their options in the orders menu as Tech 1 Upgrade, Tech 2 Upgrade, and so on — not as "morph." Mouse over any button in the orders menu and the tooltip explains what it does.

You don't have to select the unit at all. Upgradeable units display a small clickable upgrade button floating above them in the world. Click it and the upgrade starts — no selection, no menu, no interruption to whatever else you were doing. This is by far the fastest way to keep your army current, and it's easy to miss because it looks like a status indicator rather than a control.

Alongside the upgrade buttons in the orders menu you'll find add to upgrade queue, pause upgrade and cancel upgrade. Queued upgrades process one at a time as Research Points become available (§18), so you can queue up your intentions and let the RP economy work through them.

Upgrades currently complete in about three seconds, so the pause and cancel controls rarely come up in practice — but they're there. Full detail in §32.

Your units fight on their own

Unless set to Hold Fire, every unit automatically shoots anything valid that comes into range. You do not need to order each shot.

This sounds trivial and it changes how you play. It means you can micro your entire army with movement alone — reposition, pull back, form a concave, flank — and the shooting takes care of itself. Combine this with Set Target and your units will move where you put them and shoot what you told them matters.

New players often click-attack every target manually, which is exhausting and slower than just moving well. Move well. The guns work by themselves.

Repeat — the most powerful button in the game

The repeat toggle makes a unit loop its entire order queue forever, until it dies or you switch repeat off. Give any sequence of commands, turn on repeat, walk away.

This is not a convenience feature. It is a fundamental multiplier on how much you can manage at once:

• Factories. Queue the exact unit mix you want — say two assault, one anti-air, one scout — hit repeat, and the factory produces that composition on a loop indefinitely. Your army stays balanced without you ever touching it again. This alone fixes the "my factory was idle" failure from §8.
• Constructors. Queue a set of structures, hit repeat. If any of them are ever destroyed, the constructor goes and rebuilds them automatically. Your base repairs its own gaps while you're busy elsewhere. (Note: this rebuilds destroyed structures — it does not repair damaged ones. See §22.)
• Transports. Queue pick-up here, drop-off there, hit repeat, and you have a permanent ferry line running without supervision.

Set up repeat loops early and you free up all the attention you'd otherwise spend on maintenance — which you can then spend on the map, where games are actually won.

Queuing: hold Shift while issuing orders to queue them. You can chain a dozen commands — build this, then that, then move here, then patrol. Queue your constructors' work so they never go idle while you're looking elsewhere.

12Reading The Screen

SplinterFaction's interface is a custom "Static GUI" suite — all panels share a consistent visual language, and any of them can be toggled through the widget selector.

On screen from the start

• Minimap — the whole map at a glance. Shows your units, known enemies, and seismic sensor contacts. Click it to jump the camera. Look at it constantly; it is where you notice an attack coming.
• Resources display — metal and energy: current stock, storage capacity, and income vs. expenditure per second. This is the most important panel on screen. §13–16 is essentially an instruction manual for reading it.
• Supply readout — how much unit supply you're using against your capacity. When this fills up, you stop being able to build units. Watch it, and build more supply before it caps out, not after. See §8.
• Research Points display — your accumulated RP. Easy to forget it exists; unspent RP is wasted RP (§18).
• Orders menu — the commands available to your current selection: Fight, Attack, Patrol, Guard, Stop, unit states, Set Target, and tech upgrade buttons (§11). Mouse over any button and the tooltip tells you what it does — this is the fastest way to learn the game.
• Build menu — what the selected constructor or factory can produce, organized by category.
• Selected units display — what you currently have selected, and how many of each.
• Tooltip — hover anything at all, in the world or in the interface, for a plain explanation of what it is and what it costs. Use it relentlessly.
• Additional info panel — hold Space while hovering for a deeper breakdown than the tooltip gives: full stats, weapon details, the numbers behind the description. Holding Space also rings every one of your constructors so you can spot idle ones at a glance (§19).
• Players list — everyone in the game and their status.
• Menu — options, settings, and quitting.

Overlays that assist you

These are all on by default. They're listed here because knowing what they're telling you is more than half their value.

• Healthbars — damage on units and structures, including shield strength where applicable. Given that hull damage is permanent (§21), this is how you know which units to rotate out.
• Range rings — visualize weapon and build ranges. Watch these when placing defenses. There is no excuse for a turret that doesn't cover the thing it was built to cover.
• Unit resource drain labels — what each structure is costing you to run. This is how you find the energy leak that's stalling you.
• Abilities panel — context actions for the selected unit.

Panels available from the top-right menu

• Sharing menu — send resources or units to an ally (§37).
• Economy graph — a live, real-time picture of what your economy is actually doing: income against expenditure as it happens, rather than the single snapshot the resources display gives you. This is the fastest way to understand your own macro. The resources display tells you that you're floating metal right now; the graph shows you that you've been floating it for four minutes and the gap is widening. Open it occasionally even when nothing feels wrong — patterns show up in a line that are invisible in a number.
• Statistics graphs — income, army value and more over the course of the match. Genuinely worth reading afterwards: if you lost, the graphs usually show you exactly where and when.
• Chat log — messages from allies and the system.

Drawing on the map

Hold the backtick key (`, above Tab) and the mouse becomes a map-marking tool. Everything you draw is visible to your allies and invisible to your enemies.

This is a communication tool and, in team games, it's a better one than chat. Typing takes both hands off the game and by the time you've written "there's an army coming through the north pass toward your third converter," it has arrived. An arrow drawn on the map takes half a second and is unambiguous.

Use it for: - Pings for urgency. "Look here, now." The animation is designed to catch attention. - Arrows for intent. Draw where you're attacking, or where you want an ally to go. Two arrows converging on a point is a plan. - Labels for persistence. Mark the vents you've spotted, the enemy's undefended flank, the place their army keeps staging from. Labels stay put; use them for facts you'll want in five minutes. - Circling threats. Ring the thing you want dealt with.

It's also useful alone. Marking the resource locations and geothermal vents you've scouted but haven't claimed yet turns the map into your own to-do list — and given there's no radar to remind you (§34), writing things down where you'll see them is worth more here than in most games.

Erase your own clutter occasionally. A map covered in ten minutes of accumulated scribble stops communicating anything.

Rearranging the interface — tweak mode

The interface isn't fixed in place. Tweak mode lets you pick up GUI elements and put them where you want them.

Enter tweak mode (Ctrl + F11 by default), and the panels become draggable: click and drag any element to reposition it. Leave tweak mode and everything stays where you put it, including between sessions.

This is worth ten minutes on your first evening, because the default arrangement is a compromise designed for everyone, and you are not everyone:

• Move what you check constantly to where your eyes already are. If you spend the game watching your army on the left of the screen, having the resources display in the far top-right corner means a full eye movement every time you check it. Move it closer.
• Move what you never use out of the way, or turn it off entirely in the widget selector.
• Account for your monitor. On an ultrawide, default positions can put critical readouts uncomfortably far apart. On a small screen, they can crowd. Neither is something you should just endure.

A layout that suits you reduces the number of things you have to consciously remember to look at — which, given how much of this manual is "check your supply, check your income, check your factory," is worth real games.

Two menus you should visit early

• Keybind menu — you can rebind any default key. If a hotkey feels wrong to your hand, change it rather than fighting it for a hundred games (Appendix B).
• Widget selector — turn any interface element on or off to taste.

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Part IVEconomy

This is the part new players skip and then lose to. Read it twice.

13Metal, Energy And Supply

Three things govern your economy. Two are resources you spend; one is a ceiling on how much army you're allowed to have.

METAL — the primary constraint. Everything costs metal. It comes from EM Converters built on resource locations and from reclaiming wreckage. That is the complete list. There is no third source, no hidden trick, and no way to build metal income at home without taking ground.

ENERGY — the enabler, and upstream of metal. Comes from power plants you can build anywhere. Energy powers construction, weapons, special systems — and your EM Converters, which means your energy economy and your metal economy are the same economy.

SUPPLY — not spent, but capped. Every mobile unit occupies supply. Run out and you cannot build more units. Covered in §16.

Everything is a flow, not a pile

In many other strategy games you send workers to collect from a pile of ore, and the pile runs out. Nothing here works that way. Resources arrive continuously, per second, from structures you've built, and they keep arriving until those structures are destroyed.

So each resource is described by three numbers, all visible on the resources display:

• Income — what's coming in per second
• Expenditure — what's going out per second
• Stored — the buffer between them

If expenditure exceeds income and the buffer empties, you stall (§17).

The trickle

You receive a small amount of metal and energy simply for being alive, independent of anything you've built.

It is not much and you cannot live on it. What it does is stop you from locking yourself out of the game. If you make a mess of your opening, lose your converters, or simply don't understand what you're doing yet, the trickle means you always have something coming in and can always eventually rebuild. You cannot reach a state where you have zero income and no way back.

New commanders: this is a safety net, not a plan. It exists so your bad early games are recoverable, not so you can skip building an economy.

14Em Converters And Resource Locations

EM Converters can only be built on resource locations — fixed positions scattered across the map. Under the hood they're metal makers restricted to specific spots: they consume energy and produce metal, continuously, until destroyed.

This single restriction produces the most important consequence in the game:

THE MAP IS THE ECONOMY. TAKING GROUND IS TAKING INCOME.

There is no way to build more metal income inside your base. If you want more metal, you must physically go out and hold more of the map. This is why RTS players fight over apparently empty ground — it isn't empty, it's income.

They run on energy

A converter with no power to feed it produces nothing. Every converter you add raises your energy demand. Expanding your metal economy therefore always means expanding your power economy at the same time — they are not separate projects and you cannot do one without the other.

This is the most common way new players tie themselves in knots: they build converters everywhere, don't build power to match, energy-stall, and their whole economy — including the metal it was supposed to produce — grinds to a halt.

Rule: every time you place converters, ask what's powering them.

They manage themselves (a bit)

Converters have automatic controls that switch them off and on to keep things smooth. Most visibly, when your metal storage is full they'll generally shut off, freeing that energy for something more useful than metal you can't store.

This is helpful, but don't mistake it for the system solving your problems. A converter that's switched off because your storage is full is telling you something: you aren't spending your metal. Fix that, not the converter.

Upgrading converters

Converters can be upgraded through tech levels, exactly like your Commander — a button in the orders menu takes it to the next tier, paid with Research Points (§18).

Higher tech converters produce more metal and consume more energy to do it. That trade is the whole decision. An upgraded converter is a bigger draw on your power economy, so upgrading without power to back it up makes your economy worse, not better.

Expand or upgrade?

• Expanding (new converters on new locations) is cheaper per unit of income and spreads your risk across the map. But it requires you to defend more ground.
• Upgrading is safe, needs no map control, and concentrates income into a small footprint — which is also its danger, since a single successful raid flattens a large fraction of your economy.

General guidance: expand first, upgrade second. Upgrade when the map is genuinely contested, when you're out of safe locations, or when you have surplus energy and RP and nothing better to do with them.

15Making Power

Energy plants can be built anywhere, which makes energy the part of your economy you control most directly. It's also the part that gates everything else — converters, construction, shields, cloaks and weapons all draw on it.

The power ladder

Plus the Geothermal Power Plant, which is built on geothermal vents — fixed map features, like resource locations. Geothermal output is excellent, and vents are worth taking and holding.

What you can build on a vent

A vent supports four different structures, and you pick one:

TAKE VENTS EARLY. A vent you don't hold is a vent your opponent gets to make all four of those choices on. They're fixed, finite, and every one of them is a significant economic asset. Scout for them at the start of the match and factor them into where you expand.

A warning about Research Centers: they consume an enormous amount of power — more than the vent itself generates. A Research Center is a net drain on your grid, not a self-sufficient building. Don't site one thinking the vent pays for it, because it doesn't.

Principles

Build power before you need it, not when you need it. Plants take time to construct. If you wait until you're stalling, you stall for the entire build time — and everything else stalls with you.

Cheap plants early, big plants later. Early on, several small plants beat one large one because they come online sooner and the compounding rule (§7) applies to energy too. Later, higher-tier plants give far better output per unit of base space and metal.

You can pack them freely. Power plants don't chain-explode in SplinterFaction (§22), so there's no penalty for building them close together. Spread them only if you're worried about a single artillery barrage catching several at once.

Watch your drain. Converters, construction and some weapons consume energy continuously. The unit resource drain labels (§12) are on by default — read them when you're trying to work out where your power is going.

CLOAKING AND SHIELDS ARE FREE. Neither costs energy — not personal shields, not projected shield generators, not the Deleter, not cloaking towers. Once built, they simply run.

This is worth knowing precisely because it's unusual. In most games in this family, stealth and shielding are a permanent tax on your power economy, and players ration them accordingly. Here you don't have to. Cloak everything. Shield everything. The cost was paid when you built the structure.

Your energy budget is about converters and construction, not about your faction's signature system.

Power scales with everything else. Every converter, every upgrade, every new army capability increases demand. If you take one habit from this section: whenever you build anything that draws power, build power in the same breath.

16Supply

Supply is a cap on army size. It is not a resource you spend — it's a ceiling you raise.

Every mobile unit occupies supply proportional to its value. Cheap scouts take very little; expensive heavy units take a lot. So your supply usage tracks the real size of your army, not just the number of things in it.

Supply Depots raise your available supply. Build more depots, field more army. That's the whole mechanism.

⚠ WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF SUPPLY, YOU STOP BEING ABLE TO BUILD UNITS.

Not slowly. Not at reduced rate. You simply cannot produce. Your factories sit there with a full metal bank and nothing happens.

This is the failure new commanders find most bewildering, because nothing looks broken. Watch the supply readout (§12), and listen to the voice advisor (§8) — it will tell you to build more supply, out loud, before it becomes a problem.

There is a hard cap, but it is set so high you will never reach it. Don't plan around it. In practice, your army size is limited by your economy and your supply depots, not by any ceiling the game imposes.

Supply is a target

Here's the part that isn't obvious: supply depots are enemy infrastructure worth killing.

Destroying enemy supply depots doesn't just cost them the metal — it directly shrinks the army they're allowed to have. If they're near their supply limit and you kill depots, they can't replace losses until they rebuild. You've capped their army from the outside.

Which means, in reverse: don't leave your supply depots undefended or clumped somewhere a raider can reach. They're a legitimate strategic target and a good opponent will treat them as one. Spread them, and put them behind your defensive line rather than out on an exposed flank.

17Storage, Stall And Excess

Stall

STALL is what happens when a resource hits zero and demand exceeds income. Everything that needs that resource slows down proportionally.

• A metal stall means every constructor and factory in your base crawls.
• An energy stall is worse, because energy is upstream of your metal: construction crawls and your converters stop producing, so a power failure becomes a metal failure a moment later. (Your cloak and your shields are unaffected — they don't run on energy. See §15.)

Stalling is the most common self-inflicted defeat in the genre.

How to avoid it: watch income vs. expenditure on the resources display. If expenditure sits consistently above income, you are about to stall. Build economy ahead of production, not after. And when you add anything that draws power, add power.

If you're stalling right now: pause or cancel the least important construction, and get more power up immediately.

Excess

The opposite failure, and it feels fine, which is why it goes unnoticed. If your storage is full and income keeps arriving, that income is being thrown away every second.

The voice advisor will tell you that you're excessing metal. Believe it. It means you have income you aren't converting into anything — which, per §7, is compound interest you're refusing to collect.

Storage

Storage buildings are far more important than they look, and new players almost universally under-build them.

Storage acts as a capacitor for your economy. It smooths out spikes. Your income and expenditure are never perfectly matched moment to moment — you finish a building, start an expensive one, a batch of units completes, a fight drains your shields. Without a buffer, every one of those bumps is either a stall or an overflow.

With good storage: - Brief spikes in spending draw down the buffer instead of stalling you - Brief surpluses fill the buffer instead of overflowing to waste - You can save toward expensive things rather than being limited to what your per-second income allows - Your whole economy simply runs smoother, which compounds over a long game

Storage produces nothing on its own — it's insurance and it's a shock absorber. But an economy with good storage does noticeably more with the same income than one without.

The healthy state: metal hovering low but not at zero (you're spending, but not stalling), energy comfortable with headroom, storage never pinned at maximum for long, supply always a little ahead of your army.

18Research Points

SplinterFaction's third resource. RP is not bulk material — it's a currency of capability. Metal buys you more; RP buys you better.

Where RP comes from

1. Being alive — 1 RP per second. A baseline trickle, automatic, from the moment the game starts. It means every player is always accumulating research, and a player who's been contained still has something developing.

2. Research Centers, built on geothermal vents. Fixed map locations, like resource locations. This is how you meaningfully accelerate your research — and it's why vents are contested ground (§15). Note the tension: a vent can host a Geothermal Power Plant or a Research Center. You're choosing between power and progress every time you take one.

3. Killing enemy units and structures. You receive a percentage of the destroyed thing's metal value back as RP.

That third source deserves emphasis, because it changes how you should think about combat:

FIGHTING WELL IS AN ECONOMIC ACTIVITY. Every enemy unit you destroy funds your own advancement. A player who wins engagements isn't just removing enemy army — they're converting it into their own tech. Combined with reclaim (§27), a won battle pays you twice: metal from the wreckage, RP from the kills.

This is also why passive turtling is weaker than it looks. If you never kill anything, you're forgoing an entire income stream.

What RP is spent on

• Upgrading your Commander through tech levels, unlocking what you're able to build
• Upgrading EM Converters to higher tiers (§14)
• Army-wide upgrades — weapons and armor tracks that improve your entire force
• Abilities such as scanner sweep
• Other unlocks and capabilities across both factions

Upgrades appear as Tech 1 Upgrade / Tech 2 Upgrade / etc. buttons in the orders menu of eligible units, and can be queued — queued upgrades process one at a time as RP becomes available (§11).

How to spend it

Unspent RP is wasted RP. Exactly like floating metal. It is doing nothing while it sits there.

• Early RP is best spent on things that raise your ceiling — converter upgrades, Commander tech that unlocks what you actually intend to build.
• Army-wide weapon and armor upgrades apply to every unit you own and every unit you will build, which makes them quietly enormous in a long game. The bigger your army, the more each one is worth.
• Exotic single-use capabilities are a luxury purchase for a player who's already ahead.

Check the RP display every few minutes. It's the easiest resource in the game to forget about, and arriving at minute twenty holding a fortune you never spent is a genuinely common way to lose.

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Part VConstruction

19Constructors And The Build Queue

Constructor units build everything. Your Commander is one. You will want more — quickly.

There are exactly two, and they never change

• Ground Constructor — built from your ground factory.
• Air Constructor — built from your air factory. Flies, so it ignores terrain entirely.

That's the whole roster. Constructors are never upgraded — there's no advanced builder tier to tech into, and no reason to hold off building them early.

Your Commander and your constructors share the same build list. Whatever your Commander can build, an ordinary constructor can build too. This is genuinely important and it has one big consequence:

YOU NEVER NEED TO RISK YOUR COMMANDER TO BUILD SOMETHING.

There is no structure that only the Commander can place. If something needs building on a contested expansion, send a constructor instead — there's no reason to expose a loss condition (§4) for a job anything can do.

Air constructors deserve a mention for expansion specifically: they fly over terrain, so they reach resource locations and vents that a ground constructor would have to walk around. They're also fragile and helpless if intercepted. Use them for speed and reach, not for anywhere contested.

Constructors capture enemy structures

Constructors can capture enemy buildings, taking permanent ownership of them rather than destroying them.

This is worth remembering because destruction is the reflex and capture is usually better. A captured converter starts producing for you. A captured factory is production you didn't pay for. Capture takes time and leaves your constructor exposed, so it needs the area secured first — but when a raid succeeds and the defense has collapsed, ask whether you'd rather have the rubble or the building.

All construction is mobile

There are no nano turrets or static builder structures in SplinterFaction. Every piece of construction in the game is done by a unit that has to physically travel to the site.

This means constructor positioning is a real logistical concern rather than an afterthought. You cannot drop a builder-tower near the front and have it project construction into an area. If you want something built somewhere, a constructor goes there — which takes time, and exposes it on the way.

Plan for it: keep constructors distributed sensibly rather than all bunched at home, and remember that a forward expansion needs a constructor sent to it, not just a decision made about it.

Building and queuing

To build: select a constructor, open the build menu, pick a structure, place it on the ground. A translucent outline ("ghost") shows where it will go and whether the terrain allows it. Left-click to confirm.

Queue construction with Shift. Select a constructor, hold Shift, and place six buildings in a row. It will build all of them in order without further input. Do this constantly.

For converters specifically, use the drag. Right-click a resource location to queue a converter there — or right-click and drag connect-the-dots style across several locations to queue converters on all of them in one gesture. This is by far the fastest way to claim an area (§38).

Then consider putting it on repeat (§11). A constructor with a repeating queue of structures will rebuild any of them that get destroyed, indefinitely, without you ever thinking about it again. This is the closest thing the game has to base automation.

Placing many buildings at once

You are not limited to one click, one building. Hold Shift and drag while placing, and the modifier keys reshape what gets queued. These are worth ten minutes of practice — laying a power farm or a turret line becomes one gesture instead of twenty clicks.

That last one is the trick most players never find. Point at your factory with Shift+Ctrl held and a converter selected, and you get a perfect ring around it, correctly spaced, in one click.

Spacing and facing

Two more controls that make placement tidy:

• Build spacing — Z increases the gap between queued buildings, X decreases it. Wider spacing means artillery splash catches fewer buildings at once; tighter spacing means a more compact base. Set it before you drag.
• Build facing — [ and ] rotate which way the building faces before you place it. This matters for factories, whose exit determines where units emerge. Point it toward your front, not into a cliff.

Practical uses

• Power farms: Shift+Alt+drag a block. Since nothing chain-explodes (§22), you can pack them.
• Turret lines at a choke: Shift+drag along the terrain.
• Defensive perimeters: Shift+Alt+Ctrl+drag a hollow box.
• Ringing something valuable: Shift+Ctrl and point at it.
• Claiming resource locations: right-click drag connect-the-dots across the spots (§38).

AN IDLE CONSTRUCTOR IS A BUG IN YOUR PLAY. Every constructor should always have work: building, reclaiming, capturing, or on patrol (which makes it find its own work).

HOLD SPACE TO FIND YOUR CONSTRUCTORS. An animated colored ring appears around every one of them, anywhere on screen.

This turns "do I have idle constructors?" from a chore into a one-second glance. Hold Space, look for a ring that isn't doing anything, give it a job. Do this every couple of minutes and you will never lose a game to a builder that quietly finished its queue ten minutes ago.

20There Is No Build Assist

⚠ SPLINTERFACTION RULE: CONSTRUCTORS CANNOT ASSIST ANYTHING — INCLUDING EACH OTHER.

One structure, one builder. Piling constructors onto a building does not make it go up faster; only one of them can work on it at a time.

Factories cannot be assisted either. In many other Recoil-family games the standard technique is to park a swarm of constructors on a factory so it produces far above its base rate. That does not work here. A factory produces at its own rate, full stop.

If you're coming from another Recoil-family game, this is the single biggest adjustment. There is no way to concentrate builder power onto anything. A constructor can take over a structure another builder has abandoned, but two of them will never work on it together.

What this changes:

• Your production capacity is your number of factories, not your number of constructors. If you want to build twice as many units, you build a second factory. There is no shortcut.
• Constructors are for infrastructure, not for army throughput. Their job is converters, power, supply depots, defenses and reclaim — spread across the map, not stacked on one site.
• Factory count is a real strategic commitment — expensive, visible, and it must be paid for by an economy that can keep it fed. A factory you can't afford to run is a hole in the ground.
• Investment decisions are cleaner. Metal goes into economy, or into production capacity, or into army. You can't paper over a bad choice with a pile of assistants.
• Build time is a real constraint on everything. You can't rush a critical structure by throwing builders at it. If you need something up quickly, the answer is Production Boost (below) or having started it sooner.
• Constructor count is about coverage, not speed. More constructors means more things being built simultaneously in more places — never one thing built faster. This is why the standing-role division in §38 works so well: three constructors each doing their own job in their own area is strictly better than three constructors following each other around.

Practically: plan for your second factory well before you're floating metal, and treat "am I producing continuously from every factory I own?" as a core macro check.

Production Boost

There is one way to make something build faster: the Production Boost ability.

Select a builder or factory, activate the boost, and its production speed increases significantly for 20 seconds.

Because no form of build assist exists, this is your only lever for producing something right now — and 20 seconds is short enough that when you use it matters:

• Emergency defense. An attack is inbound and you need units on the field before it arrives.
• Racing a timing. You know reinforcements will decide a fight that's happening in the next half-minute.
• Getting critical infrastructure up. A power plant you're stalling without, a defensive structure at a choke before the raiders reach it.
• Punching a batch out during a surplus. Floating metal you can't otherwise spend fast enough.

Don't waste it on routine production. Anything that would have finished comfortably anyway gains you nothing. Boost is for the moments where twenty seconds is the difference between having the thing and not having it.

21There Is No Repair

⚠ SPLINTERFACTION RULE: THERE IS NO CONSTRUCTOR REPAIR. AT ALL.

Not for units. Not for structures. Constructors build things and reclaim things. They do not fix things.

This is a deliberate, defining design decision and it reshapes how the whole game is played. Absorb it properly:

Damage is permanent. A tank that comes out of a fight at 40% health stays at 40% health. You cannot pull your army home, patch it up, and send it back out fresh. Your damaged defensive turret stays damaged until something finishes it off.

Consequences you must internalize:

1. Every fight has a lasting cost. You do not just count who won the battle — you count what condition the winner's army is in afterwards. Winning a fight at 20% health across the board means you cannot fight again for a long time.
2. Trading efficiently is everything. Losing 300 metal of units to kill 500 metal of enemy units is a genuine victory even if you "lost the fight." (And per §18, those kills also paid you in Research Points.)
3. Damaged units still have value — as damage dealers, not as tanks. Their guns work at full strength regardless of hull. Pull them to the back of the line and let the healthy units eat the incoming fire. Use the drag-line (§11) to reshape your formation with the wounded behind.
4. Retreating is a real decision with a real cost. Retreating a hurt unit costs you nothing further — the damage already happened — so if it's going to die without taking anything with it, pull it out. But you can't "heal up and re-engage" either, so don't retreat expecting a refund.
5. Structures are consumable. A defensive turret is not a permanent installation; it is a resource that gets used up as it absorbs damage. A turret line that has held off three attacks may not hold off a fourth, and there is nothing you can do to restore it — you can only build more. (Repeat-queued constructors will rebuild destroyed structures automatically — §11, §19 — but only once they're actually destroyed.)
6. Attrition warfare is genuinely lethal. Poking at a defended position, taking chip damage each time, and going home to "recover" is a losing pattern. There is no recovery. Either commit, or don't go.
7. Turtling has a shelf life. Because defenses degrade permanently under repeated pressure, a purely defensive posture doesn't hold indefinitely — it holds until your structures are ground down. See §41.

What healing does exist

Only two things in the entire game restore health, and they are both faction-specific:

FEDERATION OF KALA: - Hull regeneration. Fed units recover hull automatically over time, out of combat. Slow, but it's real, and over a long game it's an enormous cumulative advantage. - The healstation. A Fed structure that repairs hull damage for friendly Fed units within its radius. This is the only genuine healing structure in SplinterFaction, and only Fed has it. Build them, and rotate damaged units through. A Fed player using healstations well can sustain aggression indefinitely in a way no other force in the game can.

LOZ ALLIANCE: - Shields recharge quickly out of combat, and shields absorb damage before hull does. But hull damage underneath is permanent, exactly as for everyone else. Loz has no healstation and no hull regeneration. Once a Loz unit's hull is chewed, it is chewed forever.

This asymmetry is the core of the matchup. Fed can bleed, withdraw, and come back whole. Loz cannot — every point of hull damage Loz takes is permanently subtracted from their army for the rest of the game. Loz therefore must not fight battles they don't need to fight, and must win the ones they do fight decisively. Fed's entire strategy is to deny them that.

Understand this and half of Part VII makes sense before you read it.

22Laying Out A Base

Base layout is free power. It costs nothing but thought.

Do: - Leave lanes. Units must be able to move through your base. A solid wall of buildings around your factory means your army spawns and immediately gets stuck. - Cluster by function. Power in one area, production in another, storage somewhere safe. Makes it easy to see what you have. - Put fragile, expensive things behind sturdy, cheap things. Your power plants and supply depots go behind your factory, not in front of it. - Protect your supply depots. They cap your army size (§16), which makes them a high-value raid target. Interior, not perimeter. - Build defenses at chokes, not around every building. One turret covering a pass beats four turrets scattered pointlessly. - Check the range rings when placing defenses. They're shown by default — so there is no excuse for a turret whose radius doesn't reach the thing it was built to protect. That's 100% wasted metal. - Keep constructors near the front but not at the front.

Don't: - Wall yourself in so completely that you can't expand. - Ring your entire base in defenses — it costs more than an army, it can't attack, and remember §21: those turrets never get repaired. - Bunch everything so tightly that one artillery barrage hits six buildings. - Put your factory exit facing a cliff.

ONE THING YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT: in some games in this family, destroyed power plants explode violently enough to set off their neighbors, so packing power tightly risks losing your whole grid to one lucky hit. Nothing chain-explodes in SplinterFaction. This is deliberate — it looks dramatic, but it makes for frustrating games where a single shot cascades through a base you spent ten minutes building.

So pack your power plants however you like. Spread them if you're worried about artillery hitting several at once, but you'll never lose a grid to a chain reaction.

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Part VICombat

23Unit Roles

Every unit occupies a role. SplinterFaction's ground rosters follow a consistent shape at each tech tier, which makes them easy to learn: a raider, a main battle tank, and an artillery piece — with the artillery frequently doubling as anti-air.

SCOUT — Fast, cheap, sees far, often unarmed. Its job is information, not damage. Loz field the Flea on the ground; both factions use the Gnat air scout drone. Build them early and keep building them.

RAIDER — Fast, cheap, hits hard, dies fast. Its job is to get behind the enemy line and kill constructors, converters and supply depots. Fed's A.K. and Loz's Diamondback are the archetypes. Raiders lose head-on fights and should never be in one.

MAIN BATTLE TANK / ASSAULT — The backbone. Durable, solid damage, moderate cost. Fed run Storm → Bear → Goliath; Loz run Roach → Reaper → Mammoth. This is most of your army.

SKIRMISHER — At Tier 1 this role is filled by the main battle tanks themselves: Fed's Storm and Loz's Roach both have the speed and range to fire, reposition, and fire again rather than standing still and trading. Loz's Flashpoint arguably counts too.

SKIRMISH SUPPORT — Fed's Equalizer is worth calling out separately. It cannot really kill anything on its own — its job is to stack disruption on targets so that the units around it can. Don't field it alone and don't judge it by its kill count.

ARTILLERY — Long range, slow, devastating, helpless up close. Fed's Thud and Avalanche, Loz's Scorpion, Luger and Emperor Scorpion. Must be screened — artillery that gets reached by anything fast is dead artillery.

ANTI-AIR — Fed's Crasher and Phalanx, Loz's Pulverizer. Some artillery doubles as AA — Loz's Scorpion engages ground, air and naval targets alike. Dedicated AA generally cannot shoot ground; check before you rely on it.

AIR — Interceptors (Sparrow, Wasp) kill only aircraft. Strike fighters (Hawk, Hornet) handle both. Bombers (Crow, Bumblebee, Locust) hit ground hard and need escort. Fed's Falcon is a strategic nuclear bomber in a category of its own.

NAVAL — A full parallel roster built from Sea Factories in deep water: torpedo corvettes, frigates, destroyers, cruisers and capital ships. See §25.

SUPPORT — The units that don't shoot but decide fights. Fed's Deleter cloaks everything around it; Loz's Protector shields everything around it. Both are fragile, both are worth more than the units they protect.

DEFENSE STRUCTURES — Layered by tier and by target. Light anti-ground (Menlo, Jericho) stops raider swarms. Anti-air ladders from cheap (Stinger, Razor) to long-reaching (Javelin, Rattlesnake). Heavy turrets (Immolator, Inferno) punish anything that holds still.

A NOTE ON "MASSIVE" TARGETS. Two Tier 3 turrets — Fed's Guardian and Loz's Annihilator — prefer MASSIVE-category targets: enemy heavy units and capital ships. If one is in range, that's what they shoot.

They aren't useless otherwise — with no MASSIVE target available they'll happily engage ordinary ground units and structures. But their targeting priority means they'll turn away from whatever's currently hurting them the moment something big walks into range. Build them as your answer to things nothing else can threaten, and keep other defenses alongside to handle everything smaller.

TIER 4 UNITS ARE GAME-ENDERS. Fed's Juggernaut and Loz's Silverback are not simply "the best units" — they are, in most matches, the unit that decides the match. Both mount four to six weapon systems simultaneously and both take an enormous amount of concentrated firepower to bring down.

They can be killed. They take a LOT of killing. If your opponent fields one and you have no answer prepared, the game is probably over — and if you field one, understand that you've committed a very large fraction of your economy to a single target that must not be caught alone or unsupported.

A mixed army beats a pure army. Any single unit type has an answer. Tanks in front, artillery behind, AA along, support tucked in the middle — that composition has no clean counter.

24Specialist Weapons: Heat And Disruption

THERE IS NO COUNTER WEB IN SPLINTERFACTION.

If you've played other RTS games you may be used to armor classes and damage types — "this weapon does 200% against light armor, 50% against heavy." SplinterFaction deliberately does not do this. Damage is damage. There are no hidden multipliers to memorize, no charts to consult, no units that are secretly useless against a category you couldn't see.

What decides fights here is numbers, positioning, range and tech level — not a lookup table. This is a design choice in favor of readability: what you see is what you get.

What the game does have is two specialist weapon effects that do something other than reduce hit points. Both accumulate on the target, and both are tracked separately from health.

Reading the bars

A unit under one of these effects shows a vertical bar beside it, independent of its healthbar:

• HEAT — the left-side vertical bar
• DISRUPTION — the right-side vertical bar

Neither bar is hit points. A unit can be at full health and about to die of heat, or at full health and completely unable to shoot. Learn to read these two bars — they tell you things the healthbar cannot.

Heat weapons

Heat weapons raise a target's thermal level with every hit. The effect escalates:

This is a kill mechanism that ignores how much health the target has left. A fully healthy heavy tank that has been cooking under sustained fire dies anyway.

The escalation is what makes it nasty. At 50% the target is slowed, which means it can no longer escape the weapon that's heating it. Heat is self-reinforcing: the longer you hold the beam on something, the less able it is to leave.

Loz are the heat faction. The Flashpoint (T1) and Cauterizer (T2) are built around it, the Mammoth carries it as one of three systems, and the Loz Commander's own weapon is a heat ray.

Playing with heat: stay on one target. Switching targets wastes accumulated heat. Pick something, cook it, kill it, move on.

Playing against heat: watch the left bar on your units. Pull anything past 50% out immediately — after that it can't outrun the thing killing it. Rotating a heating unit to the back of your formation lets it cool while something fresh takes over.

Disruption weapons

Disruption weapons stack an impairment effect. The escalation:

That last stage is the one to plan around. A fully disrupted unit becomes a weapon against its own army, seeding disruption into the units packed near it. Against a clumped enemy force, driving one target to 100% can cascade into the whole group.

A fully disrupted unit is, for that window, not in the battle at all. It cannot shoot and it cannot leave. Against an expensive target that's effectively a kill, with the actual destruction as a formality.

Fed are the disruption faction. The Equalizer (T1, a support unit that stacks disruption rather than killing) and Dominator (T2) are dedicated platforms, the Striker (T3) pairs a disruption laser with a particle cannon, and the Fed Commander carries an EMG Disruption Cannon. Loz's Diamondback raider also applies disruption, which is what makes it so dangerous to constructors.

Playing with disruption: focus a volley on high-value targets. Several disruption units hitting the same target lock it down far faster than one — and if you can drive one target in a tight enemy formation all the way to 100%, the nova does the rest of the work for you.

Playing against disruption: watch the right bar. A unit climbing toward lockdown should be withdrawn before it immobilizes — once it does, it's stuck exactly where the enemy wants it, and it will disrupt your own units standing nearby. Don't bunch up against a disruption army; the nova is a reason to spread out beyond the usual splash argument. This is especially punishing for Loz, whose units are slow enough already.

Why this matters more than a counter table

Because these effects bypass health entirely, the usual instinct — "my unit is at 80%, it's fine" — is wrong. Damage is not the only clock running on your units. Check all three bars: health, heat, disruption.

25Terrain, Water And Line Of Fire

Recoil simulates terrain and projectiles physically, which produces a few consequences worth knowing.

Projectiles are real objects

They travel, they arc, they can hit terrain, and they can miss a moving target. So:

• Artillery arcs over hills — and into the hill in front of it if you position badly. High-arc weapons like Fed's Avalanche can reach over cover that flat-firing weapons cannot.
• Fast units genuinely dodge slow projectiles. Fed's Storm is explicitly built around this: a slow, high-damage rocket, paired with enough speed to weave out of return fire. Maneuvering isn't decoration, it's damage prevention.
• Your own units do not block your fire. Shots pass through friendlies, so a back rank still shoots freely. What a clump does cost you is spacing — every unit standing in the same place shares the same artillery blast.

Elevation

High ground gives a modest range bonus to plasma weapons. It's real but small — don't reshape your strategy around it. Take the hill if it's convenient; don't march across the map for it.

Terrain does not block movement

No terrain type is impassable. There are slopes and there are speeds, but there is no ground your army simply cannot cross. You do not need to memorize pathing exceptions, and you cannot rely on terrain to protect a flank the way you might in other games. If there's a gap on your map, assume something can come through it.

Water

All ground units are amphibious. They can cross water freely. There is one critical restriction:

UNITS CANNOT FIRE WHILE UNDERWATER.

A ground army crossing a lake is a defenseless army in transit. It can move; it cannot shoot back. Crossing water is one of the most dangerous things you can do in this game, and catching an enemy army mid-crossing is one of the best things that can happen to you.

• Crossing: pick the shortest crossing, know what's on the far side before you commit, and don't do it in view of enemy artillery.
• Defending: watch your shorelines. An amphibious approach isn't a special tactic requiring transports — anyone can do it, any time.
• Punishing: artillery and air are ideal against units in the water, because nothing shoots back.

Naval warfare

Water maps support a full naval roster, produced from Sea Factories built in sufficiently deep water. The line-up mirrors ground roles: fast torpedo corvettes (Piranha, Snake) for raiding, frigates (Crusader, Enforcer) as all-rounders, destroyers and cruisers (Colossus, Executioner, Conqueror, Warlord) as the line, and capital ships (Harbinger, Leviathan) as the heavy end.

Naval play follows the same principles as ground play — economy, composition, positioning — with two differences: ships are generally slower to replace, and water is often where the uncontested resource locations are. On a water map, sea control is economy control.

Many ships carry anti-air as a secondary. Check what yours have before assuming your fleet is safe from bombers.

26Micro Techniques That Actually Matter

In rough order of value-per-effort:

1. Focus fire. Kill one enemy unit at a time rather than damaging five. A dead unit deals zero damage; a wounded one deals full damage. This is the highest-value micro in the game and it's just clicking the same target.

2. Pull damaged units back. Remember §21 — that damage is permanent. But a wounded unit's gun is at 100%. Pull it to the second rank where it still shoots but isn't the thing being shot. Fed players should pull wounded units out entirely and let them regenerate.

3. Use Fight, not Move. See §11.

4. Kiting. With faster, longer-ranged units: shoot, back off while reloading, shoot again. The enemy never gets to fight back. This is Fed's whole personality.

5. Spread against splash. If they have artillery, don't stand in a ball.

6. Use terrain. Fight from the hill. Force them through the choke. Put your artillery behind a ridge.

7. Focus the support. In an enemy army, the constructors and artillery are worth ten times the assault units. Snipe them.

27Transports, Gunships And Ferry Lines

SplinterFaction's air transports come with an important framing difference:

THESE ARE GUNSHIPS THAT CAN CARRY UNITS, NOT TRANSPORTS THAT HAPPEN TO HAVE A GUN.

Fed's Condor and Eagle, and Loz's Crane and Titan, all carry downward-firing weapons — particle cannons, railguns, rocket batteries, microwave beams — specifically so they can suppress the ground while loading and unloading. That's the window where a conventional transport is helpless, and here it isn't.

Loz's Dragonfly is the exception: a genuine unarmed Tier 1 transport with no business in contested airspace.

What transports are actually for

1. Putting an army where it cannot be expected. This is the real threat, and it's strategic rather than tactical. A loaded heavy transport in the air means your opponent's rear, their expansions and their undefended converters are all suddenly reachable. Higher-tier transports (Eagle, Titan) lift the largest ground units — which means the thing appearing behind their line isn't a raiding party, it's the actual army.

2. Reaching places ground units can't get to quickly. Islands, isolated resource locations, vents across water.

3. Not crossing water on foot. Per §25, ground units can't fire while swimming. A transport turns a defenseless crossing into a fast, armed one.

Ferry lines — and why Loz need them

Set up a transport with a queue — pick up here, drop off there — and turn on repeat (§11). It will run that loop indefinitely, ferrying units from your factory to wherever you're fighting, unsupervised, until you tell it to stop.

This is disproportionately valuable to the Loz Alliance. Loz units are slow. On a large map, a Loz tank built at your factory may spend an appreciable stretch of the game simply walking to the front — during which it contributes nothing, and during which it can be picked off alone.

A ferry line fixes that structurally. Loz production comes off the line and gets delivered, arriving as reinforcements rather than as a trickle of stragglers. If you're playing Loz on anything bigger than a small map, set one up early. It is one of the highest-value things a Loz commander can do, and it costs one transport and thirty seconds of setup.

Cautions: a ferry line flying through contested airspace is a delivery service for your opponent. Route it around known anti-air, and check on it occasionally — a repeat loop will happily keep flying into a Rattlesnake forever.

28Wreckage And Reclaim

When a unit dies, it has a chance to drop a reclaimable part on the ground. When it does, that part is worth a high percentage of the dead unit's total cost. Constructors reclaim these parts, turning them back into metal.

This makes reclaim one of the two most under-used sources of income in the game, and it deserves more respect than new players give it.

A BATTLEFIELD IS A BANK. After a large engagement, the ground is littered with parts worth a substantial fraction of everything that died there — yours and theirs. A reclaim field is a fantastic way to finance a brand new army.

The strategic consequences are real:

• Winning a fight and staying is worth far more than winning and leaving. Whoever holds the field afterwards collects it. Half your army's replacement cost may be lying on that ground.
• Denying reclaim is a legitimate objective. If you can't hold the field, contest it — an enemy who can't safely bring constructors in doesn't get paid.
• Losing a fight on your own ground stings less than losing one deep in enemy territory, because at least the parts are somewhere you can collect them.
• Combined with RP from kills (§18), a won battle pays twice — metal from the field, research from the kills. This is the strongest argument against passive play in the game.

How to actually do it: send constructors to reclaim after a fight. Better, put them on patrol across the battlefield and they'll auto-reclaim everything they find, hands-free. Better still, combine patrol with repeat (§11) and you have a permanent salvage crew working an area you fight over repeatedly.

Also reclaimable: terrain features such as rocks and debris, and your own unwanted structures.

Given that damaged units cannot be repaired (§21), reclaim is your only way to recover value from a battle. Do not walk past it.

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Part VIIThe Factions

29Federation Of Kala

Doctrine: speed, stealth, sustainability.

Fed fields fast walkers — legged chassis that reposition rapidly and prefer never to be where the enemy is aiming. Their armament leans on missiles, plasma, particle beams and disruption.

Defining systems:

• Cloaking — true stealth. Not merely invisibility. See §34; in a game with no radar, this is the most powerful information tool either faction has.
• Hull regeneration. Fed units recover hull automatically over time. In a game where damage is otherwise permanent (§21), this is enormous.
• The Healstation. A repair field structure, unique to Fed, that restores health to friendly units in its radius. It pauses briefly when a unit takes damage, so it heals units rotating off the line rather than units still on it.
• Disruption weapons. The Equalizer, Dominator and Striker stack impairment until a target is blind, then immobile (§24).
• Mobility. Fed arrive first, leave first, and choose whether a fight happens at all.

How to play Fed: - Don't stand and slug. Trading blows in a static line against Loz shields is playing their game. - Raid constantly. Converters, constructors, supply depots. Leave before the response arrives. - Kite. Your speed is a weapon — shoot, withdraw, shoot again. The Storm is explicitly designed for this. - Use regeneration and healstations as a resource. Rotate damaged units out, heal, return. A Fed army that skirmishes for twenty minutes and recovers between engagements can bleed a Loz force to nothing without ever fighting a pitched battle. This is the Fed win condition. - Use cloak to position, not to hide. A cloaked army sitting on a flank that decloaks into their rear is worth more than a cloaked army sitting safely at home. - Cloak freely. Cloaking costs no energy (§15) — there is no reason to ration it. Your power budget is for converters and construction.

Fed's weakness: individual units are fragile. Caught in the open, or pinned somewhere they can't withdraw, Fed evaporates. Fed is never allowed to be careless — but is allowed to be wrong twice, which Loz isn't.

30Loz Alliance

Doctrine: mass, protection, inevitability.

Loz field slow heavy tanks built around energy shields at every scale, with heat rays, railguns and lightning weapons.

Defining systems:

• Personal shields. Every Loz unit carries its own regenerating barrier that absorbs damage before the hull takes any. Shields recharge quickly out of combat. Hull damage underneath is permanent (§21) — so the shield is the only healing Loz has.
• Projected shields. The Protector is a mobile shield tank that bubbles nearby friendlies. Small and Large Shield Generators do the same for a fixed area — the Large fields 10,000 shield power with 300/sec regeneration and a 25-second recharge delay once collapsed.
• Heat weapons. The Flashpoint, Cauterizer, Mammoth and the Loz Commander all cook their targets toward detonation (§24).
• Heavy firepower. Loz win direct exchanges. A Loz line that gets into position and stays there is very hard to move.
• Slow. You will not catch anything and you will not run away. Every engagement you enter, you are committed to.

How to play Loz: - Advance deliberately and hold what you take. You don't raid; you arrive. - Manage shield state. Rotate depleted units to the back until they recharge. This is the single highest-value Loz technique — it converts permanent hull loss into temporary shield loss. Use the drag-line (§11) to reshape your front on the move. - Layer your shields. Personal shields, a Protector in the formation, generators over key ground. Each layer is damage your hulls never take. - Shield everything, freely. Shields cost no energy (§33). Personal, Protector, generators — there's no upkeep, so layer as much as you can build. - Force fights where Fed can't disengage. Chokepoints, pincers, cutting off retreat. If Fed kite freely, you lose on attrition. - Run ferry lines (§27). Your units are slow; don't make them walk.

Loz's weakness: you cannot choose your engagements. A faster opponent decides when and where fights happen. And because you have no healstation and no regeneration, every hull point you lose is gone for the rest of the game.

31Matchup Notes

Fed vs. Loz is a race between attrition and commitment.

• Fed's plan: never fight fair. Bleed shields through repeated skirmishes, disengage, regenerate, and win on cumulative permanent damage.
• Loz's plan: refuse to be bled. Force decisive engagements, take ground and hold it, and win on the fact that a Fed army that gets caught dies.

The three things that decide it:

1. Economy. Neither faction's signature system costs energy (§15), so this isn't a question of powering your cloak or your shields — it's the plain question of who converts more metal, fields more army, and researches faster. The faction mechanics are free; the army using them is not.

2. Information. With no radar and Fed cloaking suppressing seismic pings (§34), Loz can be attacked by an army they never saw coming. Loz commanders must scout relentlessly and sweep ground before crossing it, or accept fighting blind.

3. Whether Loz can force the fight. Everything else follows from this. Fed's entire strategy is refusing pitched battles; Loz's entire strategy is imposing them.

The asymmetry underneath it all: Fed can bleed, withdraw and come back whole. Loz cannot. Every point of hull damage Loz takes is permanently subtracted for the rest of the game. Loz must therefore not fight battles they don't need, and must win the ones they do fight decisively.

Mirror matchups collapse into positioning and economy, which is an excellent way to learn fundamentals without a faction puzzle on top.

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Part VIIIAdvanced Systems

32Tech Tiers And Upgrades

Your Commander is your tech tree

⚠ THE ONLY WAY TO RAISE YOUR TECH LEVEL IS TO UPGRADE YOUR COMMANDER.

Nothing else does it. Not a research building, not a factory upgrade. Your Commander advances through four tiers, paid for with Research Points (§18), and your Commander's tier is your tech level. Everything you can build is gated behind it.

Your Commander is also a weapon

Upgrading gains you more weapon range and dramatically more damage at each tier. Commanders are strong units, and you're expected to use them. A Commander can bully an enemy force off contested ground, break up a raid, or hold a choke that your army hasn't reached yet.

Each faction's Commander carries its faction's signature weapon:

• Fed Commander — an EMG Disruption Cannon. It blinds and then immobilizes what it hits (§24), which makes it superb at pinning a raiding party in place.
• Loz Commander — a heat ray. It cooks targets toward detonation, and once something passes 50% heat it's too slow to escape.

⚠ COMMANDER WEAPONS ARE MOSTLY INEFFECTIVE AGAINST OTHER COMMANDERS.

Do not plan on winning a duel. Two Commanders shooting at each other is close to a stalemate — deliberately, since the alternative would be a game decided by one lucky meeting.

The practical read: your Commander bullies armies, not other Commanders. And if you want to kill their Commander, bring an army to do it, because yours won't manage the job alone.

The judgment to develop is knowing when to push and when to walk it home. A Commander in the wrong place is not a lost unit — it's a lost game (§4).

Once you have a tech level, you can never lose it. Tech is permanent. Even if your Commander dies, everything already unlocked stays unlocked.

What happens if you lose your Commander in a team game

In 1v1 this is academic — losing your Commander loses the game (§4). In a team game, you play on, and this rule becomes one of the most interesting situations in SplinterFaction:

You keep every tech level you had. You can never gain another.

If your Commander dies at Tier 1, you will be building Tier 1 units for the rest of the match while your opponents climb to Tier 3 and 4.

This sounds fatal. It isn't — and the reason is weapons and armor upgrades.

Those army-wide RP upgrades don't require a Commander, and they apply to everything you own and everything you build. A player frozen at a low tier can pour all their RP into them and field lower-tier units that hit far harder and survive far longer than they have any right to.

FROM THE DEVELOPER: "In a team game some time back, I lost my commander at Tier 1 because I wasn't paying attention. I used T1 units and mass weapons and armor upgrades in order to stay in the fight. Killing T2 with buffed T1 isn't exactly efficient, but it allowed me to stay in the game and help my team win."

That's the intended shape of the recovery. It is not efficient — you'll spend more to kill less — but it keeps you contributing, and in a team game contributing is the whole job. If this happens to you: stop mourning the tech tree, dump everything into weapons and armor, and become the player who grinds down what your allies are too busy to handle.

Upgrades in the orders menu

Upgradeable units show Tech 1 Upgrade / Tech 2 Upgrade / etc. buttons in the orders menu, with tooltips explaining each — and a clickable upgrade button floating above the unit itself, which is quicker still (§11). Alongside them: add to upgrade queue, pause upgrade, cancel upgrade. Queued upgrades process one at a time as RP becomes available.

Upgrades currently complete in about three seconds, so there's little vulnerability window in practice.

What's upgradeable: your Commander (four tiers, gating all tech), EM Converters (four tiers, multiplying output — Tier 1 doubles base, Tier 2 triples, Tier 3 more than five times, Tier 4 more than ten), and army-wide weapons and armor tracks.

Guidance: converter upgrades and Commander tech both raise your ceiling and should come early. Weapons and armor scale with the size of your army, so they're worth more the bigger your force gets — and they're the entire fallback plan if your Commander dies.

33Shields (Loz Alliance)

Loz shielding operates at three scales, and they stack.

1. Personal shields. Every Loz unit carries one. It absorbs damage before the hull, and recharges quickly once out of combat. The hull underneath does not recover.

2. The Protector. A mobile shield tank that projects a bubble over nearby friendlies. It carries no weapons and cannot fight — its entire value is the cover it provides. A Protector embedded in an advancing formation absorbs fire that would otherwise shred the units around it. Keep it behind the front rank and keep it alive.

3. Shield Generators. Static projected bubbles. The Small (Tier 2, 250 radius, 1,200 shield power) buys time under light pressure. The Large (Tier 3, 750 radius, 10,000 shield power, 300/sec regeneration) can absorb a serious volume of fire — but once collapsed it takes 25 seconds to come back, and that window is when a good opponent commits.

The core technique: rotate

Watch the shield bars. Pull depleted units back, push fresh ones forward, use the drag-line to reshape your front without breaking formation.

Every point a shield absorbs is a point your permanently-damageable hull never takes. A Loz player who rotates loses roughly half as much army as one who doesn't — same units, same fight.

Shields are free

Shields cost no energy — not personal shields, not the Protector, not the generators. They recharge on their own, for free, forever. There is no power bill and no reason to hold back on shield infrastructure.

This means an energy stall, however bad for your economy, never leaves your army unshielded. Whatever else is going wrong, your protection stays up.

34Stealth, Sensors And Seeing The Map

This section applies to everyone, because SplinterFaction's information model is unusual and it shapes every game.

There is no radar

⚠ SPLINTERFACTION HAS NO RADAR. AT ALL.

If you've played other RTS games, delete the expectation now. There is no structure that reveals a wide area of the map as blips, no radar coverage to extend, no radar range to compare.

What exists instead are seismic sensors, and they are far more limited:

• A sensor tells you that something is there. That's all.
• It does not tell you what it is. Not the unit type, not the tier, not whether it's a scout or a Silverback.
• It does not tell you how many. One contact is not one unit.
• It only detects movement. A unit standing perfectly still generates no seismic ping and is completely invisible to sensors.

Consequences you have to internalize:

1. You cannot know what's on the map without going and looking. Sensor contacts are prompts to investigate, never answers. Scouting isn't optional in this game the way it is in others — it's your only real source of information (§39).
2. A still army is a hidden army. Any player can exploit this, not just Fed. Park a force somewhere quiet and it produces nothing for the enemy to detect. Staging an ambush costs nothing but patience.
3. Absence of contacts means nothing. Empty sensor coverage is consistent with empty ground, a stationary army, or a cloaked one. Never read quiet as safe.

Fed cloaking is true stealth

Cloaking doesn't just make Fed units invisible to the eye. It also suppresses their seismic pings. A cloaked Fed unit is undetectable by both of your information channels simultaneously — you cannot see it and your sensors cannot feel it, even while it's moving.

This is why cloaking is the strongest information tool in the game and why the Fed matchup is genuinely unnerving for Loz.

Cloak breaks in two situations:

1. Proximity. Every cloaked unit has a decloak radius. Enemies that get close enough will reveal it.
2. Firing. Opening fire drops the cloak.

Fed's cloaking assets: the Deleter (mobile mech projecting an area cloak field), the Cloaking Tower (300 radius) and Large Cloaking Tower (800 radius, Tier 3). All of them cloak everything friendly inside their radius, and notably they run at no energy cost — the cloak field itself is free once built. They're fragile and unarmed; their value is entirely the invisibility they grant.

Playing Fed with cloak: - Position with it, don't hide behind it. A cloaked army parked on a flank that decloaks into their rear is the play. A cloaked army sitting at home is wasted metal. - Cloak your expansions. A converter your opponent doesn't know exists is a converter they don't kill. - Set units to Hold Fire (§11) if you want them to stay concealed — a unit that auto-fires at a passing scout has just announced your ambush. - Large Cloaking Towers hide entire sectors. A forward staging base under one is an army that appears from nowhere. - Respect the decloak radius. Cloak buys surprise, not immunity. Anything that walks close enough will find you.

Playing against cloak: - Assume it's there. If a Fed army disappeared from your sight and hasn't reappeared anywhere, it exists, it's somewhere, and it's probably closer than you'd like. - Move through suspect ground. Proximity breaks cloak — units advancing through an area will trip over anything hidden in it. Cheap scouts are ideal for sweeping. - Watch for the gaps. Territory that produces no sensor contacts at all, in a place that ought to have traffic, is suspicious rather than reassuring. - Loz especially: you cannot outrun an ambush. Sweep ground before you commit your slow, expensive line to crossing it.

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Part IXGame Modes

35Skirmish Vs. Ai

Add a SimpleAI opponent for a standard one-on-one match. SimpleAI plays a conventional game — builds an economy, produces an army, attacks. It is the right way to learn the fundamentals without the pressure of a human opponent noticing every mistake.

Learn against the AI in this order: 1. Just survive a full game. Don't optimize anything. 2. Play a game where you never let your factory go idle. 3. Play a game where you take every resource location you safely can. 4. Play a game where you never let your stored metal exceed a small buffer. 5. Play a game where you scout every three minutes.

Each of these is a single habit. Learn them one at a time, not all at once.

36Survivalai: Wave Defense

SurvivalAI is SplinterFaction's wave-based survival mode, and it's an excellent way to learn the game because it removes the "what is my opponent doing?" problem while keeping every economic and defensive lesson intact.

It is also co-operative. A team of players can share a survival map and hold the line together — which makes it the single best way to introduce a friend to the game, since an experienced player can handle the pressure while the newcomer learns the economy without being eliminated for a mistake.

Scaling to player count is up to you. The convention is one SurvivalAI per player, which keeps the pressure roughly proportional to the size of your team. But it's entirely optional — three players against a single SurvivalAI is a much gentler game, and four players against four is a serious one. Set it to whatever difficulty you actually want.

How it works:

The AI operates from beacon units, which act as its spawn points and command structures. Waves of attackers emerge from these beacons and come for you, escalating over time.

Wave archetypes — each wave has a character, and reading it tells you what defense you need:

Beacon network specialization. Beacons aren't identical — they take on roles that make the waves they support meaningfully harder:

• Shield beacons — reinforce attacking waves with protection
• Cloaking beacons — every unit sent from this beacon arrives cloaked. Given there is no radar and cloak suppresses seismic pings (§34), a cloaking beacon's waves are genuinely invisible until they're on top of you
• Accelerator beacons — increase wave frequency or speed
• Forge beacons — improve the quality of units produced

This creates a target priority list. Killing the right beacon changes the shape of the game. Take out the accelerator and you get breathing room. Take out the forge and the waves get softer. Take out the jammer and you can see again.

Garrison turrets defend beacons, so beacon assaults are real operations requiring a real army — not something you do with three spare units.

Surge waves are escalation events, larger and more dangerous than the standard cadence. The game telegraphs them. Prepare during the lull.

Last-beacon rage mode. When you reduce the AI to its final beacon, it goes into overdrive — a dramatic escalation for the endgame. Do not stroll into the final beacon with a tired army and expect a formality. Build up first, then commit fully.

How to play SurvivalAI: 1. Economy first, hard. The early waves are gentle deliberately. Every second you spend on defense you don't yet need is a second of compounding economy lost. Take resource locations aggressively. 2. Build defense to a schedule, not to panic. Know roughly when waves come; have the answer built beforehand. 3. Cover every approach, and check with range rings. Drop waves specifically punish players who defended only the front. 4. Build anti-air before the first air wave, not during it. 5. Go on the offensive. Pure turtling loses eventually — the waves scale up and your defenses (which don't get repaired, §21) get ground down. You must go out and kill beacons to reduce incoming pressure. 6. Prioritize beacons by their specialization, not by proximity. 7. Use the lulls. Between waves: reclaim wreckage, rebuild losses, expand, push out. Downtime spent idle is the mode's real difficulty setting.

The dedicated survival panel shows wave timing, composition and status. The beacon labels overlay identifies beacons and their specializations on the map. Keep both on.

37Multiplayer

Joining a game

Joining works through the lobby. Pick a room, pick a team, ready up.

Hosting a game

You have two options, and one of them is much easier.

Option 1 — use a SPADS autohost. There are official SPADS autohosts available. An autohost is a permanently-running server that hosts battles for you; you join it, set up your game through its commands, and play. This requires no configuration on your end and no network setup. If you just want to play a game with friends, use an autohost.

Option 2 — host it yourself. Hosting directly from your own machine means other players connect to you, which means your router has to let them in.

⚠ SELF-HOSTING REQUIRES PORT FORWARDING.

You must forward port 8254 to the machine running the game. This is the default; it can be changed on the Host a New Battle screen if 8254 is already in use on your network.

If you skip this step, the battle will appear in the lobby and nobody will be able to connect to it. This is the single most common hosting problem, and it looks like a bug rather than a configuration issue — which is why it's worth saying plainly.

Port forwarding is done in your router's admin interface, not in the game. The procedure varies by router; search for your model plus "port forwarding" if you haven't done it before. You forward TCP/UDP port 8254 to the local IP address of the computer that will host.

If you can't or don't want to forward ports, use an autohost. There's no penalty for doing so and it's what most players use anyway.

Multiplayer etiquette: - Ready up promptly. - If you're new, say so. People are generally happy to explain things and much less happy to be surprised by an ally who vanished. - If you must leave early, say so rather than dropping. - Team games: talk. "Attack coming to my north" is worth more than any amount of solo skill.

Allied play: - Share vision and use it. Your ally's sensor coverage and line of sight are yours too — between you, you can watch far more of the map than either could alone. - Share resources when it helps. An ally who's stalled and can't rebuild is a dead ally, and then you're alone. The share menu handles unit and resource transfers. - Coordinate attacks. Two armies arriving at the same place at different times is two defeats. Arriving together is one victory. - Divide the map. Decide who covers which flank before the game starts.

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Part XStrategy

38Your First Five Minutes

Here is a concrete, working opening. It isn't the only one, but it's a real one, and it will not embarrass you.

The build

1 EM Converter → 2 Fission Power Plants → 1 Factory → 3 Constructors → raiders

That's it. Commit it to memory and you never have to think about the first two minutes again.

Note the shape: one converter, then power immediately. Converters run on energy (§14), so a converter with nothing feeding it is a decoration. The two Fission plants pay for the first converter and leave headroom for construction.

Then the factory, because production capacity can't be rushed later (there's no build assist of any kind — §20). Then three constructors, which is where your economy actually starts.

After that: raiders. They serve double duty — a few sitting at home are point defense against an early rush, and the same units can go harass instead if scouting shows nothing coming.

Give your constructors jobs

This is the part that separates a smooth opening from a scattered one. Don't manage three constructors as one pool. Assign each a standing role:

Constructor #2's job sounds strange until you've stalled a few times. A constructor whose entire career is building power means you will essentially never run out of energy — and since energy gates converters, construction, shields and cloak, that one habit removes most economic failure from your game. Set it going and let it run.

Queueing converters quickly

Two ways, both fast:

• Select a constructor and right-click a resource location. It queues a converter there.
• Right-click and drag, connect-the-dots style, across several locations. It queues converters on all of them in one gesture.

Use the second one. Sweeping across five resource locations in a single drag is the difference between an economy that grows while you're looking elsewhere and one that waits for you to remember it.

Then

By 3:00 — scout. Non-negotiable, and §39 explains why it's more urgent here than in most games.

By 5:00 — expand, add supply, keep the factory running. Push converters outward. Add supply depots before the readout gets tight. Keep constructor #2 building power forever.

The four checks

Every couple of minutes, ask:

1. Is my metal near zero? (spending everything)
2. Is my factory producing? (never idle — use repeat, §11)
3. Am I ahead on supply? (never blocked)
4. When did I last look at the enemy? (under three minutes ago)

That list beats most opponents on its own.

39Scouting

Scouting is the highest-value action in the game, and in SplinterFaction it matters more than in most RTS games.

Here's why: there is no radar (§34). Seismic sensors tell you something is moving somewhere — not what, not how many. A stationary army pings nothing at all. Cloaked Fed units ping nothing even while moving.

In other games, scouting supplements your radar picture. Here, scouting is your picture. If you aren't sending units out to look, you are playing blind, and you will not find that out until something arrives.

Rules: - Scout early. By minute three you should know where they are. - Scout continuously. One scout at minute three tells you about minute three. - Scout before committing. Never attack into ground you haven't looked at. - Scout economically. Count their converters. If they have twelve and you have six, you cannot win a long game and must act.

What to look for: - How many converters? (their economy) - How many factories, and which kind? (their production ceiling and their plan) - How many supply depots, and where? (a soft target that caps their army — §16) - What units? (what you need to answer) - Where are their defenses? (where to attack — and where not to) - What's missing? (no anti-air is an invitation)

⚠ THE AIR RUSH IS THE ONE TO WATCH FOR.

The most dangerous early commitment in SplinterFaction is a player going hard into air and bombers. It is genuinely devastating against an opponent who didn't see it coming, because bombers ignore your ground defenses entirely and go straight for whatever you value most.

The good news: it is completely nullified by seeing it coming. Anti-air is cheap, quick to build, and every faction has a T1 option (Fed's Stinger and Crasher, Loz's Razor and Pulverizer). An air commitment that arrives at a prepared base is an enormous quantity of metal thrown into a wall.

The bad news: if the first you know of it is bombers halfway to your base, you do not have time to build the answer. As the developer puts it — it's going to be a long day, or a very short one, depending on your point of view.

This single threat justifies the entire scouting habit. An air plant spotted at minute four costs you one scout and a few turrets. The same air plant spotted at minute nine costs you the game.

Losing your scout tells you something too. A scout that dies instantly at a specific place means something is defending that place.

40Attacking On A Timing

Random attacks fail. Attacks with a reason work. A timing attack is one launched at the specific moment you hold an advantage.

Good reasons to attack: - You just finished a batch of units and they haven't. A temporary edge — use it before it evaporates. - You have something they can't answer. Air against no anti-air. Artillery against static defenses. - They just expanded. Metal spent on a converter is metal not spent on an army. - They're behind economically. Push and stop them catching up. - You scouted a weakness. An undefended flank, an exposed expansion, a lone constructor.

Bad reasons: - They have units sitting there. (That's defense. It's a job.) - You're bored. - You're losing and hoping. (Attacking from behind into a stronger position accelerates the loss. Expand instead, or hit somewhere undefended.)

When you go: - Bring a composition, not one unit type (§23). - Advance with Fight, not Move (§11). Consider Set Target on their constructors or artillery before you arrive. - Bring a constructor — to fortify what you take, reclaim the field afterwards (§28), and possibly capture something (§19). - Have an objective. "Kill their eastern expansion" is an objective. "Attack" is not. - Remember §21. Damage taken is permanent. An attack without a reason isn't neutral — it's a permanent cost.

41Turtling, Booming, Rushing

Three postures. Each beats one and loses to another.

RUSH — early aggression before defenses exist. Beats booming. Loses to turtling. BOOM — skip early army, maximize economy, overwhelm later. Beats turtling. Loses to rushing. TURTLE — heavy defense, hold a small area, tech up. Beats rushing. Loses to booming.

NO STRATEGY IS BETTER THAN THE OTHERS. THIS IS DELIBERATE.

It's a mind game, closer to poker than to chess. You are not playing the optimal line — you are playing your opponent.

Keep them guessing. Hit where they least expect. Harass them into a mistake. Or fortify until they dash themselves to pieces against your line. Or economy like a maniac and use the boom to build an army faster than they can answer.

All three win. What loses is being predictable, and being readable — an opponent who knows which of the three you're doing gets to pick the counter for free.

Which is why §39 cuts both ways. Scouting is how you find out what they've chosen. Denying scouting — killing their scouts, cloaking your expansions if you're Fed — is how you stop them finding out what you've chosen.

A note on turtling in this game specifically — and it differs by faction.

Loz cannot turtle indefinitely. Nothing repairs a Loz structure. Defenses degrade permanently under repeated pressure, so every wave that hits your line leaves it weaker than before, forever. A Loz turtle has a shelf life measured in how many attacks it can absorb, and the only way to extend it is to keep building replacements.

Fed can. Fed structures regenerate, and healstations repair them. A Fed defensive line that survives an attack comes back to full strength before the next one, which makes turtling a far more sustainable posture — you can genuinely sit behind a line and let an opponent break themselves against it.

Both factions still forgo the RP that kills provide (§18) by never fighting, and neither can win by sitting still. Turtle to buy time and force a bad attack. Just understand that for Loz it's a clock running down, and for Fed it's a position you can actually hold.

For new players: aim for the middle. Build economy hard, keep a modest army for safety, one defense at your choke, expand steadily. It beats nothing perfectly and loses to nothing catastrophically, which is what you want while learning.

42Common Mistakes And Their Fixes

The five that cost the most games

1. Not spending your resources. Metal in the bank does nothing. Every second it sits there is compounding interest you're refusing to collect (§7). If you're floating, you should be building — army, economy, supply, upgrades, anything.

2. Not keeping on top of upgrades. Research Points accumulate whether you use them or not, and unspent RP is exactly as wasted as unspent metal (§18). Converter tiers, Commander tech, weapons and armor — check every few minutes. Players routinely reach minute twenty sitting on a fortune they never spent.

3. Ignoring the low supply warnings. The voice advisor tells you, out loud, before it becomes a problem (§8). Ignore it and your factories simply stop, usually at the worst possible moment (§16).

4. Trying to do too much before your economy can support it. The most common way good intentions lose games.

DON'T STRETCH YOUR ECONOMY TO THE BREAKING POINT.

A second factory, a tech upgrade, an expansion and a defensive line — each is a good idea. All four at once, on an economy that supports two, means everything happens at quarter speed and nothing finishes. You stall, and a stalled player produces nothing while their opponent produces normally.

Fewer things, completed, beats more things, all half-built. Pick what matters most right now, finish it, then start the next one.

5. Never scouting. Especially against an air opening (§39). There is no radar in this game; if you don't look, you don't know.

The full list

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AGlossary

Terms used in this manual and by other players. Where SplinterFaction differs from the genre convention, the entry says so.

AA

Anti-air. Weapons that hit aircraft. Most cannot shoot ground targets.

All-in

An attack that commits everything. Wins or loses the game outright.

APM

Actions Per Minute — a measure of clicking speed. Massively overrated.

Attack-move

What other games call the Fight command. See Fight.

Autohost

A permanently-running server (SPADS) that hosts battles, so no player needs to forward ports.

Base race

Both players attack instead of defending; whoever kills faster wins.

Beacon

A SurvivalAI spawn point. Killing them reduces incoming pressure.

Boom

Prioritizing economy over army.

Build order

A planned sequence of construction for the opening.

Cheese

A gimmicky all-in that wins by surprise. Beaten by scouting.

Choke / Chokepoint

A narrow passage. Defensively valuable.

Composition

The mix of unit types in your army.

Concave

A shallow arc formation curving toward the enemy. Beats a clump.

Contain

Trapping an enemy in their base so they can't expand.

Converter

EM Converter — the structure that produces metal, buildable only on resource locations.

Counter

A unit that beats another unit type. Note SplinterFaction has no damage-type counter web (§24).

Deathball

One large army moving as a single blob. Vulnerable to area damage.

Disruption

Weapon effect that blinds, then silences, then immobilizes a target. Tracked on the right-side bar.

Drop

Delivering units behind enemy lines by transport.

Eco

Economy.

Expand

Taking a new resource location.

Ferry line

A transport on a repeating pick-up/drop-off loop, delivering units to the front.

Fight

The order that moves units while engaging anything encountered. What other games call attack-move. Use it.

Float

Accumulating unspent resources. Bad.

Geo / Vent

Geothermal vent. Hosts a geothermal power plant, converter, research center or condenser.

Harass

Small attacks to disrupt economy without committing.

Heat

Weapon effect that cooks a target toward detonation. Tracked on the left-side bar.

Kiting

Shooting while retreating so the enemy never fires back.

Macro

Economy and production management.

Map control

How much of the map you can safely operate in.

MASSIVE

Target category for the heaviest units and capital ships. Some Tier 3 turrets prefer them.

Mex

Slang from other Recoil-family games for a metal extractor. SplinterFaction's equivalent is the EM Converter.

Micro

Individual unit control in combat.

Natural

The expansion nearest your base, easiest to defend.

Nova

The burst of disruption a unit emits when driven to 100% disruption, spreading it to nearby units.

Push

A deliberate advance with your army.

Raid

Fast attack on undefended economy.

Reclaim

Converting wreckage back into metal.

Reclaim field

A battlefield covered in reclaimable parts after a large engagement. Free money.

RP

Research Points. Spent on tech tiers, converter upgrades, and weapons/armor tracks.

Rush

Very early aggression.

Seismic sensor

Detects that something moving is present. Not radar — gives no identity and no count.

Snowball

Small advantage compounding into a large one.

Stall

Running out of a resource, causing everything that needs it to slow.

Supply

The cap on army size. Raised by building supply depots.

Supply blocked

At your supply cap and unable to build units. Build depots.

Tech

Advancing to more powerful units and capabilities. Gated by your Commander's tier.

Timing attack

Attacking at a moment of specific advantage.

Trade

Exchanging losses. A "good trade" means you lost less value than they did.

Turtle

Heavy defense, little aggression.

Wall / Wall-in

Using buildings to block a path.

BKeybindings

SplinterFaction's bindings come from two places: the engine defaults (the standard Recoil uikeys.txt set, familiar to anyone who has played a Recoil-family game) and SplinterFaction's own additions in sf_keys.txt.

Your own bindings always win. SF's defaults are appended behind anything you've already bound in your personal uikeys.txt, so keys you've claimed keep their meaning and SF only fills in the gaps.

The keys that matter most

If you learn six, learn these.

Orders

Holding Shift with any of the above queues the order instead of replacing the current one.

Targeting (SplinterFaction addition)

Unit states

Set through the orders menu. Move states: Hold Position, Maneuver, Roam. Fire states: Fire at Will, Return Fire, Hold Fire. See §11.

Building

Full explanation in §19.

Upgrades (SplinterFaction addition)

Selection

Selection splitting (SplinterFaction addition)

Useful for sending half your army one way and half the other without re-boxing them.

Camera

Interface

Hotbinding: the fastest way to bind anything

Hover the mouse over any button in the orders or build menu and press Ctrl + Insert. The game asks for a key, and that button is bound to it immediately.

Ctrl + Delete over the same button removes the binding.

This is the quickest way to put your most-built structures on keys without opening any menus.

The Static Keybinds editor

SplinterFaction includes an in-game keybind editor so you never have to hand-edit a text file.

Two tabs:

• SF Keys — SplinterFaction's own bindings, grouped under the same section headings used in this appendix. This is where you'll spend your time.
• All Bindings — every binding the engine currently knows about, including all engine defaults. Comprehensive, and long.

Rebinding:

Key colors tell you the state at a glance: yellow for bound, gray for unbound, green for something you've changed this session.

Conflicts are handled, not hidden. If the key you pressed is already used, a confirmation dialog lists exactly what it's currently bound to before anything changes. Confirming unbinds those actions; canceling leaves everything alone. You will never silently break an existing binding.

Two buttons at the bottom:

• Reapply Key Files — reloads the keybind files from disk. Useful if you've hand-edited something outside the game.
• Reset All Rebinds — clears everything you've changed and returns to engine defaults plus your own uikeys.txt plus SF's defaults.

Where your changes are saved

⚠ THE EDITOR NEVER TOUCHES YOUR uikeys.txt.

Changes are written to a separate file called sf_uikeys.txt in your Recoil write directory, alongside uikeys.txt. Your personal bindings from other Recoil-family games are safe.

The load order is:

1. Engine defaults
2. Your uikeys.txt
3. SplinterFaction's sf_keys.txt (fills gaps only — never overrides the above)
4. Your sf_uikeys.txt (loaded last, so it wins)

Because sf_uikeys.txt loads last, it can also remove an SF default you don't want: add a plain unbind line for it. Hand edits to that file survive the editor, provided they're plain bind / unbind lines.

CTroubleshooting

Nobody can join the game I'm hosting. You almost certainly haven't forwarded port 8254 to your machine. See §37. Alternatively, host through an official SPADS autohost instead and skip the network configuration entirely.

The game won't launch. Update your graphics drivers first — this fixes most cases. Then check that your antivirus hasn't quarantined the engine executable. Then let Coilbox re-verify the game files.

Poor performance / low framerate. SplinterFaction uses a GL4 rendering pipeline with deferred rendering and several GPU-driven effects (weather, fog, rain, instanced healthbars). If performance is poor: - Lower the graphics settings in the options menu - Disable weather and time-of-day effects - Turn off non-essential widgets in the widget selector - Reduce shadow quality - Verify you're running on your dedicated GPU, not integrated graphics

The interface looks wrong / panels are missing or misplaced. Open the widget selector and re-enable what's missing. If panels are badly positioned, reset widget configuration to defaults.

The game desyncs or crashes in multiplayer. First, check that everyone is on the same game version — Coilbox handles this automatically, but manual installs may not match.

If the versions match, please report it. Desyncs and crashes are bugs, and they're very hard to diagnose without data from the affected game. Open an issue on the SplinterFaction GitHub repository and attach:

• Your infolog.txt — written to your Recoil data directory after every session. It contains the engine and game log for the run that failed.
• The replay file for the affected match.

Those two files together are usually enough to identify the cause. A report without them generally isn't actionable, however detailed the description — so please attach both.

I can't see the enemy but I'm being attacked. You're fighting Fed, and cloaking in SplinterFaction suppresses seismic pings as well as vision — so neither your eyes nor your sensors will find them. Sweep suspect ground with scouts; proximity breaks cloak. See §34.

Everything in my base slowed to a crawl. You're stalling. See §17.

My units won't repair. They can't. See §21. This is intentional.

My constructors won't speed up my factory. They can't. See §20. This is also intentional.

DUnit Reference: Federation Of Kala

Fast walkers, cloaking, hull regeneration, missiles and plasma.

Command and Construction

Federation Command Unit The Federation Commander is the player's starting unit and the foundation of every match. It builds all structures, reclaims wreckage, and captures enemy buildings, while its EMG Disruption Cannon provides a meaningful self-defense option that stacks impairment on anything it hits. The Commander upgrades through four tiers alongside overall tech progression, gaining range and dramatically increased weapon damage at each step — by Tier 4 a single hit from its cannon is a serious statement. Losing the Commander ends the game; protecting it while using it aggressively is the central tension of every match.

Lifter — Ground Constructor The Federation Engineer is the dedicated ground construction unit, capable of building structures, reclaiming wreckage, and capturing enemy buildings. Engineers are the backbone of any expanding economy — build them early, build them often, and keep them busy. An engineer doing nothing is metal and supply wasted.

Originator — Air Constructor The Air Engineer is the Federation of Kala's flying construction unit, capable of building, reclaiming, and capturing structures from the air. It can reach terrain and positions that ground engineers cannot, making it invaluable for forward construction, island operations, or establishing infrastructure in areas where ground access is contested. It is lightly built and cannot survive direct engagement — escort it or keep it clear of the front.

Production

Land Factory The Land Factory is the Federation of Kala's primary ground production facility, responsible for building the full range of land units available at its tech tier. It requires a Tech Facility to unlock higher-tier units and Supply Depots to support a larger army. A second factory running in parallel dramatically increases unit output when metal income is sufficient to sustain it. Keep it away from the front — a destroyed factory sets production back significantly.

VTOL Factory The Air Plant is the factory responsible for producing all air units for its faction. It activates immediately on completion and can begin building aircraft as soon as it finishes. A second Air Plant can be built to run parallel production queues when air power is the primary strategic focus. Keep it away from the front line — a destroyed factory cannot be replaced quickly.

Sea Factory The Sea Plant is the naval production facility for its faction, built on water and capable of producing the full range of naval units. It must be placed in sufficiently deep water to operate. A second Sea Plant allows parallel naval build queues when controlling water is a strategic priority. Position it in a sheltered bay or behind a defensive line if possible — it is difficult to replace quickly once lost.

Ground — Tier 1

A.K. — Raider The fastest bot in the Federation's ground roster, the AK is built for hit-and-run harassment rather than sustained combat. Its rapid-fire laser deals negligible damage to armored targets, but against undefended economy structures and constructors it is ruthlessly efficient. Best deployed in swarms, where its low cost and high speed let it overwhelm a base before a proper defense can be organized.

Storm — Skirmisher A skirmisher built for fighting on the frontline. It's rocket is a bit on the slow side, but is high damage. It is best used in conjuction with maneuvering so that it's rockets hit while deftly dodging incoming fire.

Equalizer — Disruption skirmisher The Equalizer carries an EMG Disruption Cannon that applies a stacking impairment effect with every hit, eventually locking a target unit down entirely for a time. Against individual targets it is a reliable disabler; against a column, a coordinated volley can bring an entire advance to a standstill. Its moderate speed and health make it a solid frontline skirmisher as long as it stays in the fight long enough to stack its effect.

Thud — Artillery The Thud is the Federation's indirect fire answer to armored pushes, lobbing high-velocity plasma shells in a steep arc over intervening terrain. Its long reload and fragile frame mean it cannot take a hit, but a well-positioned battery can devastate grouped units before they ever close to effective range. Keep it screened and far from the front.

Crasher — Mobile anti-air A cheap, dedicated anti-air platform that punishes any enemy commander who neglects air cover. Individual missiles hit lightly, but the Crasher's fast reload and guided tracking make it a persistent threat to anything airborne. Field them in clusters to screen advances or protect key positions — a sky defended by Crashers is a sky that stays contested.

Ground — Tier 2

Bear — Heavy assault mech The Bear is a heavy assault mech that brings both a rapid-fire particle cannon and a long-range plasma cannon to bear simultaneously. The particle beam keeps sustained pressure on targets while the plasma cannon punishes anything that tries to hold ground at distance. It hits slower than Tier 1 skirmishers but its dual-weapon output makes it a serious threat to any armored unit that wanders into its considerable range.

Cobra — Fire support The Cobra is a dual-weapon fire support mech that pairs a burst plasma cannon with a volley of guided cluster missiles, both slaved to the same targeting solution. The plasma cannon scatters energy across the blast zone while the missiles pile on with tracking warheads, making the combined strike punishing against any unit that can't get clear in time. Slow on its feet and not built for the front line, it rewards commanders who keep it screened and positioned well.

Dominator — Disruption platform The Dominator is the Federation's premier disruption platform at Tier 2, wielding a heavier EMG Disruption Cannon that hits harder and reaches further than the Equalizer it succeeds. Like its predecessor, it stacks an impairment effect with each hit that eventually locks its target down entirely for ten seconds. Against high-value units, a Dominator that lands its full disruption cycle effectively removes the target from the fight long enough to finish it off.

Avalanche — Burst artillery The Avalanche is a long-range burst artillery unit that fires two simultaneous volleys of scatter-shot plasma shells, blanketing a wide area with high-damage impacts at ranges that most units cannot effectively answer. It defaults to a hold-fire stance and must be directed deliberately — its enormous per-volley damage and area coverage make it devastating against clustered formations, but its slow reload and fragile frame mean poor positioning will get it killed before it fires twice.

Phalanx — Mobile anti-air The Phalanx is the Federation's dedicated Tier 2 anti-air platform, trading the Crasher's guided missiles for a high-velocity burst machinegun that saturates a column of airspace with an overwhelming volume of fire. Its long range and high burst count make it extremely difficult for aircraft to approach without taking crippling damage. Slow and lightly armored, it should always operate behind a frontline screen — but positioned correctly, it makes enemy air operations against your forces an expensive proposition.

Ground — Tier 3

Goliath — Heavy assault The Goliath is the Federation's premier Tier 3 ground combatant, fielding twin precision laser cannons and twin plasma cannon batteries all slaved to a single targeting solution. The lasers deliver focused, punishing single-target damage while the plasma cannons saturate the surrounding area with overlapping blasts in the same firing cycle. It is slow and massive, but what it points at tends to stop existing — and everything nearby it tends to suffer for the privilege of being close.

Striker — Disruption assault The Striker is a large Tier 3 mech that pairs a rapid-fire disruption laser with a sustained depleted uranium particle cannon, both targeting the same enemy simultaneously. The disruption laser stacks its impairment effect with every hit while the particle cannon hammers the target with kinetic rounds — a unit that isn't killed outright by the combined fire will shortly find itself locked down and unable to fight back. Fast for its size and expensive enough to field carefully, the Striker rewards aggressive, well-supported pushes into enemy lines.

Ground — Tier 4

Juggernaut — Apex ground unit The Juggernaut is the Federation of Kala's Tier 4 ground behemoth and the most expensive unit in their land arsenal. It brings six weapon systems to bear simultaneously: a rapid-fire particle cannon that shreds armor with relentless high-energy pulses, two heavy plasma cannons that deliver single-shot damage capable of crippling most units outright, twin guided cluster rocket launchers, and a vertically launched missile system raining down heavy warheads at a steady cadence. It moves slowly and turns slowly, but at the range its weapons operate, most enemies never get the chance to exploit that. Committing a Juggernaut to a front is a statement that the front is about to cease to exist.

Support

Deleter — Mobile area cloaker The Deleter is a support mech that projects a wide area-cloaking field, concealing all friendly units within its radius from enemy detection. It activates its cloak field immediately on deployment and maintains it passively with no energy cost. It carries no meaningful weapon and cannot survive direct engagement — its value is entirely in the cover it provides. A Deleter tucked inside a formation turns an advancing army into a ghost column, buying positioning advantages that no amount of firepower can replicate.

Air

Sparrow — Interceptor A fast, agile interceptor purpose-built to deny enemy air operations. Its particle beam hits hard and reloads quickly, and its tight turn radius lets it stay on target through evasive maneuvers. The Sparrow has no ground attack capability whatsoever — it exists solely to kill aircraft, and at that job it excels. Pair it with ground-based anti-air for layered coverage.

Hawk — Strike fighter The Hawk is a versatile strike fighter armed with fast-tracking guided missiles capable of engaging both air and ground targets without switching modes. Its flexibility makes it useful in a wide range of situations, though it excels at neither role the way a dedicated interceptor or bomber would. Best deployed as a general-purpose fast response unit — redirect it wherever the enemy is least prepared to deal with it.

Crow — Bomber The Crow is a heavy-payload bomber that delivers clusters of explosive submunitions across a broad area, making it devastating against grouped units and unprotected structures alike. A rear-facing machinegun provides minimal self-defense against pursuing interceptors, but the Crow should never be flying without an escort. Its long reload demands good timing — commit it to a target worth the wait.

Falcon — Strategic nuclear bomber The Falcon is the Federation's strategic bomber, delivering a single nuclear payload capable of erasing everything within a substantial blast radius in one strike. It is not a precision weapon and it is not a cheap one — it exists to end conversations, not start them. A Falcon committed to a target is a statement of intent. Keep it escorted and keep it away from anti-air until the moment it matters, because it only needs to get through once.

Condor — Combat transport gunship The Condor is a heavy combat transport capable of lifting and deploying large numbers of ground units directly into contested territory. Unlike a standard transport, it carries a downward-firing particle cannon that allows it to suppress ground targets while loading or unloading its cargo. It is a gunship and should be treated as one. It's ability to project force during the deployment window makes it far more survivable than a transport that arrives defenseless. The real threat the Condor poses is strategic — it can put a full army somewhere the enemy did not expect.

Eagle — Tier 3 heavy transport The Eagle is a massive Tier 3 transport capable of lifting far heavier cargo than the Condor it complements, including the Federation's largest ground units. It carries a burst rocket battery to suppress ground targets during deployment, though like all transports its survival depends on what it delivers, not what it fights. The strategic threat the Eagle poses is difficult to overstate — an Eagle in the air means an army could appear anywhere on the map without warning.

Naval

Piranha — Torpedo corvette The Piranha is a fast torpedo corvette built for aggressive naval raiding. Its unguided torpedo deals heavy damage per hit and reloads quickly, relying on the projectile's raw speed to intercept moving targets without any tracking system. Cheap relative to larger warships and quick enough to dictate engagement range, it excels at harassing enemy fleets and picking off isolated vessels before they can respond.

Crusader — Frigate The Crusader is the Federation's workhorse frigate, combining a rapid-fire particle cannon for surface engagements with a missile battery for air defense. Neither weapon is overwhelming on its own, but together they make the Crusader a credible threat in both roles. Slower and heavier than the Piranha, it is best used to anchor a fleet line rather than lead a charge.

Conqueror — Light cruiser The Conqueror is a slow but heavily armed light cruiser that delivers its plasma payload in rapid successive bursts, with each full burst carrying enough cumulative damage to threaten all but the most durable naval targets. Its long range lets it engage well before smaller vessels can close to effective distance, and its burst fire makes it difficult to simply absorb and outlast. It should not be leading the line — let faster ships draw fire while the Conqueror dismantles whatever they pin down.

Colossus — Tier 2 destroyer The Colossus is the Federation's Tier 2 destroyer, packing three plasma cannon batteries, twin cluster rocket launchers, and a flak machinegun into a single hull. No individual weapon is overwhelming, but the sheer combined weight of fire it puts out makes it a credible threat to surface targets at range while the machinegun discourages aircraft from getting comfortable overhead. It is the most well-rounded ship in the Federation's naval roster — slow to get anywhere, but difficult to ignore once it arrives.

Harbinger — Tier 3 capital ship The Harbinger is the Federation's Tier 3 naval capital ship and the most heavily armed vessel in its fleet. A central heavy plasma cannon handles long-range priority targets, four broadside plasma batteries cover both flanks with burst fire, a vertically launched missile system delivers a near-continuous rain of high-damage warheads, and a forward particle beam cannon rattles off rapid pulses at anything in its arc. No single system on the Harbinger is what makes it dangerous — it is the totality of fire it brings to bear all at once. Give it sea room and a target, and let it work.

Defense Structures

Menlo — T1 light anti-ground The Menlo is the Federation of Kala's Tier 1 light anti-ground turret, hosing down anything in its short range with an extremely rapid particle beam that individually deals light damage but accumulates quickly under the relentless fire rate. It is best suited to stopping swarms of cheap raiders before they reach more valuable structures — anything that lingers in its arc long enough takes a punishing total amount of fire. Cheap, fast to build, and effective in clusters.

Stinger — T1 light anti-air The Stinger is the Federation of Kala's Tier 1 light anti-air turret, spraying fifteen-round bursts of machine gun fire into the airspace above at high rate of fire. Individual rounds deal minimal damage but the sheer volume of the burst makes passing through it costly for anything airborne. Cheap and fast to build, it forms the base layer of Federation air defense — stack several to cover wider areas or key approach vectors.

Immolator — T2 medium anti-ground The Immolator is the Federation of Kala's Tier 2 medium anti-ground turret, firing a high-arc plasma cannon that delivers massive single-shot damage to ground and naval targets at long range. Its high-trajectory shell can clear terrain and reach targets behind cover that flat-firing turrets cannot touch. The reload is deliberate but the payoff per shot is severe — units that wander into its range without support rarely get a second chance.

Javelin — T2 long-range anti-air The Javelin is the Federation of Kala's Tier 2 long-range anti-air turret, firing pairs of fast guided missiles with excellent tracking that make escape extremely difficult for aircraft at range. Its coverage extends well beyond most Tier 1 anti-air, giving the Federation a credible defensive layer against aircraft operating at standoff distance. Position it to cover approaches that shorter-range turrets cannot reach.

Guardian — T3 anti-MASSIVE The Guardian is the Federation of Kala's Tier 3 heavy anti-armor turret, firing a massive plasma shell that detonates with a large blast radius exclusively against MASSIVE-category targets. Its enormous per-shot damage and area of effect make it the definitive answer to enemy heavy units and capital ships that smaller turrets cannot reliably threaten. Keep it screened from raiders — it has no interest in small targets and will not protect itself.

Cloaking Tower — Area cloak field The Cloaking Tower projects a 300-radius area cloaking field that conceals all friendly units within it from enemy detection. It activates instantly on completion, cloaks itself, and runs at no energy cost. It is fragile and provides no defensive capability of its own — its value is entirely in the invisibility it grants to whatever you position underneath it. A well-placed tower can make an entire defensive line or advance staging area disappear.

Large Cloaking Tower — T3 area cloak field The Large Cloaking Tower is the Tier 3 upgrade to the Cloaking Tower, projecting a 800-radius cloaking field that conceals an entire sector of the map from enemy detection. Like its smaller counterpart it costs nothing to operate and activates immediately. The coverage radius is large enough to hide substantial force concentrations, forward bases, or entire defensive lines from enemy observation.

Healstation — Repair field — Fed only The Heal Station projects a 500-radius repair field that continuously restores health to all friendly units within range, with a brief pause after any unit takes damage before healing resumes. It does not repair during active combat — it is a recovery tool for units rotating off the front line or holding a position between engagements. Place it far enough behind the line that units can actually benefit from its field without being destroyed before healing completes.

EUnit Reference: Loz Alliance

Slow heavy tanks, personal and projected energy shields, heat and railgun weaponry.

Command and Construction

Loz Alliance Command Unit The Loz Alliance Commander is the player's starting unit and the irreplaceable center of every match. It builds all structures, reclaims wreckage, and captures enemy buildings, while its heat ray weapon accumulates thermal stress on targets with every burst — a sufficiently overheated unit will malfunction and shut down entirely. The Commander upgrades through four tiers alongside tech progression, gaining range and dramatically increased damage output at each step. Losing the Commander ends the game; using it aggressively while keeping it alive is the defining challenge of every match.

Architect — Ground Constructor The Loz Alliance Engineer is the dedicated ground construction unit, capable of building structures, reclaiming wreckage, and capturing enemy buildings. Engineers are the engine of any expanding economy — build them constantly and keep them busy. A stationary engineer is a wasted investment.

Fabricator — Air Constructor The Loz Alliance Air Engineer is a flying construction unit capable of building structures, reclaiming wreckage, and capturing enemy buildings from the air. It reaches terrain and positions inaccessible to ground engineers, making it essential for island maps, amphibious operations, or establishing forward infrastructure in contested areas. It cannot survive direct engagement — keep it escorted or well clear of any fighting.

Production

Land Factory The Land Factory is the Loz Alliance's primary ground production facility, responsible for producing the full range of land units available at its current tech tier. It requires a Tech Facility to unlock higher-tier units and Supply Depots to field a larger army. Running two factories in parallel when metal income allows it dramatically accelerates unit production. Losing a factory is a serious setback — keep it away from the front.

VTOL Factory The Air Plant is the factory responsible for producing all air units for its faction. It activates immediately on completion and can begin building aircraft as soon as it finishes. A second Air Plant can be built to run parallel production queues when air power is the primary strategic focus. Keep it away from the front line — a destroyed factory cannot be replaced quickly.

Sea Factory The Sea Plant is the naval production facility for its faction, built on water and capable of producing the full range of naval units. It must be placed in sufficiently deep water to operate. A second Sea Plant allows parallel naval build queues when controlling water is a strategic priority. Position it in a sheltered bay or behind a defensive line if possible — it is difficult to replace quickly once lost.

Ground — Tier 1

Flea — Scout The Flea is the Loz Alliance's dedicated scout, built exclusively for speed and vision range. It carries no weapons and cannot fight — its job is to stay alive and relay information. The fastest ground unit the Alliance fields at Tier 1, it is exceptionally difficult to catch when handled correctly. Use it to probe enemy positions, spot for artillery, and maintain map awareness without committing combat units.

Diamondback — Raider The Diamondback is the Loz Alliance's standard fast raider, built for hit-and-run harassment of lightly defended targets. Its disruption laser deals modest damage but applies a stacking impairment effect, making it dangerous to economy units and constructors that cannot easily escape its reach. Deploy in packs and exploit its superior speed to stay out of return fire.

Roach — Main battle tank The Roach is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 main battle tank, wielding a beam railgun that delivers consistent damage at respectable range. It is slower than the Diamondback raiders but significantly more durable, and its sustained beam fire is effective against armored targets that skirmishers cannot reliably threaten. The workhorse of any early Alliance ground push.

Flashpoint — Heat tank The Flashpoint is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 direct-fire tank, built around a heat-accumulating wave laser that gets more dangerous the longer it stays on target. Each burst adds thermal stress to whatever it hits, and a sufficiently heated target will begin malfunctioning before it can disengage. Its short sight range demands aggressive positioning, but units that fail to kite it pay for the mistake.

Scorpion — Artillery / anti-air The Scorpion is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 artillery tank, firing long-range lightning bolts that can engage ground, air, and naval targets indiscriminately. Its electrical strike cannon arcs multiple bursts per shot over a considerable distance, making it useful for area suppression as well as direct fire. Fragile and slow, it must be kept behind a frontline screen — but positioned correctly it reaches targets that most units cannot.

Ground — Tier 2

Reaper — Main battle tank The Reaper is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 main battle tank, pairing a pulse beam with a rapid-fire pulse laser that adds consistent suppression fire alongside the primary weapon. The beam delivers heavy per-shot damage while the pulse laser fills the gaps between reloads with a stream of lighter hits. Together they make the Reaper a persistent and punishing threat across the full engagement range.

Cauterizer — Heat tank The Cauterizer is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 heat ray tank, carrying a significantly upgraded wave laser that burns through targets with greater intensity than its Flashpoint predecessor. The heat accumulation mechanic remains — each burst stacks thermal stress until the target malfunctions — but the Cauterizer hits harder and reaches further, making it far more threatening against armored Tier 2 opposition.

Pulverizer — Anti-air support tank The Pulverizer is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 anti-air support tank, combining a lightning cannon for engaging light ground and air targets with a burst flak cannon that detonates at altitude and saturates the surrounding airspace with lethal shrapnel. The two systems together create overlapping coverage — the lightning cannon handles closer threats while the flak denies higher-altitude approaches. Aircraft that attempt to operate within its reach do so at serious cost.

Luger — Self-propelled artillery The Luger is a self-propelled long-range artillery piece that lobs massive plasma shells at extreme range with a slow but devastating reload cycle. It defaults to hold-fire and must be directed manually — its enormous per-shot damage and wide blast radius make it capable of erasing grouped formations or key structures in a single volley. It is not a frontline unit and will not survive direct engagement; it needs screening, good positioning, and patience.

Protector — Mobile shield tank The Protector is the Loz Alliance's dedicated shield tank, projecting a wide protective bubble around itself and any nearby friendly units. It carries no offensive weapons and cannot fight — its value is entirely in the cover it provides. A Protector embedded in an advancing formation absorbs incoming fire that would otherwise shred your units, buying them the time to close with the enemy. Keep it behind the frontline and keep it alive.

Ground — Tier 3

Mammoth — Main battle tank The Mammoth is the Loz Alliance's Tier 3 main battle tank, bringing three simultaneous weapon systems to bear: a heavy beam railgun for long-range precision damage, a rapid-fire electromagnetic pulse laser for sustained suppression, and a heat-accumulating wave laser that thermally degrades any target that holds in range. The combination means the Mammoth applies escalating pressure across multiple damage types simultaneously — no single defense handles all three. It is slow and massive, but it fights like three units at once.

Emperor Scorpion — Heavy artillery The Emperor Scorpion is a massive Tier 3 artillery vehicle that fires enormous bolts of chain lightning across a range that most units cannot answer. Its electrical strike cannon fires twenty-arc bursts that jump between targets in the impact zone, and a single volley delivers damage that would destroy most units outright. Slow, fragile for its cost, and incapable of defending itself — it must be heavily screened — but positioned behind a solid line it can devastate entire formations before they reach engagement range.

Ground — Tier 4

Silverback — Apex ground unit The Silverback is the Loz Alliance's Tier 4 apex ground unit — an Endbringer-class mobile target evaporator that fields a sustained heavy beam railgun, a rapid-fire secondary railgun, and a forward microwave beam that scorches anything in its frontal arc. The heavy railgun alone deals damage that few units in the game can absorb; combined with the secondary railgun's constant suppression and the microwave beam's close-range annihilation capability, the Silverback represents a convergence of firepower that most armies are simply not built to answer. Move it slowly, position it carefully, and let it work.

Air

Wasp — Interceptor The Wasp is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 interceptor, armed with a forward-firing particle beam cannon that hits hard and reloads quickly. Purpose-built to kill aircraft, it cannot engage ground targets and has no business in any other role. What it does, it does extremely well — get it into the airspace and anything flying becomes a problem.

Hornet — Strike fighter The Hornet is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 strike fighter, carrying both dedicated air-to-air missiles and a burst air-to-ground missile rack. Its air-to-air missile handles interceptor duties with reliable tracking, while the ground attack rack delivers three-missile bursts against surface targets. The combination makes it genuinely flexible — it can clear airspace and then immediately turn its attention to the ground without switching modes.

Bumblebee — Assault bomber The Bumblebee is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 assault bomber, delivering napalm-laced explosive payloads that set the impact zone ablaze long after the initial strike. A rear-facing high-velocity cannon provides limited self-defense against pursuing interceptors, though the Bumblebee should never be flying unescorted. Its slow bomb reload demands careful target selection — commit it to something worth the wait.

Locust — T3 heavy bomber The Locust is a Tier 3 heavy bomber that drops massive incendiary bomb clusters and defends itself in every direction with six lightning cannons covering all approach angles simultaneously. The bombs set large areas ablaze and deal devastating damage to anything caught beneath the drop pattern, while the omnidirectional lightning coverage makes intercept attempts extremely costly. It is not fast, but aircraft that try to shoot it down from any direction face immediate return fire.

Dragonfly — T1 light transport The Dragonfly is the Loz Alliance's basic Tier 1 air transport, capable of lifting small ground units and repositioning them anywhere on the map. It carries no weapons and has no business in contested airspace — its value is entirely in the strategic flexibility it provides. Keep it behind friendly air cover and use it to exploit gaps in the enemy's positioning.

Crane — T2 combat transport The Crane is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 combat transport, capable of lifting heavier cargo than the Dragonfly and armed with a downward-firing railgun to suppress ground targets during loading and unloading. It is not a gunship — it exists to deliver an army somewhere unexpected — but the railgun makes approach and extraction far less one-sided than a defenseless transport would permit.

Titan — T3 massive transport The Titan is the Loz Alliance's Tier 3 massive transport, capable of carrying far heavier cargo than the Crane and armed with a microwave beam cannon that suppresses ground targets during deployment. At Tier 3 it can lift the Alliance's largest ground units and deliver them directly into the enemy's operational depth. The strategic threat it poses is severe — an enemy that doesn't account for the Titan's reach will find entire armies appearing where they were never expected.

Naval

Snake — Torpedo corvette The Snake is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 torpedo corvette — fast, cheap, and armed with a rapid-cycling torpedo launcher that deals substantial damage per hit. Its unguided torpedo relies on raw speed to intercept moving targets, and its quick reload keeps pressure sustained. Best used in packs to overwhelm heavier vessels before they can respond.

Enforcer — Frigate The Enforcer is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 frigate, combining a heavy railgun for surface engagements with a lightning cannon that arcs across multiple targets in anti-air roles. The railgun hits hard at a comfortable range while the lightning cannon provides credible defense against aircraft attempting to operate overhead. A solid all-around naval escort that holds its own against most Tier 1 threats.

Executioner — T2 destroyer The Executioner is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 destroyer, mounting four broadside beam cannons — two per side — supplemented by a torpedo launcher for anti-ship engagements. The broadside beams cover both flanks simultaneously and deal sustained damage to anything alongside the hull, while the torpedo provides a harder-hitting forward threat against naval targets. A formidable fleet anchor that punishes enemies on any approach vector.

Warlord — T2 heavy cruiser The Warlord is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 heavy cruiser, packing three long-range plasma cannons for surface bombardment and twin lightning cannons that provide anti-air and supplemental ground coverage. The plasma cannons reach out to extreme range and hit hard, while the lightning cannons discourage aircraft from thinking the Warlord is an easy target. Slow and expensive, it earns its place by being able to threaten targets that most ships cannot reach.

Leviathan — T3 battleship The Leviathan is the Loz Alliance's Tier 3 battleship, the most powerful naval unit the faction fields below Tier 4. It carries twin forward lightning cannons for direct engagement and four broadside beam lasers — two per side — covering both flanks at extreme range. The combination of forward arc and full broadside coverage leaves very few approach vectors that don't walk into sustained fire. It is slow and expensive, but what it commits to engaging tends not to survive the experience.

Defense Structures

Jericho — T1 light anti-ground The Jericho is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 light anti-ground turret, firing a rapid gamma ray beam that deals consistent damage to any ground or naval unit that ventures into its short-to-medium range. Its fast reload and continuous fire make it effective against raider swarms that would overwhelm a slower turret, though it lacks the punch to threaten heavier units reliably. Cheap enough to layer multiple in a defensive cluster.

Razor — T1 light anti-air The Razor is the Loz Alliance's Tier 1 light anti-air turret, firing rapid bursts of chained lightning that arc across aircraft attempting to pass through its coverage zone. Individually each burst deals modest damage, but the fast reload and multi-arc discharge keep consistent pressure on anything airborne. Cheap and quick to build, it forms the baseline air defense layer that more expensive turrets can extend and reinforce.

Inferno — T2 heavy anti-ground The Inferno is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 heavy anti-armor turret, deploying a sustained microwave beam that burns through ground and naval targets at long range with a fast reload cycle. Unlike most turrets it stays on target continuously rather than firing in bursts, making it exceptionally punishing against anything that holds still within its reach. Position it where enemy advances are expected to stall — it excels at finishing what the front line slows down.

Rattlesnake — T2 anti-air The Rattlesnake is the Loz Alliance's Tier 2 anti-air turret, firing high-explosive flak rounds that detonate in the airspace above and scatter lethal fragments across a wide area. Its large blast radius and high damage per shot make it exceptionally effective against both individual aircraft and formations attempting to pass through its coverage zone. Aircraft that ignore the Rattlesnake rarely get a second chance to do so.

Annihilator — T3 anti-MASSIVE The Annihilator is the Loz Alliance's Tier 3 heavy anti-armor turret, built exclusively to destroy MASSIVE-category targets. Its high-intensity beam laser holds on target long enough to burn through the armor of even the largest ground units and warships, dealing devastating single-target damage at considerable range. It has no interest in light targets — keep it screened from raiders and let it focus on the threats nothing else can handle.

Earthquake Mine — Cloaked proximity mine The Earthquake Mine is a cheap, cloaked Tier 1 proximity mine that deploys invisibly and waits for ground or naval units to wander into its trigger radius. When tripped it fires a tight shotgun burst that shreds lightly armored units and deals meaningful damage even to heavier targets. Inexpensive enough to scatter liberally across chokepoints and approach routes — an enemy that doesn't sweep for mines will pay for it.

Small Shield Generator — T2 area shield The Small Shield Generator projects a 250-radius protective bubble that intercepts incoming fire for anything underneath it. With 1200 shield power and modest regeneration it is not designed to weather sustained fire, but it provides meaningful protection against lighter attacks and buys time for units to reposition when under pressure. The Loz Alliance's entry-level area shield at Tier 2.

Large Shield Generator — T3 area shield The Large Shield Generator projects a 750-radius protective bubble that intercepts incoming weapons fire on behalf of everything inside. With 10,000 shield power and 300 regeneration per second it can absorb a significant volume of fire before failing, and the 25-second recharge delay means a collapsed shield requires careful positioning until it recovers. It is the Loz Alliance's primary Tier 3 area defense against projectile weapons.

FShared Structures And Survival Mode

Available to both factions.

Metal Production

E→M Converter (Tiers 1–4) The E->M Converter is the primary metal income structure for both factions, converting energy into metal at a rate scaled by the map's metalSpot_value and the converter's tech tier. Output and energy consumption are set dynamically at runtime by the metal maker scaling system — the higher the map's spot value and the higher the tier, the more metal it produces and the more energy it draws. Higher tiers multiply the base output substantially: Tier 1 doubles it, Tier 2 triples it, Tier 3 produces more than five times the base rate, and Tier 4 more than ten. Place converters on high-value spots and upgrade them as your tech and energy economy allows.

Geothermal E→M Converter The Geothermal E->M Converter is the highest-output metal production structure in the game, placed on geothermal vents and operating at the Tier 4 multiplier — over 21 times the base extraction rate. Like the standard converters its output scales with the map's metalSpot_value. A single well-sited Geothermal Converter on a high-value vent generates more metal than most players can spend in real time. Protect it as the strategic asset it is.

Energy Production

Fission Energy Generator — T1 — 25 energy The Fission Energy Generator is the game's first available power plant, producing 25 energy from a compact footprint at essentially no tech requirement. Its output is modest but its cost is low and it can be built early, making it the foundation of any energy economy before more advanced generators become available. Stack several to bridge the gap to Tier 2 power.

Fusion Energy Generator — T2 — 200 energy The Fusion Energy Generator is the Tier 2 power plant, producing 200 energy from a medium-sized installation. It represents a meaningful step up from the Fission Generator and provides a stable energy foundation for mid-game economies without requiring the investment of higher-tier structures. Build several to sustain the energy demands that Tier 2 units and upgrades introduce.

Cold Fusion Energy Generator — T3 — 1000 energy The Cold Fusion Energy Generator is the Tier 3 power plant, producing 1000 energy from a large footprint installation. It sits between the Fusion Generator and the Black Hole Facility in both cost and output, filling the Tier 3 energy gap for commanders who need substantial power before reaching the game's final tier. Its explosion is spectacular — build it somewhere defensible.

Black Hole Power Facility — T4 — 4000 energy The Black Hole Power Facility is the apex energy generator available to both factions, harnessing singularity-based power conversion to produce 4000 energy — more than any other structure in the game. Its enormous footprint, extreme cost, and Tier 4 requirement make it a late-game commitment, but a single facility can sustain an energy economy that nothing else can match at comparable size. Protect it accordingly.

Geothermal Energy Generator — On vents — 350 energy The Geothermal Energy Generator taps into natural thermal vents to produce 350 energy at Tier 1, outperforming the Fusion Generator at comparable cost when sited correctly. It must be placed on geothermal vent terrain. If your map has accessible vents, this is one of the most efficient early energy investments available to either faction.

Geothermal Vents

Research Center The Research Center uses an immense amount of power for it's research. It must be placed upon a geothermal vent. It's power requirements are so large that the power that it is able to generate from the geothermal vent is completely consumed and it needs to draw from other power sources in order to function.

Storage and Supply

Basic Supply/Storage Depot — +20 supply The Basic Supply Depot is the foundational supply structure available from Tier 0, providing 20 additional unit supply capacity for a minimal metal investment. It has a small footprint and builds quickly — the first structure any commander should place when army size starts bumping against the default supply limit.

Medium Supply Depot — T2 — +100 supply The Medium Supply Depot provides 100 supply capacity at Tier 2, enabling a meaningfully larger standing army than the basic depot allows. It has no storage or other function — it exists solely to raise your unit ceiling. Build them when your army composition is consistently hitting supply limits before you run out of metal to spend.

Medium Resource Storage Facility — T2 — 2000 each The Medium Resource Storage Facility provides 2000 units each of metal and energy storage in a moderate footprint at Tier 2. Its primary value is extending the resource buffer available during mid-game expansion — preventing income spikes from going to waste and smoothing out the energy fluctuations that come with running multiple production facilities simultaneously.

Large Resource Storage Facility — T3 — 20,000 storage, +500 supply The Large Resource Storage Facility provides 20,000 units of combined metal and energy storage alongside 500 supply capacity — the largest storage structure in the game. At Tier 3 it enables the resource reserves needed to sustain prolonged Tier 3 and Tier 4 operations without income fluctuation disrupting critical build queues. The supply grant also contributes meaningfully to fielding larger armies.

Geothermal Condenser — On vents — 2000 storage, +100 supply The Geothermal Condenser is a combined resource storage and supply depot that provides 2000 metal and energy storage alongside 100 supply capacity in a single building. It must be placed on geothermal vent sites. The combination of storage and supply in one structure makes it an efficient use of a vent location when you need both.

Reconnaissance

Gnat — Air scout drone A fast, nimble air scout drone. Doesn’t have a lot of vision range, but it does have the ability to get in and out without getting destroyed too quickly.

Survival Mode

Spawn Beacon The spawn beacon is very tough to kill, but doing so will push back the invasion. The more beacons that exist on the field, the more enemies you will have to contend with. As the enemy territory expands, so do the number of beacons.

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CLOSING NOTE

Nobody is good at this immediately. The first ten games are supposed to be a mess. You will forget your economy, you will lose your Commander to something embarrassing, and you will send an army somewhere with no plan and watch it evaporate.

Then somewhere around game fifteen, the loop clicks. You stop thinking about the interface and start thinking about the map. You notice your opponent's undefended flank before you notice your own units. You catch yourself building a second factory without deciding to.

That's the game. Welcome to it.

— SplinterFaction