Ground Forces & Field Battles
Ground units are a separate power curve from your fleet — colony-bound, trained at a dedicated Muster Hall, and they never board a ship. What they buy you: real, garrison-vs-landing-force battles over individual territory cells, with their own terrain bonuses, counter cycle, fortification investment, and multi-round campaigns that unfold over real time instead of resolving in one instant pass.
The Ground Roster — Five Unit Types
Every ground unit is trained at the Muster Hall and paid partly in Munitions(see Economy & Resources) rather than pure alloys and crystal. They are deliberately a separate domain from ships: a ground unit cannot board a fleet— it defends the colony that raised it, full stop. An attacking fleet's own crews are abstractly the landing force in any territory fight; there is no separate “troopship” mechanic today.
Cost and power follow their own curve, not the ship curve — bulk cost only spreads about 6× from cheapest to priciest (versus roughly 10× for ships), because your real ceiling on army size is the billet cap, not what you can afford (below).
Recon Rangers
Ground recon / screening · Aux. Light scout teams with drone screens — the eyes of a ground army, and the cheapest thing you can muster.
Never countered, never a real fighter — melt in a stand-up fight, but the earliest, most affordable garrison a new colony can field.
Colonial Line Infantry
Line infantry · Swarm. Rifle companies mustered straight from the colony rolls — the cheapest ground a world can hold, and deliberately the best defense-per-resource garrison in the entire game (better even than the fleet-side Interceptor).
That edge is paid for three other ways: infantry can't move between colonies, its training draws on your munitions stockpile, and your total army size is billet-capped no matter how much you can afford (see below).
Mech Vanguard
Assault mech · Line. Powered-armor assault mechs — the fist that breaks a dug-in trench line. Needs a Munitions Plant to unlock.
Armor Lance
Armor · Capital. Hover-tank squadrons — nothing on a field stops them except infantry with launchers. The ground army's apex hull, and by design the most expensive thing you can muster.
Siege Artillery
Artillery · Siege. Long-tube batteries firing from the back row — devastating reach, but helpless if the line in front of it collapses.
Artillery fights from the back: it contributes its full attack, but takes only half the usual casualty rate if its side loses — reduced exposure, not immunity.
Terrain & The Counter Cycle
Ground units carry the exact same five wingsas ships — Swarm, Line, Siege, Capital, Aux — and fight under the identical strict counter cycle from Fleets & Combat: Line beats Swarm, Capital beats Line, Swarm beats Capital.The one difference: on the ground this counter math is always on, never gated behind a research unlock. A dug-in garrison's composition is the terrain you're fighting over — there's nothing to hide and nothing to research your way into seeing.
On top of that, every planet has a single biome, and each ground unit type gets a real (small) bonus or penalty fighting on it — applied per unit type, so a mixed garrison is correctly differentiated rather than smeared with one blended number.
| Biome | Terrain Effect |
|---|---|
| Rocky | Favors Mech Vanguard and Armor Lance — good tread, good cover. |
| Ocean | Punishes Line Infantry, Mech Vanguard and Armor Lance alike — nobody's boots or treads want to be here. |
| Ice | Favors Recon Rangers, punishes Armor Lance — traction over armor. |
| Volcanic | Favors Armor Lance, punishes Recon Rangers — armor shrugs off the heat, scouts don't. |
| Gas Moon | Favors Recon Rangers hard, punishes Armor Lance hard — light beats heavy in low gravity. |
| Crystalline | Favors Siege Artillery, mildly punishes Recon Rangers — hard ground rewards the guns with reach. |
| Verdant | Favors Line Infantry and Recon Rangers, punishes Armor Lance — dense cover suits boots over treads. |
| Barren | Favors Recon Rangers, punishes Siege Artillery — nothing to hide the guns behind. |
| Derelict | Favors Siege Artillery and Line Infantry, punishes Recon Rangers — wreckage is good cover, bad scouting. |
Garrisons & Billets
A colony's home cell (its base territory) is still defended the classic way — every stationed unit of any domain, ships and ground troops alike, sums into one siege defense, exactly like before Field Battles existed. Every other territory a colony holds is different: you assign a subset of your owned ground roster to garrison that specific cell. A unit you never assign anywhere still implicitly defends the home cell — nothing falls through the cracks.
Garrison assignment is a full-replace allocation per cell, and the game enforces one hard invariant: the sum of everything you've assigned across everycell can never exceed what your colony actually owns. There's no way to double-book the same company of infantry across two different territories.
Void Reach tracks no separate “population” number. Instead, your total ground army size is capped by two buildings you're likely investing in anyway: every Muster Hall level adds 25 billets, and every Hydroponics Domelevel adds 10 more. Hit the cap and training simply refuses further ground units until you raise one of the two — the same “you already own this lever” philosophy as the billet system's design elsewhere in the economy.
A ground battle also burns a one-shot slice of the defending garrison's munitions upkeep straight from the colony's stockpile. Running short doesn't zero the garrison out — its power is floored at half of normal — but sieging out a munitions-starved world is a real, exploitable lever, not just flavor text.
Fortification
Any non-home territory cell you hold can be fortified: a flat resource payment, paid instantly with no build-queue wait (the same one-shot doctrine as claiming a territory in the first place), raises that cell's fortification level by one, up to a real cap. Each level adds a flat percentage to that cell's defending power — a distinct, additive layer that sits on top of terrain and counters rather than competing with them, similar in spirit to a colony's Bastion building but scoped to one cell instead of your whole empire.
Cost climbs the same way building costs do — a fixed base times a growth factor per level already invested — so fortifying a single forward outpost to the max is a real, deliberate commitment, not a throwaway click.
Multi-Round Campaigns
Contesting a territory today still starts as a fleet order: you attack carrying a claim on a specific cell. The orbital battle resolves first, exactly as in Fleets & Combat — then whatever landing force survives doesn't just flip the cell outright. It marches the shortest path across the planet's territory adjacency graph(each planet's roughly 24–32 cells are linked to their nearest neighbors) toward the cell you claimed, fighting a real garrison battle at every occupied cell along the way. An empty, ungarrisoned cell on the path still flips instantly with no fight — exactly the behavior you'd see if you never touched garrisons at all.
The first round of that march resolves the instant your fleet arrives. If the path is longer than one cell and your force still has survivors, the remaining rounds don't resolve in the same tick— they're deferred to fire minutes later, genuinely spanning real time. That gap matters: a defender who logs in mid-campaign can re-garrison a threatened cell before the next round comes due, turning a slow invasion into something you can actually react to rather than a fait accompli decided the moment the fleet landed.
An attacker's surviving Bombardiersweaken the defending garrison before the ground round even starts — the same orbital-prep idiom siege already uses against Planetary Shields, capped so a huge bombardier stack can never zero a defender out. And a Captain with the ground-combat specialization adds a further, smaller edge to whichever side they're defending or leading an invasion for — deliberately weaker than the Tactics branch since the two stack together rather than replacing one another.
Watching A Campaign Unfold
Every in-progress multi-round campaign on a planet is visible through a public, unauthenticated read — no login required. It shows the attacker's identity, the full path being marched, every round's outcome resolved so far, and the ETA to the next round. This is the same information tier as the planet's own adjacency graph: observable battlefield fact, never the defender's actual garrison composition, which stays exactly as hidden as any other defended stack.
The practical effect: a slow, multi-cell invasion is something the target, their alliance, and any curious bystander can watch tick forward in real time — not a fog of war that only clears once a report lands in your inbox.