Conquest, Breakthrough and the Bots

Conquest is the open match: every faction opens with a headquarters and two engineers, builds, and the last side standing wins, against up to seven bot opponents or other players on a curated or generated map, with every option in your hands. Breakthrough is the front line, below; the two are separate entries on the single-player menu, and in a lobby the mode sits at the head of the map pane.

Options

Option	Values
Mode	Conquest or Breakthrough (its own menu entry; in a lobby, the row above the maps)
Opponents	0 to 7 AI factions, each with its own difficulty
Starting metal	300, 600, 1,200, 2,500 (Conquest only; a Breakthrough checkpoint pays its own opening)
Fog of war	On or off
Weather	Clear, rain, snow, or random; see Weather and time
Day and night	On or off; a full cycle is 24 minutes and a match starts at dawn
Unit cap	50, 100, 150
Map	Nineteen curated maps, your own upload, or a random map in four sizes

Curated maps

Map	Character
Greenfield	Open ground, the classic first match
Twin Bays	Two coasts, one land bridge
Archipelago	Islands; navy and transports decide it
Rift Valley	A long valley with flanking ridges
Burnout Highway	Fast road lanes reward early map control and rapid flanking
Black Marsh	Mud and marsh punish heavy columns; dry routes and waterways become lifelines
Frostline	A frozen front with three contested passes and long-range firing lanes
Shattered City	A tight street grid built for ambushes, artillery angles and block-by-block fights
Caldera Crown	Four-way conflict around an impassable lava ring and a rich central prize
Leviathan Strait	Isolated homelands and resource islets force fleet control, transport raids and coastal bombardment
Six Crowns	Six homelands round one central prize
Solomon Islands	A tribute to the jungle map of the Pacific chapters, laid out as its chart has it: three islands under an estuary, the harbour and the plantation, the village, the beach and the bunker ridge, a swamp ford and a bridge between them. Four seats, nothing mirrored. Conquest and Breakthrough: the attackers stage on the landing islet and the chain runs the far bank, the south-eastern jungle, the camp
Saltbone Reach	The naval one: six rim homelands and thirty islets, two thirds of the ore out in the water
Pacific Storm	An island chain, a tribute to the Pacific map of the landing games: a mountain mainland across a strait, the airfield island with the strip up its spine, a knot of islands in the middle round a gated hill and a lagoon, an anchorage and skerries in the open sea to the east. Six seats, nothing mirrored. Conquest and Breakthrough: the attackers stage at the anchorage and every checkpoint is a landing
Iwo Jima	Experimental, and the first built for eight: one volcanic island, four seats along each coast, a fort, two airstrips and a walled plateau on the spine between them. Conquest and Breakthrough
Wake Island	The atoll as the chart has it, a tribute to the landing every generation has fought: Wake with the airstrip, Wilkes and Peale off its two legs, a causeway onto each, nothing mirrored. Conquest and Breakthrough
Coast Road	Breakthrough only: a lane down a desert coast, from a landing ground past an oasis and a town to an oilfield
Three Gates	Breakthrough only: a canyon through the mountains with three gated plateaus across it, the chain climbing them in turn
Open Range	Two mirrored proving grounds on one coast; both sides start with the whole army parked on them

Open Range

Open Range is the odd one out: a live-fire training establishment, and the only map in the table that hands both sides everything at once. A garrison of workshops and production lines stands in two ranks off its street, the aircraft are parked along the airfield apron, the fleet lies alongside in the harbour, the ground fleet is drawn up in the motor pool, and the turrets stand on the firing line looking downrange.

It is mirrored north to south down one coast, so the two stations are the same building for building, unit for unit and seam for seam, and between them is the range they share: target berms, the churn of decades of being fired across, and in the middle the target hill, walled all round with a gate in the face each station looks at. The two seams of ore up there are the only ones neither side starts near.

Nobody has anything the other has not, so it plays as a straight fight with no build-up, and it is the quickest way to look at a unit you have never used, or to try a matchup without spending twenty minutes earning it. Set the second seat to Play this faction too and nothing moves until you move it; set it to an AI and it comes for you.

Breakthrough

One side attacks, one holds. The ground between them is a chain of checkpoints, each a headquarters the defenders own, taken in order from the front; the rear ones are locked, taking no damage and refusing every order, until the one before them falls. The attackers win when the last one falls. The defenders win when the clock runs out, or when the attackers have nothing left to send.

The two sides play different games:

• The defenders build. A headquarters and four engineers at every checkpoint, with 2,000 metal apiece to dig in with (the mode's own sum; the starting metal knob is Conquest's and is not offered here), the ore round them to mine, turrets facing the way the attackers come. When a checkpoint falls its ore goes with it.
• The attackers fight. Two war factories, an airbase and a radar at a staging ground, all locked so nothing can reach them; no engineers, no base, no power grid. A war chest lands ninety seconds in, at the whistle, and there is no income after it: every unit lost is metal gone for good. Each checkpoint taken refills 4,000 of the chest, adds six minutes to the clock, and moves the lines up beside the fallen headquarters.

Knob	Values	Default
Checkpoints	2 to 5, capped by the map's spawns less one	3
War chest	6,000, 10,000, 15,000	10,000
Clock	8, 12 or 18 minutes from the whistle	12

Breakthrough is played on six maps: Wake Island, Coast Road, Three Gates, Pacific Storm and Solomon Islands name their own lane, and on Iwo Jima the first spawn is the staging ground and the rest are the chain, ordered by driving distance. Pacific Storm's chain crosses water: the attackers' lines carry a naval yard wherever the next checkpoint is across the sea, and the squads go over by landing craft. Wake Island, Iwo Jima, Pacific Storm and Solomon Islands are Conquest maps too; the two lane maps are Breakthrough's alone. In a lobby the seat's team is a side, Attackers or Defenders, and any number may sit on either; each side's objective is shown to that side. The AI plays both sides: an attacker never builds and marches on the front, a defender never marches on the staging ground and digs in between the front and the way the attackers come.

Random maps

The generator produces a fresh map from a seed in four sizes. Every generated map passes the same connectivity check as the curated ones: spawns share a landmass on ground maps, naval maps keep one ocean, and every deposit is reachable. Seeds are shown in the setup screen, so a good map can be replayed.

AI personalities

All three difficulties share one brain: they take a census of what they own, hand engineers a task list (extractors by distance, power headroom, factories, navy when the enemy is overseas, radar, turrets toward the enemy), pick production by weight against the enemy composition they have seen, scout, rally to defend, and launch attack waves that grow over time. Difficulty tunes economy multipliers, wave pacing, tech timing and unit caps.

Personality	Style
Relaxed	A calm opponent that attacks rarely and skips air and navy
Standard	A balanced opponent for most players
Veteran	Aggressive, expands fast, counters your army

The AI plays by the rules you do: it uses the same orders, pays the same prices, and only reacts to units it has actually spotted, so hiding your composition from its scouts is a real tactic.