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Steel Tide
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Getting started

Your first ten minutes in Steel Tide: what to build, in what order, and why.

Steel Tide is a base-building real-time strategy game. You mine metal, keep the power on, build factories, and field an army that counters whatever your opponent fields. This page walks through a standard opening; the other guides go deeper into each system.

The first two minutes

  1. Claim metal. You start with two Engineers, the units that build (your Headquarters makes more). Send one to the nearest deposit and place a Metal Extractor. Deposits are your income, so every idle deposit is money left on the table.
  2. Add power. The other engineer builds a Power Plant. The HQ's own output covers about one extractor; after that, every building you add needs power behind it.
  3. A factory. Place a War Factory facing the enemy and set its rally point with a right click. Build a Recon Buggy first and send it around the map.
  4. Build defense. Put an MG Turret or two on approaches inside your side’s headquarters build radius; add a Cannon Turret once tanks show up. Use mobile patrols for remote extractors outside that radius. Turrets draw power, so keep a plant ahead of them.
  5. Fight your enemy. Gather a group before you go; a handful of tanks beats a trickle. Attack-move rather than move, so units engage on the way, and keep the factory queued while they fight.

Reading the HUD

  • Metal is your bank. There is no storage cap. Spend on income and troops while keeping enough for the upgrades and repairs you need.
  • Power shows production against consumption. When it goes into deficit everything slows down: production, turrets, mining and repairs. Build a plant.
  • Units counts population against the cap. Bigger units cost more population.
  • The minimap shows what your units can see. Fog hides everything else, so scout. Your side is drawn in blue, allies included, and enemies in red; a red crosshair marks where you are being hit. M opens the battle map, where every faction keeps its own colour and buildings, ground units, aircraft and ships each wear their own mark.

Five habits that win games

  • Never idle a factory. A queue of five is better than one unit at a time.
  • Scout before you push. A Scout Drone or buggy tells you what the enemy builds, and the counter web tells you what to build against it.
  • Attack-move instead of move when heading into a fight, so units engage on the way.
  • Anti-air in every group once you see an enemy Airbase.
  • Upgrade before you sprawl. An Advanced War Factory and an Advanced Extractor beat a second base you cannot defend.

Will it run on my machine?

Steel Tide uses hardware-accelerated Canvas rendering. Settings → Graphics offers four quality presets: Max, High, Medium and Low; changing an individual option makes the preset Custom. On first launch, the game recommends a preset from the device information it can read. Desktops normally start on High, phones and tablets on Medium; older or constrained hardware starts lower, including Medium for desktop Safari. Max is selected manually. Your saved choice stays in effect, and the game does not change tiers during a match.

Minimum (Low, 60 fps)Recommended (High, 60 fps)
Windows / macOS / Linux64-bit Windows 10, macOS 11 or a Linux with glibc 2.28; a dual-core processor from 2015 or later; 4 GB of memory; any graphics with hardware acceleration; 300 MB of diskA quad-core processor from 2018 or later; 8 GB of memory; any dedicated graphics card, Apple Silicon or Intel Iris Xe
AndroidAndroid 7.0; 3 GB of memory; a 2018 mid-range chip (Snapdragon 660 / Helio G80 class)6 GB of memory; a Snapdragon 7-series from 2020, or any 8-series
iPhone and iPadiOS 15; iPhone 8 / A11, or the 2018 iPadiPhone 11 / A13 or newer; iPad Air (4th gen) or any iPad with an M-series chip
BrowserChrome or Edge 98, Firefox 94, Safari 15.4The current release of any of them

The presets change render resolution, water and lighting effects, terrain detail, rain and snow, ground marks and smoke. Max and High use the same effects at 2× and 1.5× render scale; Medium uses 1× and Low 0.75×. Medium keeps blended terrain and full precipitation but reduces water, lighting and canopy detail and omits wet reflections, heat haze and lava glow. Low also thins precipitation and turns off rain ripples, snow cover, cloud and building shadows, and chimney and muzzle smoke. If Low still drops frames, set the frame rate limit to 30.

On a slower device, pick Low yourself.

Where next

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