Tech tree and abilities

The War Lab researches the tech tree. A faction chooses one doctrine for the whole match: researching it closes the other two. Logistics can be researched before or after that choice. That choice is the faction. Two players on the same map can field different units, use different abilities and carry different bonuses, and on a team allies can split doctrines the way they already split the army, the air force and the fleet.

The War Lab

An engineer builds it, one per faction, on the ground your headquarters hold. It researches one node at a time from a short queue and is paid for as the work is done, like a factory's queue, so a power shortage slows it and an EMP stops it. You can tell a lab at work from across the base: its skylight and windows shine while a node is in research, and go dark when the queue is empty. What it has researched is kept for good: losing the lab stops new research and loses the work on the node in progress, nothing more.

The three doctrines

	Lightning	Hammer	Anvil
The choice	every unit moves 8% faster	HE and rocket rounds do 10% more damage	your buildings take 15% less damage
Ability	Smoke Screen: Wolf, Viper, Gator	Incendiary Load: Vulture, Wraith	Countermeasures + ERA: Bison, Mammoth
Unit	Hornet Suicide Drone	Scorpion Ballistic Missile Launcher	Hercules Recovery Vehicle
Ability (needs a Radar Station)	Afterburner: Falcon, Thunderbolt, Albatross	Rapid Barrage: Thunder, Tempest, Sovereign	Damage Control: Aegis, Aircraft Carrier

Once the doctrine is chosen its three nodes can be researched in any order; the last ability waits for a Radar Station standing, like Tier 3.

• Lightning is speed: be somewhere else. The Hornet is a suicide drone sent in by hand at the enemy's armour, smoke hides a column from anything more than two tiles away, and the afterburner gets a fighter into a fight or out of one.
• Hammer is firepower: the siege. The Scorpion throws two ballistic missiles far beyond its own sight, incendiaries leave a bomb run burning, and a barrage doubles a battery's rate of fire for eight seconds.
• Anvil is endurance: the hold. A Bison with its countermeasures up shoots down the missiles fired at it and shrugs off shells, the Hercules mends the column in the field, and a damage-control party puts a warship's hull back together.

Logistics

Three economy upgrades any doctrine may research, in any order: Deep Drilling (extractors mine 15% more metal), Grid Tuning (power plants put out 20% more) and Field Engineering (engineers build and repair 30% faster).

The Nuclear Program

The last node of the tree belongs to no doctrine: any faction may research it once it has researched the three nodes of its own column (or has them on the queue ahead of it, so a doctrine's whole path, the choice, the column and the bomb, fits one queue of five). It costs 1,000 metal and a minute, and it opens the Nuclear Silo and the nuclear warhead, for the silo and the Kraken, and the Wraith’s nuclear bomb. The EMP warhead is not behind it. Take a node of the column off the queue and the Nuclear Program waiting behind it comes off too.

With the tree off, the silo needs only the radar and the reactor. This is the campaign rule and the default in Breakthrough.

Abilities

A unit has at most one ability, and not every unit has one. Using it is one click, or the ability key (T): every unit in the selection that has its ability ready uses it, and nothing needs aiming or holding. Each ability runs for a few seconds and then cools down. The Recon Buggy's sprint is there from the first minute; most of the rest wait on a node of the tree.

Ability	What it does	Lasts / cooldown
Sprint	60% faster (Recon Buggy)	4 s / 20 s
Afterburner	80% faster; the turns open up with the speed	5 s / 30 s
Smoke Screen	a cloud round the unit; nothing on the ground inside it is seen from more than 2 tiles away	8 s / 40 s
Incendiary Load	the next bomb run sets the ground alight where it lands	armed up to 30 s / 45 s
Rapid Barrage	reloads twice as fast	8 s / 45 s
Countermeasures + ERA	the first 3 missiles or rockets fired at the hull are shot down, and shells do 40% less damage; it keeps moving	10 s / 40 s
Damage Control	mends 30% of the hull, paid for like a repair	10 s / 60 s
Emergency Repair	the Hercules' repair aura, three times as strong	6 s / 30 s

Your units can use defensive abilities automatically when threatened or damaged. Offensive abilities stay manual unless the units are assigned to the commander. The computer's own armies use both.

In the setup

The tree defaults to on in Conquest and off in Breakthrough, including those modes in multiplayer. Local setup and the lobby let you change it before starting. The campaign uses its mission-defined roster without the tree.