Drake Flame Tank

The Drake's weapon does not fire, it pours. Hold it on something and it throws burning fuel for a full second — a continuous tongue of flame, not a line of shells — and then the bottles are empty and it needs 2.6 seconds to come back up to pressure. What the jet washes over keeps burning for eight seconds after that, and that is the unit: it is the only thing in the game that denies ground rather than killing what stands on it.

It is also the thinnest-skinned thing the Arsenal builds. 260 hit points is less than a Wolf carries at Tier 1, its reach of three and a half tiles is the shortest on the field, and it has nothing at all for aircraft. It is priced to be spent.

How to use

Send it at what cannot answer it at three tiles: artillery, air defence, engineers at work, a swarm of light vehicles, a row of buildings. It takes a Thunder battery for a sixth of its own price. Do not send it at tanks — a Bison out-ranges it by a tile and opens it in six seconds, and a Viper deletes it from twice its reach.

Fight it in pulses. The second of pouring is the whole unit; the 2.6 seconds afterwards are a tank with a hose and no pressure, so back it out of reach while it recharges rather than standing in the open waiting. The fire it left goes on working while it does — a base that has been washed once keeps burning whether the Drake is still there or not.

And keep your own column clear of it. The ground it lights burns whoever is standing on it, your units included, and it does not care that they were yours; a curtain a column could walk through unharmed would not be a curtain. That includes the Drake, if it drives forward into what it just laid.

Anecdotes

The flame tank was always a short-range bargain. The British Churchill Crocodile of 1944 towed a seven-ton armoured trailer of fuel behind it and could throw flame about 110 metres; the crews' worry was never the range but what was in the trailer. The American M67 "Zippo" in Vietnam carried its fuel inside the hull instead, which was tidier and no more comforting.

What made them worth building was rarely the killing. A bunker that had ignored artillery all morning tended to surrender to the first jet that touched its firing slit, and the ground in front stayed unusable long after the tank had gone.