A while back I walked you through scouting: how to read someone's base before you commit. This one is the other half. You've got the dossier, you've decided to raid - so what actually happens when your army arrives, and how do you bring the right one?
Read the top half for the shape of a fight. Read the rest if you want to win the ones that look even.
The fight in one line
You send an army at a base, it travels there, it fights to a result, and the survivors carry loot home. Nothing is instant and nothing is a coin flip - the units you bring, the defences they meet, and a bit of honest luck decide it.
What a unit actually is
Every unit has four stats, and that's the whole sheet:
Power - how hard it hits.
Armour - how much incoming damage it shrugs off.
HP - how much it can take before it dies.
Speed-Evasion - how fast it moves, and how often it dodges.
There's deliberately no Accuracy stat. I tried it and it made every fight muddier without making any decision more interesting. Damage either lands or gets mitigated - and mitigation is the part worth understanding.
Armour and Evasion both reduce damage, but they don't stack. For each hit the engine takes whichever of the two is doing more for you and uses that, then records which one saved you in the battle log. A heavy unit leans on Armour; a fast one leans on dodging. Both get less effective the more you pile on, so there's no single stat you can stack to invincibility.
One thing that catches people: your army travels at the speed of its slowest unit. Speed isn't just a dodge stat, it sets your whole force's pace to the target. Bring one sluggish unit and the fast ones wait for it. That's the "Impact in" timer you see ticking on an outbound raid.
Units are fungible counts, not individuals - you have forty Railgunners, not forty named ones. The "my army got stronger" progression doesn't live on individual veterans; it lives on your research (more on that in a future dispatch).
What beats what
Stats decide how hard a hit lands. Tags decide the matchups - who's strong against whom. The rule I build to is "a number is a row, a rule is a handler": stats sit alongside tags, they don't modify each other.
Right now there's one roster in the alpha, four units, and they form a loose triangle rather than a rigid wheel:
Vanguard - your breacher. Built to smash through defences and fortified structures.
Railgunner - your marksman. Tilts the odds against massed infantry.
Lancer - your piercing unit. Eats armoured targets for breakfast.
Bulwark - your anchor. Armoured and defensive, there to soak hits and hold the line.
The counters are a tilt, not a guarantee. A Lancer into an armoured wall gets an edge on its rolls and hits harder; a Railgunner into infantry gets the edge on its rolls; a Vanguard into a defensive structure hits harder. None of that wins the fight on its own - it nudges an even matchup your way. Bring the wrong composition into the wrong base and you'll feel it; bring the right one and a fight that looked 50/50 isn't.
This is exactly why scouting pays. A dossier tells you what they're fielding, and the counter triangle tells you what to send.
How a battle resolves
A fight isn't one big damage sum. It plays out in lanes, round by round.
Each round, a slice of each side - up to ten per side - engages. They roll, they trade damage, units die, and the next slice steps up. The fight runs to a wipe: it keeps going until one side has nothing left standing, unless the attacker calls a manual retreat first. Both sides take real losses. Even a clean win costs you units, and even a loss bloodies the defender.
The part people underrate: defences are real combatants, not a flat bonus. Your walls, turrets and shields fight in their own lane as first-class units with their own stats - they're not a percentage slapped on the defender's total. That's why a Vanguard's job matters: somebody has to break the defences while the rest of your army deals with the garrison. A raid that ignores the defensive lane stalls against it.
So a garrison is a composition decision, not a number you grind up. What you leave at home, and what defences you've built, decide which attacks bounce.
The dice are honest
Combat uses a seeded random roll, run server-side, and it's reproducible and auditable. Same inputs, same fight, every time - it's not a slot machine I can tune against you, and it's the same backbone the intel engine uses. If a result ever looks wrong, the seed means I can replay the exact battle and see what happened.
There's a D20 under the hood, which means crits and fumbles. Roll a natural 20 and the hit lands clean with modifiers ignored; roll a natural 1 and it goes wrong the same way. The report flags both, so when a fight swings on a freak roll you can see it rather than wonder. Over a whole battle these average out, but a single clash can absolutely turn on one.
Reading the report
After a raid you get a combat report, and it's built to be read, not just totted up:
An army-composition panel shows what each side actually brought, instead of one meaningless "power" figure.
Crit and fumble moments are highlighted, so the swings stand out.
The "Impact in" timer tells you when an outbound army lands - and it now updates properly on refresh instead of getting stuck.
The report is where you learn. If you lost, it'll usually show you why - wrong composition, a defensive lane you couldn't crack, or just a bad run of rolls.
Loot, briefly
Worth saying because it changes how you read a fight: loot is decoupled from a clean win. You don't take a flat percentage of their pile, and you don't need a flawless victory to come away with something.
Every base protects a floor of each resource; you can only take the surplus above it, and how much of that surplus you carry off scales with the damage you did. A curb-stomp against an empty base pays little. The loot rides home with your army, not the instant the battle ends, so the trip back is part of the raid.
That's the model today, and it's about to get more interesting. The next update turns carrying loot into a logistics decision of its own - dedicated transports you bring along, a real cost to field a bigger force, and a way to recover some of what you lose. I'll give that its own write-up when it lands. For now: loot comes home with the survivors.
How to play it well
If you take five things from this:
The honest caveat
This is the core of the game and it's still alpha. Defence counter-affinities are flat for now - the turrets that specifically punish swarms or armour are designed but not switched on yet. Signature unit traits, more doctrines, items - all on the way, none of it live. And every number here, from the counter tilts to the loot cap, is a knob I'll keep turning as I watch fights play out.
So tell me where it breaks. If a matchup feels unbeatable, if defences feel like wet paper or an unmovable wall, if a result didn't match the report - that's the feedback I want while the maths is still soft.
Go pick a fight. Then read the report and pick a better one.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore