How to play
- Two factions fight over a frontier desert. The Colonial Guard is a human militia of rovers, riflemen, grenadiers, walker mechs, tracked howitzers, and hornet gunships. The Myriad is an insect swarm of foragers, skitters, acid spitters, armored husks, gliders, burrowing delvers, and the huge behemoth. Pick a side and an opponent on the title screen, and win by destroying every one of the enemy's structures.
- Your workers (prospectors for the Guard, foragers for the Myriad) mine ore from the gold-veined outcrops and carry it to your headquarters. Fuel comes from tar seeps: build a fuel pump or a sap well on one, and send three workers to it. Keep training workers early; a base runs best with about sixteen on ore.
- Every unit takes supply. Depots (Guard) and blooms (Myriad) add eight each, up to two hundred. When the supply chip turns red, build more before you train.
- Select a worker, choose Build (B), pick a structure, and click where it goes. A Guard prospector stays to build it, and another can pick up where one left off. A Myriad forager plants a seed that grows on its own, but only on the living root that hives and blooms spread. The Guard can't build on root. Guard machines and structures can be repaired; Myriad creatures and structures slowly heal.
- Click a unit to select it, drag a box to select a group, and double-click to select every unit of that kind on screen. Right-click the ground to move, an enemy to attack, ore to mine. A (then a click) is an attack-move: the units fight anything they meet on the way. S stops, H holds position, and Shift queues orders. Ctrl and a number keeps a control group, and the number brings it back (twice centers on it). Period selects an idle worker, Comma (or Select army) every soldier, and Space looks at the last attack.
- Structures train units and research upgrades: select one and pick from its card, or press its key. Right-click with a structure selected, or use its Set rally button (Y), to set where its new units go; rally workers to ore and they start mining.
- Delvers burrow out of sight, and the first strike after they surface hits twice as hard. Only a sensor mast or a hornet can find them. Howitzers can't fire at what's right next to them, and fliers can be hit only by weapons that hit air.
- Pan with the arrow keys or by pushing the mouse against an edge, zoom with the wheel or + and -, and click the minimap to look anywhere. On a touchscreen, drag to pan, pinch to zoom, tap to select or to order, and use Box select and Select army. P or Esc pauses (Esc first drops an order you're aiming). Without a mouse: Enter opens a cursor that the arrows move, and Enter again selects what's under it (Shift adds, Ctrl takes its kind on screen); a command's key then opens the same cursor to aim it. Tab steps through your structures. Daily plays today's map, and Seed plays a map by its code; leaving a war for either counts as a loss. Gfx changes the graphics quality.
Your record is kept on this device. The battlefield is drawn in 3D with Three.js.