Humans: a barracks and two kinds of soldier
Rifle infantry, and a trooper with a rocket launcher.
Discovering those two for the first time is one of the memories that stuck with me most from the
old Command & Conquer games. If you played them, you know this pair on sight - and you know which
one you keep behind the other.
They are at their best against organic creatures. They can hurt vehicles and buildings too, but
that is not what they are for.
The barracks costs 300 Riftstone and comes early - straight after command center, refinery and
power plant. Infantry is the first thing you can put on the map in numbers.
Kharzeth: no barracks at all
The Crawler is a six-legged thing that kills in melee.
The Spitter throws corrosive slime. Vehicles and infantry take damage when it hits - and
again from walking through the puddle it leaves behind.
Neither of them needs a building. Both come straight out of the Kharzeth Throne. Where the Humans
train, the Kharzeth simply produce.
The last eighteen metres
A soldier kills at range. A Crawler has to arrive. On paper that is not a fight, it is a walk to
the execution - so the Crawler can jump. Anything within eighteen metres, it leaps onto. For a
soldier that is immediately fatal.
Which turns the whole thing into one question: can it get to eighteen metres?
Everything before that belongs to the rifles. Everything after belongs to the Crawler.
And it isn't there yet
Right now the soldiers still have the better end of it. The jump is in and it does what it should -
what happens on the way there doesn't. That's the next thing on my list.
Iron Command is a classic base-building RTS - on your monitor, or from inside the battlefield in
VR. Coming spring 2027. The wishlist button is right up there if this sounds like your thing.