Expeditions
Send troops out to a deposit on the sector map and they walk there, dig, and carry the load home. A single trip can be worth more than your entire base produces in a day — once you are in a Control Sector, this is the game's real economy.
How to send one
- Join a Control Sector Expeditions need a position in the world. You get one when you finish the tutorial.
- Open the Map The Map button in the action bar. Your base is in the middle; deposits are the small markers scattered around it.
- Tap a deposit The expedition panel opens, showing how far out it is, how much it holds when full, and how much is left in the ground right now.
- Add units and send Each unit line shows what it carries, how fast it is, and how many you have free. Three buttons fill the party for you, and the estimate underneath updates as you go.
| Button | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| ENOUGH | On a unit line | Exactly the number needed to carry this deposit. The only one that looks at the ground. |
| MAX | On a unit line | Every one of that type you have free. |
| SEND ALL | Above the lines | Fills the party with everything you have, of every type. |
MAX and SEND ALL do not cap themselves against the deposit — they send everything free whether or not there is that much in the ground. That is sometimes what you want, because a party bigger than the deposit finishes the dig faster. But it also commits your whole army to one hole.
ENOUGH dials in the number that fills the party against what is actually there, which leaves the rest of your troops at home for a second run — and it counts the party you have already assembled, so using it on one line accounts for what the others are carrying.
Deposits
A Control Sector holds 650 deposits across its 37 cells, which works out at roughly seventeen a cell. They are not denser near the centre: each cell is allotted a share weighted by how much of its ground is still free, so a crowded cell is allotted fewer and the surplus lands where there is room to walk to it. Each holds gold, energy or materials, and comes in one of three grades.
That share is a target rather than a promise, and a cell can sit under it — the game tops cells up toward their share as it sweeps, and it only ever adds, so a cell that has been mined hard or was crowded when the sector was young recovers upward rather than being re-dealt. If your own cell looks thin, it is not a permanent verdict.
How much of the sector you can see at all depends on your level, and early on it is one cell — your own. That is roughly 17 deposits in reach, not 650. See How far you can see below; it is the single most important thing on this page for a new player, and it is why a sector can look almost empty.
| Grade | Holds when full | Share of the sector |
|---|---|---|
| Sparse | 1,200 | about 55% |
| Moderate | 2,400 | about 32% |
| Rich | 3,600 | about 13% |
- Grade is not tied to distance. A Rich deposit can sit next door; look before you commit to a long walk.
- Other players use the same deposits. Two parties can be out to the same one, and the race is decided at the hole, not on the way home — whoever's party finishes digging first takes the ore, however long either of them then takes to walk back. The panel shows who is currently standing on a deposit, and a ring is drawn on the ground under an occupied one.
- The ground itself does nothing. The sector's terrain — waste, rubble and scrub — is generated per sector and is scenery. It does not slow a party, block a route or change a yield. Distance is measured in a straight line regardless of what is between you and the deposit.
Deposits run out
What a party takes is gone. A deposit is debited the moment your party stops digging — not when it sets out, and not when it gets home. The ore is out of the ground and on their backs, and when the last of it is taken the deposit is stripped.
That timing is the whole of how two parties racing for one deposit resolves, so it is worth being plain about it. The walk home does not enter into it: a party that digs first and crawls back fully laden still took the ore from under a party that digs second and sprints. If you are racing somebody, the thing to shorten is the leg out — which is what a forced march is for.
What a party banks is still settled on arrival, and the two are not the same thing. Ore taken from the ground by a party that then dumps its load reaches nobody: it is gone from the deposit and gone from you. That is the cost of a fast recall.
A stripped deposit disappears from the map. It is not greyed out, struck through or left sitting there emptied — there is nothing to draw and nothing to send a party to, so the map simply stops showing it. An hour later the ground replenishes and a deposit returns somewhere else in the same cell, which is why the supply near your base stays roughly constant while the particular patch you were working does not.
If you are watching a deposit and it vanishes, somebody finished it. That is the whole signal, and it is deliberately the same whether you stripped it or a rival did.
How far you can see
The sector is fogged, and this is enforced on the server rather than drawn on the client: a base or deposit you have not earned the sight of is not in the map's data at all. Your range is measured in whole cells, from the cell your own base stands in, and it widens by one ring every ten levels.
| Level | Rings | From a central cell | From a rim cell |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–9 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 10–19 | 1 | 7 | 4 |
| 20–29 | 2 | 19 | 9 |
| 30+ | 3 | 37 | 16 |
| 60+ | 6 | 37 | 37 |
At levels 1 to 9 your range is zero rings — your own cell and nothing beyond it. One cell is 721 ground tiles of the sector's 26,677, and about 17 deposits. No amount of panning will show you more, because the rest was never sent. A sector that looks nearly empty is not a bug and is not a quiet sector; it is the fog.
This is also why reaching level 10 changes the game more than any other level. It is the first ring, and it is the point at which you can see anyone approaching you.
- It is cells, not distance. A deposit thirty tiles away in your own cell is visible; one ten tiles away across a cell boundary is not, until you have the ring for it.
- A party in the field needs both ends in sight. Someone else's column is drawn only when you can see where it started and where it is going, so a march that crosses out of your range leaves your map rather than carrying on.
- Unseated players see nothing. Before you join a sector there is no home cell to measure from, and the server reads that as "see nothing" rather than "see everything".
What you can see of another survivor
For a base inside your range, the map gives you its owner's callsign, rank, level and distance from you. Level is deliberately public — it is not something the game tries to hide.
You can also read it off the ground without opening anything, because a base's art is earned by its owner's level: a ruin at level 1, then a new cluster at 5, 10, 15 and 20. A glance across the sector tells you who has been at this a while.
And you see the base itself — every structure standing on it, what kind it is, what level it is at, and where on their ground it sits. That includes their Defense Turrets and Wall Segments. A base in your sight is not a silhouette; it is a readable layout.
What the map does not give you is anything about their army or their state: no troop counts, no garrison, no resources, and not their life bar. You can see what a rival has built and how far along they are. You cannot see what is standing in it, or how close to the edge they are.
Sight is symmetrical in what it discloses, but not in who has it: whether a particular rival can see you depends on their level and the distance between your cells, not on yours. A higher-level neighbour can read your base while you cannot see theirs.
The trip, leg by leg
Distance
Straight-line distance from your base to the deposit, rounded up to whole tiles. The panel states it as "N tiles out".
Walking out
The party moves at its slowest member's speed. Mixing one Heavy Infantry into a party of Light Tanks costs you two thirds of your pace for 80 extra carrying capacity — almost never worth it.
Digging
A full shift is 120 seconds. If the deposit holds less than your party could carry, the dig is shortened in proportion — the extra hands have nothing to load — with a floor of 20 seconds.
Walking home
This is the leg people underestimate. A loaded party is slower, in proportion to how full it is: at 100% loaded it moves at half speed, so the walk home takes twice as long as the walk out.
A full round trip to a deposit N tiles out, with a full load, is roughly three outbound legs' worth of walking plus the dig — not two. Plan accordingly when you are watching the clock.
Worked examples
Ten Infantry, eight tiles out, coming home full
- Party: capacity 500, speed 2
- Out: 8 × 30 ÷ 2 = 2m 00s
- Dig: a full load, so the full shift — 2m 00s
- Home: fully laden, speed 1 → 8 × 30 ÷ 1 = 4m 00s
- Round trip: 8 minutes.
Four Material Depots at level 1 produce 120 an hour between them. A single loaded trip is worth hours of that, and it takes minutes.
The same party, to a deposit with only 200 left
- Load: 200 — 40% of the party's capacity
- Out: 2m 00s
- Dig: 120 × 0.4 = 48s
- Home: speed 2 × (1 − 0.5 × 0.4) = 1.6 → 2m 30s
- Round trip: about 5m 20s.
That is the reward for over-sending to a thin deposit: not a bigger haul, a faster one. And a shorter trip means a smaller life award, since that scales with how full the party comes home.
Ten Light Tanks, to a Rich deposit eight tiles out
- Party: capacity 2,000, speed 3 — the same 200 per tank that the forty Infantry it took to build them carried
- Out: 8 × 30 ÷ 3 = 1m 20s
- Dig: a full load, so the full shift — 2m 00s
- Home: fully laden, speed 1.5 → 2m 40s
- Round trip: 6 minutes for 2,000 — four times the haul of the first example in three quarters of the time, and it occupies ten vehicle bays rather than forty bunks. That is what a conversion buys.
How much comes home
Both ceilings are checked when your party stops digging — not when it leaves, and not when it gets back. So a deposit another player stripped while you were walking out pays you what remains, which can be nothing; but once your party has finished digging, the load is yours and nothing a rival does afterwards can reduce it. The panel's Return with line is the game's estimate against the stock at the moment you send; the transmission when the party arrives is what actually landed.
Richness decides how much is in the ground and therefore how many trips a deposit is worth. It does not cap a single trip: a big enough party empties a Sparse deposit in one run.
| Unit | Carries | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Battle Tank | 320 | 1.5 |
| Light Tank | 200 | 3 |
| Heavy Infantry | 80 | 1 |
| Infantry | 50 | 2 |
| Recon Drone | 50 | 7.5 |
| Scout | 25 | 5 |
The panel shows Carry (what your party can lift), Return with (what it expects to bring back) and Round trip. If Return with is lower than Carry, the deposit is nearly stripped — you are sending more troops than the ground can fill, so pick a fuller deposit or send fewer units. The Round trip figure is the whole journey and does include the laden walk home, so it is the number to plan against.
Watching a party from the map
While the sector map is open, any party in the field appears in a strip under your profile. It removes itself entirely when nothing is out, so an empty corner means an idle army.
| Phase | The row reads | Means |
|---|---|---|
| Marching out | 6 → 400 | Six troops walking, expecting 400 — a forecast, not a holding |
| Digging | 6 180/400 | 180 of the 400 this dig will yield, loaded so far |
| Coming home | 6 400 | Carrying 400 home |
- The bar is the whole round trip. Two hairlines mark the moments the party arrives and stops digging, so a long walk to a short dig looks visibly different from the reverse — that is how march time and dig time stay on screen without a second countdown competing with the first.
- Tap a row to fly the camera to that party. It goes to where they actually are, not to the deposit — on a long march those are opposite ends of the map, and a recalled party may never have reached the deposit at all.
- Three rows are shown at once, soonest home at the top; a fourth scrolls.
- Hover or focus a row for the full sentence, which spells out each leg: "March out 3:00, dig 2:00, march home 6:00; home in 9:40."
Recalling a party
A party already out can be pulled back at any time, in one of two modes. Either way they still have to walk — a recall re-plans the journey home from wherever they actually are, it does not teleport them.
| Mode | Brings home | Speed home |
|---|---|---|
| Fast | Nothing — the cargo is dumped | Full unladen speed. The fastest they can possibly move. |
| Carry | Whatever has been dug so far | Slowed by the load, exactly as a completed run would be. |
- Recalling mid-dig keeps a proportional share. Half way through the shift and you keep half of what the trip would have produced — leaving early costs you the rest, not all of it.
- Recalling on the way out brings nothing back either way, because nothing has been dug.
- A recalled party cannot be recalled again. It is on its way home.
- A recall still counts as a completed expedition for the daily objective and for the life award — but the life scales with what came home, so a fast recall pays the minimum.
Sending them somewhere else
Tapping a marching column on the map puts three controls beside it. Two are free — return turns them round, and redirect sends them to a different deposit — and the third costs War Bonds. Redirecting is free because it is the same units doing the same walk, just to a different hole in the ground.
They set out again from wherever the order catches them, not from your base, so a party already most of the way across the sector does not walk home first. The new dig is sized against the new deposit, so a party redirected from a rich seam to a thin one arrives to find what is actually there. Any forced march you have paid for carries over.
This is the one rule, and it can cost you a haul you had already earned. Once a party has dug, it is holding something — and the game will not let it wander the sector with it. The order is refused, naming what they are carrying: "That party is carrying 180 gold. Dump the load to redirect them."
You can dump it and go. The ore is then gone — not banked, not carried, and already out of the deposit, so it reaches nobody. Ore is carried home or it is not carried at all. If a party is laden and you want it somewhere else, the question is whether the new deposit is worth more than the load you are throwing away.
- A recalled party cannot be redirected. Once they are on their way back, that is the trip.
- Redirecting to the deposit they are already walking to is refused rather than silently accepted — "They are already going there."
Forcing a march
A forced march adds half again to the party's speed for the rest of the leg they are walking, for 50 War Bonds. It stacks — buy it twice for double speed, three times for two and a half — and a recall takes the speed home with them, so turning back never wastes what you paid for.
- It does not speed up the dig. Only the walking.
- It ends when they arrive. The boost is bought for the leg they are on, not for the party.
- Each one buys less than the last. This is the part worth understanding before you spend anything.
That last point is arithmetic rather than a penalty. A forced march shortens the time remaining, so the same 50 bonds is worth a great deal at the start of a long march and very little near the end of one. Measured on a single party, three purchases seconds apart bought 130 seconds, then 65, then 39 — same price, same march, and the third was worth less than a third of the first.
The disc shows you the answer before you buy: it carries the price and the time that price would actually save, recalculated as they walk. Hold it down to buy; lift early and nothing is spent.
Early in a long march, when a deposit is about to be taken by somebody else, or when a party is carrying a full load and you want the life award banked. Late in a short leg it buys seconds.
Picking a target
- Send a full party. A bigger party lifts more, and housing is what caps how big it gets — see Training Yards.
- Keep the party one speed. The slowest unit sets the pace for everyone.
- Close beats rich. A Sparse deposit three tiles out will out-earn a Rich one twenty tiles out over an evening, because you can run it repeatedly.
- Don't send to a nearly-empty deposit unless you want the trip to be quick. You cannot bring home more than is there, and the life award is smaller for it.
- Stripped a deposit? Come back in an hour — but look around when you do. It refills to full and reappears somewhere else in the same cell, so the supply near you is unchanged and the address is not.
- Everything in reach is in your own cell until level 10. Picking a target is a smaller question early on than it looks — see how far you can see.
- Expeditions pay XP too — 15 plus one per tile of distance, so a long run is worth more than a short one on that axis.
