Levels & ranks

Everything you finish awards a single number, and that number is added to both your experience and your rank points. Experience raises your level, which unlocks content. Rank points raise your rank, which is the long ladder and the insignia beside your name.

Reading your progress

Your level is a badge in the player card, beside your callsign and rank — it is treated as identity rather than as a meter, because it changes a few times a week. Underneath sit two meters on one row, in the same shape so they read as a pair rather than as competitors:

• Gold, marked XP — experience toward your next level.
• Cyan, led by an insignia — rank points toward your next promotion. The insignia is the rank you are climbing to, not the one you hold.

On both, the bar shows how far along you are and the number shows how far there is to go, abbreviated and prefixed with an arrow — →1.2k means 1,200 more. The arrow is doing real work: it is the difference between that reading as a balance and reading as a distance. At the top rung the number reads MAX.

Hovering a meter, or focusing it with a keyboard, gives the sentence behind it — "Rank: 160 of 500 points toward Lieutenant — 340 to go" — which is where the exact totals and the next rank's name live. Level-ups and promotions are also announced once each, as transmissions.

The experience curve

Tables scroll sideways on a narrow screen.

The curve is deliberately cheap at the bottom: a played-through tutorial reaches level 5 in one sitting, which is everything except the Battle Tank. Level 7 needs 1,050 — several times what a tutorial run produces — so it takes real, uncompressed play.

Note that the Recon Drone's level 3 is not the whole story: every vehicle is assembled at a Factory, and a Factory needs level 4. See vehicles.

What awards experience

XP is calculated from a thing's real build or training time, not the shortened one you actually waited through — so tutorial compression and construction research do not reduce what you earn.

A vehicle is paid for on the same line as a unit, on the vehicle — so a Light Tank is one award of 32, on top of the 40 those four Infantry already earned when they were trained. Converting is a small XP gain, not a loss.

In actual numbers

The rank ladder

Sixteen rungs, from Private to General of the Army. Rank points accumulate at exactly the same rate as experience, so your rank is a direct read-out of everything you have ever finished. Rank never goes backwards.

A tutorial run clears Corporal and Sergeant on the way through — the Overseer's "promotions" are real. Staff Sergeant is a first evening; Sergeant Major is roughly a first week. Everything from Warrant Officer up is grind against real, uncompressed timers, and the star ladder is deliberately a long tail.

Every promotion also pays +1.25 life the first time you reach it. Fifteen promotions is 18.75 points across an entire career — see the clock.

Achievements

Alongside the two meters there is a record of one-off things you have done. Achievements pay life and rank points, once each, and they are the only reward in the game you have to collect by hand.

Unlocking is automatic. Claiming is not.

The moment you meet the target the trophy unlocks and a transmission tells you so — you do not need the panel open, and you cannot miss one by not looking. The reward then sits there until you open Achievements and press Claim.

That extra step is protecting you from the one ceiling there is: 100% life. An award made against a nearly full bar applies the part that fits and loses the rest. If trophies paid themselves out the instant they unlocked, a good session that unlocked three at once could waste all three while you were asleep. Pressing the button yourself means you pick a moment when the life can actually land.

• A refused claim costs you nothing. If your life is already full, the claim is turned down with a message and the trophy goes back on the board still claimable. Come back for it later.
• The rank points are settled on the first press, even when the life half is refused — the message tells you how many you banked. They are never paid twice.
• A part payment counts as paid. If only 1.5 of a 2-point award fits under the 100% cap, you get 1.5 and the trophy is claimed. Near full, leave the small ones until the bar has drained a little.

What a trophy pays

Rank points from a claim are added to your experience as well, exactly like every other award on this page, so claiming can put you over a level or over a rung of the ladder. A promotion earned that way pays its own +1.25 life on top of the trophy's.

What you can chase today

Twenty-five achievements are written and seeded, but the panel only shows ones it can actually count — a locked bar that can never move is worse than no bar at all. Eleven pass that test today, and the "unlocked" figure at the top of the panel counts those eleven, not the whole catalogue. The rest are waiting on the counting, not on you.

How those are counted, where it is not obvious:

• Builder and Architect count buildings that are standing, not orders placed. A queued construction does nothing for them until it finishes — and 25 is more than every producer and military building the grid allows, so Architect needs walls or turrets.
• First Muster and Standing Army count units that have finished training. A batch still in the queue does not count until it musters, and a vehicle counts as one unit however many troops went into it.
• Week One counts days since you enlisted, not days you played. The clock runs whether you are watching or not, which is the honest reading of "still standing".
• Tycoon counts everything you have ever acquired — base production and expedition hauls together — while Haulage counts only what expeditions carried home. That is why its target is the lower of the two.
• First Convoy counts any expedition that came home, including one you recalled.

The rest of the catalogue

Fourteen more are seeded and not yet shown. They cover joining a Control Sector, running every Gold Mine at once, two production-rate milestones, the size of your training space and of your standing army, long expeditions and full holds, finishing the survival branch, daily objectives and tribute, climbing back from critically low life, and reaching Brigadier General. Each is designed to be read from records the game already keeps — your buildings, your expedition runs, your research, the life ledger — rather than from a counter that only starts when the feature lands, so what you have already done should still count when they appear.

Four more are parked: First Blood, Warrior, Veteran and Warlord. All four count battles won, and there is no combat system — nothing in the game records a battle. They cannot appear and cannot be earned. They are kept in the catalogue as a note for whoever builds combat, not as something to wait for.