Dust Front RTS Units: Codex, Squads & Vehicles

The Dust Front RTS unit roster is the part of the design that rtsDimon, the game's solo developer, has explained in the most detail — but he has done it in Steam news posts, not in a wiki-friendly stat table. This hub collects everything that is actually confirmed about Dust Front RTS units, flags the parts that only exist in community play reports, and is explicit about the gaps.

The four confirmed unit categories

The Steam store page describes the army in four buckets: infantry, tank forces, aviation, and vehicles of various purposes plus their arsenals. That is the whole published taxonomy. There is no official unit list, no tech-tree diagram and no per-unit stat block anywhere.

• Infantry — squad-based, and squads behave very differently from most RTS games. See the squad model below.
• Tank forces — the Empire's tracked armoured core, ranging up to the Dreadnought.
• Aviation — aircraft are part of the roster, and a bomber can be called in from the left-hand tactical panel, with its flight path adjustable after you set the bombing direction.
• Specialist vehicles — repair vehicles, harvesters, rocket artillery and other support or non-line hulls.

Technology branches unlock new units, so the roster you can field grows as you research. Mercenaries with unique units can also appear at events in captured regions on the global map, which is the only route by which some unit types reach your army at all.

How infantry squads actually work

Each squad on screen is a single unit. The individual soldiers you see are a visualisation of that squad's health: they die in a strict sequence as the squad's HP drops. A squad down to its last man is at low health, but it is still one unit, still selectable as one, and — critically — still fighting.

The number of remaining soldiers does not affect damage output. A squad on its last man fights at full damage. This is the developer's own statement from a February 2026 post, and it is the single most important thing to understand about Dust Front RTS infantry, because it inverts the intuition most RTS players bring to the genre.

Refilling a squad is done by healing the unit. There is no separate reinforce button described in any official source; healing restores the squad and the soldiers come back with it. That makes medical support and healing structures a throughput mechanic rather than a convenience.

Unique weapon carriers: who dies when

The "number of soldiers does not matter" rule has one deliberate exception. A soldier carrying a personal weapon will stop contributing that weapon when he dies, and the developer has placed those soldiers at different points in the death sequence to create per-squad behaviour.

• Rocket squads — the rocket man is always the last to die, so the unit keeps firing its anti-tank weapon right up to the end.
• Rifleman squads with an embedded rocket man — here he can die earlier, which drops the squad's anti-tank damage at a certain HP threshold.
• Gunner squads — the sniper is the main man and dies last; his partner carrying the artillery guidance devices dies first, so the squad loses the ability to direct artillery when that man goes down.
• Autocannon heavies — the big warrior with the autocannon is the main one, and his henchmen always die before him.

This is a design where "what does this squad lose as it takes damage" is a real question, and the answer is baked into the squad rather than shown on a tooltip. It also means a partly damaged spotter squad can silently lose its artillery-direction capability, which matters a great deal given how artillery works in this game.

Vehicle armour, handling and reverse move

Vehicles use a differentiated armour system, represented in the interface by two conical shapes: one for the front arc and one covering sides and rear together. Not every vehicle has it — some heavy mutant units have all-around armour and take no extra damage from side or rear hits, which is one reason mutants are so hard to flank.

Movement differs by chassis type, and the differences are behavioural rather than numeric. Tracked vehicles mostly turn in place. Wheeled vehicles have a wider turning radius. Smooth-moving hovers drift fluidly into the desired direction. Light wheeled vehicles can drift while turning and carry inertia. Tanks turn on the spot once the limit angle exceeds a certain value.

Tracked, wheeled and some other vehicles can reverse move — hold G, according to the player-compiled control list, which should be treated as player-reported. Reverse move has two uses: it lets you keep stronger frontal armour pointed at the enemy while backing away, and it is a genuine manoeuvring and retreat tool rather than a novelty.

Where units come from

Production is not only a matter of queuing from a building. The demo pre-unlocks units and buildings from some high-tier doctrines so you can fight the enemy hordes, which is why you can field top-tier armour in a two-hour scenario.

• Technology branches unlock new units as you research them.
• Doctrines gate the high-tier gear; the demo deliberately opens several.
• Mercenaries with unique units appear at events in captured regions on the global map.
• Strike groups and reinforcements split your army: part deploys immediately, the rest arrives later. The demo exposes this as a pre-battle interface.
• Macro buildings upgrade everything you field. The Empire's three are the Foundry (vehicle toughness), the Arsenal (unit damage) and the Complector (free infantry, the Brutes).

Because macro buildings upgrade all units on the battlefield rather than individual hulls, base building directly changes what your existing Dust Front RTS units are capable of. That is a deliberate merge of quantitative upgrades and tech-tree unlocks into a single structure, intended to reduce button count.

What has not been published

The roster is only partially named in official sources. The Dreadnought, the Brutes, harvesters and spotter squads are all confirmed. The MLRS is player-reported. "Molots" appears by name in the D-30 changelog — their behaviour was fixed so they return to position when ordered to fire on territory — but their role is not described anywhere, so treat anything beyond the name as unconfirmed. "T-50 / T-50B" appears in community 3D model tags as an Empire main battle tank with no official source; it should not be stated as canon.

Whether Robot faction units appear at launch is unconfirmed. So is the canon name of the Empire's repair vehicle, where "Brem" is community usage rather than a developer term. If you need a definitive answer, the official Discord is the place to ask.

Related pages

• Best units in Dust Front RTS: a role-based read
• Dust Front RTS Dreadnought: modes, howitzer and wrecks
• MLRS and rocket artillery
• Factions: Empire, Mutants, Robots and Rebels
• Official Dust Front RTS Discord