Dust Front RTS: фракции — Империя, Мутанты, Роботы, Бандиты

Dust Front RTS is set on a planet where a thick layer of soot blocks out the sky and the remnants of humanity survive under concrete and behind gas masks. Four factions are fighting over what is left, but the game you can buy is deliberately narrower than the world it describes.

The four factions designed for Dust Front RTS

The developer's own wording is that there are three factions plus one additional, four in total: Empire, Mutants, Robots and Rebels, with Rebels flagged as the additional one. He has also said the names for the Mutants and the Robots are working names and may change, so treat those two labels as provisional even though they are the ones in circulation.

At release there is one campaign, and it belongs to the Empire. Campaigns for Mutants, Robots and Rebels may come later as DLC or as updates, depending on how the game does. That is a real constraint on what "factions" means for a buyer: right now it means one playable roster and a set of opponents.

The demo gives you a partial preview. You play the Empire against two opponents — the Bandit faction, which is the starting faction of the gray zones on the global map, and the Mutant faction, described as an enemy that inspires horror. The Robots are neither playable nor present as an opponent in the demo.

Empire: the Fourth Industrial Empire

The Empire is the player faction and the most fully realised of the four. Its official name is the Fourth Industrial Empire, and it is led by a General Secretary-Emperor.

The look is brutalist and Soviet-bloc flavoured: rugged heavy war machines, red colouring, angular Cyrillic lettering on structures and weapons, and concrete civilian buildings that double as bunkers. That last detail is a design statement as much as an aesthetic one — in this setting, civilian architecture is defensive architecture.

The Empire's identity is weight and recoverability. Its machinery is heavy and expensive, and it is the one faction confirmed to be able to restore destroyed super-heavy vehicles using a special repair unit rather than losing them. Its consumable infantry, the Brutes, are produced free by the Complector and are thrown at the enemy purely to take ground — the developer chose free infantry over an infantry health upgrade because a health upgrade "would be out of style for the faction".

Rebels and Bandits: fast, light, and the demo's opening enemy

Bandits and Rebels are the same side of the conflict seen from two angles: human rebels resisting imperial oppression, and the bandit factions that exist in the gray zones of the global map. In the demo they are the Bandit faction, and they are the starting opponent you face.

Their profile is the inverse of the Empire's. They have lower defence than the Empire but they are fast, fielding outward-looking armoured vehicles such as Technicals — Mad Max-style industrial vehicles with turrets bolted on. Some infantry and resource-gathering unit designs are shared with the Empire, which is worth knowing: a shared chassis means some of your own unit knowledge transfers when you fight them.

Mutants: close-quarters heavies that breed from corpses

The Mutants are described by the developer as an enemy that inspires horror. They are heavy, close-quarters monsters with a lot of heavy armour, and their entire design pushes the fight into melee range.

Their signature mechanic is what happens when they die. Mutant corpses spawn flies — a free but weak unit that is effective against any unit type — and some corpses create swarms of worms in large numbers. Those worm swarms are effectively the mutant faction's standard infantry. Compare that with the Empire, whose wrecks are about preserving expensive machines, and the asymmetry is clear: the Empire conserves, the Mutants convert death into more bodies.

Some heavy mutant units also break the standard armour model. Vehicles normally use a differentiated armour system with a front arc and a combined sides-and-rear arc, but some heavy mutant units have all-around armour and take no extra damage from side or rear hits. Flanking, which is the answer to most armour in this game, is not the answer here.

Robots: the technologically superior faction, absent from the demo

The Robots are the faction with the least published detail. What is stated is that they are a technologically superior machine faction, and that they are neither playable nor present as an opponent in the demo.

The developer has also referred to this slot in ways that suggest its identity is still in flux — the faction has been grouped with "aliens" in the fact sheet's framing, and the Robot name is explicitly a working one that can change. There are no confirmed Robot units, no roster notes and no description of how they play beyond "technologically superior".

Nuclear Ashes and the campaign question

The global layer is where the factions escalate. Under the "Nuclear Ashes" line on the Steam page, three powerful factions have rare superweapons capable of wiping cities to dust, turning them into a breeding ground for incurable diseases, or moving entire armies straight into a chasm.

Those three effects tell you what the strategic game is willing to do to you: destruction, attrition by plague, and the outright removal of your army from the map. No costs, cooldowns or acquisition conditions have been published for any of them, and it is not stated which three of the four factions hold them.

The broader campaign picture is settled in one respect and open in others. One campaign, approximately 15 hours, for the Empire — that is the developer's stated scope. The other three campaigns depend on the game's success. A skirmish mode with bots is possible but most likely only after the main game, because the game is heavily locked into the global map, and there is no multiplayer or co-op and never will be.

Related pages

• All Dust Front RTS units: categories and behaviour
• Best units in Dust Front RTS: a role-based read
• Dust Front RTS Dreadnought: modes, howitzer and wrecks
• MLRS and rocket artillery
• Official Dust Front RTS store page