You've got an army, a base and an economy. The world is where you point them. This one is about the two questions the map answers: who can I hit, and how long until I get there.
Read the top half for how targeting works. Read the rest if you want to pick your fights well.
The world in one line
Everyone sits at a real location, you can raid anyone who isn't under new-player protection - there's no strength gate - and reaching a target costs travel time that grows with distance.
A real place, not a target list
Every base, yours included, has an actual position on a shared map. That has one big consequence: raids are geographic. Arrival time is a fixed floor plus a cost that grows with distance - so a near neighbour is a quick strike and someone across the map is a real commitment. Very long hauls are bounded (the travel clock tops out after a few hours even to the far edge), but the cost of launching a distant raid keeps climbing - so reach is never free.
Your army travels at the pace of its slowest unit (the same fact that matters in a fight - see the combat dispatch). A heavy force is a slow force, which means more warning for the defender. That pace isn't fixed for good: the Drive research line speeds your whole army up, pulling those times down as you invest. Distance, composition and research together decide your reach.
Who you can hit - no strength gate
This is the rule that surprises people coming from other base-builders. There's no strength gate. The old "you can only attack bases within X% of your power" system is gone. Army power still exists, but only as an internal number the combat engine uses when a fight resolves - it doesn't decide who you're allowed to attack.
So what stops a veteran farming a beginner? Two things, and neither is a matchmaker:
New-player protection. A fresh base sits under a protection window and simply can't be raided until it lifts. On the map it reads as locked.
Geography. You spawn out at the frontier (next section), so the bases actually near you are your rough cohort, not the established players sitting elsewhere on the map. Anyone can be reached, but distance is a real cost, so who's close shapes who you hit day to day.
Sitting on top of all that is a rating - a competitive score that tracks how well you raid. Beat someone tougher than you and it climbs; lose and it slips. It shows as a number and a tier (Unproven up through Apex), and it's the ladder you're really climbing. But be clear on what it is: a scoreboard, not a gate. It doesn't decide who you can see or who you can hit.
What you can see before you scout
The map gives you two levels of knowledge, and the gap between them is the whole information game.
Public - free, for every base on the map:
Position - where it is, so you can measure the distance.
Who owns it - the handle and their Concord doctrine, the shape of army they favour.
Their rating - the number and tier from above. A rough read on how good the player is.
Whether it's open - can you raid it right now, or is it under protection or on a cooldown from your last hit.
That tells you who a base is. It tells you nothing about what's standing inside it right now.
Behind espionage - the wall:
What they're actually holding - salvage and ore, and how much of it is exposed rather than locked away in the Vault (the surplus is the part you could actually loot).
What's home to fight you - the garrison, its size and its make-up.
To cross that wall you need intel (the whole of "How Intel Works"). Until you've scouted, you're reading a name and a ranking, not a battle plan. The map tells you who's worth a closer look; a spy tells you whether to commit. That split is deliberate - it rewards scouting without making the map useless to a player who hasn't unlocked spies yet.
Finding your feet - spawn and relocate
New players spawn at an expanding frontier, which clusters newcomers together rather than dropping them next to established bases. You get neighbours at roughly your stage.
And you're not stuck where you land. You can relocate - free, on a cooldown - to reposition yourself: away from a bad neighbourhood, closer to the action, wherever suits. It's a real lever, not a panic button, so use it with a reason.
(The map itself - panning, zoom, the minimap, and armies you can watch moving across it - landed in "Onto the Map". This dispatch is about what the map means, not how it looks.)
How to play it well
Read the board, then scout. The map shows you who's open and roughly how they rank as a player; a spy shows you what's actually home. Never commit a raid off the map alone - a name and a rating aren't a garrison.
Mind the distance both ways. A near target gives you little warning - and gives them little when they hit back. A far one is a bigger commitment for everyone.
Counter-scout anything inbound. Geography means a distant attacker gives you time to read them and re-garrison (see the intel and combat dispatches). A close one doesn't - plan accordingly.
Climb on quality, not volume. Rating rewards beating real opposition, not farming. Punching up and winning moves you; stomping the helpless doesn't.
Relocate with purpose. If your patch is all bots or all sharks, move - but spend the cooldown on a position you actually want.
The honest caveat
The biggest gap is honest to name: right now the only reason to send an army somewhere is another player. Reasons to push into the world that aren't someone's front door - the PvE side - are the next big thing the map is built to hold, and they're not here yet. The new-player protection window and where the frontier drops newcomers are both still being tuned, so the early neighbourhood will shift as I watch it. And the map itself is young - if travel times feel off, or the public read on a base shows too much or too little before you scout, that's exactly the feedback I want.
Open the map. Find someone worth hitting. Then go find out what they're really holding.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore