You've fought a few raids. This one is about the other half of the game: the slow part, where you turn a starter base into something that hits hard and holds - and then into more than one base. Two engines drive a single base, your buildings and your research, and they work differently on purpose. Once you've got the hang of one base, you can start founding others.
Read the top half for how a base is shaped. Read on for where the real power comes from, and how you grow past a single plot.
The shape of it in one line
Your HQ sets the ceiling, your buildings do the jobs, your research is the long game that makes everything you own hit harder - and once you've researched the room for it, you can hold more than one base at a time.
The HQ runs the show
One rule shapes your whole base: your HQ caps every other building. Nothing can out-level your headquarters. Want a higher generator, a bigger vault, a deeper defence bay? Level the HQ first, then the rest can follow.
It sounds restrictive. It's actually the thing that keeps a base legible - you can't sprint one building to the moon and ignore the rest, so every base grows as a whole rather than a single spike. The HQ is your tempo. When you're stuck, it's almost always the next thing to raise.
There's no separate anti-rush gate sitting on top of that. I had one and pulled it. The cost curve does the job by itself: each level costs geometrically more than the last, so rushing isn't blocked, it just gets expensive fast. You set your own pace and pay for it.
The buildings that matter
Every structure does one job. The ones you'll touch most:
Generators - your passive income. The Salvage Reclaimer and Ore Extractor earn while you're away, and their level sets how fast you bank each resource. The accrual is lazy - the game works out what you've earned the moment you look, so you lose nothing by logging off.
The Vault - your storage and your loot shield in one building. Its level sets how much of each resource you can hold before you overflow, and it protects a floor of that stockpile that no raider can take. The protected floor starts at 10% and climbs to 30% as you level it (more on loot in the economy dispatch). Raise the Vault and you both hold more and bolt more of it down.
The Defence Bay - gates how many defences you can field. Your turrets are real combatants in a fight (see the combat dispatch), and the bay is what lets you put more of them on the board.
The Watch - your espionage building, covered in full back in "How Intel Works". It's available early, so you can be scouting from your first sessions rather than waiting for the late game.
The Support Bay - opens at HQ 5 and builds your support units: the Steward that founds a colony and the Pioneer that plants a mining outpost. More on both below.
Defences come in two shapes worth knowing: some you build more of (turrets and traps - quantity), some you level up (walls, vault, defence bay escalate in cost and strength as you raise them). Note that walls don't fight in a lane of their own - they soak damage as an ablative shield that absorbs hits before your force takes them. The build queue handles all of it: you pay as each item starts rather than when you queue it, and base builds, defence builds and unit training all run on separate queues, so reinforcing your walls never blocks putting up a new structure or training troops.
Where the real power lives: research
Here's the part that surprises people. Your individual units don't gain veterancy - forty Railgunners are forty Railgunners, fresh or seasoned. So when your army gets stronger, where does that come from?
Research. Your Proving Ground runs an account-wide upgrade engine. Four lines lift your army:
Weapons - the attack of everything you field.
Armour - your damage resistance.
Hull - your units' HP.
Drive - your speed, which means faster armies and quicker travel.
Each level of a line raises that stat across your whole army by a small amount - interim, it's about 4% a level - and every level costs noticeably more than the last, climbing roughly 12% each time. A fifth line, Turret Calibration, does the same job for your standing defences - it lifts turret attack, and it lifts harder than the army lines, about 9% a level, because turrets are your main defensive lever. Its cost climbs on the same curve as the rest.
It isn't quite endless, though it's meant to feel close. Each research line is capped at your Proving Ground level, and the Proving Ground is capped by your HQ. So the ladder runs HQ, then Proving Ground, then research - no hard ceiling is written into the game, you climb it by raising the buildings underneath. The Proving Ground itself opens at HQ 8, so research is a mid-game engine, not a day-one one.
This is why unit costs are flat. A unit costs the same to build at hour one and hour five hundred - the minutes-to-months span of progression lives in research, not in ever-pricier troops. Your counts stay sane; your power compounds. Pick the lines that suit how you play: lean Weapons and Drive if you raid, Armour and Hull if you'd rather be the base nobody wants to hit.
Growing past one base
For a while your base is your whole world. Then it isn't.
There's a sixth research line - Frontier Logistics - and it does something the others don't: each level grants one more base slot. Research it once (it opens at HQ 5) and you can hold a second base; keep going and you hold more. Each new slot costs more than the last, on the same curve as the rest of your research, so a wider empire is a paced investment rather than a default.
That same research is what unlocks your first colonist, so it's the one gate you clear before you can expand at all. Founding a colony then works a bit like a raid in reverse. You train a Steward at your Support Bay and dispatch it to a hex you pick on the world map. It has to sit at least two hexes clear of any base you already own, so colonies spread out rather than huddle together. Send a garrison and a load of cargo along with the Steward if you want the new base defended and stocked from its first minute. When the Steward arrives, the colony is founded on the spot.
Every base runs its own economy - its own generators, its own Salvage and Ore, its own storage. Raising a building on one base does nothing for another; each is a separate project with its own queues. Research is the exception: your Weapons, Hull and the rest are account-wide, so every base you hold fights with the same upgraded army. You pay for research out of whichever base you're working from, but the level you unlock applies to all of them.
More bases means more income and more presence on the map. It also means more to defend and further to move things around - the deeper logistics of hauling resources between your bases is its own subject, and I'll cover it in the next dispatch.
A second kind of base: mining outposts
Colonies are your permanent territory. There's a lighter, more specialised base sitting alongside them: the mining outpost, and it exists for one thing - a third resource called Breach Shard.
Breach Shard doesn't come from generators. It's pulled out of the world. Crystal and rift tiles on the map hold it, and you claim one by planting a mining outpost on it. You train a Pioneer at the Support Bay - unlocked by its own research line, Forward Operations - and dispatch it the way you'd send a Steward, with two differences: an outpost only lands on the right kind of tile, and it can sit right next to your other bases instead of keeping its distance.
An outpost isn't forever. It runs a refinery loop - raw Breach Shard builds up on its own, and you run an Extract to lock it in as the secured resource you can actually spend - and after about a week it destabilises and is gone. It's a claim, not a colony: go where the Shard is, work it, pull out before it collapses.
That's the short version. Breach Shard, the refinery loop and what the stuff is actually for deserve their own dispatch, and they'll get one. This is just so the outpost you'll see on the map reads for what it is - not a colony, and it doesn't play like one.
How to play it well
Six things:
The honest caveat
Multi-base is new - and mining outposts newer still - so the parts around expansion are the ones I'll be tuning first: the two-hex spacing rule, what a Steward costs, how long an outpost should last, how much a second base actually earns you against the extra front it opens. And every number here - the 1:1 HQ cap, the ~4% per research level, the ~12% cost climb, a base slot per Frontier Logistics level, build times - is a knob I'll keep turning as I watch how bases actually grow. If progression feels too slow, too fast, or like it stalls at a particular point, that's the feedback I want.
Level something. Then go see what it changed.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore