Light · Ground · ×24
Skitter
Melee chaff swarm
Twenty-four cheap bodies that soak the big guns and swarm single-shot heavies.
- Squad
- ×24
- HP
- 500
- Speed
- 16 m/s
Knee-high five-legged drones with drill mandibles. They pour across the field like a carpet and win by numbers.
On the battlefield
The Skitter is chaff: a carpet of twenty-four drones whose job is to be shot at. Every heavy gun on the field wastes a whole shell killing one 500 HP drone, so a single squad in front of your line buys your damage dealers seconds of free fire. At 16 m/s they are among the fastest machines on the ground, which lets them close on slow, single-target machines and eat them alive: in the launch tests a Skitter wave beats the Aurochs, the Heron, the Salvo, the Courser and the Hexguard. They cannot touch air, and anything that hits an area shreds them: Ridgebacks, Torches, Weavers and the Cutter's beam all clear a swarm, as does the Landship.
Hexguard
Courser
Heron
Aurochs
Salvo
Ridgeback
Rotor
Cutter
Torch
Mirage
Weaver
Breaker
LandshipFrom equal-supply battles of each pair at 400, 800 and 1,600 supply (no techs, 20 seeds each). Real armies mix units, so read these as tendencies.
Where to deploy
In front, as a screen ahead of your real army, or on a flank to run around the enemy line into its artillery. Spread two squads apart so one flamethrower can't burn both.
Early and late rounds
Strongest in the first rounds, when the enemy has single-target guns and few answers to numbers. Late, a squad still earns its 100 supply as a decoy that pulls fire for the first seconds of the battle.
Techs that change its job
Tunnel Run turns it into an assassin: the squad burrows at the start (untargetable) and surfaces among the enemy, ideal against artillery hiding in the back. Diamond Teeth (+125% damage) lets it chew through heavies; Brood spawns a new drone for every kill and snowballs against other chaff; Acid Burst leaves corroding acid where each drone dies, punishing whatever killed it.
Anatomy
Drag, hover and tap the parts. Open it full screen.
Stats
- Deploy cost
- 100
- supply
- Unlock
- Free
- unlocked from the start
- Squad
- ×24
- 24 machines
- HP
- 500
- per machine
- Damage
- 79
- per hit
- Attack interval
- 0.6 s
- Squad DPS
- 3,160
- whole squad, before armor
- Range
- Melee
- Speed
- 16 m/s
- Targets
- Ground
- Splash
- None
- Layer
- Ground
- Footprint
- 5×2
- tiles of 10 m
Level 1, no techs. Distances in metres (one board tile is 10 m).
Techs
| Tech | Cost | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tunnel Run | 200 | Starts each battle untargetable and invulnerable, until it attacks |
| Acid Burst | 150 | Leaves corroding acid (6 m radius for 6 s: eats 3% of max HP a second, +150% damage taken) where each machine dies |
| Brood | 200 | Each kill spawns 1 Skitter |
| Diamond Teeth | 200 | +125% damage |
| Overdrive | 150 | Attacks 25% sooner (shorter interval) |
| Heavy Plating | 100 | +40% HP, blocks 60 damage from every hit |