Intelligence and Radar
Knowing where the enemy is can matter more than how big your army is. Intelligence is how you turn a blank map into a picture of who is moving against you. The foundation of all of it is radar: passive coverage that watches the ground around your territory and tells you what is there, without you doing anything each tick.
What radar does
Radar reveals two things inside the area it covers: hostile squads and outposts. If an enemy squad is sitting on a tile within your radar, or an enemy outpost stands there, you see it. Outside that coverage the map is dark, and a force could be massing one tile past your edge without you knowing.
Radar is always on. You do not spend energy or issue an order to use it. It simply watches the ground you can reach, every tick, for free. That makes it the cheapest intelligence you have and the first thing you should think about when you pick where to settle and what to build.
How far you can see
Your vision comes from your Colony Radar structure, and it grows as you level that structure up:
- Level 1 covers roughly 3 cells around your colony. This is what you start with on day one.
- Level 2 widens it to about 4 cells.
- Level 3 reaches about 5 cells.
- Level 4 reaches about 6 cells, the widest a single colony sees.
Every level you add pushes your horizon outward and gives you more warning before something reaches you. Raising Colony Radar is one of the most underrated early investments, because warning time is what lets you react instead of just absorbing a hit.
Extending coverage with outposts
A single colony can only see so far. To watch ground far from home, you capture and upgrade a radar outpost. A radar outpost projects its own coverage, roughly 4 cells around itself, so you can post vision over a contested border, a chokepoint, or the approach to an ally without stretching your colony's own radar.
A freshly taken radar outpost does not switch on instantly. It comes online after a short startup delay (about 6 ticks) before it begins projecting coverage, so plan to hold it a little while before you rely on it.
Sharing radar with allies
Radar is shared across your alliance. Every patch of ground an alliance member can see, you can see too, and your coverage feeds theirs. A well-spread alliance effectively builds one large shared map, which is one of the strongest reasons to coordinate where members settle and place radar outposts.
What radar will not tell you
Radar is broad but shallow. It tells you that hostile squads are in an area, but not their exact composition, weapon mix, or true strength. It also will not show you squads that are still in transit and being kept hidden until they arrive. When you need detail (how many, what kind, what is incoming) you have to scan. Radar finds the threat; scans read it.
See also: Scans for reading the detail radar cannot, Spies and Agents for intelligence from inside enemy territory, and Jamming and Lockdown for how radar can be shut off.