Recruitment
Units do not appear instantly. You recruit them at your military structures, pay for them in resources, and wait while they train over a number of ticks. Recruitment is the bridge between a healthy economy and a real army, and how you manage the queue decides how fast you can field force.
Where units are trained
Units are produced at your Military Chassis structure and the related military buildings. Those structures are what unlock each chassis, weapon, and upgrade focus in the first place. If a unit type is greyed out, you are missing the structure level or tech that unlocks it, not the resources. Build the military side of your colony before you expect to train the heavier or more specialised units.
What recruitment costs
Each unit costs a mix of Metal, Oil, and Workers, and the cost climbs with the chassis and the upgrade focus. Heavier bodies and stronger tuning cost more across the board.
| Unit | Metal | Oil | Workers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infantry, Armor | 100 | 0 | 1 |
| Infantry, Damage | 150 | 50 | 1 |
| Infantry, Range | 200 | 100 | 1 |
| Vehicle, Armor | 200 | 0 | 2 |
| Vehicle, Damage | 300 | 100 | 2 |
| Vehicle, Range | 400 | 200 | 2 |
| Tank, Armor | 300 | 0 | 3 |
| Tank, Damage | 450 | 150 | 3 |
| Tank, Range | 600 | 300 | 3 |
Workers spent on recruitment are consumed, so a big training run draws down the same Workers that boost your Metal and Oil income. Armor units are always the cheapest of their chassis and need no Oil, which makes them the natural backbone of an early army.
The recruitment queue
Recruitment is queued, not parallel. You line up the units you want and they complete in order as the realm ticks. Training time is set by the chassis: Infantry take 2 ticks, Vehicles take 4 ticks, and Tanks take 6 ticks each. A queue of ten Tanks is a long wait, so plan your production well ahead of when you need the army, not the moment a threat appears.
Recruitment overhead
Here is the part new players miss. The bigger your standing army, the more every additional unit costs to recruit. This is recruitment overhead, and it scales with your total soldier value (Infantry count as 1 each, Vehicles 2, Tanks 3). Roughly every full hundred points of soldier value adds another twelve percent to recruitment cost, and there is no cap.
The practical consequences:
- A second army is meaningfully more expensive than your first. Mass early while overhead is low.
- Overhead drops the moment your army shrinks, so it is recalculated before any replacement is costed. Losing units in a fight makes the survivors' replacements cheaper than they were.
- Hoarding idle units you never use still taxes every future recruitment. Keep your army purposeful.
See also
Read the Military Overview for how recruitment sits in the wider loop, see Unit Types for the stats behind each cost, and check Economy and Income to balance a recruitment run against your resource production.