Teleport Gate

Marching a squad across the map takes ticks, sometimes a lot of them. The Teleport Gate is the answer to that problem: it lets a stationed squad jump from one point you control to another instantly, for a price in energy. It is one of the strongest pieces of strategic mobility in the game, which is why it sits at the very top of a structure tree and comes with real limits.

Unlocking the Gate

The Teleport Gate is unlocked at Weapon Workshop level 5. That is the most expensive level of one of your military structures and takes a full day of game time on slower realms, so a working gate network is a mid-to-late commitment, not an opening move. Getting there means having already built Beam and Explosive weapons and both unit upgrades along the way.

How a Jump Works

A gate connects endpoints you control: your colony and the gate outposts you hold. To use it, you pick a squad that is currently stationed at one of those endpoints and send it to another. Instead of an ETA counted in ticks, the squad arrives effectively at once.

This is not free. Each jump spends energy, scaled to how far the trip would have been by normal travel. The cost is about half the travel time the squad would have spent marching, measured in ticks (specifically, the travel ticks rounded up and then halved). A short hop costs little energy; a jump that would have been a long, exposed march costs a lot more. Since energy is capped and refills slowly, gate-hopping is a deliberate spend, not something you do every tick.

You must control both ends. The departure point and the destination both have to be yours, and a captured endpoint usually has to be held for a stretch (its control ticks) before it counts as truly yours for gate use. You cannot gate into territory you have not secured.

What Blocks a Jump

A gate is powerful, so the enemy has tools to shut it down. A jump fails if:

• The departure point or the destination is jammed. Radar jamming aimed at a colony or gate endpoint closes gate travel through that point for as long as the jam lasts.
• The endpoint is under lockdown. A locked-down point will not let squads (or nukes) leave, so a gate jump out of it is blocked.
• You do not control the endpoint, or have not held it long enough.
• You do not have enough energy for the jump.

If a jump will not go through, the squad simply stays where it is. Watch your endpoints: a well-timed jam on a key gate can strand a relief force at exactly the wrong moment.

Gate Travel Versus Marching

Normal movement is slow but cheap and always available: it costs no energy, only time and a little oil, and nothing technological can stop a squad already on the move. The trade-offs are clear.

• Speed: A gate jump is instant. A march can take many ticks, up to the long end of squad travel.
• Cost: A march spends time and oil. A gate jump spends energy instead, more for longer distances.
• Reach: A march can go anywhere on the map. A gate only connects points you already control.
• Risk: A marching squad is visible and exposed for the whole trip. A gate jump skips that window entirely, but can be denied by jamming or lockdown.

Use marching to expand into new ground and to commit forces you are willing to leave in transit. Use the gate to react: to rush defenders to a threatened endpoint, to redeploy a strike squad between fronts you already hold, or to pull force out of danger before it is too late. The players who win late realms usually have a gate network and the energy to actually use it.

See also: the Structures overview, Movement, Squads, and Outposts.