User:Buckymancer/UnitTierList

This is an incomplete draft for a tier list for v1.14.2.0, updated March 2026

Formatting based on Aquanim's Tier List

Rating Scale

S Tier: Clear best in class, sometimes worth making an extra Plate for or otherwise warping the lane around its presence.

A Tier: Strongly preferred units within class, the typical unit here will be a solid generalist and also have some notable strength within its role.

B Tier: They do the class's basic job well, and have situations where they're better than the alternatives

C Tier: They do the class's basic job poorly, or only within a niche

D Tier: I don't think it's worth making; attempts to use it have repeatedly failed, or it's too expensive for what it is to the extent that I'd be better off making a new factory for a higher tier option.

F Tier: Using this unit is actively detrimental to the team. It's best used as a reservoir of reclaim for projects that are actually viable.

Unclassified: I do not understand this unit well enough to rate it

Ratings are for a mid-size to large teams game unless otherwise indicated. 1v1 or small teams ratings would be different. Some hybrid units go in multiple categories.

Constructors

A Tier

Quill: Fast and cheap makes it the best con at second-line tasks and particularly explosive expansion and microgridding. But being able to show up earlier after a fight in another lane is itself a significant perk, as is the strategic flexibility to quickly Plate off a distant teammate. It's not even particularly fragile.

Conjurer: The innate cloaking and jamming lets it get away with an awful lot, and the active area cloak lets it make plays as a budget support unit. Worse than the other A tier options at actually building stuff.

B Tier

Convict: Boring but reasonably effective. Its main perk is that gangs of them are difficult to kill, to the extent that you can attack move them with your army to benefit from incidental tanking, but you can also stick Bandits up one's sleeve for an improvised riot.

C Tier

Mason: It does construction jobs just fine, its above average speed means it's above average at expanding on flat ground. But it's overshadowed by Quill on flat terrain and the bot cons on rough terrain.

'Weaver: Slow and expensive, but in sufficiently nasty terrain all the other ground options are worse. Bringing one of them with your army to get radar coverage with your repair team isn't a bad idea, though. For big projects it's a bit more cost-effective than the cheapest cons.

D Tier

Wasp: Overpriced. It's actually faster than most of the ground cons, and it has a few tiny niches where Crane and maybe Athena are the only competition, but if you can use a ground con you generally should.

F Tier

Unclassified:

Athena: Doesn't build most of the things I'd want cons to build, but makes units instead.

Raiders

S Tier

Glaive: The gold standard of raiders as an army component

A Tier

Scorcher The best raider at quickly demolishing helpless targets, but requires a lot of micro against other raiders.

B Tier Bandit: A slow and expensive Glaive is still a functioning raider. It's got a comparative advantage as an anti-assault from its range and dodging ability. It tends to lose to heavier raiders.

Dagger: Speed specialist, flat ground only. They're good at pulling the opponent around and picking off lone raiders or skirms, but in a dense map that doesn't count for much. They can flex-AA and have the speed to try to intercept planes.

C Tier

Scythe: A specialist at deep raids with a side order of suicidal assassin. They're too expensive for general use.

Flea: Cheap annoyances. Use 'em to convince the opponents to build Lotuses or patrol raiders everywhere. Don't use 'em where there are Lotuses or raider patrols. They can swarm skirms and some assaults as long as they have no escort whatsoever. In today's meta that's not much of a niche despite having the highest practical DPS per cost in the game... but see the scouting section.

Venom: Has the opposite problem from Flea, where they can easily stun out light defenses but can't quickly turn the resulting opening into real damage. They need extra micro against groups of skirmishers because they have a tendency to stun their main target and stop dodging, or to step in other Venoms' AoE zones. This hybrid does better as a riot.

D Tier

Dirtbag]: They do some of the screening functions of raiders, and they're a cheap thing that can bash down Wind Generators and Metal Extractors unless something more than twice their cost contests the move. They can even die on the metal spot afterwards to delay rebuilding. They do not function as a general purpose raider.

F Tier

Locust: Can get kills on things that literally can't shoot back, but its DPS is far too low to properly raid rather than merely annoy.

Unclassified

Skirmishers/Fire Support

S Tier Recluse: The longest ranged conventional skirmisher, which lets them beat up the other skirmishers. Groups of Recluses can even devastate incoming raiders with spray-and-splash tactics. Their main downside is being fragile for their cost, and thus preferred pickoff targets. Move speed is a secondary drawback, as any army they're pressuring can easily disengage for repairs. While common wisdom says they're countered by AoE fire, their range lets them spread more than their competitors.

A Tier

Rogue: They comfortably outrange typical skirms and light porc, and pack a lot of alpha. Their accuracy against mobile units suffers, but they still win a lot of unit matchups by kiting. They benefit disproportionately from being able to hide behind Thug shields.

Scalpel: They trade away DPS and range for speed and reliability. The result is a skirmisher that scales well in the early-to-mid game and falls off hard once everything important outranges them.

Crab: Worth the premium cost if you can spare the tempo. Shreds other skirms. Gets much better with some sort of mobility support, like Lobster, or with bespoke terraform; in a favorable terrain it needs specific counters, but it's vulnerable trying to get to said positions so you want to either move it externally or manufacture the terrain where it already is.

B Tier

Ronin: Cheap and spammable, but also the most mobile skirmisher. They pay for it by having short enough range and vision that they take return hits from almost all porc and blunder into Gausses and Stingers without seeing them. They also tend to lose head-to-head to other Skirmishers.

Fencer: Unmatched range lets them batter down even Gauss turrets from safety, they can zone out the more fragile enemy skirmishers, and they're accurate enough to get partial riot credit. But they can't dodge and shoot at the same time, so they're trumped by any unit with longer range. They're a strong and forcing early tempo play, though, because they prey on Lotuses.

Badger: Good range for this category, so easy to keep alive, but very poor DPS. They miss a lot while kiting, but the lingering mines give partial credit for misses in a back-and-forth. Best used in a skirm stack behind another Skirmisher.

C Tier Dominatrix: High risk high reward, but it gets bullied harder than anything else in the skirm mirror. If properly protected, though, a group of Dominatrixes can win a fight at negative cost. Notably the worst unit in the game for your attrition graphs, which don't count captures.

Hermit: They're just long enough range to skirmish most riots, and agile enough to dodge slow projectiles, and tough enough to make autoretreat useful. These strengths let them act as a very effective pseudo-skirm in the factory mirror, although Recluses generally overshadow them in the role.

D Tier

F Tier Felon: The shieldbot factory has several very powerful shield units. Attach this to them to make them worse at their jobs. In exchange, you get a few random pickoffs at the start of each fight. This suggests it should work as an attrition tool, but the damage it does to your ability to fight pitched battles usually means it won't survive.

Unclassified

Riots

S Tier

A Tier

Mace: The riot that bullies other riots. Good speed, good DPS and excellent range. Unfortunately, it's expensive enough to be a premium target for enemy fire support without the health to match, and lack of AoE impairs it against assault swarms.

Venom: Extreme mobility for a riot and generous AoE make groups of Venoms very difficult to raid through. Other riots will outrange them but the AoE lockdown can turn the tables on a careless riot ball.

B Tier

Reaver: The budget riot. Being slow and short-ranged are major downside, but they're cheap and punch well above their weight when they do get in range. Putting one on patrol is a good substitute for medium porc.

Ripper: A defensively oriented archetypal riot that specializes in large AoE, which makes it good support to keep Fencers or Commanders from getting swarmed. Gets bullied by other riots in small numbers and relies on AoE to fight larger groups of them. It's usually a good idea to bring at least two to avoid its reload time becoming a liability.

CLAYMORE: HUGE EXPLOSIONS for armies that want to bring INSTANT DESTRUCTION to their enemies! It'd see a lot more play on land maps if it weren't in the same factory as Mace, but it's got a different target profile - it wants to use its superior speed to get into position to make cost in one HUGE EXPLOSION, and to avoid bad fights with other riot-skirm armies in the meantime. And it can pull retreat advantage on some of those other riots if they chase. The biggest downside as a riot is that it can't shoot across domains - it does nothing to air units and its shots get blocked by two elmos of water.

C Tier Redback: Does solidly against other riots, but lacks the speed to close with pretty much anything and thus ends up as a strictly defensive tool unless it can use ridges to set up ambushes.

Outlaw: Effectively a support-riot. It does not function on its own in small numbers. Larger groups are decent at defending from raider swarms without help, but do want help to finish anything even remotely heavy. They have a niche as minesweepers/decloakers.

D Tier

F Tier

Unclassified:

Assault

S Tier

Thug: The game's top meatshield by virtue of shielding with shields rather than meat. They perform best with a secondary DPS source but any old riot will do.

A Tier

Convict: Thug variant that trades its built-in weapon for the ability to build Lotuses.

Halberd The queen of the fast assaults. The combination of cheap dps, speed and health lets a Halberd gang go for aggressive pickoffs despite low raw health. She needs to disengage earlier in her health bar than the other assaults, but her armor lets her do more before hitting that point anyway and her speed lets her break contact very quickly. She excels at composure under fire - repairs are cheap and she gets the full benefit of armor. Just don't trade hits with raiders, her ballistics are poor enough that she rarely hits them.

B Tier

Ravager: Generic fast assault, specializing in run-bys and hit-and-runs. It's not particularly good as the line-holder unit Rovers desperately need in midgame teams, but it does its duty there regardless. It's borderline at pitched fights with riots.

Aspis: As an Aegis morph, it's a universally available if expensive solution to the problem of your units dying on contact. Just remember to charge it before fighting, and to pull it back early.

Revenant: It would be an S tier assault if the opponents didn't make AA. Instead, it's a role-player to exploit holes in their AA cover.

C Tier Mace: Can just drive at porc and beat it down through sheer DPS. It takes expensive losses in return, however.

D Tier

Knight: Has trouble actually assaulting because it's so slow, and it's not particularly tough either. Use it in a different role

F Tier

Unclassified

Dirtbag]: People attack move 'em with autoretreat into enemy porc. They don't seem very good at it but I haven't tried myself.

Artillery

S Tier

Impaler: A group of Impalers is a delete button for buildings on a 10 second cooldown. Their payoff is limited mainly by your attention and scouting. They're worse against units but can often do a drive-by at 1500 range against parked ones. Played well, they're extremely difficult for the other team to engage.

A Tier

Phantom: Attrition machine best used as assassins. Very difficult to remove. Energy requirements limit its early mass deployment. It's fortunate to share a factory with Gremlin.

Lance: Premium problem deleter with a long cooldown. Lance is the specialist among big artillery at dealing with mobile targets. The main tradeoff is that they cannot quickly deal with Lotus spam. A large group of well-supported Lances is among the easiest endgame compositions to reach although not an unstoppable one. Having a wide body and poor turning means you need to control them carefully in battle because allied units can easily embarrass their pathing.

B Tier

Sling: The best artillery you can buy for 100 metal. Highly threatening to medium porc in numbers, but easy to trump and hard to deal with when spread widely.

C Tier

D Tier Badger: Has a niche identifying targets for other artillery, and pulls its weight battering area shields, but very slow at actually killing buildings.

F Tier

Unclassified

Anti-Heavy

S Tier

Lance: A warning shot may make them back off, but multiple Lances are better used to either kill a heavy outright or catch it overcommitted. Getting there is expensive, however.

A Tier

Racketeer: Doesn't kill the heaviest heavies, but can make 'em go away for a fraction of their price and leaves 'em vulnerable for assassination attempts.

Gnat: OP on paper, not quite so much in practice, it's the key component of the traditional commnap combo. Even without stealing the target, a Gnat swarm is dirt cheap for the effect it has on fights between heavies. However, they drop like flies in the face of accurate riot escorts.

B Tier

Dart: Turns the tables on the anti-heavy heavies. They typically won't win by themselves, but they can render the heavy ineffective and keep it from escaping.

C Tier

Knight: Has a second life locking down even slower units, particularly ones large enough that it won't randomly miss them, although it needs help or enemy carelessness to close the gap.

D Tier

F Tier

Widow: Bait. The cost is prohibitive. It's expensive even to move it. You need several to stun the true high end units. And when it does hit, not only is it usually dead in retaliation, but the opponents know what you're trying to kill and can punish you for the attempt. It sometimes works, but without exceptional judgment it's firmly negative expected value.

Unclassified

Support

S Tier

Charon: Dirt cheap logistical assistant. As a base, it moves slow units where they need to go - factory guarding or ferrying armies between lanes. But with the right cargo it's arguably out-competing other planes and gunships at their own strengths - carrying workers instead of using an air con, carrying Reavers instead of attacking the same vulnerability with Locusts, or dropping Snitches as a heavily discounted Likho.

A Tier

Aspis: Once the game hits the artillery phase, these are very good at keeping your other stuff from randomly dying to late game hazards. The flexibility to move them around can frustrate the opponents' silo and artillery play. Just be aware that the bubble makes them look like a target and some shorter ranged options (and AA) will happily poke them just to make them recharge.

Hercules: Slow Charon with extra lift capacity. Most of the Striders could use the lift. But it has a secondary application kidnapping immobilized heavies, which Charon tends to be too fragile for, as well as a bunch of rare niches.

B Tier

C Tier Iris: Meta as a luxury support unit, and a headache to deal with, but they're far more expensive than the alternatives. Attentive opponents should generally be able to figure out where it is and Sparrow is a universal countermeasure.

D Tier

F Tier

Unclassified

Scouting/Intel

S Tier

Gremlin: Unparalleled as an advance scout for a ground army, and cheap enough to be disposable. The likelihood that the enemy can't tell they've been seen is a major draw.

A Tier

Flea: They work either as a pre-positioned mole or a disposable spotter. A comparatively cheap group of Fleas can quickly comb a large area for cloaked units, and fight a lot of the things they might find, or lurk as a tripwire that reveals cloaked units crossing it. Their one major drawback is that attentive foes will notice you placing them and deliberately clean them up.

B Tier

Bolas: One Bolas on a target keeps its slow from decaying. A gang of them fills the slow meter very quickly. And they're an inconvenient weight for a lot of the heavies to engage.

C Tier

Dart: An expensive Flea in this role that can't climb nor cloak. Impalers make spotting valuable enough to use them as scouts anyway, as they're not so expensive to force a fac switch.

D Tier Widow: In theory, its tiny decloak radius lets it slip through gaps Gremlins or Scythes couldn't to get valuable backline intel. In practice, it's prohibitively expensive. The only thing keeping it out of F tier is that _maybe_ you can zap an Antinuke at a critical moment, in which case the intel is incidental.

F Tier

Unclassified

Single-Use/Bombs

A Tier

Snitch: The archetypal walking bomb. A sneaky Snitch can destroy entire armies. An insufficiently sneaky Snitch does nothing.

B Tier

Imp: Powerful as a threat, but they take lots of support to actually function.

Bombers

S Tier

A Tier

B Tier

C Tier

D Tier

F Tier

Unclassified

Air

S Tier

A Tier Revenant: A bomber that doesn't need airpads, or an assault with air movement, take your pick. While it's vulnerable to flex-AA, it can soak some AA fire in exchange for a pickoff, and if they don't respond appropriately the same Revenants can make another run in ten seconds

B Tier Nimbus: Punishes the opponents' front for having their AA too far back. Always inefficient at damage output due to accuracy problems, but make up for it with the range to easily retreat. Successful use typically involves abusing vision mechanics or the opponents simply not adjusting.

C Tier Harpy: Has a narrow window of utility at the start of the game, where it can mess with raider fights and skirm duels with impunity. But they get run out of town pretty quickly by the likes of a single Razor or a trio of Vandals.

D Tier

Locust: Gunships' DPS-per-cost champion, but its DPS is too low to actually take fights. Blunders into Hacksaws. Borderline unusable in contested areas, but sometimes one or two is the best way to remove a specific annoyance.

Unclassified

Blastwing, Krow

Anti-Air

S Tier

A Tier

Flail: The assassin of AA. By the time the opponents hear the launch, their plane is already doomed. But they won't know where the Flails are for a couple of seconds and they're already moving. Against the tougher gunships, although their DPS is lacking, their move speed makes up for it by giving them extended chase time. Needs radar support, though.

Vandal: One Vandal is cheap anti-loiter. A swarm is a well-rounded air defense that can move under its own power. The small individual shots means they don't suffer much from breakpoints, but the weight of numbers gives them good anti-bomber alpha anyway.

Tarantula: Swift slayer. Long range and high DPS make up for its high unit cost - you get the same output with the same area coverage with fewer units. Its low speed for the class is a significant problem, but it generally doesn't have trouble keeping up with a push. It also has AoE, as if Swifts weren't afraid enough of its one-shot potential.

B Tier

Trident: Slower than the other air-to-air options, but with much less difficulty dealing its full damage. It has trouble stuffing incoming bombers because of the long interval between launches, but that air mobility helps it get into position to deal its full burst. And a group of Tridents is generally favored against Swifts.

C Tier

Gremlin: Handicapped against bombers by their short range that falls off further with altitude, they can make up for it with ambush tactics. Their DPS per cost is excellent, which means they do fine for their cost against most gunships and they are notably effective at stuffing Blastwings. It's often worth using a small number of Gremlin specialists to spot for longer ranged AA.

Crasher: Short enough range to almost be overshadowed by Fencer, and a reload long enough to ruin their DPS without giving them notably good burst. Their main benefit is speed - outrunning most raiders being able to keep up with targets even Flail cannot. They're saved from D tier by chasing tactics and the Roam move state, as well as the occasional situation that requires mobile AA so urgently that you can't plate.

D Tier

F Tier

Unclassified

Static Defense

S Tier

A Tier

B Tier

C Tier

D Tier

F Tier

Unclassified

Strider/Endgame

S Tier

A Tier

B Tier

C Tier

D Tier

F Tier

Unclassified

Sea Control

S Tier

A Tier

Claymore: The premium anti-sub option, and can fend off surface raiders as well, but it needs support against both air and artillery, and it loses head-to-head to Corsairs.

B Tier Bolas: Competes with Corsair as a heavy raider, and Seawolf as an anti-heavy army component in an environment with lots of heavy to go around. Not necessary, but playable

C Tier

Dagger: Its pure speed gives it a niche giving the enemy army the runaround, and it can punish them for spreading too much in response. It also hits air units, but it's otherwise worse than Hunter.

Lance: Its main perk is being able to go onto islands to avoid torpedoes, which it needs to do frequently because it can't snipe underwater stuff. Envoy also raises the bar for artillery stats, although Envoy is itself a premium Lance target if you manage to get a clean shot.

D Tier

Mace, Halberd: Lose to almost everything afloat, and can't hit anything _not_ afloat either.

Scalpel: Badly outclassed by Mistral.

F Tier

Unclassified

Commanders

A Tier Strike Commander: The best frontline Commander. Speed plus regen plus radar jamming helps it stick around. Engineer Commander: The best backline Commander. It's slow and vulnerable, but the extra build power more than compensates if you aren't risking it, and blueprinting has a ton of niche applications.

B Tier Recon Commander: It can jump plop and take metal spots in unfriendly terrain. Later it trades some of its build power for the ability to jump on raider leaks. A big team generally wants one or two, but it's map dependant.

C Tier Guardian Commander: Needs upgrades to match Strike Commander's forward presence. The drone intel is a nice perk but lets the other team know it's present.