The Game

Wavefront: Vanguard is a low-poly, combined-arms real-time strategy game about seeing first, striking first, and holding the line on land, at sea and in the air.

Most RTS games treat vision as a circle around each unit. Here, information is the main weapon. An enemy only exists for you while one of your detectors actually holds it: eyes, radar, sonar, magnetic sensors or a laser designator. Every detector has its own physics, range limits, blind spots and counters. Winning means building a sensor picture the enemy can't match, then hitting what it shows you.

Players	1–8 per match, human or AI, in any alliance arrangement
Modes	Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, Persistent World, plus 15 single-player missions
Maps	Procedurally generated islands, archipelagos, straits and riverlands, 8 km across and up, in temperate, desert or arctic biomes
Multiplayer	Player-hosted over Steam (friend or public lobbies, invites) or LAN; skirmish against AI offline
Look	Fully procedural low-poly art: every unit, building, prop and effect is generated in code
Languages	English, French and Spanish
Platform	Windows 10/11, on Steam. Coming soon to Early Access
Engine	Unity 6 (URP), FishNet networking, Steamworks

An armour engagement. The fused sensor picture in the corner lists every contact and which detectors are holding it.

The information war

Every detector on your side, and on your allies' side, feeds one fused sensor picture. What you can shoot is what that picture holds, and every detector has a hard range beyond which nothing is seen.

Detector	Carried by	Range	What to know
Eyes / optics	Every unit	300–600 m	Needs line of sight. Shrinks at night and in bad weather unless the unit has thermal optics.
Ground radar	Radar station, early warning radome, airfield, CIWS	1.5–5.5 km	Follows the real terrain, so hills cast radar shadows. Low fliers hide in ground clutter.
Ship radar	Patrol boat, frigate, carrier	1.6–3 km	The same, from the sea.
Airborne early warning	AEW aircraft	6 km air, 4 km surface	Look-down radar from altitude. Hills never mask it.
Aircraft radar	Fighter, patrol aircraft	up to 3.2 km	A fighter only sees the 60° cone ahead of its nose.
Sonar	Ships, submarines, shipyard	0.6–2.4 km	Underwater only. Loud ships are heard furthest, deep submarines only close in.
Magnetic (MAD)	Sensor buoys, patrol aircraft	~0.7 km	Finds hulls and mines through water at any depth.
ESM	Many units	up to 3.5 km	Hears enemy radars and jammers transmitting.
IR designator	Forward observer, UAV	short	Locks a target and makes it a magnet for heat seekers.
Counter-battery radar	Counter-Battery Radar	4 km	Back-tracks shells and ballistic missiles to whoever fired them.
Mine detector	Mine-clearing vehicle	60 m	Reveals enemy land mines to the team.

• Emission control. Switch a radar off and it vanishes from enemy ESM, but it's blind while it's off. It's also the answer to an anti-radiation missile, which only homes on an emitter while it transmits.
• Jamming. A jamming station projects an aimable 30° cone out to 2.6 km. Anything inside it drops off every other team's radar. Hills shelter what's behind them, and the jammer's own noise makes it a target.
• Target size matters. Small drones and missiles are picked up much closer in than a frigate, and the stealth fighter closer still.
• Map discovery. The ground itself has to be found. Every map starts under a dark shroud. A radar sweep or an aircraft overflight surveys the relief as a contour map, and only eyes on the ground explore it in full. What your side learns stays learned for the rest of the battle.

Radar scope: the world as your radars actually see it.

Thermal, in white-hot, black-hot or ironbow: engines, fires and tracers glow. Smoke still blocks sight.

Night vision: a wide, grainy picture that still can't see through terrain.

The Layers menu paints each detector's coverage straight onto the 3D terrain: radar shadows, blind-spot hatching, sweeping beams, a translucent cone for each fighter's nose radar and the jammer's terrain-masked static cone. The eyes layer draws only the edge of what your units can actually see.

Combined arms

SAM batteries have no radar of their own and need the radar network. Bombers need someone else to find their targets. Carriers need escorts. Every unit has a job and a weakness. The full roster is 23 mobile units, 18 structures and 7 field-deployed items, all listed with their cost and role on the units page.

On land: main battle tanks with smoke dischargers, fast eight-wheeled light armored vehicles, scout cars that lay mines and obstacles, combat engineers, logistics trucks, forward observers with laser designators, mortar carriers, mobile AA guns and missile carriers, armored bridge layers, mine-clearing vehicles with a line charge, and ballistic missile launchers that can strike any point on the map without seeing it.

At sea: fast patrol boats, guided-missile frigates with a point-defence laser, attack submarines that dive deep enough to vanish from everything but sonar, and aircraft carriers that build and rearm aircraft anywhere on the water.

In the air: F-22-style air-superiority jets with internal bays, strike aircraft carrying anti-radiation missiles, slow and heavily armoured close air support jets that attack in gun runs, maritime patrol aircraft that hunt submarines, airborne early warning aircraft with a rotodome, attack helicopters that hug the terrain, and cheap reconnaissance drones.

Defences and sensors: ground radar stations, early warning radomes, counter-battery radars, CIWS turrets, layered SAM batteries, jamming stations and coastal anti-ship missile batteries.

A guided missile frigate leaves the shipyard

A jet flight over open water, camera locked on the lead

An armoured column crosses the grand bridge

Combat

• Simulated weapons. Shells follow ballistic arcs, and heavy rounds ricochet off sloped ground at grazing angles. Missiles fly through boost, loft and terminal phases with g-limited homing.
• Seekers and counters. Heat seekers are decoyed by flares and blinded by smoke, radar seekers by chaff, and deep submarines are hard to hear. Anti-radiation missiles home on radars and jammers, and switching off in time makes them miss.
• Shape your own missiles. Each missile carries a fixed total impulse, and you decide how its motor spends it: a hard boost for short range, or a long sustain for reach. The thrust curve editor is true to scale, and a built-in flight simulation shows top speed, burnout and effective reach.
• Modular munitions. Seekers, fuzes, warheads and mine triggers are separate modules, swapped on a 3D ordnance bench in your loadout.
• Mines and obstacles. Land and sea mines, concrete blockades and barbed wire, placed exactly where you want them with a rotatable ghost.
• Real destruction. Walls, bridges and buildings shed parts as they take damage, each shattering along its real shape. Big blasts leave embers, burning debris and a smouldering crater. Wrecks burn and their ammunition cooks off. A destroyed submarine breaks in two and both halves sink to the seabed. Dropping a bridge section really does cut that river crossing, and vehicles on it fall with it.
• Fly it yourself. Ride along with any aircraft in cockpit or chase view, then take the controls: mouse aim, throttle, pick a weapon and fire from the cockpit.

The thrust curve editor: shape a missile's motor and see its flight profile before you build it.

A strike aircraft heads out at dusk.

The battlefield

Every match is played on a freshly generated map from a shared seed, and every map has a short map code you can copy and share to play the exact same one.

• Shapes: a single large Island, a naval- and air-heavy Archipelago, a Strait with two landmasses either side of a navigable channel, or a Riverland cut by a grand tidal river that ships can sail far inland, crossed only by one or two great truss or suspension bridges. All ringed by open sea.
• Size: 8 km across for up to four commanders, growing to 9 km for five or six and 10 km for seven or eight.
• Biomes: Temperate grassland, forests, snowy peaks and rivers; Desert dunes, sandstone mesas and oasis valleys; or Arctic tundra under a glacier line, with an ice sheet stepped in shelves over the high ground and pack ice along the coasts.
• Terrain that matters: erosion-shaped relief with real cliff faces, rivers that widen from stream to estuary, lakes, waterfalls, thickets that slow vehicles to a crawl, deep snow and sand that bog them down. Mountain ranges block radar, roads give ground vehicles a 50% speed boost, and bridges can be destroyed section by section.
• Weather: fronts come through every few minutes. Rain, storms with lightning, fog, sandstorms and snowstorms all cut how far eyes and laser designators can see. Radar, sonar, MAD and ESM ignore the weather, so in a storm the radar network carries the fight.
• Day and night: a full day/night cycle changes the battle. At night, eyes lose most of their range unless the unit has thermal optics.
• A living landscape: trees sway in the wind, cloud shadows drift across the land, flocks of birds scatter from explosions and fish school under the surface.

Rivers carve valleys, drop over rock steps and widen into estuaries.

Military strategy over base-building

The economy is deliberately small: four economy buildings and five resources (cash, crews, metal, knowledge and fuel). Your decisions go into positioning, timing, logistics and fire support, not into managing a sprawling city.

You start with a Command HQ, two combat engineers and a scout car. Everything else gets built during the match, from vehicle factories and radar stations up to shipyards, airfields and SAM batteries. Lose a building and everything it unlocked goes with it, so key structures are real targets. Every vehicle, ship and aircraft burns fuel, and running dry slows your whole army to a crawl. Every destroyed asset leaves salvage worth metal to whoever drives over it first.

A vehicle factory with the production panel open.

A combat engineer's construction panel.

Game modes

• Team Deathmatch: eliminate every enemy HQ and production building.
• Capture the Flag: carry the enemy's flag from their base back to your HQ. First to 3 captures wins.
• Domination: hold control points by being the only alliance nearby. First to the target score wins.
• Persistent World: one large, mixed-biome world that saves and reloads. There's no winner: expand, explore and come back to your base later. Absent players' bases are minded by a bot, and the world remembers what you explored and which bridges you cut. Roaming world events keep the map alive: hostile compounds, crashed aircraft, supply convoys, air-defence nests, pirate flotillas, air raids and minefields.

Learning to play, and the missions

Basic Training teaches the controls, the base and the first battle step by step. Three short sensor lessons follow: switch a radar on and let a SAM site fire on its tracks, spot for mortars with a forward observer, and hunt a deep submarine with buoys and a patrol aircraft.

Then come 15 single-player missions on fixed maps, each with primary and bonus objectives worth up to three stars: an opening beachhead, a night raid, a river crossing to hold against seven waves, a SEAD strike on enemy radars, a convoy through a minefield, a sandstorm, an electronic warfare duel, an air superiority fight, a naval laser screen, a three-way last-commander battle and more. Every mission has a global Steam leaderboard ranked by stars, then by the fastest time. The missions page has every briefing and objective.

Multiplayer and AI

• 1–8 players per match, human or AI, in any alliance arrangement.
• Player-hosted over Steam (friend or public lobbies, invites, no port forwarding) or LAN, plus offline skirmish against AI. Lobby and battle chat, team-only chat and pings for allies.
• AI commanders play by the same rules as humans. They only know what their own sensors detect. Pick Easy, Normal or Hard, and a personality: Balanced, Turtle, Rusher, Air power, Naval, or Random so you find out by fighting it.
• Equal footing, on by default in multiplayer: account progression is ignored, so a veteran account has no edge in a public match.
• After the battle, a debrief charts army value and kills over time for every side, your resources as sparklines, your most valuable unit, first contact and the medals you earned.

The battle lobby: seats, alliances, AI personalities, map shape, biome, weather and mode.

The main menu, with Basic Training, Missions, Skirmish and Multiplayer.

Progression

Every match earns XP for a persistent account:

• Skill Tree: operator abilities such as night vision, thermal imaging, the radar scope, faster building, field repair and reactive armour.
• Equipment Tree: requisitioned hardware such as mortar carriers, AA guns, UAVs and ballistic launchers, plus fuzes, seeker heads and warheads.
• Loadout: choose which unlocked modules your weapons carry, on a 3D ordnance bench.
• Skins: cosmetic camouflage for your units. Some are earned in game with war bonds, others are sold on Steam. Every player in the battle sees them.
• Steam achievements and stats: 53 achievements cover onboarding, the economy, sensors and electronic warfare, combat, every mode and map type, multiplayer and long-term career kills. See them all, with the battle medals, on the achievements page.

The skill tree: operator abilities bought with XP between matches.

The in-match tech tree: three tiers, from outpost to advanced.

The field guide: stats, sensors and weapons for everything you can build.

Every skin on a main battle tank.

Sound

Most of the sound is synthesized in code at startup, like the art: gunfire by weapon type, missile motors, engines that Doppler-shift as aircraft pass, explosions by size and medium, running sounds for every vehicle, ship and structure, and ambience that follows the camera. A staff announcer reports what matters on the radio and your units answer your orders, in English and French. Music by Eric Matyas plays in the menus and in battle.

Status

Wavefront: Vanguard is coming soon to Early Access on Steam. Early Access is planned to last 12 to 18 months, with balance, content and polish shaped by player feedback. All four modes, the 15 missions, the full unit roster, sensor fusion, the vision modes, weather, progression, AI commanders and multiplayer are in place. Balance tuning and a full multi-account Steam test are the next steps. Follow along in the devlog, or get it on Steam.