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.

Ground radar coverage painted onto the terrain. The hatched areas behind the ridges are radar shadows.

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 unless the unit has thermal optics.
Ground radar	Radar station, airfield, CIWS	1.5–3 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.
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.

• Emission control. Switch a radar off and it vanishes from enemy ESM, but it's blind while it's off.
• 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.

Sensor layers show coverage, sweeping beams and blind spots.

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

Thermal: engines, fires and flares glow. Smoke still blocks sight.

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.

On land: main battle tanks, scout cars that lay mines and IEDs, combat engineers, logistics trucks, forward observers, mortar carriers, mobile AA guns and missile carriers, armored bridge layers, and ballistic missile launchers that can strike any point on the map without seeing it.

At sea: fast patrol boats, guided-missile frigates, 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: air-superiority jets, strike aircraft, maritime patrol aircraft that hunt submarines, attack helicopters that hug the terrain, and cheap reconnaissance drones.

Aircraft carrier

Submarine, patrol boat and frigate

Fighter, recon UAV and attack helicopter

Combat

• Simulated weapons. Shells follow ballistic arcs. Missiles fly through boost, loft and terminal phases with g-limited homing.
• Seekers and counters. Heat seekers are decoyed by flares, radar seekers by chaff, and deep submarines are hard to hear.
• 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. A built-in flight simulation shows the result.
• Mines and obstacles. Land and sea mines, IEDs, concrete blockades and barbed wire, placed exactly where you want them.
• Real destruction. Walls fracture piece by piece, wrecks burn and smoke, and dropping a bridge really does cut that river crossing.

Air superiority jet on afterburner

An explosion tears through a night-time convoy

A bridge layer spans a river

The battlefield

Every match is played on a freshly generated map from a shared seed.

• Shapes: a single large Island, a naval- and air-heavy Archipelago, or a Strait with two landmasses either side of a navigable channel. All 8 km across, ringed by open sea.
• Biomes: Temperate grassland, forests, snowy peaks and rivers, or Desert dunes, mesas and oasis valleys.
• Terrain that matters: mountain ranges block radar, rivers cut valleys, roads give ground vehicles a 35% speed boost, and bridges can be destroyed.
• 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.

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.

A coastal base going up, with the production panel open.

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. Roaming world events keep the map alive: hostile compounds, crashed aircraft, supply convoys, pirate flotillas, air raids and more.

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.
• AI commanders play by the same rules as humans. They only know what their own sensors detect.

Progression

Every match earns XP for a persistent account:

• Skill Tree: operator abilities such as night vision, thermal imaging, the radar scope, faster building and field repair.
• 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.

Status

Wavefront: Vanguard is a playable prototype. All four modes, the full unit roster, sensor fusion, vision modes, progression, AI and multiplayer are in place. Balance, audio and a full-scale Steam test are next. Follow along in the devlog.