The rules of the RTS have been pretty well codified for years, with most games featuring a selection of factions that each have their own units, tech trees, and upgrade paths. Team17 and Petroglyph seek to upend tradition with Forged Battalion, a new real-time strategy title that lets you build your own faction and customize your units to suit every battle.
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Every battle you fight across campaign, skirmish, and multiplayer grants you new resources to pump into a persistent tech tree. Those upgrades unlock not just new units, but new archetypes, movements systems, weapons, and special abilities, letting you build new types of units customized to every particular situation and giving you a faction entirely unique unto itself.
Forged Battalion will launch in Steam Early Access early next year, featuring five skirmish maps, multiple skirmish modes, dedicated servers for multiplayer, and five missions comprising the first act of the campaign. The story sees an overbearing military threat known as the Collective taking advantage of the devastation of climate change to expand their power, while you forge your battalion – so to speak – to fight back against the threat. Early Access is pencilled in to last six months, and the final game is expected to launch with Steam Workshop support.
Petroglyph were founded in 2003 by former Westwood Studios employees, first developing Star Wars strategy mainstay Empire At War. Their subsequent games have seen mixed success, though Grey Goo served as an engaging return to form in 2015. More recently, they’ve been building the 8-Bit Armies series of micro-sized RTSes and expansions.