Army of Earth Player Manual

What Army of Earth is

Army of Earth is a multiplayer game about small tanks fighting over territory. You drive one tank, but you aren't fighting alone. Your team also builds and defends a base, paid for with credits you dig out of the ground: a power plant, a mine, gun turrets and more. Up to six teams can share a match, and each one is trying to be the last left standing while the others are worn down and destroyed around them.

Install and launch

Army of Earth runs on Windows and macOS. Download the zip for your system and unzip it wherever you like — there's no installer and no setup step. On Windows, run ArmyOfEarth.exe from inside the unzipped folder. On a Mac, open Army of Earth.

On a Mac the app isn't notarised with Apple yet, so the first launch may be blocked. If it is: open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, click Open Anyway, then launch it again. You only do this once. The app is universal — it runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, macOS 11 or later.

Sign in

Before you reach the main menu, you'll be asked to sign in. An account is required to play, as it was in the original.

New to the game? Choose Register and fill in an email address, a username (this becomes your name in the game) and a password of at least eight characters. You're signed in the moment you register, and nothing about ordinary play waits on anything else. A verification code gets emailed to you, and typing it in confirms your address. Verifying doesn't gate normal play, but it will matter later once ranked play is switched on, because only verified accounts appear on the leaderboard.

Played before? Sign in with your username or email and your password. Tick "stay signed in" and you won't see this screen again on this machine.

If the account service can't be reached at all, either because you're offline or because it's briefly down, you'll be offered an offline option so you can still run Practice or a LAN game.

Join a match

From the main menu:

• Quick Join. One click. The game finds a server with room and connects you.
• Server Browser. See the list of open servers and pick one yourself.
• Connect to Server. Dial a specific address, if someone has given you one directly.
• Host a game (LAN / dev). Run your own server for others on your network.
• Practice (solo). Start immediately in a full match with AI filling all five other teams, so you never have to wait for anyone. A good way to learn the ropes.

Once you're connected you land in a lobby. Pick one of six coloured teams, and you'll see everyone else's picks listed as they come in. The match starts on its own once enough players have joined, with a countdown. If you arrived through Quick Join while the server is still gathering players, you'll see a short "waiting for more players" message before that countdown appears.

Your first five minutes

Every spawn in Army of Earth arrives the same way, your very first one included: your tank drops in from high above and floats down over a few seconds before it's ready to move. You land next to two buildings your team already owns, a Power Plant (already powering whatever you build next) and a Respawner (where you'll reappear after you die).

Start driving. Right click the ground to send your tank there. It turns to face the way it's going and accelerates on its own. Look around with A and D, which swings your view independently of the direction you're driving. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because it's also how you aim. More on that in a moment.

Glance at the minimap in the bottom left. You show up as a white arrow pointing the way you're looking. Most of the map around you starts dark, which is normal. It clears once your team has a working Radar.

You begin with 1500 credits. Press B to open the build menu, or click one of the icons along the bottom of the screen. There's no placing things with the cursor: hover a building to preview it, click it, and the game finds a clear spot next to your tank and builds it there for you. A sensible first buy is a Mine (1000 credits). Drive onto a patch of gold coloured ground and build it there, because mining is your income for the rest of the match. After that, a Radar to light up your minimap, and a Turret or Laser to start defending your base, are both reasonable next steps.

Combat is deliberately separate from movement. Left click fires towards wherever your cursor is pointing in the 3D view, and right click moves your tank, so you can drive one way and shoot another, aiming with A and D as you go. You start on the Cannon. F swaps to Artillery, which hits much harder but arcs downward like a mortar, and won't fire at all until your team has a working Armory.

If you're destroyed, don't worry about it. You'll rise, fade, and reappear over your team's Respawner a short while later with every credit you had still intact.

Controls

There's also a row of buttons in the top left corner during a match: Build, Weapon, Give $, Respawn and Bot. Most of them mirror the keys above, but two are only available here. Give $ splits your whole credit balance evenly among your living human teammates, and Respawn destroys you on the spot and sends you straight home through the usual rise and fall, which is handy if you're stranded a long way from base.

Settings, reachable from the main menu or with Esc during a match, lets you swap which mouse button moves and which one fires, and adjust how fast A and D turn your view.

The map, teams, and how a match is won

Each map is generated fresh for the match: rolling, hilly ground with some lakes or coastline, always green, and never the same twice. It's a few kilometres across.

Up to six teams can take part, each with its own colour: Red, Blue, Orange, Yellow, Green or Purple. You choose a team in the lobby and can still switch afterwards, but only until you personally own a building that's still standing. At that point you've committed. Empty seats on a team don't stay empty for long, because they fill with AI players who build, mine and fight much as a human teammate would.

A team is "in the match" once it has built its first base, and it's eliminated once every one of its buildings has been destroyed. The match ends when only one team, out of all those that ever built a base, is still standing.

Losing your last building isn't necessarily the end for you personally. If at least one other team is still alive, you and your surviving teammates are folded onto a randomly picked surviving team and carry on playing. You rejoin with zero credits, since your old team's credits are pooled and shared out among your new human teammates instead, and you take a small score penalty. Only when your team is the very last one wiped off the map does the match actually end for you, with a Victory or Defeat screen showing the final standings, every player's stats, and who got the most kills and destroyed the most enemy buildings.

Rather than fighting on to the last building, a team can also vote to give up. From the pause menu, choose Concede defeat. If more than half of your team's human players vote yes, your team forfeits.

Most matches simply run until one team is left, with no clock. Some servers may run a timed match instead, in which case anyone still standing when time runs out is treated as having drawn with everyone else who survived.

Credits and mining

Credits are what you spend on buildings and on summoning Bots. Every player starts a match with 1500.

The only ongoing income is mining. Build a Mine directly on a patch of gold coloured ground and, while it's powered, it earns 5 credits a second for your team. Gold patches aren't bottomless. Each one holds a fixed amount, and once it's exhausted, mining from it stops for good, so keep an eye out for fresh patches as a long match wears on. You can build more than one Mine on the same patch, but they draw from the same pool, so doing that just makes the patch run dry faster rather than doubling your income.

If your whole team is eliminated and the match carries on without you, as described above, your credits are pooled with your teammates' and handed to the human players on whichever surviving team you land on. Outside of that, credits are never lost by dying. A normal respawn costs you nothing.

You can also give your credits away on purpose. The Give $ button splits your entire balance evenly between your living human teammates, which is useful if you're sitting on a war chest and someone else needs it more than you do.

Buildings

Building doesn't involve placing anything with the cursor. Open the menu with B or click a hotbar icon, hover to preview, and click to buy. The game finds a clear spot beside your tank and puts the building there. Every team starts a match with a Power Plant and a Respawner already built.

Your tank: weapons

Your tank carries two weapons and swaps between them with F. Ammo for each regenerates on its own up to a cap, so you can save shots up for a burst, and a working team Armory reloads both faster.

Both weapons detonate wherever they hit, whether that's terrain, a building or a unit, and both do splash damage, so a near miss can still hurt. A shot that reaches the end of its range without hitting anything simply fizzles out. Friendly fire heals rather than harms, so there's no way to hurt your own teammates by accident.

Your tank moves at 15 metres a second on land and half that in water, and it turns to face wherever you send it instantly.

Bots and the Summoner

Two different things get called "AI" in Army of Earth, and they're worth telling apart.

Some of your fellow players, the ones filling seats a match would otherwise leave empty, are AI players. They build, mine and fight much as a human teammate would, and they show up on your roster the same way.

Separately, any player can summon a Bot: a simpler tank, controlled by AI, bought at a Summoner building for 800 credits. Press X, or use the Bot button on the command bar.

A summoned Bot has 800 hit points, and it holds a position rather than roaming the map looking for a fight. By default it guards near the Summoner that called it, but if you've built a Waypoint it holds there instead, which is how you send your Bots to a particular front line. Wherever it's guarding, it opens fire on any enemy that comes into range.

Fog of war, the minimap, and the Radar

Your minimap, bottom left, always shows your own team's units and buildings, along with the terrain around you. Enemies are a different story. They only appear on the minimap while a friendly, powered Radar is nearby. A Radar's coverage stretches over a good chunk of the map, but outside it the minimap stays dark around an enemy position, even if you can plainly see that enemy in front of you.

You appear on the minimap as a white arrow that turns with your view, and everyone else is a dot in their team's colour. Human players' dots blink, while AI players and Bots show solid. Click anywhere on the minimap to send your tank there, and it draws a line and a destination marker until you arrive.

In the 3D world, fog works differently from the minimap. You'll generally spot enemy units and buildings once they come within a fairly generous distance of one of your own. You won't see a base clear across the map, but you don't need a Radar just to notice a tank rolling up on you.

This is also a deliberate measure against cheating. The game only ever sends your computer information about things it has decided you're allowed to see, which closes off the "reveal the whole map" cheating that troubled the original.

Dying and respawning

When your tank is destroyed it explodes, then rises straight up over a few seconds before disappearing. After a short wait you respawn, descending the same way in reverse, over your team's nearest working Respawner. If your team doesn't have one standing, you come down at a random spot near where you first started. You keep every credit you had, because a normal respawn never costs you anything. You can't move, shoot, build or summon while you're in the air, either on the way up or on the way down.

You don't have to wait for a real death to go home. The Respawn button on the command bar puts you through the same sequence voluntarily, on the spot, which is a quick way back to base if you've wandered too far to drive.

Ranked play: rating, rank and experience

Ranked play is switched off and hidden for now. Nothing that happens in a match today changes any of the numbers below. This section describes how it's designed to work once it's turned back on.

Once it's live, every account will carry three numbers.

• Rating is a skill estimate, starting at 1500. It moves each time an enemy team is eliminated, or your own is. Your team gains rating for eliminating others and loses it when eliminated itself, scaled by how many humans were in the match and how strong the opposing side was. Teams filled with AI count for much less than human ones.
• Rank is your position on the leaderboard, recalculated once a day. Lower is better, and rank 1 is the "World Rank Leader".
• Exp is simply a measure of how long you've played. It has nothing to do with skill, and climbs slowly the more time you spend in matches.

Only matches on trusted, ranked servers will count once this is switched on. Quick practice games and matches on ordinary servers won't affect your Rating either way.

One thing worth knowing: the "Points" total you see during a match today, for destroying enemy buildings, is a separate and much simpler tally. It isn't the same thing as ranked Points, even though the original used one name for both.