Brains & Behaviors

The brain

Every Icaroid needs a brain, which represents the pilot AI. The brain sets three things about how well the unit fights, and limits which behaviors and target priorities you're allowed to pick:

Accuracy - the baseline chance to land shots. Accuracy below 100% introduces a chance to miss a shot; 0% accuracy means your shot will never land exactly where intended. High accuracy (specifically, higher than a target's evasion) increases the chance those shots land as critical hits. A high-accuracy brain wants a precise, single-target-heavy loadout with high damage; a low one should be equipped with weapons with a high volume of fire or blast radius.
Evasion - how well it uses its armor to deflect incoming fire. Evasion doesn't stop shots from landing, but it can reduce a powerful incoming shot to a glancing hit, and it helps prevent dangerous critical hits. Its effect scales inversely with weight higher than your mobility, so it's near-useless on a heavy, immobile tank and superb on a feather-light flanker.
Thinking rate (1–3) - how decisively it executes its role, and a major input to initiative (smarter pilots tend to act earlier in the round).

The six brains, from crudest to most specialised:

Brain	Acc	Eva	Think	Best at
Doldrum	75	25	1	A barely-sentient default. Only knows how to walk towards a target and blindly open fire.
Jack	70	30	1	An early jack-of-all-trades. This brain can fill many roles, but it doesn't excel at anything in particular.
Ranger	90	10	2	The Ranger specializes in highly-accurate firepower. It has the highest accuracy in the game, but very poor evasion. It's generally used for snipers, skirmishers, artillery, and anything expected to not be on the receiving end of incoming fire.
Scout	40	60	2	This brain focuses on evasive movement, flanking, and skirmishing with enemies. On a light frame most hits against a unit with this brain will probably be reduced to a glancing hit, and its enhanced thermal imaging lets it hunt shield-heavy targets.
Cavalry	80	20	2	The Cavalry brain is often used for mobile, aggressive shock troopers, usually with melee weapons. It seeks out openings, then charges into range of all of its weaponry for a decisive blow.
Support	50	50	3	This defensive-minded brain eschews weapons in lieu of evasion and the fastest thinking rate of any brain. It is often found escorting and buffing allies rather than leading the charge.

Match the brain to the job

Each brain tends to specialize in a stat or behavior. Always match the brain you pick to the Icaroid's purpose. Put a high-accuracy Ranger with a Sniper behavior in the back with a long-range weapon and light armor, an evasive Scout on a light flanker, and the smart Support brain on a unit to protect a high-value Titan or to buff allies with auras.

Behaviors

The behavior is the combat doctrine the Icaroid follows whenever it needs to act independently. Each behavior below describes the overall play, not the exact math. Which behaviors you can pick is set by the brain (see above).

Thug front line: A blunt, single-minded brawler. It walks straight at its chosen target and opens fire the instant it gets in range, then keeps advancing until every weapon can fire. Once every weapon is in range of a target, it simply stands still and holds down the trigger, minimizing accuracy loss from movement. It does not use cover or advanced tactics, just relentless forward pressure. Great on a cheap, durable frame that demands enemy attention and can trade hits with an enemy frontline.
Infantry front line: Infantry are your bread-and-butter unit for holding the front lines. This behavior advances alongside the other Icaroids until an enemy is found, closes to a medium engagement band, then holds that line and trades fire on the best target in range every round. Where the Thug keeps walking into your face, Infantry stops at a stable mid-range, keeping it slightly safer from a melee-heavy opponent. This role is key for a balanced main line. If given mostly melee weapons it will close the gap and attack instead of keeping its distance, but a ranged weapon anywhere in the loadout will cause it to remain stationary at range instead of charging forward.
Sniper long range: Snipers provide long-range fire support. It fires every round it possibly can and treats movement purely as a way to hold the perfect distance, never to close with an enemy. It likes to sit behind a friendly screening force and shoot over it; it keeps enemies at the far edge of its longest gun, and backs off if something gets closer than it's comfortable with. However, it will never retreat so far that it cannot fire. Pair it with a high-accuracy brain and a long-range weapon, and give it front-line allies to hide behind for best results.
Skirmisher kiter: The Skirmisher uses (hopefully) superior mobility to stay at range, dancing into range to fire shots with its longest-ranged weapons and backing away when an enemy gets close enough to return fire. It does its best to keep a clean shot at all times, favoring positions in cover that allow it to see (and be seen by) only its primary target if possible. When no target enemy has been seen yet, this behavior will try to identify the front lines and stay comfortably behind them to allow heavier units to advance first and take the hits. This behavior is best used with a screening force in front of it, but can still be deadly on its own if it's faster than its opponents and has longer-ranged weaponry.
Rogue flanker: The Rogue attempts to assassinate enemies. It works toward the edge of the field through low ground, staying out of enemy sight for as long as it can. Once it has flanked an enemy, it charges into range of its hardest-hitting weapon and attacks. It moves as much as possible each round to bank its movement evasion bonus. If armed with a melee weapon it drops the standoff entirely once it has flanked, and simply runs its mark down. Devastating on a fast, evasive Scout frame that punishes exposed opponents or squishy backline snipers.
Lancer melee charge: Lancers are shock troops, strongest on the attack. It hugs low ground and cover when possible, staying unexposed and avoiding incoming fire, until a target is spotted. Once it has a target, it charges into melee range and strikes. Because melee weapons swing after the move, it can close a gap and hit on the same round once it decides to charge in. Once it has made contact it stays at the front, engaging with its current target until it expires. Best used with heavy melee weapons and at least a moderately durable design.
Duellist single combat: The Duellist picks one opponent and fights it alone. It scouts for contact like any advancing unit, then singles out the most isolated enemy it can see - the one with the fewest other units, friend or foe, standing near it. It then closes to the range of its shortest-ranged weapon, where its whole loadout can attack at once. It tries to keeps distance between itself and its allies, so a pack of duellists spreads around a target instead of piling up against each other. When it fights at range it hunts for ground where only its own mark can see it, keeping even ranged exchanges a 1-on-1 trade and avoiding the sightline of other enemies. Unlike the other closing behaviors it moves to chosen ground rather than chasing the unit itself. Therefore, it's adept at holding space and carefully choosing its angle of attack. Without this behavior, area-of-effect melee weapons are a danger to their wielders and allies as much as the enemy. The Bretteur rely heavily on this behavior.
Trencher low profile: Trenchers hug the terrain, attempting to hide behind terrain as much as possible to minimize exposure to return fire while still shooting back. It always tries to stick to low ground, and will even dig out the terrain to form its own approaches with a Resonance Quake or Raise Terrain if its loadout allows.
Aura Support buffer: This behavior is used by force multiplier units, not weapons platforms. It positions so its support auras cover as many allies as possible, deliberately maintaining space from other units with the same design (whose auras would likely not stack). While it will fire on targets in range if it carries weapons, it will not go out of its way to do so. If the unit does not have an Aura - or no allies are left that aren't also an Aura Support unit - the Aura Support drops its role and fights in the front line as Infantry.
Guardian escort: Guardians are quite simply bodyguards. It picks an ally to shadow, preferably a behavior that focuses on combat. Once selected, the Guardian sticks as close to it as it can, timing its actions to move right alongside its ward. It will fire on an enemy in range if possible, but it won't move away from the unit it's guarding to do so. If left alone with nobody to guard, it falls back to fighting as Infantry.

Closing behaviors fight differently with a blade

Behaviors that close with the enemy (Thug, Lancer, Rogue, Bunker, and Infantry when nothing it carries outranges its melee weapons) switches to a charge the moment it is holding a melee weapon and can reach a target. They chase the target itself rather than a specific location, so they will keep tracking a target that moves earlier in the round, and it will attempt to attack every turn, whether it knows it will reach the target or not, firing ranged weapons as well. Since melee swings after the move, this lets a single Icaroid fire ranged weapons at a target, move to close the gap, and land a melee attack on the same round. If the movement falls short the melee swing simply finds nothing and does not go off. A Guardian keeps shadowing its ward instead of charging, but still fires and swings at anything it can reach if equipped with melee weaponry.

Behaviors adapt when the plan breaks down

These roles aren't rigid scripts. A support or screening behavior that finds itself with no ally left to help or no teammate advancing to make contact stops waiting uselessly and takes over the fight (usually by scouting or fighting as Infantry). The idea is that no unit stands idle just because its preferred situation didn't materialise; an idle unit on the battlefield is often worse than having no unit at all.

Target priority

Once a behavior is in range to shoot, the target priority chooses who. Like behaviors, the priorities you may pick are decided by the brain.

Priority	Picks…	Good for
Nearest	The closest enemy.	Targeting the nearest enemy is usually the safest default, but artillery or indirect-fire weapons with a minimum range may not find this targeting ideal.
Furthest	The most distant enemy in range.	Long guns reaching past the front line may use this to hit backfield support and artillery. Good for units that may cause friendly fire due to blast radius or units designed to attack squishy backliners.
Weight	The heaviest chassis.	Focusing the biggest, most valuable enemies.
Shield	The most-shielded enemy.	Ideal for shield-shredding loadouts, rogues, and other units that want to soften an enemy up for a followup blow.
Structure	The lowest-health enemy.	Finishes off wounded enemies before they can be repaired or retreat.
Armor	The least-armored enemy.	Ideal for rapid-fire or low-damage weapons. This targeting mode focuses on soft targets your weapons can actually damage instead of wasting shots on heavy armor you stand no chance of piercing.

Armed enemies come first, always

Whatever priority you set, every behavior first prefers enemies that still have a working weapon over disarmed ones. There's also a friendly-fire guard: a unit will prefer to fire at safe targets and will only take a shot that would catch an ally in the blast when no other target is reachable.

Making contact & retreat

Behaviors run on what the unit can actually see. Thanks to fog of war, most behaviors begin a battle with nothing spotted, so their first job is to make contact. While scouting, units sweep forward through the fog until an enemy is detected, then switch into their real role. This means a battle often opens with a cautious advance before anyone commits to charging in.

In campaign battles and some manual battles there's one more layer: a unit that can no longer fight (every weapon destroyed) stops following its behavior and retreats toward its own back edge to escape the field to hopefully survive the fight instead of dying uselessly. A retreating unit never attempts to fire (it couldn't anyway) and never uses abilities; it's just running for safety.

Choosing a combination

Brain, behavior, loadout and target priority should all tell the same story. A few reliable pairings:

Overwatch sniper - Ranger brain + Sniper behavior + a long-range gun + Furthest priority. Sits back, out-ranges everything, and reaches past the line to kill less-defended support and skirmish units.
Anvil - Doldrum or Jack brain + Infantry behavior + durable mid-range weapons + Nearest. Holds the center and grinds down enemies.
Flanking assassin - Scout brain + Rogue behavior + a heavy short-range hitter on a light frame + Structure or Shield priority. Slips around the side and deletes a wounded or shielded target.
Shock lancer - Cavalry brain + Lancer behavior + a big melee weapon + Weight priority. Lurks, then charges the biggest tank to deliver a devastating blow.
Bladed duellist - Jack or Cavalry brain + Duellist behavior + a fast, lightly-armored frame with blades or throwing weapons + Nearest. Cuts a lone enemy out of the line and kills it before its friends arrive.
Escort / buffer - Support brain + Guardian or Aura Support behavior on an aura carrier, shadowing your main line.

Remember these choices only matter when the Icaroid is acting on its own. In a manual battle the stats from the brain type still apply, but you always command your Icaroids directly. See How Battles Work for how orders, initiative and target priority play out round to round.