Armies & Movement
Armies are how you project force across the map - stacks of Icaroids and drones that march, defend, and fight. Moving units well is half the campaign: getting the right strength to the right province at the right turn. This guide covers standing move routes, how far an army travels each turn, and how to combine or divide your forces.
What an army is
An army is a group of units sitting on one province - any mix of your Icaroid designs and drones, held together as a single stack. A province can hold several of your armies at once, and you command each one independently. Armies are the only things that move on the strategic map; everything else - provinces, buildings, factories - stays put.
Standing move routes
You don't nudge armies one hex at a time. You give an army a destination and it holds that route as a standing order until it arrives. To order a move: select the army in the garrison panel, then right-click the target province. The game traces a path across the connection graph and stores the whole route.
The route persists across turns. If the destination is further than one turn's travel, the army advances as far as it can this turn and resumes toward the same target next turn, and the turn after, until it gets there - you set it once and forget it. A move arrow is only drawn to provinces the army can legally reach; if no arrow appears, the route is blocked (see below).
Movement points
Each turn an army has a budget of movement points based on the movement speed of the units1 that compose the army. The army spends one movement point per province along its route. When the budget runs out, the army stops for the turn wherever it reached, then continues next turn. Longer routes simply take more turns to travel.
Your ground only
There's one rule that governs every march: you can enter a province you don't own, but you can never pass through one. An unowned province is a valid destination - the army marches in and stops there, which is exactly how you attack or claim it - but a route is never allowed to traverse foreign ground to reach something beyond it.
In practice, your armies flow freely across your own connected territory and halt the moment they step onto someone else's. This is enforced both when you plot the route (no arrow is drawn through unowned land) and during resolution (an army that lands on a province it doesn't own drops the rest of its route). Expansion is deliberate, one province at a time - you can't send a lone army lancing deep through an enemy's heartland regardless of how far it can travel.
Garrisons and selection
Select a province and its garrison panel lists the armies you have there, broken down by unit type and count, with the controls to command them. For your own armies you see the exact headcount; for enemies you see only that a force is present and a rough size estimate, not its true size (the fog of war withholds that).
When you first select a territory, all armies in that territory are automatically selected. However, selection is flexible: a plain click picks one army, and you can hold ctrl/cmd to toggle several in and out, or shift to grab a list of armies. A right-click move order then routes every selected army to the same destination at once - handy for sending a whole hex's worth of force forward together.
Merging and splitting
Armies on the same province can be merged into one, folding all their units into a single stack, which can be easier to command and keep together. Going the other way, you can split a chosen subset of units off an army into a new one, picking how many of each design and drone type to peel away.
Merge to mass a decisive blow; split to leave a garrison behind while the main body moves on, or to send a fast detachment ahead. Both actions clear the affected armies' standing routes, so re-issue move orders afterward.
Retreat, in brief
Units don't always fight to the last. In a campaign battle, a unit that can no longer contribute - stripped of every weapon, or on a side that's lost all its firepower - will retreat toward its own edge and try to leave the field, so a beaten army can preserve a remnant instead of being annihilated. What happens to those escapees - whether they hold the ground, flee to safe territory, or are cut down - is covered in Campaign Battles.
Marching well
Give armies destinations and let their standing routes do the walking; merge armies to command large groups easily, and split to hold what you take; and remember you can only take advantage of your full movespeed in your own1 lands. Every advance means capturing the next province, not skipping past it. Where those armies get paid for and reinforced is Economy & Production; where they come to blows is Campaign Battles.