Building an Icaroid

Anatomy of an Icaroid

Every Icaroid is built from these parts:

• Core - the mandatory chassis. It's the root everything else attaches to, and it carries the biggest pool of structure, armor, weight, and ammo storage.
• Brain - the pilot AI. Sets baseline accuracy and evasion, and unlocks which combat behaviors and target priorities the Icaroid may use.
• Mobility - legs, wheels, treads, or hover units. At least one is required; they provide speed and mobility.
• Weapons - how you deal How Damage Works. See Weapons.
• Utility - support gear: sensors, shields, ammo storage, jammers.
• Modifiers - small upgrades that bolt onto a component to tweak its stats or grant an effect.
• Ichor upgrades - crystallized Ichor pieces placed in a component that, in the right shapes, trigger powerful glyph bonuses.

The connection model

There is no fixed slot layout. Instead, each part exposes connection ports of a given size, and a component plugs into a port of a matching size on its parent. Ports come in several sizes:

• Large, Medium, Small - accept a component of that size. Larger slots can fit smaller components, but not the reverse.
• Artillery - specialized faction-specific heavy weaponry. Components that fit this slot are often very powerful, but Artillery-class slots are rarer than other slots.
• Titan-weapon - the single oversized-weapon port a Titan core exposes in place of its mobility slot. Nothing but a titan-weapon fits it, and only a Titan core has one.

The Core is the root of the tree. It exposes at least one Mobility port plus one or more component ports (a Halfweight Core, for example, exposes Mobility and Medium slots). Components attach to the core, and components that themselves have slots (like the Ballistarius Rifle's Small slot) can carry gear of their own.

Component stats

Every component carries some subset of these stats:

Weight, speed & mobility

Three stats interact to determine how fast an Icaroid can move.

• Weight - the total mass of the core plus every component, modifier, and ichor piece.
• Mobility - locomotion capacity, summed across all components (mostly from movement components).
• Speed - raw tile budget, averaged across the mobility components.

An Icaroid moves at its base speed only while its mobility can carry its weight. Once weight exceeds total mobility, speed is dragged down proportionally:

base speed = avg(mobility-part speed)
if weight > total mobility: speed = base speed × total mobility / weight

So a heavy weapons platform carried on light legs may barely be able to move, while the same legs under a stripped-down frame with light or no weaponry may sprint across the battlefield with ease. Weight matters beyond movement, too:

Climb height (the tallest step the Icaroid can scale) is the highest height among its mobility parts, and the Icaroid's line-of-sight height is the core's height plus the average mobility height. Both feed into Movement & Positioning.

Cores

The core is the foundation. It contributes the largest share of structure, armor, and shielding and contributes heavily to the weight that dictates your movement capabilities and evasiveness. It exposes the Icaroid's top-level ports; provides baseline shared ammo and ammo manufacturing; and generates the Icaroid's per-round power (Solari cores most of all). Cores also host their own ichor grid for Ichor Glyphs.

Cores are organised into faction series (Welter's Lightweight, Hardball, and heavier lines; common Halfweight/Quarterweight; and so on), with marks within a series trading weight for more slots and structure. A representative spread:

Improved versions and heavier series add ports and structure but raise weight capacity demands. You'll need to balance raw firepower against the speed and evasion costs above. At the top of the scale sits each faction's Titan core - an integrated core-and-mobility super-heavy with its own Titans guide.

Brains

The brain is the Icaroid's pilot. It sets baseline accuracy (chance to land shots, and to land them critically) and evasion (turning incoming hits into glancing blows), a thinking rate of 1–3 (how well it executes its role), and - crucially - which behaviors and target priorities the Icaroid is allowed to use. For instance, you'll probably want a high-accuracy brain on a sniper and an evasive brain on a flanker.

Evasion's effect scales inversely with weight, so the Scout's 60 evasion turns most hits into glancing blows on a feather-light frame and is mostly wasted on a tank. Behaviors and target priorities decide how the Icaroid acts on its own each round - see Brains & Behaviors for what every brain and behavior actually does, and How Battles Work for how they play out in a round.

Mobility components

Legs trade speed, mobility, weight, armor, and climb height against each other. Hover/flight types carry the Hover effect (ignore terrain costs, clear obstacles) and high height; tracked chassis are slow but tough and cross any ground. The full common and faction roster:

Utility & modifiers

Utility components take a component port and provide support rather than firepower - shields, sensors, ammo, jamming. Many grant effects or abilities. A sampling across factions:

Modifiers bolt into a dedicated slot and tweak the component carrying them: flat stat boosts (Ablative Plate, Heavy Frame), accuracy (Targeting Reticle), ammo (Extended Magazine), or specialised effects. Welter brings ammo-conversion rounds (Flechette, Hollow Point, Armor-Piercing, Charged), Solari brings burn protection and energy control (Flame-Retardant Plating, Overclock, Capacitor Bank), Chorus brings grid amplifiers (Grid Amplifier, Throughput Magnifier), and Ironfall brings missile fire-control (Smart Guidance, Tandem/Incendiary Warhead, Auto-Loader). The ones that change how a weapon shoots are detailed in Weapons.

Factions

Components are faction-flavoured. Common parts may be used by any faction and provide some baseline capabilities of every type; one can never expect the Welters to be totally without energy weaponry despite their usual focus on projectiles, for instance. However, generally each of the four factions push a distinct philosophy, which often heavily influences the parts it's built from.

Welter

Heavy, ammo-hungry bruisers - big armor, big alpha strikes, ammo logistics, and battlefield control (suppression, entanglement, fortification).

Solari

Fast, precise energy fighters - lasers and plasma, near-zero ammo, high evasion, and heat/energy as their limiting resources.

Chorus

Ichor-focused technologists - weapons and movement that grow stronger as their Ichor Glyphs light up, plus glyph-suppression warfare to cripple enemy capabilities.

Ironfall

Missile and artillery specialists - indirect fire, auto-firing batteries, point defense, and saturation tactics that beat interception.

Praxis

Drone hordes - potent single-target weaponry, enhancement auras, shield projectors, swarming combat drones.

Exordia

Damage Over Time - heavy armor, crippling debuffs, able to hide in every crack and crevice in the terrain.