Dust Front RTS の最強ユニット：役割別の読み解き

Players arrive at this question expecting a tier list, and Dust Front RTS is a game that resists one by design. The developer has said outright that the game is not balanced and that you will sometimes face enemies superior in both number and strength. Against an enemy base that can be scaled up to four times larger, with an optional modifier that multiplies enemy health, "best" depends entirely on what the map is asking of you.

Why there is no tier list

No official ranking exists, and none is likely. Dust Front RTS is a single-player PvE game with a global map and procedural missions, so units are not competing in a symmetrical metagame the way they would in a multiplayer RTS. There is no leaderboard to optimise against and no multiplayer at all — the developer has ruled it out permanently.

The developer's own guidance points at composition rather than picks. His stated tips are that economy is everything, that you should move your base and develop a passive economy when resources run short, and that controlling the frontline matters because a narrow front lets the enemy strike you with their entire army. The clearest one cuts directly against tier-list thinking: this game is not about squads, it is about battalions — companies of tanks and the thunder of artillery.

The anchor piece: Dreadnought

The Dreadnought is the one unit that is unambiguously confirmed as the Empire's top-end answer. It is a super-heavy artillery land battleship with a triple turret: in mobile mode the gun fires on the move, and in deployed siege mode the suspension locks for greatly increased range, accuracy and rate of fire.

Its claim to "best" is not raw damage, it is the combination of reach and recoverability. It is classified as an ultra-large unit, so when destroyed it leaves a repairable wreck rather than simply vanishing. For the most expensive machine in your army, that changes the risk calculus completely. You can also pay additional resources to rebuild it into a heavy howitzer — the highest firepower in the Empire — at the cost of the triple gun's mobile fire.

The correct pattern is a mix, not a conversion. Rebuilding is an individual upgrade rather than a blanket one, so convert the Dreadnoughts you intend to keep behind a trench line and leave the rest able to shoot while advancing. Since the D-30 demo update, rebuilding preserves the unit's current mode and its order queue in mobilized mode.

Artillery and the spotters that make it work

Artillery is described by the developer as "a kind of ultimatum force". His own answer list for countering it is short and telling: excessive losses depending on army composition, other artillery counter-fire, or aircraft from tactical support abilities. Anything that can only be answered by those three things is close to the top of any honest reading of the roster.

The mechanism that makes it work is the spotter squad. Spotters are artillerymen who are also snipers, and a squad can direct heavy artillery fire at any distance. Free artillery in the required mode will immediately aim at the target once correction is completed. In other words, your artillery is only as good as your vision, and the squad that provides the vision is the same squad that can lose the capability as it takes damage.

That last point is not theory. In the infantry squad model, the member of a gunner squad carrying the artillery guidance devices dies first, so the squad loses the ability to direct artillery when he goes down. Protecting partly damaged spotter squads — or healing them back to full — is a real part of keeping a battery firing.

Repair vehicles and the wreck economy

The Empire's faction identity is partly built around not losing expensive machines. The developer confirmed that the Industrial Empire's vehicle wrecks stand out for the ability to restore destroyed super-heavy vehicles using a special repair unit, preserving expensive machines instead of writing them off.

Even on the confirmed part alone, this is the closest thing to a universally correct pick in the game. On the highest difficulty modifiers, where enemies have multiplied health, replacing losses is the binding constraint, and a unit that converts losses back into fighting strength scales with that problem. One D-30 fix is worth knowing: repairing a ruined vehicle used to produce negative supply, which made recovery actively punishing. That is fixed.

Harvesters with the self-defence upgrade

Harvesters are confirmed as resource-gathering vehicles, and their behaviour was improved in the D-30 update — the developer's changelog cites better tank and harvester behaviour, and specifically fewer harvesters getting stuck in infinite loops in chaos and complex road situations.

Community play reports that harvesters can be upgraded with rocket pods for self-defence, and that you select the unit to see the upgrade. That upgrade detail is player-reported, not confirmed. If it works as described, it addresses the most common way an economy dies in this game: raiders finding an undefended harvesting line. The developer's economy advice — move your base, develop a passive economy, keep production running continuously — is what a defended harvester line buys you the time to do.

Brutes: free Complector infantry

Brutes are the free infantry produced by the Complector, one of the Empire's three macro buildings. They are a confirmed unit with a confirmed purpose: infantry thrown at the enemy purely to take ground.

The design history is worth understanding. Semantically the Complector should have upgraded infantry health, but the developer chose free infantry instead because a health upgrade "would be out of style for the faction". Brutes are therefore not a damage unit — they are a way of spending a building slot on board control and on bodies in front of your artillery. Given that squads fight at full damage until they are dead, free bodies in quantity are worth more than they look.

How to read the roster instead of ranking it

Think in roles and check which of them you have covered before each push.

• Reach — Dreadnoughts or other artillery, plus the spotter squads that give them targets.
• Vision — spotters and screening units; artillery without eyes is dead weight.
• Board control — Brutes and cheap infantry to hold a front wide enough that the enemy cannot concentrate.
• Preservation — repair vehicles for wreck recovery and frontline repairs.
• Economy — harvesters, defended, so the above can be replaced.

Related pages

• All Dust Front RTS units: categories and behaviour
• Dust Front RTS Dreadnought: modes, howitzer and wrecks
• MLRS and rocket artillery
• Factions: Empire, Mutants, Robots and Rebels
• Official Dust Front RTS Steam news hub