Video Game / Metal Fatigue

Metal Fatigue is what happens when you take Command & Conquer, replace the infantry with vehicles and the various tanks with Humongous Mecha. Developed by Zono Inc. and published in the US by Talon Soft and in Europe by Psygnosis in 2000, it stands out from similar games by boasting a three-level battlefield and customization of the game's primary units, called Combots.

The single-player campaign tells the story of three brothers: Diego, Jonus and Stefan Angelus, as well as three "CorpoNations",: Rimtech, Mil-Agro and Neuropa Limited. Each CorpoNation has its eyes set on a distant world where a cache of potent alien technology is believed to be hidden. Armed warfare ensues between the three as soon as each makes planetfall. In the opening Cut Scene, the three brothers, working for Rimtech, find an alien Energy Weapon while on patrol. Diego, the eldest brother, understandably plans to take the weapon back to their superiors. Jonus, the middle brother, has other plans, however, stating that Neuropa would pay top dollar for the technology. An argument ensues, and would have come to blows were it not for a sudden Mil-Agro airstrike. In the ensuing chaos, Stefan, the youngest brother, is hurled over a cliff, Jonus escapes with the alien weapon and Diego returns home empty-handed, believing Jonus a traitor and Stefan killed in action. However, Stefan turns out to have survived his fall, though he was implanted with a mind control chip by Mil-Agro and pressed into service as their newest champion.

Thus, the stage is set for brutal confrontation between the brothers and through them, the CorpoNations.

This game provides examples of:

• Action Girlfriend: The Rimtech combot pilot Issadora Toltec is this to Diego. When she joins Diego's unit as his XO, Issadora is two levels higher than the maximum Diego can get at that point, resulting in her being able to inflict more damage with the same part loadout. Diego even mentions in his log entries that she's very good at her job, even better than he hoped for from her reputation alone. After Jonus' and Stefan's betrayal of Rimtech is discovered, her companionship is the only thing keeping Diego going and her death at Akiri's hands causes Diego to completely go off the deep end.
• And I Must Scream: Stefan discovers the implants Mil-Agro put in his head the hard way when said implants force him to recite Rimtech military secrets to Zeke Cob when asked, unable to stop himself from speaking.
• Archaeological Arms Race: Naturally, the best way to get the best parts is to find alien technology caches (as well as stealing parts you've blased off enemy combots).
• Arm Cannon: Neuropa's Plasma Cannon. Rimtech's Energy Gun is actually stronger despite being smaller and lighter. Mil-Agro has the Gatling Arm and Cluster Bomb Arm. Neuropa also has a high-tech sniper Arm Cannon and an arm rocket launcher.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Stefan delivers two to Diego in the Rimtech ending. It works.
  Stefan: You've won this battle. It's time to end this!
  Diego: He killed Issadora!
  Stefan: And when you kill my friend, do I then have to kill you? Where does it end?
  Diego: Stefan... come back with me.
  Stefan: To your new vision of Rimtech? A CorpoNation without honor?
• Artificial Stupidity: Problems with pathfinding are not uncommon, and units will sometimes suicidally rush off to their death while trying to pursue some inaccessible and unimportant enemy. The game offers a lot of options to let you control how each unit reacts to the enemy, which helps reduce this problem somewhat, but babysitting is still often necessary.
  • Mostly averted with enemies. Their AI usually avoids above problems and on the plus side when supplied with enough energy AI enemies will probe your defenses and put pressure on weak points or even sneak cloaked units past your defenses. That is as long as they have energy supply - when they run out they attack till they're reduced to buildings and civil units.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Neutron Bomb armament for railgun platforms temporarily disables buildings and kills the crews of critically damaged combots, but deals no direct damage.
• Beehive Barrier: The Point Defense structure generates a number of floating energy discs that orbit around the structure and deflect incoming railgun shots.
• BFG: Neuropa Sniper Laser Arm and Rimtech's Long Missile Arm. Both inflict massive damage at a very long range, but take a long time to recharge.
• BFS: Rimtech's Katana Arm. Not as good as late-game melee weapons, but has a fairly good chance at amputating the arms of enemy combots.
• Boring, but Practical: The Orbital Bomb loadout for railgun platforms is exceedingly expensive and slow to build, reloads slowly and can be stopped with Point Defenses, but deals a heck of a lot of damage where it hits. The large radius is enough to wipe entire asteroids clean of Solar Panels and thereby put a serious dent in the enemy's resource income.
  • There is no way to stop a surface-based outpost set to launch mode from teleporting to the nearest asteroid above. Thus it doesn't matter how fortified an asteroid is, teleporting a few Nemesis vehicles up there tends to crack those fortifications in very short order.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Even lone Hedoth Spider Tanks can give a poorly-fitted Combot serious trouble. En masse? You'll need a lot of combots to take them out. Maybe a lot of artillery, too...
  • On the other hand, Hedoth tanks tend to not wander away from their starting positions, so Outpost-teleporting or elevator-transporting Nemesis vehicles right next to them tends to eliminate them with minimum fuss.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Turns out the reason why Mil-Agro troops are so brutal in combat is because every single one of them is outfitted with mind control implants that prevent them from acting on any thought contrary to their orders, such as sparing enemies out of conscience.
• Cain and Abel: There are elements of this between Diego and Jonus, but Stefan is a wild card.
• Chainsaw Good: Neuropa's top-tier melee arm, essentially a rotary saw made of plasma.
• Character Customization: In a sense. You can mix and match torsos, legs and arms to create a variety of different combots. Figuring out which setups work best is a key aspect of success.
• Color-Coded Characters: With general appearance style to boot. Rimtech units are blue, with their combots having a rounded, TRON-esque appearance. Mil-Agro units are red, with boxy shapes, and visible bolts. Neuropa units are an odd purple and green mix, and have alien-like organic shapes and cycloptic eyes on their combots.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: Averted for the most part. Aside from the most basic parts, each side possesses a completely different arsenal of combot parts. Units and structures are functionally identical, but each side's stuff has sharply different armor values. The same vehicles also have a varying ratio of kinetic to energy damage for each side: Mil-Agro leans towards more HP, doing more kinetic damage and having better defenses against energy damage, while Neuropa does the opposite and Rimtech balances between the two. At the end of the day, however, a Rimtech tank works exactly the same way as a Neuropa Hover Tank and the Mil-Agro Matter Converter is exactly the same structure that Neuropa and Rimtech have, just with a boxier model and a chromatically superior paint job.
• Death from Above: The game features fighters and bombers, which if shot down can hurt whatever the debris lands on (fighters are barely an annoyance in this regard while bombers do tons of damage in a wide radius). Combots can also be equipped with certain parts to fly. There is also an entire orbital layer of battle in addition to the surface and underground sections. You can build on the asteroid platforms up there.
  • Even better: If a fighter or bomber is shot down on the orbital layer and doesn't land on an asteroid, it will fall down to the surface layer and crash there. Similarly, if a bomber starts doing a bombing run, any bombs that don't hit something will fall straight to the surface and do damage as usual... except that this kind of attack cannot be protected against via AA defenses.
  • It is also possible to build railgun Orbital Bombs, which take ages to reload but can take out entire armies of small units with a single hit, or slowly wear away the enemy's base from halfway across the map. Provided the enemy doesn't have a Point Defense structure set up, of course.
    • The little brother of the Orbital Bomb takes this trope to an entirely different level: the Tectonic Torpedo can fire through the ground to attack underground targets.
• Deflector Shields: Several. Rimtech's Power Shield Arm and Mil-Agro's Power Shield Legs passively increase a combot's health and resistance against energy weapons, while Rimtech's Forcefield Torso grants both energy weapon resistance and an active shield that completely nullifies a single hit against the combot but takes about 30 seconds to recharge after each deflection.
• Drill Tank: The Drill Truck, though it's not much of a tank. The drill is used for making new passages underground and drilling into Hedoth structures.
• Dual Wielding: There's nothing to stop you from equipping the same arm part twice on a combot. On ranged combots, this effectively doubles rate of fire while on melee combots, it dials up their raw damage output quite a bit. On the other hand, dual weapon loadouts run the risk of weighing combots down, slowing them to a crawl. Mil-Agro's arm parts especially suffer from this problem due to their heavy weight, to the point where one of their faction-specific legs explicitly exists for this situation.
• Easily Detachable Robot Parts: Arms can be ejected and re-attached at any time, even while in battle. In fact, bladed weapons frequently amputate arms in battle - especially if the wielder has Mil-Agro Steady Legs that increase the chance of this happening.
• EMP: Rimtech has an EMP Torso that deploys a damaging area-of-effect pulse. Unlike the Blast Pulse Legs, this one only affects combots and while combots that get hit with this show visible sparks for a few moments, it doesn't actually disable them. However, each side has access to the Nemesis vehicle that explodes with respectable splash damage when destroyed, but if an enemy combot is in range, the Nemesis' kamikaze explosion releases an EMP. Unlike the Rimtech torso's version, this one disables every combot in its range for a few seconds. Even the Hedoth Black Combots.
• Faction Calculus: Rimtech (Balanced), Mil-Agro (Powerhouse) and Neuropa (Subversive).
• Five Rounds Rapid: This is about all tanks are good for against Combots. Missile Tanks are slightly more effective, however. Used en-masse, Missile Tanks can quickly tear down a lone Combot.
  • Expect this to happen any time you come up against the monstrous Hedoth Combots, which can put the hardiest human-made designs to shame and dish out even more damage.
• Flight: All sides have a part (Rimtech has Jumpjet Legs, Mil-Agro and Neuropa have a Jumpjet Torso) that has pathetic HP, but makes the combot capable of flying. While in the air, combots behave like ordinary aircraft: they use the same movement patterns, can only be attacked by ranged weapons, etc. Also, combots can fire ranged weapons from the air and if ordered not to engage in melee, they stay floating in mid-air while gunning for the target. On the other hand, a flying combot has no armor whatsoever until it lands, so massed AA can take it out very quickly.
• Four Is Death: Rimtech Mission 4 is when the kid gloves come off. Prior missions were against one faction at a time with simple objectives, only really need to worry about one additional front and facing a few combots which they can't replace. Now you're in a three way battle, under attack from the moment you arrive, the enemy are cranking out combots as fast as you can kill them and you better be coordinating between the secondary maps or you're hosed.
• Framing Device: All missions are framed as after-action reports by the Mission Control AIs used by all three factions instead of straight-up briefings, seemingly Leaning on the Fourth Wall until the final cutscene, which reveals that said Mission Control AIs were collating that information for the Hedoth in order to evaluate whether humanity is worthy of becoming Slave Mooks.
• Fragile Speedster: This can be combined with the above trope. If you manage to equip a combot with both a Jumpjet Torso and Jumpjet Legs, it'll have next to no HP besides what the arms contribute, but it'll fly very fast, allowing it to rapidly get into position where it can do the most damage and escape with impunity when the enemy counterattacks.
• Gatling Good: One of Mil-Agro's ranged arms and the only hitscan arm in the whole game, making it highly efficient against aircraft. The Flak Torso has a stronger Shoulder Cannon version.
• Glass Cannon: Artillery are very fragile, but their shots hit hard to the point where a dozen of them will very quickly scratch out even a combot, provided said combot is occupied by someone else.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Fist Arms enable combots to fight this way. While they're nowhere near as good as Blades for removing limbs they've got much higher armor values to go with their impressive raw damage.
• Grand Theft Prototype: Some campaign missions start out with you needing to do this.
• Guide Dang It!: The weight mechanic is not explained anywhere in the game or the manual. Weight values are also impossible to find other than by trial and error.
• Heel–Face Turn: Brik Cob goes through this after he released Stefan and his crew from Cob control.
• Heel Realization: Diego has one when he finally catches up to Akiri and is about to crush him with his own destroyed combot's wreckage when Stefan shows up and warns Diego that killing Akiri to avenge Issadora will start a Cycle of Revenge.
  Diego: My little brother's grown up... heh, maybe more than I have.
  • Jonus gets when he discovers Komrov was mind-controlled by Mil-Agro after he kills him in the second to last mission in the Neuropa campaign. This combined with the fact that it's impossible for him to leave Neuropa results in him regretting his choices and becoming The Atoner.
• Hero Must Survive: Present in every campaign mission, since you always have one of the three brothers (depending on faction) present in-game as a combot crew. Sometimes other characters from the storyline appear, and must survive, as well. It's usually easier to leave these "Hero" units out of harm's way for the entire mission, since it's easy to build standard combot crews to replace them, and between missions these standard crews can even be upgraded to equal the skill of the "Heroes". This leads to annoying Gameplay and Story Segregation as the post-mission de-briefings will often mention how awesome and absolutely essential the "Hero" units were to the victory, when in reality they may not have even set foot inside a combot at any point during the game.
• Homing Projectile: Neuropa's Homing Missile, as well as Rimtech's Missile Torso and Missile Legs. Aside from the Missile Legs which can only fire at ground targets, all of them are competent anti-air weapons.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Zekiel Cob attempting to pull a You Have Failed Me on Brik results in the latter deactivating Stefan's Restraining Bolt implants, causing Stefan and Akiri to save Brik from execution and have him deactivate everyone's implants, causing the downfall of the Cobs.
• Humans Are Warriors: The conclusion of Mission Control's narration in the final cutscene, said to the returned Hedoth.
• Humongous Mecha: They serve as your main attack force. Interestingly enough, they are piloted Motion-Capture Mecha style (à la Mobile Fighter G Gundam), but also require a support crew who operate a ring of control consoles around the pilot's center platform. They're also damn big, dwarfing the tanks and artillery pieces that support them.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The AI names in Multiplayer/Skirmish are meaningful, though like weight this is never explained. Lord Bedlam, MadDog and Sgt. Dolt (Neuropa, Mil-Agro and Rimtech) are the 'stupid' practice A.I.s.
• Invisibility Flicker: Neuropa Camo Torso. Cloaks every friendly in-range, but the effect is broken as soon as they attack.
• Jack of All Stats: Rimtech units and Combot parts are this.
• Large and in Charge: The Rimtech Armored Torso has the highest HP value of any non-alien Combot part and some real mean armor.
• Laser Blade: Rimtech's Laser Sword Arm, superior to the Katana in damage output. Neuropa has an energy rotary saw as top-tier melee weapon.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: comes in two flavors. Rimtech's Energy Shield is a Beehive Barrier geared toward energy defense while Neuropa's K-Shield is essentially a combot-sized riot shield geared against kinetic damage. Both increase the combot's health by a notable amount when equipped.
• Macross Missile Massacre: A possible build for a pure ranged Rimtech Combot, consisting of a Missile Torso, Missile Legs and two Longbolt Missile Arms (or Neuropa Homing Missile Arms for lower damage but faster rate of fire). Just don't get tied up in close combat though.
  • Rimtech's Missile Torso and Missile Legs are especially notable for this trope due to firing a salvo of "drunken" missiles that visibly Robotech around in flight. No other missile weapon in the game demonstrates this behavior.
• A Mech by Any Other Name: Combots, a portmanteau of "Combat" and "Robots".
• Mecha Game: Fits the standard of relying heavily on unit customization. A bit of a toss-up as to whether it's more in the "Stompy" or "High-speed" categories: most combots are fairly slow, but it's possible to put together a high-speed build; there's plenty of tactical long-range weapons, but "hand-to-hand" combat is also very common (though it's also fairly slow-paced, with combots slowly swinging heavy weapons and shields at each other like medieval knights in rusty armor).
• Mega Manning: The only way to get an opposing combot's parts is to salvage it after or during combat, although the "during combat" part only works for arm parts. Bladed melee weapons and certain other parts help in this regard. Gathering parts is a necessity for success, so that you can form a more flexible battle strategy with your combots.
  • If you're fighting against Mil-Agro or Neuropa, this trope kicks into high gear. Mil-Agro has extra armor against energy attacks and have only kinetic weapons while Neuropa is the exact opposite. Since they're less resistant against the kind of damage they themselves inflict, jacking their weapons to beat them at their own game is a good idea (to the point where even the AI does it).
• Mêlée à Trois: It gets worse when the actual aliens show up to make a mess of things.
• Mighty Glacier: Mil-Agro units and Combot parts are this. Also any Combot with all Armor parts, such as the Rimtech Armor Torso and the Neuropa Armor Legs.
  • All non-leg combot parts have a certain weight, while legs have a maximum limit for the amount of weight they can carry. Overweight combots are limited to a brisk marching pace with Neuropa's Speed Legs and Ominous Walk with everything else. While Mil-Agro parts tend to be heavier, their Strength Legs have the highest weight capacity in the game. Of the mighty part, Mil-Agro again: their Power Shield Legs give extra armor against energy attacks but make the combot unable to do anything but Ominous Walk.
• Mind Control: How the Cobs keep the rest of Mil-Agro in line: they outfit everyone else with neural implants that cause any Cob's orders to act as a Compelling Voice. This ends up working a little too well in the end when it turns out that if none of the Cobs actually say that a squad that had their implants deactivated isn't allowed to, say, tightbeam into the field HQ to crash the execution of someone the Patriarch of the Cobs personally ordered dead, nobody is actually capable of refusing the request out of their own volition.
• Mook Chivalry: Computer opponents will sometimes show a distressing tendency to attack your heavily-defended base with a few units at a time, over and over again, instead of attacking en masse. This is especially noticeable in the campaigns, though in Skirmish mode some of the AI settings seem to be a bit better about this.
  • It primarily seems to depend on the AI's access to resources, however. With a secure supply, the AI will not hesitate to attack with half a dozen combots at a time.
• More Dakka: A possible build for a pure ranged Mil-Agro combot. It makes a devastatingly effective mobile anti-air platform as well.
• Moving the Goalposts: Neuropa's way of keeping Jonus in their service, repeatedly saying "just a few more missions" when he tries to quit. He eventually catches on.
• My God, What Have I Done?: All three Angelus brothers have such a moment in their respective campaigns.
  • Diego, after disobeying his superior officer's orders and lying to said superior officer in order to get a shot at Akiri, only to end up going on a wild goose chase. It gets said superior officer killed in a surprise attack Diego wasn't around to repel and Diego is put in command, seemingly unrepentant for his actions until Stefan explicitly tells him off for dragging Rimtech's honor through the mud in the name of personal revenge and Diego gives up on hunting Akiri for good.
  • Stefan, after the Cobs force him to massacre the Rimtech training facility at New Providence. Possibly further reinforced when Diego refuses to believe the existence of the Cobs' neural implants and rejects Stefan's ceasefire offer.
  • Jonus also gets one this near the end of the Neuropa campaign, resulting in him becoming The Atoner.
• Nintendo Hard: This game doesn't screw around. This can often simply be Fake Difficulty however, due to the fact that The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. Thought the Rimtech campaign was hard? Try Mil-Agro or Neuropa.
• Power Fist: Every side has their own version as a mid-tier melee weapon. Rimtech's Armor Fist is a simple gauntlet, Mil-Agro's Blade Fist has Wolverine Claws and Neuropa's Power Fist has an energy blade mounted onto the knuckles. Aside from superior damage compared to early-game melee weapons, they are also quite light.
• Real Robot Genre: Combots are built using parts researched in your faction's tech tree or stolen from the rival factions. They are expensive, but ultimately replaceable, their crews as well. Unless they've gained a few levels...
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Diego, after Akiri kills Issadora. Starts out as pulling rank on another commander to have an excuse to be in the sector where Akiri was last spotted, continues with him lying to his superior officer and disregarding a direct order to safeguard Sperry Ridge which gets most of the Rimtech Board killed in a Mil-Agro ambush and conveniently removes all traces of his insubordination, continues with him taking command of all of Rimtech to box the target of his rampage in and finally ends with him sparing Akiri when Stefan shows up and gives him a What the Hell, Hero? speech, warning Diego that he's about to start a Cycle of Revenge.
• RPG Elements: Accomplishing missions and certain bonus objectives (such as succeeding within a time limit or completely wiping the enemy off the map without the mission objectives explicitly asking for it) rewards you with upgrade points that can be spent to upgrade your staff's neural interfaces. Combot pilots receive increased weapon damage, structures and vehicles get boosted firepower and reduced manpower requirements.
• Rule of Three: Three brothers, three factions, three stories.
• Secret Test of Character: The entire game was one, orchestrated by the Hedoth to test whether humanity has what it takes to become their Slave Mooks by reverse-engineering and using Hedoth technology to cull their weak until only the strong remain. And humanity passed with flying colors.
• Shield Bash: How any combot that only has shield arms fights.
• Shock and Awe: Neuropa's basic melee weapon is the Electrogrip, a large, three-fingered hand with a special attack animation that momentarily stuns enemy combots.
• Shockwave Stomp: Rimtech's Blast Pulse Legs. Notable in being able to affect overflying aircraft, making it surprisingly useful at fending off harassing Hoverjets in a pinch.
• Shoulder Cannon: Neuropa's Tracer Fire Torso, as well as Mil-Agro's Flak Torso and Howitzer Torso.
• Shoulders of Doom: Rimtech combots crewed by a hero unit or a crew above level 4 get these.
• Spread Shot: Mil-Agro's Cluster Bomb Launcher Arm, firing a salvo of bomblets in a roughly arc-shaped spread. Each bomblet does little individual damage, but they impact close enough together to stack up that Splash Damage and really put the hurt to enemy tanks.
• Stone Wall: It is possible to arm a combot with two shield arms. While the result will have abysmal melee damage, it can take major punishment before going down and the shields do not prevent it from firing any torso- or leg-mounted ranged weapons.
• Super Robot: Any combot that has at least one piece of alien tech can easily solo five enemy combots. The only way to eliminate one without taking losses is by air assault - and that's if it doesn't have a ranged weapon. If it does, well...
  • Also a rare aversion of Cutscene Power to the Max from the intro cutscene. They really are (well, almost) that dangerous. On the other hand, the research and production times are ridiculous.
• Took a Level in Badass: Stefan. Fresh out of training, captured and brainwashed by Mil-Agro into their service, he's little more than a scared little kid at the beginning of his campaign. By the end, he leads a slave uprising against the Cobs, calls Diego out on his actions and issues an open proclamation to Rimtech and Neuropa that the next person who tries to boss him or his fellow slaves around is dead man walking.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Brik Cob after Stefan and his crew bust him out of a Rimtech prison. The results are that he becomes humbler and kinder to Stefan and his staff (which needless to say actually shocks the latter two). It also leads him to becoming a Defector from Decadence and initially leading to his Heel–Face Turn.
• The Dreaded: The Black Hedoth Combots. They look like even more sinister versions of Neuropa's bots (in fact the latter based their newer combots off the former), can auto-repair if damaged, are slow yet incredibly tough and very resistant to both kinetic and energy weapons, and can dish out terrible damage in melee with their scythe-like claws or energy guns (one being an arm, while the other being mounted on the torso as a shoulder cannon). Needless to say these things can't be defeated without a large number of combots of your own, and even then only with mid and late tier parts.
• Underground Level: You can use elevators to transport units underground. It's a good place to hide valuable structures and the lava pools that are your main resource for the early-to-mid game are much richer and last longer than the ones above ground, plus you are safe from combot attacks and can use Recon Poles to see what's going on above without having to go up there. Drill Trucks can be used to dig new tunnels and construct new elevators, allowing you to send vehicles behind enemy lines.
  • Sadly, the game's underground parts add a lot of boredom: you're forced to rush the enemy with a whole lot of tanks - that take a proportionally long time to build. On the other hand, massed artillery supported by Tectonic Torpedoes (targeted at enemy tank concentrations) from above can do some real damage.
• Unstoppable Rage: Let's say that Diego didn't take Issadora's death well.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted, your combots can pick up the discarded arms of enemy combots in the field and use them immediately. This can result in Rainbow Pimp Gear however, with, for example, a Rimtech Combot (blue) with a Mil-Agro axe arm (red with white highlights) and a Neuropa Energy Weapon (gray with some purple bits).
  • On the other hand, if you haul the parts back to base... you can research them and build your own versions of that part which actually use different models and textures to suit your faction. For example, the Neuropa K-Shield is more lozenge-shaped, compared to the Mil-Agro and Rimtech versions which look basically like a combot-sized riot shield emblazoned with the faction logo.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: There are two kinds of resources.
  • Metajoules are needed to build stuff and are harvested from lava pits or generated by Solar Panels. The maximum storage capacity can be increased by building Energy Banks, with each one adding another 2000 to your maximum capacity. For those who played Supreme Commander, Metajoules are functionally identical to SC's Mass. Disassembling structures (even your enemies'!) and selling combot parts stockpiled at the Assembly Bay refunds some of their Metajoule cost, but not all of it.
    • What the game doesn't mention is that Solar Panels actually generate Metajoules faster if under your defense grid. Eight Solar Panels under the defense grid of an Outpost have an income equivalent of four Hovertrucks working at a lava pit, which roughly breaks even with a single Vehicle Factory.
  • Manpower is required to operate vehicles (including combots) and structures. This one is increased by building Cryofarms (which also function as a source of combot crews) and AI Facilities (which decrease the manpower requirement of buildings and are a prerequisite for top-tier combot parts). Structures can be turned off to reuse their manpower and cannot be turned back on if it would exceed your maximum manpower, but exceeding the limit anyway (by losing Cryofarms or building too many buildings) slows down all production.
• Wham Line: Pretty much the entirety of the narration in the final cutscene, initially appearing to be leaning on the fourth wall before heading off into an entirely different direction.
  Mission Control: Summary: humans are creatures of contradiction. Brilliant, yet foolish; aggressive, yet tender. They were intelligent enough to duplicate my Overseer technology, yet never understood my true purpose or realized that they've been the subject of this test. However, they have mastered the rudiments of Hedoth weaponry. The weak have been culled and only the worthy remain. Conclusion: they will make excellent soldiers in our armies. The Hedoth Dominion will grow as never before and our victories will outlast the suns themselves. Welcome back, masters. Humanity is ready to learn obedience. End of report.
• What You Are in the Dark: Despite having deserted Rimtech to side with Neuropa, in his campaign ending Jonus lets Diego and Stefan escape his forces, rather than hunting them down.
  Overseer: Inquiry: what profit is gained by allowing their escape?
  Jonus: Profit? For Neuropa, none. For Jonus Angelus, more than you could ever know.
• Zerg Rush: Pretty much the only chance tanks have against a combot, even a weakly-equipped one: it's doable, but inefficient in terms of cost. You're better off countering enemy combots with your own.

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