Released on February 23, 2024, the sequel to the 8-Bit Armies series of Real-Time Strategy games, 9-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far, takes everything from the original Armies version of the game and builds upon it, with new maps, new units, and new yet familiar factions. Like its predecessor, it takes great inspiration from old-school Command & Conquer games, this time drawing more from their immediate sequels like Red Alert 2. Like its predecessor, the game is relatively simple among other games in its genre, making it more accessible to players new to RTS games. Also like its predecessor, it features a Retraux voxel aesthetic, with music composed by Frank Klepacki.
In this game, there are two playable factions. The Overlords are styled after a somewhat modern military, using a spread of infantry, tanks, aircraft, and nuclear weapons to overpower their foes and achieve victory. The Sentinels, by contrast, are styled as resistance fighters as they oppose the Overlords, using their own set of infantry and tanks, an orbital laser cannon, and automated drones as their air force.
On release, only the Overlords campaign is available, with a Sentinels campaign still in development. Both campaigns will be fully playable single-player or cooperatively.
9-Bit Armies provides examples of:
- Action Bomb: The Sentinels Anti-Air Drone is effectively a controllable missile, flying into and self-destructing on enemy aircraft to destroy them.
- Attack Drone: All Sentinels aircraft are unmanned.
- Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Overlords Transport Chopper and Sentinels APC are both capable of transporting infantry, but are subversions for not doing much else; the Overlords transport can carry vehicles while the APC is tougher and can run over enemy infantry. Both factions have access to identical sea transports, which carry a larger number of ground units than both faction-unique transports combined.
- Car Fu: Some units are capable of simply crushing most infantry units. This can make taking down Harvesters particularly hazardous if they are traveling at a distance to collect resources. Most of the units that can crush infantry can also destroy certain destructible features of the map just by driving through them, which can be useful in games with bonus crates enabled.
- Composite Character:
- The Sentinels, like the Guardians before them, are composites of GDI and Nod. Possessing units equivalent to some of those found in those factions, their superweapon is also inspired by the GDI Ion Cannon.
- By contrast, the Overlords take after the Allies and Soviets of the Red Alert series, just as the Renegades did. While the inspiration for the Heavy Tank is obviously the Mammoth Tank, which is famously a GDI unit, it was also the original Soviet super tank before it was replaced by the Apocalypse Tank from Red Alert 2 onwards. They also use nuclear missiles as their superweapon.
- Kill Sat: The Sentinels can build a satellite uplink to command one to fire a powerful laser beam anywhere they see fit.
- Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: Subverted compared to the 8-Bit games. While building one superweapon structure isn't likely to be more than an inconvenience to an enemy that is hit by one, building multiple can cause an increasing amount of trouble for anyone unfortunate enough to be hit by them.
- In the case of nuclear missiles, where in 8-Bit Armies the Renegades' nuke would simply cool down faster as all other superweapons did at the time, the Overlords' version here in 9-Bit Armies trades that for multiple missiles being fired, enabling a wider area of damage and a lingering radiation field to damage units that managed to survive the initial strike, if they didn't come in after the fact.
- The Sentinels, who largely use the Guardians' arsenal, also lose the cooldown reduction bonuses given to 8-Bit superweapons in favor of a wider radius for their orbital laser. It can last quite a while, erasing entire armies or even chunks of bases if left unchecked.
- Time Travel: If you're a returning player from the 8-Bit games, you may be wondering why the factions look like the Renegades and Guardians by new names. In the Overlords campaign, collecting the hidden Gwen in each map reveals some background on why this happened, with the game's main narrative contributing a bit when you are dealing with Dr. Thaddeus Loopwell. According to Gwen's logs, Dr. Loopwell invented time travel and was hired to remove someone from the timeline; that someone turned out to be the Eternal Commander, the player character of the original series of games. Without the Eternal Commander to lead the Renegades, they were defeated by the Overlords – their previously-unnamed Palette Swap opposing force in the original Renegades campaign – and the Guardians, who originally rose up in response to the Renegades, were largely defeated in turn, with some surviving cells reorganizing into the Sentinels. This is also why The Multiverse is starting to fall apart at the seams, with portals opening up to bring units from the other two games into this new version of the universe of Armies.
