Meet the horde

Every fort in FortWar is under siege from the moment you claim it. The first wave lands 45 seconds in, then one every 40 seconds, plus a trickle of stragglers in between. The waves grow the longer your fort stands, and the longer it stands, the stranger the things in them get.

There are seven kinds of monsters right now. Here's the whole lineup.

Crawler

The bread and butter of every wave. Crawlers are fast, fragile and many. One is nothing. Forty at once, pouring around the side of your walls, is a problem. Any turret kills them; the trick is having turrets everywhere they can come from. Scatter turrets, which hit up to three targets at once, are made for crawlers.

Brute

Slow, tough and hits like a truck. Brutes are the ones that actually break your walls. A crawler has 30 health; a brute has 160. This is what the Rail Tower is for: long range and heavy, slow shots. Set a Rail to Strongest and it saves those shots for the brutes.

Spitter

Spitters show up as the horde grows. They don't come to the wall. They stop at range and lob acid at your turrets. Their range (11) beats a Scatter turret's, but not a Pulse's or a Rail's, so those can pick them off on the way in. Behind that, it's walls in front and a Factory nearby to keep repairing.

Stinger

From about eight hours in, the first stingers arrive. They fly. Walls and rock mean nothing to them: they go straight for your nearest building that isn't a wall. A fort that put all its turrets on the outer ring finds out fast that the middle needs cover too. Turrets can be set to Flyers first.

Burrower

Older forts meet burrowers. They tunnel in under a dust trail where nothing can hit them, then surface right beside a Mine or a Factory. Your walls don't help here. What helps is turrets and troopers inside the fort, near the things they're after.

Shield-bearer

Shield-bearers carry a bubble that soaks up damage for every monster within 4 of them until it breaks. The bearer itself isn't shielded, so the answer is to kill it first: focus it with a Rail, your commander or siege troopers. Turrets have a Shields first priority for exactly this.

The Behemoth

Every 15th wave (about every ten minutes), and every horde surge, brings a boss: the Behemoth. It's huge and slow, it slams the ground every few seconds, and chat gets to name it. It has a whole post of its own later this week.

All of them at once

The new types each break one strategy, so a fort that's been standing for a day has to cover all of them at once. The game gives you a one-off hint the first time each type turns up, and the Field Guide (H) has the counters.

A mixed wave on the walls, in the model showcase's test fort (the game's real renderer and models, with a simulated fight).

Go meet them

The horde is waiting at fortwar.io, free in your browser. If you have a monster idea, I'd love to hear it: tell me in the Discord or in chat on the stream, where a lot of this got built.

— Jeff