under pressure

How to beat a tank rush

A rush is a bet. The attacker has spent their opening on units instead of income, and if the attack fails they have nothing — which means surviving one is not just surviving, it is winning.

Updated 26 August 2026 · 3 min read

An early rush feels like the least fair thing in strategy games and is actually the most fragile. Understand the economics and it stops being frightening.

Step one: see it coming

Almost every loss to a rush is really a loss to a surprise. Send one cheap unit — a rifleman, 100 credits — toward the enemy at around the two or three minute mark and look at three things:

• How many harvesters are working? One, this late, means they are not playing an economic game.
• Do they have a refinery expansion or a second power plant? If not, their credits went somewhere, and units are the only other place.
• Is there a barracks or factory with nothing around it? The units are already on their way to you.

If two of those are true, stop your own tech and prepare. You have about ninety seconds.

Step two: buy the right counter

The instinct is to build tanks, because they are attacking with tanks. This is usually wrong — you are buying the expensive thing on the back foot with less money.

The right answer is nearly always cheap dedicated anti-armour. In TANKS that is the rocket soldier:

Two rocket soldiers cost 400 credits and out-damage a 500-credit tank by a factor of five. They are made of paper — that is the trade — so they must not be the front rank. Which brings us to the actual skill.

Step three: put them in the right place

Anti-armour infantry standing in the open die to the first shell. The arrangement that works, in every game in this genre:

1. Something durable in front. Riflemen, a tank, even a wall. Anything that the enemy targets first.
2. The rockets behind, on hold or guard stance. They must not walk forward to acquire a target. Hold stance means they fire from where you put them and nowhere else.
3. Both of them behind a choke. A gap between rocks, a gate, the mouth of your base. Tanks arriving through a two-tile gap arrive in ones and twos, and your whole group shoots each one as it comes.

The difference between rocket soldiers scattered around a base and the same rocket soldiers stacked behind a choke is roughly a factor of three. It is the highest-value thing you can learn in this genre.

Step four: protect the actual target

A rush is usually not trying to kill your base. It is trying to kill your harvesters, because that achieves the same thing more cheaply. A harvester is 700 credits, unarmed, slow, and out in the open by design.

• Park two units at the refinery permanently, on guard, not aggro. Aggro will follow a scout off the map and leave the refinery empty, which is exactly what the scout was for.
• If a raid gets in, pull the harvesters rather than trying to save them where they stand. A harvester driving home is a harvester you still own.
• One gun turret near the ore field is often better than two more units, because it never gets distracted and never walks off.

Step five: punish it

This is the part people forget, and it is the whole point. The moment the attack breaks, the attacker is poor, has no army and has no economy. Do not rebuild calmly and settle in. Counter-attack immediately, with whatever survived plus whatever comes out of your factory in the next minute.

You do not need much. They have nothing at home — that was the entire premise of their strategy. Six tanks arriving at a base with one harvester and no army ends the match.

The mirror: rushing well

If you want to be on the other side of this, three rules. Scout first so you know they went greedy. Take everything, all at once, not in drips. And go for the harvesters and the power plants rather than trying to grind down a construction yard — you are not trying to win the fight, you are trying to make their next ten minutes worthless.

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