WELCOME TO THE GALACTIC RECLAMATION LEAGUE

Draft a squad of five units - a mech and pilot pair. Each chassis fills a different role: front-line soaker, fast skirmisher, long range sustain damage, support. Buy weapons, armor, and utility from the shop to kit out your mechs. The key is finding some core combos and synergies to build around.

Set your formation on the grid, select your mission, then drop in. While fight mostly runs itself, the squad leader can call quick plays mid-fight to focus a target or brace the line. Certain missions will provide your team with some curve-balls to deal with and put your squad management skills to the test.

Between missions you'll return to your hangar with a chance to continue to enhance and customize your units through hangar upgrades, promotions, and power-ups. The challenge is deciding when and how to spend your limited resources. The threat meter builds as you clear missions. At threat milestones you will be given a choice - take on a random boss encounter and continue your run with even more challenging fights OR take on an apex megaboss and end your current run with a big payout.

CLIMBING THE RANKS

The league awards manager 1 of 10 ranks based on their earned Reclamation Points. As you progress the ranks, the per-run conditions become harsher. In order to succeed, you'll be required to take advantage of every bit of knowledge you gain through your career.

Sponsors love to see their items used during your runs. Every decal you bring into a mission earns reputation with that brand, and rep unlocks nodes on the Glory Track - a permanent perk tree that persists between runs. Better shop odds, better drops, equipment lines you can only buy if a sponsor likes you.

Different broadcast formats tilt the rules of a run - loot pools, encounter mixes, combat modifiers. Win enough and you unlock more of them. The career ladder and the perk tree pull in opposite directions on purpose: rank should be a mark of skill, glory is an expression of time invested.

THE SETTING

The Reclamation Authority represents most of charted human space. It also owns the broadcast rights to cleaning it up.

Rot is biomechanical — spore-fed, wet, growing. It swallows the rim worlds. Rust is the opposite: corroded automatons that won't power down, grinding through the inner colonies. Between them, most of the map has been eaten.

The Authority seeds both. Spore canisters in the upper atmosphere, dormant Rust frames buried in the crust - a closed loop that keeps the contracts paying and the planets just hostile enough to film. They call it managed reclamation.

You run a squad of contractors who go out and clear it. Most squads lose. The ones that don't are, technically, celebrities.