PHALANX

Read before you deploy

Field manual

Everything you need to know, in the order you will need it. Ten minutes here is worth an evening of finding it out the hard way.

1The mission

Four teams share one walled city: Red, Blue, Yellow and White. Each has a base in its own corner with its flag inside. Take an enemy flag and bring it back to your own base.

10
Capture a flag
3
Take a station
1
Destroy a tank
  1. Lift it. Drive over an enemy flag and it is yours. You are about a fifth slower while you carry it, and everybody in the city can see it on their map.
  2. Bring it home. Drive onto the pad in your own base. The capture only counts while your own flag is on its stand, so if yours has been taken, get it back first.
  3. Score it. Ten points, and every tank on the team you took it from is destroyed on the spot.
  • Destroyed while carrying a flag, you drop it where you stood.
  • Drive over your own dropped flag and it goes straight back to its stand. Left alone, it goes home by itself after thirty seconds.
  • Destroyed, the screen goes black for a moment and you are back at your base, fully repaired and rearmed. There is no waiting to do.

Bounties

  • Every tank carries a bounty, on a plate under its name. Each tank it destroys adds 100 to it.
  • Destroy a tank and you collect its bounty on top of your own 100, and its bounty goes back to nothing. The more a tank has destroyed, the more it is worth to you.
  • Land a real hit on a tank in the fifteen seconds before somebody else finishes it and you get the assist: a quarter of its bounty comes to you instead of them — their own 100 for the kill is theirs regardless.
  • The biggest bounty in the city is gold and reads Most wanted. Yours is on your screen, under your speed.
  • Destroyed by a teammate, a base gun or a fall, a bounty is lost: nobody collects it. Bring a flag home and you collect the bounty of every tank the capture destroys — a capture has no assist split, the carrier takes it all.
  • Take a charging station and every tank holding it when it flips is paid a bounty too, no kill needed. The more of the five stations your team already holds, the bigger the payout — see Stations and the battery.
  • A bounty is not your team's score. Your biggest bounty and the total you have collected go on the leaderboard.

2The keys

The game is played on a keyboard, with a mouse or trackpad if you like one for aiming. Your left hand drives, your right hand fights.

Driving

W S
Forward and reverse
A D
Turn the hull left and right

Turret

J L
Swing the turret
I K
Raise and lower the gun
← ↑ ↓ →
The same, on the arrows
Click the battlefield once to take the mouse, then move it to aim. Out of the box the left button fires, the right button is the turbo and the wheel changes which gun Space fires — and every button and the wheel can be set to anything in Controls, like a key
T
Snap the gun back to dead ahead

Weapons

Space
Fire your main gun
Y U H N M
Fire gun one to five on its own. Hold two and both fire
X Z
Choose which gun Space fires

Modules and the rest

Shift
Rocket Booster: hold to fly
V
Turbo Boost: hold to sprint
C
Cloak: tap on, tap off
G
Remote Satellite
B
Change tank, inside your own base only
O
Settings, without leaving the match
  • Which key is which gun depends on your tank. Guns are numbered in the order they sit in the bays, and a gun welded to the hull is always number one. You do not have to remember: the key is printed on each gun's tile at the bottom right of the screen.
  • A module only has a key if you have fitted it. Shields, armour and Nano-Repair work by themselves.
  • Every key can be changed on the Controls page, where steering and both axes of aim can also be inverted.
  • F goes full screen, and works in the garage rather than mid-match; so does the button in the bar. It belongs to the browser, not the tank, so it is not on the Controls page. Esc comes back out of full screen, in the garage or in a match.

Play it as an app

On an iPad, Safari puts its own X and a “swipe down to exit” note over any page in full screen, and no web page can take them away. Put PHALANX on your Home Screen instead and it opens as an app of its own: the whole screen, with nothing of Safari’s on it.

  1. Open PHALANX in Safari at phalanx.tektology.com.
  2. Tap Share, then Add to Home Screen, then Add.
  3. Start PHALANX from its new icon on your Home Screen, from now on.
  4. Sign in once inside the app. It keeps its own sign in, apart from Safari’s, and remembers it after that. A passkey works too.

3Your screen

You sit in the turret, looking along the gun. This is a real frame from the game with everything on it numbered.

The driver's view at dusk: your own gun barrel in the foreground, a blue tank and a red one ahead on a charging station, a warning across the top, and the instruments round the edge of the screen.
  1. The score. One chip a team. A chip also says when that team's flag has been taken or dropped.
  2. The battle log. Who destroyed whom and with what, flags, stations and warnings. It scrolls back fifty lines.
  3. Announcements. A station being taken, or a tank inside somebody's base. Everyone in the city sees these.
  4. The map. The whole city from above. See the next section.
  5. Settings. Opens over the match, and Esc closes it. The game keeps running behind it.
  6. The crosshair is where a laser lands. White means the gun is on it, amber means the turret is still coming round or the barrel is blocked, red means that gun is empty or your battery is flat. It is always in the middle of the screen. On a teammate it flashes red: hold your fire.

    Every hull runs a transponder, and with Aim assist switched on (Settings → Aim assist, off by default) your optics read it: get the crosshair near an enemy and brackets close round that tank while the view eases onto it, so the crosshair, the gun and the target end up in one place. Move the mouse and it lets go — your hand always wins. The same transponder is what flashes the crosshair red on a teammate, on or off.
  7. Armour, shield, charge and speed. Armour is what keeps you alive, the shield takes the hit first, and charge is the battery that pays for everything.
  8. Your modules. What is fitted, what is running and what is cooling down. Change Tank appears here while you are inside your own base.
  9. Your guns. One tile each: its name, its key and the rounds left. The lit tile is the one Space fires.

When you are hit

  • A glow on the edge of the screen shows which way it came from, in the colour of the team that hit you. A blue tank on your left lights the left edge blue; one behind you lights the bottom.
  • It follows your view. Turn toward it and it slides up to the top of the screen: when it is at the top, you are looking at whoever is shooting you.
  • A bright glow means the hit got through to your armour. A paler, smaller one means the shield took it. It is still a warning: something is shooting at you.
  • A heavy hit from the railgun lights it harder than a burst from the blaster, and steady fire from one place is one steady glow rather than a flicker. A shot points back along the way it came, a blast points at the blast, and a base gun points at the gun. A fall has no direction, so it has no glow.

Put things where you want them

  • The screen above is the standard arrangement: the log bottom left, armour bottom right, your modules and guns down the right-hand side.
  • Open Settings and choose Move controls. The battle log, the armour readout, the modules, the guns, the settings button and the station announcement can each be dragged where you like. The map and the score stay where they are.
  • Lock in place keeps it for your account, on any device. Reset positions puts everything back as it is above.

4The map

Top right of your screen, and the most useful thing on it. It shows your whole team and every enemy that is not running Stealth, wherever they are.

A square is a base, in its team's colour.
A ring is a charging station. Its colour is the team that holds it. Grey belongs to nobody yet. A ring is not a tank, even when a tank is sitting in it.
A big dot is a flag. On its base it is at home. Anywhere else, somebody has it or has dropped it.
A small dot is a tank.
The arrow is you. It points the way your hull is facing, and the pale wedge in front of it is where your turret is looking.

5Your base

Red's base from above at dusk: a walled deck marked out in red light, the flag on its stand with a beam of light above it, and a gun on stilts in the far corner.
Red's base. The flag on its stand, the pad in the foreground, a gun on its stilts at the back.

Inside your own walls

  • You are recharged, repaired and rearmed, and your shield is restored. You do not press anything. Just be there.
  • It is the only place you can change tank: B, or the Change Tank button that appears by your guns.
  • The pad is where you bring a captured flag.
  • There is a gate in each of the two walls that face the city.

Inside somebody else's

  • Your battery drains, as fast as your own base would fill it.
  • Four guns on stilts open fire on you, one in each corner. They can be destroyed, and they rebuild themselves three minutes later. They never fire at anyone outside the walls.
  • Everyone is told. A warning with your name on it goes up on every screen. A cloaked tank is the one exception, until it fires.

6Stations and the battery

Two blue tanks on a charging station that is turning from yellow to blue around them, with a column of blue light rising from its middle.
Two Blue tanks taking the Central station from Yellow. The floor turns their colour as the clock runs down.

One battery pays for everything

  • Driving, turning, every shot and every module you run all come out of the same cell. Lasers have no ammunition at all. The battery is their magazine.
  • A flat battery leaves you crawling at a fifth of your speed, and your guns will not fire. Get home, or onto a station your team holds.
  • The charge gauge moves when you are being charged and runs red when something is draining you.

The five stations

  • Central in the middle of the city, and North, East, South and West out by their own walls — the names the warnings and the battle log use. A station charges only the team that holds it, and the middle of the disc is three times as fast as the rim.
  • Hold one uncontested and it mends you too: armour and shield come back at half the rate your own base repairs them.
  • To take one, stand on it with no other team there. One tank takes nine seconds, two take half that, three a third. A second team on the disc stops the clock — and stops everything else the station was giving the team that already held it, charge and repair alike.
  • Worth three points, and the whole city is told who is taking which station and with how many tanks.
  • Every tank on it when it flips is paid a bounty on top — see Bounties. The more stations your team already holds, the bigger it is.

7Hiding and finding

Stealth

Takes you off the enemy's map for as long as it is fitted, and draws a slow trickle of charge the whole time. They can still see you with their own eyes.

Cloak

Tap C and the enemy cannot see you at all, on screen or on the map. Your own team sees a glassy outline. It drops the moment you fire, a blast lands near you or the battery runs flat.

Remote Satellite

Press G for six seconds of everything on your map, Stealth or not. Then it rests for forty seconds.

8The city

Buildings

They stop every shot, lasers and lines of sight. Use them. Your shots leave holes in them, which does nothing but look right.

Tunnels

The biggest buildings have a tunnel driven straight through them. A way across the city that nobody can shoot down into.

Ramps and rooftops

Some buildings have a ramp up to the roof, and a Rocket Booster will put you on any of them. Every tank climbs every slope. The heavy ones are slower about it.

9The tanks

Four hulls. Each trades armour, speed and room differently, and what you drive matters more than how you drive it. Broadly, the heavier the hull the more it carries and the slower it comes round; the Specter is the odd one out, built around its stealth rather than its size. The bars are the figures the server runs on, so compare them there.

Your motor pool keeps up to five tanks. Pick one from the roster and press Deploy. New tank builds another, Edit changes the one you have picked, and neither keeps anything until you press Save — Cancel leaves the tank exactly as it was. Delete empties its bay; your last tank always stays.

Reading the catalogue…

10Weapons

Fit as many guns as you have bays for. Lasers hit the instant you fire and run off the battery. Every other gun fires a round that takes time to arrive and has to be led at a moving target. Nothing drops: every shot flies dead straight, so wherever the crosshair is, that is where it goes, at any range. A building in the way stops it.

Reading the catalogue…

11Support modules

Everything in a bay that is not a gun. Most work by themselves the moment they are fitted. The ones you switch on have their key beside them.

Reading the catalogue…

12Your first match

  1. Start from a ready-made tank. Line, on a Warden, is the all-rounder. Change one thing at a time once you know what you miss.
  2. Look at the map before you leave the gate. Find your own arrow, then the nearest ring. A station your team holds is a second home.
  3. Watch your charge, not just your armour. More tanks are lost to a flat battery in the wrong street than to any gun.
  4. Do not drive into an enemy base alone. The battery drain, four guns and a warning on every screen are three good reasons.
  5. Go home to mend. Your own base puts everything back in seconds, and it is where you change a tank that is not working.
  6. The flag is the game. One capture is worth ten kills, and it destroys their whole team the moment you get it home.

Deploy Set your keys

Something wrong, or something missing? Tell tank@tektology.com.