Welcome to this guide for Planetary Annihilation. My name is Quitch and I've been playing since the alpha first launched. I wanted to make a series of guides to make it easier to pick up the game and play it well, based on what I've learned.

When this tutorial refers to "clicking" without referencing a mouse button, assume the primary/left mouse button.

This version of the guide is no longer maintained. Click here[exodusesports.com] to see the latest revision.

There are a number of options you can tweak to make the game easier for you to play. I'm not going to delve into things like graphical options, I'm sure you can figure those out.

The camera is controlled either by keys configurable on this screen, or by holding the third mouse button and dragging. To recreate the typical tutorial experience feel free to start a game, move the camera about, then comment in your gruffest voice that you're "the best ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ soldier I've ever seen!"

Once in-game you'll notice that as you move the camera about the planet that the north and south poles shift in relation to the screen. While this is the optimal way to play the game it can be incredibly disorientating. We don't get straight onto a two wheeled bike, we first start with stabilisers. That's training wheels for US folks. Planetary Annihilation has these stabilisers in the form of Planet Pole Lock.



Switching this option on will ensure that north is always at the top of the screen and south is always at the bottom. Now, this is a sub-optimal way of playing for a couple of reasons: it gets you thinking about attack lines only from the east and west because that's how you rotate the map and it makes it much harder to navigate around the poles, which can thus discourage you from spawning there or making any plays around them. However, despite this you're going to have a lot to be learning at first so not having to fight camera disorientation can be helpful during this period. Indeed, I used Planet Pole Lock for the first few weeks of playing.

I'm not going to talk about these bindings, only draw your attention to this screen and advise that you look at familiarising yourself with them at some point.

Cinematic turns off every player aid, such as the user interface, to allow you to take cool screenshots and make videos.

Show Unit Icons controls the strategic icons that appear over units so you can control them even at extreme zooms. Personally I recommend setting this to "always" as icons are much easier to make out than the units themselves.



Icon Display Distance controls how far out you must zoom before unit icons are shown.

Show Metal Spots controls the display of green dots over metal spots. You will always want this on.

Show Stat Bars controls when unit health bars are shown, as well as the small white indicators used for recharge times of energy dependent units such as your bombers. You should probably leave this on.

Show Focus controls whether or not you see arrows between a unit and its destination when you hold shift. These arrows will change in colour based on the order, so green for move and patrol, red for attack or reclaim and blue for assist . It will also show the end point of a command, so a movement symbol at the end of a movement path, or an assist system on a unit being assisted. You can also use CAPS LOCK to turn this feature on.



Note that the final movement of patrol loop is not shown until a unit reaches the first patrol node.

Focus Behaviour controls whether "show focus" (when enabled) applies to only the selected unit or all units.

Show Build Previews controls whether you see wireframes for buildings queued for construction. Modal means you see them when you hold shift.



Selection Icons is similar, except it changes the selected unit's strategic icon to a teal colour. I highly recommend enabling this one.



Orbital Shell controls when the green orbital layer is displayed around a planet to assist with orbital navigation. Modal means it appears when you select an orbital unit.



Just set this to the region closest to you.

Don't be fooled by the name, that button is used for creating skirmish games as well.


You currently have two game modes to select from: FFA and Team Armies. By default Team Armies plays using the standard team model you see in every RTS, but there is a second option: shared armies. You change between these two options over in the player slots on the right, a grey "share army" button means you're in the mode where everyone controls their own independent force and economy, while a green button indicates that shared armies is active meaning that all players on the team share all units and have a shared economy. Beware using the "select Commander" hotkey in this mode as it will select all Commanders on the team.

if you have spectators in a game note that they are assigned a colour. If you find yourself unable to select your favourite colour, and none of the players are using it, open a slot for the spectators to join so you can find the culprit and have them change to another colour.



In a FFA you can enable "Dynamic Alliances" which allows you to ally (and unally) during the course of a game with other players. Breaking an alliance with someone breaks it both ways. You cannot see alliances between other players. You can also choose to enable victory for the last alliance left standing.

To the right of each player is the economic multiplier. By default this is set to 1.0. Changing it to 0.5 would give a player 50% of their normal income while setting it to 2.0 would give them 200%. You can set this anywhere from 0 to 5, both for players and the AI.

By default the game generates a system, creating a number of planets based on the number of player slots. You can also load systems you created in the system editor.



When you load a system, or when first joining a lobby, you will see a rotating graphic in the system area as well as next to your name. Only when both these loading icons have disappeared will you be able to start the game, or select ready, depending whether you are the host or not.

Only the host can launch a game, and they can only do so once every player has clicked the "ready" button. Once they have done this a green tick appears on their row. Any changes to the lobby's settings by the host removes the ready state from all the players. When you are in a ready state you cannot make any changes to your setup.

You can change your primary colour and also which Commander you will spawn in as by left-clicking. Set your default commander through the Armoury on the main menu. Some Commanders may be unavailable[support.uberent.com], for example the Alpha Commander is only available to Kickstarter backers who backed at the alpha level, or to people who bought the Cosmic Edition.

You can also add one or more AIs in the lobby. AIs on your team are supported, but not in shared team mode, nor will the AI use or respond to dynamic alliances.

AI difficulty controls how well they manage their economy, their micro level, which player it focuses attacks on, and how smart its threat decision making is. The AI plays by the same rules as you; it does not know where you spawn, it cannot see things outside of its line-of-sight.

This is Planetary Annihilation's randomly generated single-player campaign. You start out with almost no tech and must fight your way across the galaxy defeating enemies and gaining more technology. Victory is obtained when you eliminate the three enemy faction leaders.


On the setup screen you select your commander and faction, both of which are cosmetic elements only. You can also name your game for later access.

The Size setting determines the size of the galaxy you will play in. A larger galaxy means a longer game, it also generally means an easier one as you will have more opportunities to collect tech ahead of battling a faction leader.

The Difficulty controls how quickly the AI ramps up in difficulty in terms of AI difficulty level, number of commanders and economic multipliers. On Absurd difficulty the AI has no ramp up, it starts out at its top difficulty settings from the first planet. At the time of writing no one, including some of the game's best players, had beaten absurd difficulty in a small galaxy.

The Commander Loadout controls what technology you start the game with. You will unlock additional loadouts over the course of your Galactic War games.

For further information on playing Galactic War, click the How to Play button in the game.

Select a spawn location and click "start annihilation". You will appear where you clicked within the spawn zone, so choose wisely.

When playing with shared armies all players on the team see the same spawn locations, in all other modes every player gets unique spawn options.



The first thing we see when we spawn is our Commander. This is the key unit in Planetary Annihilation; lose your Commander, or in shared army mode lose all your Commanders, and you are out of the game. It doesn't matter how big your base is, if the Commander dies everything else dies too.





In the top left is a count of the players and if we click it on we can see a list of who is playing. Any names in red indicate annihilated opponents.



The system name and a list of planets can be found in the top right. Clicking on a planet switches your view to that planet at the current zoom level. Clicking the icon next to the planet switches your view to that planet and fits it on the screen.

Under some planets you may see little engine icons, this indicates that this planet is a smashable. Build as many engines, or "Halleys", on the planet as are indicated by the icons and you will be able to select another planet to annihilate, destroying everything on both worlds.

At the top of the screen is one of the most important parts of the game: the economy bar.
On the left is your metal. The bar itself and the numbers underneath represent the amount of metal in storage against your total storage. The numbers to the right represent your incoming and outgoing metal, the top green number is income and the bottom red number is spending. The large number on the right is the result of income minus spending. To start with you are making ten metal per second from your Commander. On the right-hand side you will see the same information for your energy.

In the centre is your overall efficiency which impacts the speed at which you build units and buildings. At 50% efficiency two fabricators or factories are building at the same rate as one fabricator or factory would at 100% efficiency. Fabricators are the construction units of the game.

Issuing an order to my Commander to build something you will see the number and colour of the bars change. Blue means you are earning more than you're spending and your storage is full. Red means you're spending more than you're earning and your storage is empty or about to run out. Green is in-between the two and the colour they should ideally be most of the time.



Hovering over any unit which is currently building will show you how much it is costing you. The cost is always the same, regardless of what is being built. Likewise, buildings which generate metal or energy will show you how much they're making. The green bar represents the health of the unit.



Planetary Annihilation operates using a flow economy, meaning that all units and structures are built over time and cost your economy the whole time they're being built. For example, let us take a standard Fabricator Vehicle which builds at 10 metal a second for a cost of 1000 energy per second. It can build a Missile Defence Tower, which costs 300 metal. This means for an economy operating at 100% efficiency it would take the fabricator 30 seconds as 300 metal divided by 10 metal a second is 30. The total energy cost would be 30,000, that's 1000 energy a second for 30 seconds. If your economy were operating at only 50% efficiency then the fabricator would only be building at 5 metal a second, but this would still cost you 1000 energy every second resulting in a total cost of 300 metal and 60,000 energy over 60 seconds. The higher the metal output of a fabricator or factory the faster it builds things.

When you select a unit you can give it context sensitive orders with the right mouse button. For example, if you right-click in an empty space with your Commander selected it will be issued a move command. Right-click on an enemy and it would get an attack command. A left-click deselects the currently selected unit. This works for factories as well, so you can setup orders for as the rollout, such as a default patrol for fighter aircraft.

Selecting a unit will cause the orders bar to appear on the right and, if the unit is a Commander, fabricator or factory, the build bar at the bottom. Let's first talk about the options on the orders bar.

Move is self-explanatory. You would generally use this when you want to move into a densely packed enemy area and the contextual command keeps changing to attack. When you order a group of units to move they will do so in a formation at the speed of the slowest unit. Units will continue to attack anything in range while moving.

Attack allows you to perform attack moves whereby units will move to a location but stop to attack anything along the way. Also used to cause a nuke to attack a ground location. Unlike many other RTSs your units can attack while moving and therefore a move command will often suffice unless you have a particular reason to maintain your unit's full range. Units on an attack command will not maintain formation and will move independent of one another.

Alt Fire exists only for the Commander and controls its Ubercannon. This is a short-ranged, energy expensive attack that will devastate enemy units. It is much less effective against buildings and enemy Commanders.

Assist is similar to the guard command seen in other games. A unit will follow the unit it is assisting, protect it from harm, and help it build things if possible. Fabricators can help factories build faster in this way.

Repair allows fabricators to heal units and buildings. Fabricators will automatically repair units they are assisting.

Reclaim is used by fabricators to suck up units and buildings and take back the metal. It can also be used against enemy units.

Patrol forms a patrol route based on the patrol orders you lay down. The first patrol order acts as the beginning and end of the path. Fabricators will automatically repair, reclaim and assist anything they come across.

Use is for particular buildings like the Teleporter. You should never need to select this from the orders bar, it can always be issued as a contextual command via the right-mouse button.

Stop cancels everything that unit or building was doing.


Ping is available at all times and forms a ping your teammates and spectators can see. Notice how a ping creates an alert. Hovering over the alert provides a view of the area, and clicking the alert takes you to the alert location. Other events, such as the loss of a building or an attack on the Commander will also generate these.

Fire orders allows you to control when a unit will open fire. The icon changes depending on the order selected.

Move orders currently serve no purpose. The icon changes depending on the order selected.


Energy orders are used to pause factory queues or disable energy expensive units as required. The icon changes depending on the order selected.

Build mode is a contextual order for factories. Changes between normal and continuous modes. This determines whether completed units are removed from the queue or moved to the back of the queue. The icon changes depending on the mode selected.

Holding shift you can queue up a number of different orders or even multiples of the same order.

The build bar appears only for fabricators or factories, such as the Commander, and allows you to build structures. You can queue these in the same way as orders by holding shift.



The build bar for factories will show the currently queued units. While in normal build mode the number of units queued will decrease by one each time the factory starts building another unit, for example starting to build a fabber will reduce the fabber number from 2 to 1. In continuous mode the factory will loop through the queued units and the numbers displayed will not change.

Holding shift allows you to increase the number of queued units in increments of 5. Holding ctrl allows you to queue units at the start of the queue rather than the end, but these units will always be removed from the queue when construction is started even if the factory is in continuous mode. You can use the stop command to cancel the current construction.

When you have selected an order, or a building to construct, the left-mouse button becomes the action button and the right-mouse button is cancel.

The game provides you the ability to issue commands over areas rather than simply at individual points. Select an order, such as patrol, then click and drag. You can do this with orders for units or even factories. Below are shown four examples:


A factory is given an area patrol command. All planes this factory produces will patrol this area.


A fabricator is given an area build command for metal extractors.


A fabricator is given an area build command for energy plants. Almost all buildings will area build in a line.


A fabricator is given an area build command for energy storage. Storage builds as a cluster.

Area commands, such as patrol, when dragged beyond the planet will now encompass the entire planet. You can use this to, for example, have aircraft patrol an entire world, or build on every metal spot.

One of the unique features of Planetary Annihilation is picture-in-picture. The PIP allows you the exact same functionality as the primary window, you can view anything or anywhere, give orders, etc.

You can also use the buttons to swap the PIP and primary views as well as setting your current primary view as the PIP view



Another unique feature is the Chronocam, which allows you to look into the past, even during a live game. Currently this is for viewing purposes only, but later on you will be able to choose to continue a game from a point in the past.

Closing the Chronocam takes you back to the present.


This isn't a separate view or UI feature, simply by zooming out we can see the whole system and all its orbits. When units are moving between planets you will see them here. You will only see the movement of enemy units if you have a Deep Space Radar.

The feature that Planetary Annihilation derives its name from. Once you have built the required number of engines on a planet you will see a new button in the system list.



Clicking it will zoom your view out to see the entire system. Potential targets will have a new icon next to them.



Click the red bullseye for the planet you want to annihilate. The view will now switch to the surface of the planet and you will be asked to click the location you want to come down on. Once you have done that click the final button.



Once clicked the engines will light up and away it goes.

And that covers the game's interface and control scheme. If you found the guide helpful please be sure to rate it up. Also, check out this and other guides over at eXodus eSports[exodusesports.com].

I would recommend that next you take a look at my guide The Foundations of Good Play, which will help you avoid some of the classic mistakes people make when playing PA.