Sanctuary: Shattered Sun promises to command vast armies across the surface of a star-encompassing Dyson Sphere, and its T5 units represent the logical extreme of that scale. As the developers put it:
You should see those soon […] They absolutely crush, absolutely just decimate everything. They can walk through a base. They’re about the same width as six factories. They’re absolutely titanic and if you build one you win.
These Gigabots abandon any pretence of subtlety. They exist for one purpose: breaking deadlocks through overwhelming force.
The developer’s approach is refreshingly honest about what these units represent. Rather than attempting to balance game-ending weapons for competitive play, they’ve embraced the power fantasy. Supreme Commander 2’s King Kriptor assault bot and the original Supreme Commander’s Yolona Oss missile launcher established the template for experimental units that dominate entire battlefields, but Sanctuary’s T5s push that concept even further.
Each faction gets one T5 unit, and the design philosophy becomes clear from the announced roster. The Chosen receive a colossal hover tank that presumably combines mobility with devastating firepower. The Guard’s flying battle base suggests a mobile command centre that can reshape entire sectors of the battlefield. The EDA’s unit remains undefined, with developers soliciting community input – a delay that reveals the challenge of creating something that feels distinct in a category defined by excess.
The economic risk involved in constructing these units creates an interesting strategic tension. As the developers explain:
You just can’t build it because the other guy will build a million tanks instead and roll into your base so the only time you’d be able to build one is if the game is like totally static and paralyzed and that’s why it’s a game ender it’s to break the stalemate.
This risk-reward calculation mirrors real-world military procurement decisions, where nations bet enormous resources on superweapons that may never see combat.
The six-factory width gives a sense of the sheer scale these units represent. The visual impact of a unit that massive moving across the battlefield speaks to the spectacle these units are designed to create.
Sanctuary’s developers explicitly acknowledge that T5 units aren’t balanced for competitive 1v1 play. This represents a mature understanding of different player motivations within the RTS space. Not every unit needs to serve tournament-level balance when casual players want moments of overwhelming dominance. The spectacle of deploying a base-crushing giant serves the power fantasy that drew many players to the genre in the first place.
The naming convention reveals developer confidence in their vision. The developer’s thought process illustrates the progression:
I was kind of like leaning towards the word Megabots for the T4 and then Gigabots for T5 because then if there was ever a T6 there would be Terabots and Terabots just sounds cool.
This escalating terminology suggests they understand the inherent absurdity of the concept while embracing it completely. The self-aware approach prevents the units from feeling like failed attempts at serious military simulation.
The stalemate-breaking function addresses a genuine problem in RTS design. Extended matches often devolve into resource-exhausting wars of attrition where neither side can achieve decisive victory. T5 units provide a hard timer on such scenarios – build yours first, or face the consequences of letting your opponent reach that threshold.
The game’s promise of hundreds of units and grander strategy suggests T5 units will operate within a broader ecosystem of massive-scale warfare. Rather than being isolated superweapons, they’ll function as the apex predators in a food chain that includes conventional armies, support structures, and resource networks.
The success of these units will ultimately depend on their integration with Sanctuary’s core gameplay systems. Supreme Commander’s experimentals worked because they felt like natural extensions of the game’s economic and technological progression. Sanctuary’s T5s need to feel similarly inevitable – the logical endpoint of a faction’s technological development rather than arbitrary additions to extend tech trees.
Whether these Gigabots will create the memorable moments their developers envision remains to be seen. But their existence signals a developer willing to embrace the genre’s potential for spectacle over strict competitive balance. In a gaming landscape increasingly focused on esports viability, that willingness to prioritize player fantasy over perfect balance represents a refreshing design philosophy.
