To the uninitiated, EDA looked like the tutorial faction. Standard RTS fare. Human-centric units, tanks, conventional weapons. Clean lines. Think GDI from Command & Conquer, the UEF from Supreme Commander, or Terrans from StarCraft. The obvious pick for players who wanted something familiar while they learned the game.
That’s over.
In the last Developer Q&A, Sanctuary Producer nine2 revealed how EDA is becoming something scrappier and more vicious. They’re not a professional military anymore. The design philosophy changed. Now their lack of resources is the entire point, not a weakness to overcome.
They could like for example, you know drop little canisters of liquid coolant on the enemy units which causes them to freeze and stuff like that. So that’s an example of this improvised tech which is kind of becoming a trait of EDA that I kind of like. – nine2
You’re getting a faction that fights dirty. Coolant bombs from drones. Suicide engineers. Jury-rigged weapons made from salvaged parts. Units that break normal gameplay rules. One example from the Q&A: crash your builder drone into enemies and watch it explode instead of constructing anything.
This changes how they play. Less structure, more chaos. Less predictability, more asymmetry. They don’t hold defensive lines. They find weak spots, punch through, and punish anyone who plays conservatively.
Fighting them requires different thinking. Scouting becomes critical. You can’t predict their tech path or unit composition. You might expect a stealth unit and get something entirely different; improvised, scrappy, and built to cause problems. They’re designed to be unpredictable without being random or gimmicky.
That might be like, you know, crashing your engineer drones into the enemy units as suicide bombers instead of using them as engineers. – nine2
That’s better than being the ‘default’ faction, which is code for boring. The generic army that gets abandoned once players understand the alternatives. New EDA is a problem-solving faction built around pressure and improvisation.
It fits their place in Sanctuary’s power structure. EDA represents the human survivors who don’t have the technological advantages of other factions. They’re making do with what they can build, steal, or repurpose.
They’ll have those elements so they’ll have stealth and you know a mobility unit that can move in a fancy way like tunnelling through the ground or something like that and could tunnel underneath the cliff maybe. – nine2
The faction is still evolving. But the direction is clear: fewer generic units, more controlled chaos. The developers know what they want.
EDA isn’t the middle-ground choice anymore. It’s the knife-fight faction. You’re going to get messy. That’s exactly what they’re going for.
