DREADNOUGHT TARTARUS sets its war in FC 2057, after an unidentified super-scale battleship appears in Earth's orbit and a devastating war erupts. From the bridge of the TARTARUS, the player commands a city-sized dreadnought through that war, and the opposition spans four broad categories. The overview article frames the wider setting; this article focuses on what the dreadnought points its guns at.
Confirmed Enemy Categories
Pre-release material describes four broad categories of opposition the player encounters during the campaign. Specific named enemies inside each category have not been confirmed.
Category | Profile |
|---|---|
Occupied or Rogue Urban Defense Systems | Fixed installations and city-scale fortifications, fought over the footprint of the cities they were built to protect. |
Human Military Forces | Conventional armies, vehicles, and other state-grade hardware scaled up to face a city-sized opponent. |
Gigantic Monsters and Anomalous Lifeforms | Kaiju-scale and anomalous targets large enough to justify the dreadnought's main-cannon firepower. |
Extraterrestrial Invasion Units | Invasion units from extraterrestrial civilizations. They tie the enemy roster to the FC 2057 orbital-battleship framing. |
Tying to Reverse Engineering
Each category is likely to drop a different kind of intel because each is built on a different technology base, and that intel feeds directly into reverse engineering, the system that converts study of defeated enemies into new TARTARUS armaments and modules. Mechanised urban defenses, conventional military hardware, biological lifeforms, and extraterrestrial machinery do not teach the same lessons, so leaning on one category narrows the range of unlocks. Players who want a wide armament tree are pushed toward engaging the full roster across the continuous campaign rather than farming a single target type.
Tying to Combat Scale
Not every fight in the four categories is shaped the same way. Urban defense systems, gigantic monsters, and extraterrestrial fleets are obvious work for the main batteries of the TARTARUS, where city-leveling firepower is the right shape of force. Smaller-scale confrontations, including ground-level skirmishes or precision objectives where flattening the surrounding area is undesirable, are the situations where the player deploys the combat mech from the hangar bay instead. A single category can produce both dreadnought-scale and mech-scale work depending on the encounter.
Unconfirmed Details
A great deal about the enemy roster has not been clarified in pre-release material. Treat the following as open questions until the developer shares more:
Specific named enemies
. Individual ship classes, vehicle types, monster species, and unit names within any of the four categories.
Named boss encounters
. Whether each category includes flagship-tier or apex-tier opponents.
Stat blocks
. Hit points, armour values, damage outputs, and other numeric balancing data.
Zone-by-zone breakdowns
. Which categories appear in which parts of the strategic map and in what mix.
Player allegiance
. Whose side the TARTARUS fights for and the player's relationship to each category.
Internal factions
. Whether each category contains rival sub-factions.
The four categories above are the only enemy framing publicly described. Anything more specific should be treated as open until benkimchi confirms it.