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Four powers divide the ruined Earth of Dust Front RTS. Three of them dominate the war outright, and a fourth exists in the gaps between them. The developer has described all four in his own faction write-up, and the same short labels appear in the store text and in the project's long-running question and answer post. This page collects what has been said about each of them. For the wider state of the world they fight over, see World and Setting; for the weapons the three dominant powers hold, see Superweapons.
The Four Powers at a Glance
Three factions predominate in a world almost entirely stripped of life, wrapped in an industrial hell of metal and concrete dust that gives off a radioactive background. A fourth group exists alongside them without ever having been a true faction.
Faction | Standing | Character |
|---|---|---|
Fourth Industrial Empire | Dominant; the player's side | Militarists from over-industrialised regions who answer every problem with force |
Evolved Mutants | Dominant | A bioengineering project meant to push humanity past the ordinary human form |
Robotic Escalation | Dominant | Machines seen mostly near the front lines, hostile to both other powers |
Armed Groups | Unofficial fourth side | Bandits and rebels, fragmented and slowly dying out |
The Fourth Industrial Empire
The Empire is the side the player commands, and the campaign is told from its point of view. It is described as militarists drawn from over-industrialised regions who use force, might, and cruelty to carry out their plans. The bulk of its population is made up of artificial people, described as synthetic human replicas, and its leader is titled the General Secretary Emperor, the Tsar-Sphere of the industrial lands, a figure said to be merciless toward any race that differs from the approved human blueprint. The Empire compensates for the weakness of the individual person with superior firepower and weight of numbers.
That doctrine shows up directly in how the Empire plays. Its macro structures, covered under Base Building and Resources, push mass and industry rather than elite troops, and its vehicle wrecks can be recovered rather than written off, as described under Units and Armies.
The Evolved Mutants
The mutants began as a radical bioengineering idea: adapt humanity completely to a world whose flora and fauna are gone, and in doing so turn it into something more perfect than the ordinary human. Their leaders despise the Empire and its understanding of bioengineering. Almost all of their industry runs on a biological basis rather than a mechanical one.
Their military approach follows from that. Mutant tactics are built around destroying enemy formations outright and breaking through defensive lines with heavy mutants. In the demo, the playable Mutant Faction fields heavy, well-armoured units alongside worms and flies, and its weight tends to force fights into close quarters.
The Robotic Escalation
The robots are the least understood of the three. The overwhelming majority of them have been sighted in front-line areas, and little is known about them beyond one strange detail: the machines use oddly outdated materials while applying technology of a much higher order. They are hostile to both of the other dominant powers rather than allied to either.
The developer offers one hint about them, phrased as a possibility rather than an answer, that the key to their mystery may lie in the fact that humanity's third path in this world was escapism.
The Armed Groups
Beyond the dominant powers are those who never managed to end up on one side or the other. Bandits and rebels form what the developer calls the unspoken fourth side of the conflict, and he is blunt about their standing: they were never a full-fledged faction. Their level of production can barely compete with the others, and the fragmentation of their society and command structure, with power divided among individual warlords, makes their eventual destruction only a matter of time. Their population is a slowly dying-out species of ordinary humans scattered across the expanses of a concreted Earth.
The demo's Bandit Faction is the playable form of this group. It is the starting faction of the gray zones on the global map, and it leans on light, fast units rather than heavy armour.
Playing as a Faction
The developer has stated the count plainly: three factions plus one additional faction, four in total, with the rebels as the additional one. At release the game assumes a single campaign, played as the Empire, and the developer has said that focusing everything on one polished campaign is a deliberate choice for a systems-driven strategy game rather than a story-linear one. He has also said that campaigns for the other factions could follow later depending on how the project does, and that a skirmish mode against bots letting you play the factions not covered by the campaign is possible but would most likely come after the main game.
None of that is a commitment, and none of it is dated. Treat the single Empire campaign as the confirmed scope and everything past it as an open possibility. The developer has separately confirmed that plans to ship only one campaign at launch have not changed, while noting that the other factions are still being fully worked out and equipped.
A Note on Names
Two naming layers exist side by side. The developer's long-running question and answer post lists the four by short labels, Empire, Mutants, Robots, and Rebels, and notes that the mutant and robot labels are working names that may change. His later faction write-up gives the fuller forms used above. Only the Fourth Industrial Empire has appeared in an official English-language post; the other three names are rendered here from the developer's Russian-language write-up, so the exact English wording the game ships with may differ.
Which of the three dominant factions holds which superweapon has not been stated. See Superweapons for what is known about the weapons themselves.