Supreme Commander 2

TheWord's Guide to Cybran Units.

This is the first of an epic saga of guides dedicated to helping everybody learn everything there is to know about Cybran units and their associated abilities. I would also like to thank in advance to everybody that helped me in the making of this guide. Names will be named at the end of the last guide of the saga.

Lets start off with buildings as you will almost always have to build these in any game that you play.

Economic Buildings:




Factories:






The Cybran economic buildings are almost exactly the same as the economic buildings of the other factions. They share the same health, build cost, and build time but they differ in one particular area.
They differ in economy upgrades. The Cybran has no unlockable upgrades in the research tree that increase the effectiveness of their mass extractors, power generators or research stations. This means that the Cybran must carry on on the same +1.2 mass per second on his Mass Extractors and +6 energy a second with his Power Generators throughout the game. The only way to increase the resource income is to get mass conversion, and this approach is still inferior to the other factions Mass Conversion purely because of the fact that the other factions can get a energy production boost on their power generators after getting Mass Conversion.

But regardless of this economical unscalability the Cybran economy has a big trick up its sleeve. The build time and build cost decrease upgrades are able to give the Cybran a very big early game advantage if no units need to be unlocked at the start of the game.

The first upgrade is:


Build time decrease by 10% which costs 2 research points. This means that after unlocking this upgrade the Cybran is able to get his base up and running 10% faster than the enemy, which does not seem like much but in a very early game centric strategy this can pay dividend.

The second upgrade is:


Build cost decrease by 10% which also costs 2 research points. This saves the Cybran 10% of the energy and mass consumed when building structures, which are already being built 10% faster than the enemy structures. Combined these two upgrades allow the Cybran to have 6 Mass Extractors, 3 Power Generators and 3 Factories building Loyalists at the 2 minute mark. This a feat that no other faction can match.

Cybran land factories have no economical upgrades and continue working in the same way the entire game.

Air Factories on the other hand have a 15% time decrease upgrade which means the Cybran Gemini takes 15% less time to build. This is an important upgrade to get when competing for air superiority.
The Cybran Naval Factory has two important upgrades that it gets. These are the Sea Operations and the build time decrease of 15%. Sea Operations give the Naval Factory long range cannons which are similar to the executioners weapons. It allows the Cybran naval base to become a fortress able to resist land and sea assaults. Coupled with fully upgraded Naval Factories the Cybran naval base becomes a very hard nut to crack. The 15% time decrease allows the Cybran to be able to build naval at a rate that no other faction can match.

Basic Buildings:



Let us first have a look at the Cybran radar. It is the only radar that has radar and sonar all in one building, which also means that it can be built on water as well as on land. This is not what makes the Cybran radar special however, it is two particular upgrades.



Now with these upgrades the Cybran is able to see a very big part of the map for radar and is able to completely cover most maps with sonar. This gives an enormous advantage when it comes to detecting flanks and naval anywhere on the map.

Cybran defensive structures have two very important upgrades that allows them to do well at their role. The Cybran have a 30% rate of fire increase upgrade in the structure tree that turns the anti air and the point defence towers into killing machines.



When this upgrade is combined with structure training then it is one of the best possible damage upgrades in the entire game. The other important upgrade is structure detonate.



It is the best defensive upgrade possible for Cybran. It only costs 3 Research Points and comes after build time decrease. Its comparable to Illuminate Electroshock and the UEF Mass Extractor Gauss Cannons. The ability itself has a range of 15 (for ALL buildings, so Point Defenses look like they have bigger range because they allow units to go closer to the structure) which is slightly less than the range of Cybran Loyalists (17). This ability works with different buildings and they each have different damage outputs when they are detonated.

The general rule of thumb is that the expensive structures (Mass Extractors, Factories, Research Stations and defence structures) do much more damage than Power Generators and Radars for instance. The key benefits of Structure Detonate is that Mass Extractors and defence towers have the ability to inflict enough damage to kill off any single land unit in one shot. This means that if the enemy is rushing into your base you will be able to kill off every single land unit (not experimentals) that is within the 15 range of the building with one Structure Detonate. This also, surprisingly, applies to gunships as well. So any sort of low flying unit (Gunships, jump jetting Loyalists, Mega Fortresses and AC-1000s) are vulnerable to structure detonate. Gunships are killed by one Mass Extractor, while experimentals are heavily damaged. Beware that this ability leaves no building remains after the building is detonated, meaning that there is no 50% build cost decrease when you build the same building in the same spot that the previous one was in.

Special Buildings:



Cybran shields are similar to Illuminate shields but are infinitely better than UEF shields for the single reason that they are not affected by area of effect damage. They are unlocked for 5 Research Points. See my structure placement guide for more information on placement, but do not forget that these are able to be detonated to surprise a greedy opponent that thinks a shield is a free kill.



The Cybran Long Range Artillery piece is the best artillery unit in the entire game. The 30% rate of fire increase that was mentioned in the previous chapter also applies to the long range artillery and for this reason the Cybran artillery is able to out damage any other artillery piece in 1v1 combat. It also has the ability to be detonated, which considerably slows down your opponent in their efforts to kill it quickly. Another important upgrade that has been added by the DLC is the Nanite Shell Camera:



This gives artillery shells vision when they explode so the Cybran Commander is able to scout a large portion of the map by using ground fire, this upgrade costs 5 Research Points.



The Recycler is a reclamation building that functions like the Engineer or ACU reclaim ability. It automatically reclaims all dead units within it's massive range which is slightly larger than the Fatboy range. It leaves destroyed structures alone though, so that you can always gain the 50% decrease in cost when you rebuild the building. Another very interesting property is that it is able to reclaim units that are alive if given a reclaim command. This is not very effective against large land armies as it takes a long time to singly reclaim every single unit, but against experimentals it is very effective and in sufficient numbers can reclaim several experimentals before they even get in range. So if you are having large land or air wars very close to your base or front lines then this is an ideal building to get to recoup some of the losses without risking an engineer getting killed while on patrol. This building costs 8 Research Points to unlock and comes after build cost decrease.



I will deal with all the strategic missile buildings here in one place. Even though the nuke launcher and the nuke defence buildings are separate upgrades they are actually the same building. They still function exactly the same as other strategic missile launch and defence facilities, just that you do not have to spend more resources building another silo for defense or offense if you already invested in one.

The Boomerang is new in this DLC and is a nuke missile defense building. But it accomplishes this in a very different way to normal strategic missile defense buildings. The Boomerang is able to deflect enemy strategic missiles back to the launcher that it came from. Keep in mind that deflected nukes still belong to the same team, so nuke defence silos of the launcher do not fire on it! Another note is that Boomerangs are not the end all of stopping nukes, they build extremely slowly and are quite costly. If your opponent is going nuke spam then getting one of these is a given, but you will still need plenty of normal anti nukes just to make sure you don't get overwhelmed. Another key difference mentioned by Sovietpride is that the nuke defense/offense silo has no tactical missile defence, even though having a tactical missile defence this late in the game has little effect.



The Protobrain is an experimental building and air unit. When built it generates large amounts of research and creates an air experimental that is able to inflict some damage on the enemy. Keep in mind that the air experimental is free and thus it is not very effective. In an escort role it excels as it increases the veterancy income of any unit close to it. Keep in mind that when the air experimental is not docked with the structure the research gain will be lessened, so it is a trade off between veteran units or more research points. The Protobrain costs 10 Research Points and comes after Mass Conversion.



The Magnetron is the late game land defence unit of choice for the Cybran. It costs 12 Research Points and on its own is able to deter any land army from coming close. When two are up and running it is able to keep any land army at bay for a very long amount of time, or suck them in in a minimal amount of time. Keep in mind that if you are going to be taking on major experimentals you will need two minimum! When units are sucked in close to the Magnetron they are automatically reclaimed, and the mass gained is significantly more than how much was spent on the unit. This means that if you are able to suck in a land army, you will be swimming in mass.

Keep in mind its energy costs so that you can always activate it at a moments notice. Normally the way to use the Magnetron is to keep your opponents land army at bay until you can build some shields or other low value structures next to your magnetron so that the enemy units target that instead of your valuable magnet. Remember that there is no link in the cooldown of attract and repel, so feel free to repel as soon as your attract has stopped working.

That concludes everything that there is to know about Cybran structures! Stay tuned to the supcom 2 portal for more guides to come!

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• Check out Word's guide for structure placement!