Dust Front does not use a single damage number. Each weapon stores three, one per target class, and the spread between them is the whole counter system. The figures below are read from the game files, build 23882143; the damage-per-second values are computed from damage and fire cycle, and they are marked as computed wherever they appear on this site.
Start with the clearest case. The Spotter squad deals 400 damage to infantry and 10 to vehicles — a ratio of forty to one. Riflemen sit at 20 against 1, a ratio of twenty. Put either in front of armour and they contribute essentially nothing. Now the opposite: the Dreadnought “Howitzer” deals 50 to infantry and 200 to vehicles, a ratio of one to four in the other direction. It is an anti-armour weapon that happens to also hit people.
Against infantry, the highest sustained output among weapons that reload — the BTR flamethrower fires continuously, so its figure is exact but not comparable, and we do not rank it — comes from the Flamethrower tank and the Flamethrower turret, tied at roughly 369 damage per second — the turret for 150 minerals and the tank for 200, then the “AK-30” turret at 225 for 130, then the Dreadnought at 203 for 700. Note what that ordering means: the flamethrower turret is joint-highest in output AND the cheaper of the two that reach 369, so it is the most efficient per mineral of the four; the Dreadnought, which costs 700 for less output than a 130-mineral turret, is by far the least. A Dreadnought costs five times what an “AK-30” turret costs and kills infantry more slowly — buying one to clear infantry is buying the wrong tool at five times the price.
Against vehicles, the Dreadnought leads at about 125 per second, followed by the Cerberus at 76 and the P-2 at 62.5. Against buildings, the Strong crawler tops the list at about 94 per second for 120 minerals — cheaper than anything near it, and the reason a small crawler push can end a base faster than an armoured column.
One unit is deliberately absent from those rankings. The Flamethrower armoured personnel carrier has no reload at all in the files: its weapon fires continuously rather than in discrete shots. A damage-per-second figure can still be computed for it, and it comes out enormous, but it is not comparable to a cannon’s. We flag it rather than rank it, because a number that looks like the others while meaning something different is worse than no number.
The weapon families themselves are worth knowing: across the demo the files hold 26 projectile weapons, 25 machine guns, 22 cannons, one flamethrower and one laser. Machine guns cluster on the anti-infantry side, cannons and projectiles on the anti-armour side. When you cannot look up a specific unit, the family is a reliable first guess.
Values read from game files · version 23882143