Pickup

The Pickup is the Renegades’ cheap scout: 60 minerals, 5 population, twelve seconds. The official description packs the whole role into one line — “a light vehicle with a heavy anti-aircraft machine gun. High speed, light armor, excellent for reconnaissance and infantry skirmishes.” The files show 240 hit points with 50 in reserve behind uniform 5 armour, and a gun doing 60 damage to infantry, 15 to vehicles and 10 to buildings on a 0.8-second cycle: 75.0, 18.7 and 12.5 damage per second. It fires while moving, with no minimum range. Confirmed by the game files of build 23882143.

The Pickup is the Renegades in miniature. The developer described them himself when he announced the demo on 3 June 2026 — the bandit faction is “the starting faction that exists in the gray zones of the global map, primarily focused on light and fast units.” ⚠️ That wording is in the announcement, not in the game files: none of the four factions carries a description of its own in build 23882143, and we say which is which because the two are not the same kind of source. Its number to notice is 75.0 damage per second against infantry — higher than the Empire’s BMP manages at 71.4, from a vehicle costing 60 minerals against the BMP’s 150. The Renegades do not buy durability; they buy output per mineral and accept that it arrives in something with 240 hit points.

Use the Pickup for the two jobs its description names and nothing else. Against infantry it out-damages vehicles costing twice as much; against armour it does 18.7 damage per second, which will not finish anything. The anti-aircraft mount is the part players forget: an enemy P-2 has 240 hit points and 2 armour, and the Pickup is a real threat to it for 60 minerals. Keep moving — it fires on the move and has no minimum range, so there is never a reason to stop it — and never let it be caught by something with a cannon. Our reading.

Anything with a cannon deletes it. Two hundred and forty hit points behind 5 armour means a single Gorb Tank shell — 330 against vehicles — is overkill by a wide margin, and the Pickup has no directional armour to reward good positioning. Its area resistance is 0.2, low enough that splash works well. The real difficulty is catching it: it is fast, it shoots on the move, and it is cheap enough that losing several changes nothing. Defend against it with static anti-infantry cover rather than by chasing it, because chasing it is what it is for. Our reading.