Angels Fall First Ground Vehicles Guide: Every Vehicle and How to Use It

Ground combat in Angels Fall First runs on a ten-vehicle roster: five classes, one vehicle per faction per class. Vehicles arrive by scoring, not by walking to a pad, and every one of them can be customised through the same budget system as your infantry kit. This guide covers the roster, the shared mechanics, and the tactics that keep expensive machines alive.

Shared mechanics first

Vehicles are earned in-match. As your score climbs (the threshold appears to track your combined Combat + Support + Command points), the game offers you a vehicle appropriate to the map. Accept via the Esc map or the C rosetta; it airdrops behind friendly lines with you in the driver’s seat. Decline freely — the offer returns.

Facing matters. Rear hits deal bonus damage on every vehicle. Fight nose-in, reverse out.

Repair or die rich. Every vehicle soaks fire; the Multitool repairs them. Drivers should carry it themselves and retreat to repair, and a passenger with a Multitool doubles a vehicle’s effective health. Repairing an occupied vehicle earns Support XP; empty hulls pay nothing.

All vehicles have temporary shields (Z key) and armour that self-repairs out of combat if you fit the Self Repair electronics.

Customisation: electronics (scrambler, EM sensor, motion sensor, self-repair), chassis mods (insulation, ammo, boost, armour, anti-shock) and swappable secondary weapons on lighter platforms. Armour spec trades boost duration; boost spec trades armour. As with infantry: mod to solve real problems, not by default.

Light transports — ULA Hare / AIA Silverback

Driver, gunner, two passengers. Fast, fragile, and the best point-response tool in the game. The job is delivery and harassment: rush an early Territories point, drop a fireteam behind an objective, relocate a squad after a stage break. Concentrated small arms kill them, AV weapons delete them — speed is the armour. Never stop moving in the open, never trade with anything armoured.

Best on: Yin Tao Shan, Plains, any Territories map with back-cap routes.

Light mechs — ULA Velius / AIA Gheist

Single-pilot walkers sized between vehicle and tank. Mechs go where tanks can’t: courtyards, ramps, streets and the tight approaches around indoor control points. Two weapon systems, but only one fires at a time — swap proactively (anti-armour loaded before you round a corner onto a tank, anti-infantry before a plaza).

They bully infantry and screen tanks; they lose straight duels with MBTs. Use buildings to break line of sight while weapons cycle, and lean on their small profile — a mech in a doorway is a fortress, a mech in a field is target practice.

Best on: Fortress (indoor points, tight approaches), Errah.

Personnel carriers — ULA Turtle / AIA Basta

“APC” undersells them; both play as infantry fighting vehicles. Heavy armour, a potent driver weapon, a rooftop gun (the Basta mounts the Tir-Boda plasma weapon), and a passenger bay. Doctrine:

1. Lead the push on open approaches — the hull absorbs the AV fire that would evaporate your infantry.
2. Park hull-down near contested points as a mobile fire base and rally.
3. Keep a Multitool passenger aboard; a repaired Turtle/Basta on a point is genuinely hard to remove.

The counter is isolation: an APC without infantry gets swarmed and satcheled. Stay with your squad — you exist to make their push work.

Main battle tanks — ULA Partisan / AIA Dhaka

Driver-plus-gunner heavyweights, and a genuine asymmetry between factions:

• The Partisan’s cannon hits very hard with a small splash radius — a dedicated vehicle-killer. Against infantry the driver falls back on a coaxial MG while the gunner works. Play it like a sniper: long lanes, first shot, reverse to cover.
• The Dhaka is a hovertank firing explosive plasma with a large splash. It strafes sideways to dodge — a Dhaka driver who straferides during a duel will dodge Partisan shells and win trades — and its splash makes it the superior anti-infantry tank. Splash doorways; you don’t need direct hits.

Both die to the same things: AV infantry in the rear arc, gunships, and their own impatience. An MBT is the most score-expensive thing on the ground — retreating to repair is always correct. Escort with infantry or a mech, or don’t push at all.

Gunships — ULA Sturm / AIA Locust

Close air support, exclusive to ground maps, and the vehicle with the steepest learning curve thanks to flight modes: middle mouse toggles gravity mode — off to hover like a helicopter, on to fly like a fixed-wing aircraft. Hover to aim, fly to reposition and evade.

• The Sturm’s precise, low-splash cannons suit vehicle hunting, and it can mount a unique AI-controlled tail gun that punishes anyone chasing it.
• The Locust’s four plasma cannons have slow projectiles but heavy splash — it erases infantry concentrations and slow targets, and even misses suppress a capture zone.

Gunships dominate until the enemy fields dedicated AV (a RID’s instant beam is the gunship killer — its red targeting laser is your only warning) or their own gunship. Altitude discipline and short attack runs beat hovering majestically over the objective until someone locks you.

Countering vehicles as infantry

• Carry the counter on vehicle maps. RID (ULA) instant beam, no leading; MLI (AIA) guided splitting missiles, always fire locked-on, and remember you can lock then fire over cover.
• Shoot the rear. Bonus damage applies to your launchers too.
• EMP grenades disable vehicles and turrets long enough to finish or escape.
• Autosentries distract gunners and chip armour.
• On infantry-only maps (Irega, Errah Territories) none of this budget is needed — swap loadouts. That’s what the multiple-loadout system is for: see best loadouts.

Related guides

• Best loadouts for every role
• Space combat & fighter guide
• Map database