Video (short v2 demo), Discord (questions and support), Documentation

Overview

Pioneer Mass Strategy System is a high-performance, data-oriented foundation for building RTS, top-down strategy, and large-scale combat games in Unreal Engine. Built on Unreal’s Mass Entity framework, Pioneer gives you the core systems out of the box: large-unit navigation, selection, commands, combat, formations, rendering, and animation, so you can focus on your own units, factions, maps, and game rules.

Core Features

• Mass unit navigation with navmesh-based pathfinding, avoidance, steering, confinement, and sleep optimization

• Melee and ranged combat with health, armor, teams, target acquisition, projectiles, damage, and death handling

• Groups and formations with control slots, group recall, merge, ungroup, and built-in formation layouts

• Command queue so players can plan multi-step orders

• Unit selection and commands including click selection, drag selection, move, attack move, attack, hold position, stop, patrol, follow, retreat, and charge

• Actor-Mass Bridge so regular Unreal Actors and Mass entities can fight side by side

• Mass unit animation states for idle, walk, run, charge, attack, and death using baked vertex animation data

• Efficient rendering through Instanced Static Mesh support, dynamic LOD, and vertex animation workflows

• Large unit counts with tested support for up to 10,000 units on suitable hardware and map setups

• Entity Config Assets for creating unit types through reusable traits

What You Can Build

• RTS and top-down strategy games

• Large-scale battle simulations

• Wave-based enemy games

• Hybrid games with Actor heroes or squads fighting Mass armies

• Strategy prototypes with selection, movement, formations, combat, and UI already connected

Included Sample Modes

RTS Mass Battle

A large-scale RTS battle starting point with deployment, command cards, groups, formations, melee units, ranged units, projectiles, match state, and HUD.

Top Down Zombie Shooter

A squad-action sample where Actor operatives fight Mass zombie entities through the Actor-Mass Bridge. This is useful if your project needs a smaller number of detailed Actor characters fighting many Mass enemies.

Updates

Version 4.1

• Defensive move behavior: Move orders now stay focused on their destination while still letting units defend themselves against immediate nearby threats

Version 4.0 - Combat Update

• Two new sample game modes: RTS Mass Battle and Top Down Zombie Shooter

• Melee and ranged combat for Mass entities

• Projectile simulation with direct, ballistic, and lobbed trajectory options

• Actor-Mass Bridge for combat between regular Unreal Actors and Mass entities

• Group and formation system with control slots

• Command queue for multi-step orders

• New Mass animation system for locomotion, charge, attack, and death states

• New combat-ready unit examples and zombie enemy examples

Version 3.1

• Improved performance: Consolidated navigation processors, improved use of cached data and simplified obstacle querying

Version 3.0

• Terrain navigation: Units can now walk on Z-Axis based on navigation mesh data

• Animation blending

Version 2.0

• Instanced Static Mesh (ISM) support for units

• You can now render up to 10,000 units on screen while maintaining smooth and stable FPS

• Dynamic LOD system

• Foliage support with navigation mesh

• Vertex animation setup

• Free camera mode

Performance Notes

Pioneer is built for large unit counts, but performance depends on hardware, map complexity, navmesh complexity, unit setup, animation cost, combat density, and how many systems are active at once.

The 10,000-unit target was tested on:

• AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070

• 32 GB RAM

Before You Buy

Pioneer is mainly a C++ project built on Unreal's Mass Entity framework. C++ knowledge and a basic understanding of Mass Entity are required if you want to integrate the system deeply into your own project or add custom gameplay logic. Without C++ knowledge, you can still use and adjust included content such as units, buildings, resources, maps, data assets, and some Blueprint-facing setup. However, advanced custom behavior is difficult to build only in Blueprints because most runtime data lives in Mass fragments and most core logic is implemented in C++.

The included game modes are starting points and examples, not complete shipped games. They are intended to show how the systems fit together and give you a practical base to customize.

Required Plugins

• CommonUI