Stratagems, explained: why the beacon bounces and what actually shortens the cooldown

A stratagem is called in by opening the stratagem wheel and entering a directional code — up, down, left, right, in the order the game gives you — which ends in throwing a beacon, the "stratagem ball," toward wherever you're aiming. The beacon marks the drop point; the actual reinforcement, weapon, or strike follows that mark down from orbit. Get the code wrong and you just re-enter it. Get the throw wrong, and the beacon — not you — decides where things land.

Why it bounces

The ball isn't a marker painted on the ground, it's a thrown object with physics: it arcs, it hits something, and it can keep moving after that first hit sends it somewhere else. Throw it at a rock, a sloped roof, a fallen tree, or an ally standing in the way and it can deflect off that surface and roll before it settles — sometimes a couple of metres off, sometimes well past where you aimed. Slopes are the most common culprit: a beacon thrown downhill keeps momentum and rolls with gravity instead of stopping where it first touches down, which is why a drop called from high ground so often ends up lower than intended.

There's a second, unrelated reason a strike can miss its mark that looks identical from the ground: indoors, and in city or factory maps especially, the ship providing orbital fire sometimes has to reposition itself to get a clean line on the spot you marked, which adds to the call-in time and can shift where the first shot actually lands. That's a targeting delay, not a bounce, but the fix is the same either way — throw on flat, open ground when precision matters, and give the beacon a second to settle before deciding it went to the wrong place.

The cooldown, and what actually shortens it

Every stratagem goes on a cooldown after use, a fixed wait that ticks down regardless of what else you're doing. What shortens it isn't something you fall into by accident — it's specific ship modules bought and installed at the ship management terminal, and each one is scoped to a bucket rather than a blanket speed-up: some cut cooldown for support weapon stratagems specifically, some for backpacks, some for orbital-type stratagems, and a couple apply a smaller cut across everything you own. If one slot in your loadout keeps being the bottleneck between fights, that's the module room to check, not the loadout screen.

Personal boosters — the mission-wide perks a squad picks before dropping — don't touch stratagem cooldown at all. They cover things like faster extraction, wider radar range, or spawning with full ammo and stims instead. Eagle airstrikes work a little differently again: instead of a straight per-use cooldown, an Eagle carries a limited number of uses before it needs to rearm, and rearming can be triggered on demand with its own code rather than waiting for the payload to run out.

Four types, and what a set of four is actually for

Every mission loadout is exactly four stratagems, drawn from stock that splits into a few broad roles: offensive strikes and barrages that hit an area, defensive turrets and emplacements you plant and leave running, supply — which covers support weapons, backpacks, and vehicles you call in for yourself — and mission-specific tools tied to an objective. A set of four that leans entirely on one of those roles is a set with no answer for whatever the mission needs from the role it's missing: no anti-armor pick when something heavily armored shows up, or nothing but area denial when the actual problem is numbers closing in.

The steadier way to build a loadout isn't copying whichever four stratagems are winning the argument this patch — balance keeps moving, and a "best" list from a few months back can already be wrong — but making sure the four cover different jobs: one heavy option for armored targets, one crowd-control pick for swarms, one defensive or support choice that keeps you upright, and one utility slot for whatever the planet or objective specifically calls for. Armor passives and boosters round the rest of a build out, but the four stratagem slots are the part that decides what you can actually respond to mid-mission.

The rules nobody writes down

None of this is enforced by the game, and all of it is why a squad survives its own support fire rather than dying to it:

• Don't throw an orbital or an airstrike at a target standing next to a teammate — the blast radius doesn't check for friendlies.
• Don't call in anything explosive near the extraction point once the shuttle is inbound; a barrage there kills the mission as fast as the enemy does.
• Call out what you're throwing, especially anything with a delay before impact — a teammate walking toward a beacon has no way to see it land from your screen.
• If a beacon visibly bounces somewhere else, say so immediately instead of assuming it landed where you aimed. The couple of seconds before impact is exactly when someone walks into it.

That's the shape of it: a beacon that's a physical object first and a marker second, a cooldown that only ship modules actually move, and four slots that do more spread across roles than stacked on whatever's strongest this week.