Silica

Which Silica Faction Fits Your Playstyle (Sol vs Centauri vs Aliens Explained)

Cami

4 November 2026

21 min read

#Which Silica faction should you play?

Play Sol if you want high-tech toys: hover tanks, railguns and plasma that reward precise, mobile play. Play Centauri if you like thick armour, big guns and winning head-on. Play the Aliens if you prefer fast, swarming creatures and ambush tactics. Each of the three Silica factions wins differently, so pick whichever matches how you fight.

#How the three Silica factions fight over Baltarus

Silica drops you on Baltarus, a desert planet in the year 2401 where all three factions want the same thing: Balterium. Sol and Centauri, the two human powers, mine it. The native Aliens would rather nobody did. Strategy mode lets any mix of the three factions share one map, so a full Sol vs Centauri vs Aliens brawl is standard.

One player commands from an RTS view, placing structures, ordering units and keeping the economy alive. Everyone else drops in as a soldier, a creature or a vehicle crew and handles the shooting (or biting).

Your faction changes both halves of that job, but a few rules apply to all three:

You need a resource: Balterium for the humans, biotics for the Aliens.
Your base has a heart, a Headquarters for humans and a Nest for Aliens. Structures that lose their link to it decay and die.
Tech tiers gate your best units. Humans research at a Research Facility, Aliens at a Quantum Cortex, and losing that building drops your tier until you rebuild it.
Up to eight AI units can follow you as an FPS player, so a lone wolf still gets backup.

Sol and Centauri shared one roster with different paint for most of Early Access. That ended with the V0.9 "Unit split" update in December 2025, which added 21 new units and 13 new structures so each human faction fields its own army. The full 1.0 release on 3 November 2026 ships with a voiced Centauri campaign, co-op Strategy with difficulty settings and 1v1 matchmaking.

#Silica Sol faction: hover tech, railguns and precision

The Silica Sol faction is humanity's old money. Bohemia's devblog describes Sol as the power that dominates through technology and trade, and the army shows it. Sol engineers build Balterium into their gear, which is why the faction's signature vehicles float instead of roll and fire plasma and railgun slugs instead of plain shells.

#What Sol brings to the fight

Infantry: Scout, Rifleman, Heavy, Sniper and Commando, plus a Hover Bike for crossing the map fast.
Light vehicles: Light Quad, Heavy Quad, Light Striker, Heavy Striker, AA Truck and Platoon Hauler.
Heavy vehicles: Hover Tank, Railgun Tank, Pulse Truck and Barrage Truck.
Ultra heavy: Siege Tank and Hover Harvester.
Air: Gunship, Dropship, Fighter and Bomber.

#Sol strengths and weaknesses

The Hover Tank sums the faction up. It jumps and boosts over terrain, its main cannon handles armour at medium range, and a separate machine-gun turret chews through swarming crabs. The Railgun Tank punches through heavy vehicles and structures from range, and the Pulse Truck projects a wall of energy that deletes infantry and buildings alike.

Subtlety is the trade-off. Hover thrusters glow bright blue, so Sol vehicles get spotted from a long way out. The Siege Tank is a slow-firing monster that struggles against swarms by design, so it needs an escort. Sol armour also runs thinner than the Centauri equivalent, which makes positioning matter more than raw HP.

#Who should play Sol

Pick Sol if you like kiting, flanking and hit-and-run play in vehicles. StarCraft players who love micro, Halo fans who grew up jumping Warthogs, and anyone who enjoys landing a long-range railgun shot will feel at home. Returning players will also recognise most of the original Early Access vehicles here.

#Silica Centauri faction: armour, firepower and a grudge

The Silica Centauri faction comes from Centaurus, a rain-soaked colony under a red dwarf star, and it carries a grudge against Sol for hogging the Balterium. Bohemia's devblog describes the Centauri as a people built on martial prowess and ruthless efficiency, forged by a harsh homeworld. Where Sol floats, Centauri rolls: thicker plating, bigger shells and tanks that would look at home in a 20th-century war museum.

The Silica creators has summed the faction up as "brute force without finesse". The 1.0 campaign tells the Centauri story, so this is also the side most new players will meet first.

#What Centauri brings to the fight

Infantry: Militia, Trooper, Juggernaut, Marksman and Templar.
Light vehicles: Light Raider, Heavy Raider, Assault Car, Strike Tank, Flak Truck and Squad Transport, plus the Jet Bike added in 1.0.
Heavy vehicles: Combat Tank, Heavy Tank, Pyro Tank and Rocket Tank.
Ultra heavy: Crimson Tank and Harvester.
Air: Interceptor, Shuttle, Dreadnought and Freighter.

#Centauri strengths and weaknesses

Centauri wins by bringing more metal than the enemy can chew through. The Combat Tank is the grounded answer to Sol's Hover Tank, the Rocket Tank lobs artillery out to around 2,000 m without needing line of sight, and the Pyro Tank torches anything inside 200 m. Then there is the Crimson Tank, a double-barrelled beast modelled on the WWII Maus that exists to flatten bases.

Speed and reach are the price. Centauri armour rolls rather than floats, the Pyro Tank's turret only covers a forward arc, and the biggest tanks crawl. A Sol player who keeps their distance, or an Alien player who swarms the flanks, can bleed a Centauri push dry before it lands. Keep Flak Trucks close or enemy air will own you.

#Who should play Centauri

Pick Centauri if your idea of fun is a tank column grinding forward while the artillery sings behind it. Battlefield tank mains, Warhammer 40,000 fans and anyone who likes to commit to a fight and finish it will click with this roster. It is also a forgiving commander faction: ground vehicles behave predictably, and the campaign doubles as guided practice.

#Silica Alien faction: swarm, ambush, adapt

The Silica Alien faction is the planet fighting back. Bohemia describes the Aliens as crustacean and cephalopod-like natives that hunt smaller creatures for food and resources, then recycle that biomass into structures and spawn. Nothing here gets built. A Queen nests, cysts grow around her, and creatures crawl out.

You shift between creatures at will, crabs climb walls, and your base is a cluster of small biotic structures that hide well and grow fast. One catch defines the whole faction: if the Queen dies, the swarm dies with her.

#The Silica alien roster

Ground creatures: Shrimp (your harvester), Crab, Horned Crab, Shocker, Hunter, Behemoth, Scorpion and Goliath.
Air creatures: Wasp, Dragonfly, Squid, Firebug, Defiler and Colossus.
The Queen, who commands from her Nest and is exposed whenever she moves.

#Alien strengths and weaknesses

Numbers and speed are the whole game. Crabs are cheap, travel in swarms and love an ambush. Wasps dive on harvesters from above and can land to dodge anti-air fire. The Shocker gives you an early ranged option with its electric bolt, the Hunter blends speed with strength, and the Scorpion is the alien answer to a tank, spitting molten silica from its tail that melts through armour. The Goliath has no ranged attack and does not care, because its shell shrugs off most of what humans fire at it.

The weakness is that most of your roster wants to be close. Single creatures are fragile next to a tank, open ground is a kill zone, and a human line of Heavies and machine-gun turrets can turn a crab wave into paste. Your commander also has to keep spawning, because an alien army that stops growing starts losing.

#Who should play the Aliens

Pick the Aliens if you miss playing Zerg, loved the special infected in Left 4 Dead, or main melee classes in shooters. Flankers, harvester hunters and people who enjoy being underestimated thrive here. It is the hardest faction to command well, so treat your first few alien matches as practice.

#Sol vs Centauri vs Aliens at a glance

	Sol	Centauri	Aliens
Combat style	Mobile, precise, long range	Heavy, head-on, high damage	Fast, swarming, close range
Signature unit	Hover Tank	Crimson Tank	Scorpion
Economy	Harvesters mine Balterium	Harvesters mine Balterium	Shrimp gather biotics from tar pits
Base	Large structures linked to an HQ	Large structures linked to an HQ	Small cysts grown around a Nest
Mobility	Highest (hover, jump, boost)	Lowest	High, with wall-climbing crabs
Toughness	Medium	Highest	Low per creature, high in numbers
Biggest risk	Spotted from range	Getting kited	Losing the Queen
Learning curve	Medium	Easiest	Hardest

#Five questions that settle it

Vehicles or claws? Driving and flying means human. Being the monster means Alien.
When a fight turns bad, do you reposition or commit? Reposition points to Sol. Commit points to Centauri. Spawn more and try again is pure Alien.
Range or brawl? Railguns and artillery live with Sol and Centauri. Melee pressure and short-range zaps live with the Aliens.
How do you feel about losing your base? Human structures are big and slow to replace. Alien cysts grow fast and hide well, as long as the Queen lives.
Do you want a story first? The 1.0 campaign is Centauri, so that is the faction with a guided on-ramp.

#How to test all three without a public lobby meltdown

The quickest way to find your main is to play each side as both commander and grunt, and to bring the same group of friends each time so the comparison is fair. Public lobbies make that hard, because faction slots fill up and half the room wants to command.

A private match fixes it, and running your own Silica server hosting setup is the cleanest way to get one. You pick the map, set the match variables and decide who plays what, with nobody stuck on a vote screen. This rotation works:

Spin up a Strategy match with three teams and give each team one commander.
Set starting resources, the tech tier limit and starting distance so nobody gets rushed early.
Play one full round, then rotate each team one faction along: Sol to Centauri, Centauri to Aliens, Aliens to Sol.
Swap commanders every round so everyone feels both halves of the game.
After three rounds, compare notes. The faction you kept thinking about between rounds is your answer.

If your group is small, 1.0's co-op Strategy mode lets you fight AI commanders together, and 1v1 matchmaking allows mirror matches for roster practice.

#Silica factions FAQ

#Are Sol and Centauri the same faction in Silica?

No. They were near-identical for most of Early Access, but the V0.9 update in December 2025 gave each human faction its own units and structures. They still share the same base-building logic and the Balterium economy, so skills carry over between them.