Hostage Taker Side: Imperium Type: Vehicle Movement Type: Wheeled Ground Weapon: None Anti-Air Weapon: None Range: N/A Damage: N/A Hit Points: 450 Sight Range: 9 Movement Speed: Extremely Fast Cost: 600 Requirements: Advanced Assembly Plant Built At: Assembly Plant

The brutal Hostage Taker captures enemy infantry and converts them into mindless suicide bombers that will obey their new Imperium masters to their dying breath.

Note: The Hostage Taker is not available by default in custom games.

Converting Prisoners

When one of these tanks reaches an infantry target, it sucks the poor fellow up into its hold. While it has a prisoner in its hold, a progress bar displays a countdown. When the timer runs out, the Hostage Taker spits out its prisoner—now converted into a Suicide Zombie at your command—at the first available moment.

A Hostage Taker can only hold one infantry at a time. If you select the tank and click on it again, you can force it to eject its prisoner at any time; however, unless the conversion progress completed, the prisoner will be released in his original condition. Also notice that the Hostage Taker must stop first before it can eject its newly-converted Suicide Zombie. It won’t spit it out if it’s currently occupied doing something else or if it’s in a Repair Station. In this situation you can eject the zombie yourself, although usually just selecting the Hostage Taker and pressing the s key will do the trick.

Should a Hostage Taker be destroyed while it is in the middle of converting a unit, the prisoner is released unharmed. As such, if an enemy Hostage Taker grabs one of your units, keep in mind you can free it by destroying the Hostage Taker.

If a Hostage Taker picks up a wounded infantry unit, the resulting Suicide Zombie will have the same percentage of health missing.

As an interesting aside, you can convert your own units into Suicide Zombies by using the Attack command and targeting your infantry to force the Hostage Taker to pick them up. If you can’t find any enemies to convert and you want some zombies, it may be an acceptable sacrifice. Once you’ve paid the cost of the Hostage Taker itself, you can convert your own Guardians to zombies for the cheap price of 150 credits a pop, which is a lot less than the 600 credits the Freedom Guard have to pay per Martyr.

It should be noted that the Hostage Taker tends to keep chasing after infantry even after it already has a prisoner in its hold, when what you really want it to do is run away from the enemy until its conversion process is complete. You may need to micromanage your Hostage Takers and direct them to a safe area once they have captured enemy prisoners.