Hive broods and carriers pushing into Blight lines through an asteroid field

A low-poly space RTS for phones and browsers. Command a fleet, take the map, destroy the enemy's command station, and drop into the cockpit of any ship mid-battle.

▶ Play in your browser Meet the factions
At a glance

Sins of a Solar Empire, sized for a phone

Fleetfire takes the big-fleet, real-time space battles of games like Sins of a Solar Empire and fits them into 15–20 minute matches you can play on a phone, in a browser or on a desktop. You build an economy, research up, and grow from a few fighters to a navy of hundreds. When you want to fight it yourself, you can fly any ship.

15–20 mintypical match
7 factions8 ships each, plus structures
1v1 · 2v2 · FFAup to 4 players
800+ shipsin a single battle
~2 MBwhole game, no downloads
The story

They call it fleetfire

Three hundred years ago the settled systems were joined by the Lanes: corridors of folded space anchored by ancient beacons that nobody alive built. Then, in a single year, the beacons failed, the systems went dark, and the United Worlds that governed them shrank to a handful of systems around its capital. That was the Long Night.

Now the beacons are waking. Whoever holds a system's beacons when its Lane steadies controls the Lane, and every fleet in the dark is coming to take it.On the worlds below, people watch the battle as silent lights between the stars. They call it fleetfire.

The beacons

Control points

Lanewright relay pylons, still guarded by the Lanewrights' own ancient guns. Hold the most when the Lane's window closes and the system is yours. That's the match clock.

Aurite

Resource nodes

The crystal that powers every shield, jump drive and beam. It's the reason anyone fights over a dead system.

The helm-link

Take the helm

A Lanewright neural link lets a commander drop into any ship and fly it. The enemy sees the link's shimmer, so they always know which ship is yours.

The Long Night

Debris and nebulae

Wreck fields from the old battles still drift where they fell, and the gas from dead beacons blinds every sensor that enters it.

Vanguard NavyThe Lanes must be held, by order of a government that can barely reach them.
Hive CarriersAurite. Nothing personal.
Lumen ConcordThe beacons are sacred, and everyone else is breaking them.
The BlightEverything is raw material.
The ArchiveEverything must be recorded, including you.
The Ember ClansEverything out here is salvage, including you.
The VoidHunger.
How a match plays

Expand, out-build, break their line

Every match starts from a Command Station and a handful of ships, and ends when one side's station falls (or the clock runs out and the side holding the most control points wins).

01 · Claim

Take the map

Park ships in a site's ring to capture it, once its ancient Lanewright guns are down. Resource nodes take an extractor for income; beacons raise your fleet cap and have two dock slots (a factory, a Repair Dock, a Strike Bay or the superweapon) and three turret slots for flak, lasers and a plasma battery.

02 · Build

Grow a navy

Queue ships at your station or any forward factory, each with its own rally point. Fighters and bombers launch from carriers and bays; escorts screen the line or guard your big ships; destroyers hunt ships; support ships patch it up.

03 · Research

Tech up

Tier 2 unlocks destroyers, carriers, support ships, the Repair Dock and the Strike Bay; Tier 3 cruisers and the battleship, plus four faction upgrades. At Tier 3 you can raise a superweapon on a beacon.

04 · Fight

Break through

Group ships into fleets, set them to Hold or Advance site by site, or order them by hand. Turrets, asteroid cover and sieges make every push a decision.

Four-player free-for-all on Crossroads seven minutes in: the Archive, Blight, Hive and Lumen, strategic view
A four-player free-for-all on Crossroads seven minutes in, seen from the strategic camera: the Archive (top left) holds off the Blight (top right) while the Hive (bottom left) pushes through the centre and Lumen (bottom right) guards its home.

Readable at any zoom

  • Minimap and economy bar show credits, income, supply and the score at a glance.
  • Under-attack alerts name the structure being hit, and one key jumps the camera there.
  • Every ship fights by side. Like Sins, a broadside is two batteries with their own arcs, so how you angle a ship matters.
  • Guns need a clear shot. Asteroids, beacons and ships (your own included) stop fire, superweapons too; nebulae hide ships, and rock fills the space above and below the plane.
  • Strike craft have fuel. They fly sorties and come home to refuel at carriers, stations and bays.
The build card on the Archive's Athenaeum
The build card, here on the Archive's Athenaeum. Tap a ship to queue it; tap again to cancel for a full refund.

Made for thumbs first

  • One tap to build. The Build button opens your shipyard nearest the front, and each tap steps back one.
  • Smart orders. Tap an enemy to attack it; tap anywhere else to move and hold.
  • Four fleets and a Reserve on the bottom bar. Ships from a forward factory gather in front of it.
  • Full desktop controls too: box select, Ctrl+1–4 fleets, rebindable keys, and a right-drag camera.
The hook

Take the helm

Flying a Vanguard battleship into an asteroid field
At the helm of a Vanguard battleship, broadsides and Siege cannon ready.

Select any ship and press Take Helm. The camera drops in behind it and you fly it while the rest of your fleet keeps fighting around you.

  • Dogfight in a fighter with the mouse, or a stick and fire button on touch.
  • Command a capital ship. Its guns fire on their own or at your locked target. Fire the Siege cannon, missiles or lance yourself.
  • Flagship bonus: the ship you fly recharges its shields twice as fast. Your opponent sees the shimmer.
  • Callouts, not clutter: only the enemies that matter are marked, and anything aiming at you pulses red.
Seven ways to fight

The factions

Each faction has eight ships: fighter, bomber, escort, support ship, destroyer, cruiser, carrier and battleship. Each also has its own Command Station, factories, turrets, research and superweapon. They play very differently, and at the top level they're within a few points of each other.

The matchups (1,344 AI-vs-AI games, all seven factions): every faction wins between about 45% and 57% of its games. The brawlers, the Ember Clans and the Void, close in; Lumen and the Archive fight from range. The widest edges: the Archive over Lumen, and the Void over the Archive, whose long guns can't find it in the dark.
Ways to play

Modes and maps

Main mode

Conquest

The full game against the AI or your friends: economy, research, territory and superweapons. 1v1, 2v2, or a four-player free-for-all, with the AI on Easy, Normal or Hard. Matches run 20 minutes by default (15, 30 or 45 if you like, or with no limit); when time runs out, the side holding the most beacons wins.

New

Play Online

Make a game and send your friends its five-letter code. 1v1, 2v2 or a free-for-all, with AI in any empty seat. Drop out and you can rejoin the same match, and your own ship answers the stick at once even on a slow connection.

Mode

Combat Arcade

A straight fight on a budget. Everyone starts with the same credits and every ship unlocked, and there are no sites to take.

  • No base: a fixed budget. Spend it wisely, because nothing comes back.
  • Command Station: an optional small income, and losing the station knocks you out.
Learn

Academy

Eight short guided missions, from your first command to a graduation match against an Easy AI. There are also four faction briefings. A coach panel walks you through each one on the real rules.

Story

Campaign

One war over the Harrow system, told from every side. Seven chapters, one for every faction, each four missions with 1–3 stars for speed; briefings come from the people (and things) in it, one speaker at a time. Some of what the Void remembers isn't in any other chapter.

Toy box

Combat Sandbox

Pick any ships from any faction for either side, hit Battle, and watch, or jump into a cockpit. It's the fastest way to try a ship.

Spectate

Watch AI vs AI

Set up any line-up and watch it play out at up to 4× speed. The AI rolls its own habits each match, so no two games go the same way.

Scale

Fleet size

Small, Standard or Large. Large doubles Standard's supply, income and build speed. A Large 2v2 peaks around 700–800 ships, and a free-for-all around 900.

Map · 2 players

Duel

Two homes facing each other across a tilted centre line: open toward the nearer beacon or the nearer aurite, with asteroid fields between them. Ten resource nodes, five beacons.

Map · 2–4 players

Crossroads

Four homes around a contested centre. In 2v2 the teams are neighbours; in 1v1 the two empty homes are free to grab.

Make your own

Map editor

Place beacons, aurite, asteroids and nebulae in one sector; the editor turns it into every seat and checks the layout as you go. Your maps save in the browser and show up in the map list.

Fair by design

Turned, never mirrored

Ships are handed (broadsides, gun mounts), so maps are one sector turned around the centre. That way every seat gets exactly the same map. Mirror matches now split 228–244 over 472 games.

Under the hood

Built to run everywhere

Deterministic sim

The battle runs as a fixed 20 Hz simulation with no clock and no stray randomness. The same seed and the same commands give the same battle every time, which is how online play works: only the players' orders cross the network, through a light relay server, and every machine runs the same battle in lockstep. Your own ship at the helm is drawn ahead of the network, so it never feels laggy.

Hundreds of ships

A spatial grid answers "who's near here?" for steering, targeting and shots, which made 800–1,300-ship battles about 3× faster with identical results. The renderer draws about 35 batches however many ships are on screen.

No art files

Every ship, station, asteroid and effect is built in code from low-poly parts, so the whole game is about 2 MB and loads instantly on a phone.

Procedural sound

Every sound effect is synthesised live, and the music is generative: it never loops the same way, each faction has its own key and mood, and drums and brass swell in as the fighting near the camera heats up.

Web first, then stores

Built with TypeScript and Babylon.js. It runs in any modern browser, and Capacitor wraps it for iOS and Android. A test Android build already exists.

Tuned by the AI

Balance comes from thousands of headless AI-vs-AI games run in Node. That's how unfair seats, overtuned factions and stalemates were found and fixed.

What's next

Roadmap

Now

Playable on desktop and phone browsers

Conquest vs AI, online games with friends, Combat Arcade, the Academy, a seven-chapter campaign (every faction's side of the war), Sandbox, seven factions, two maps and a map editor, up to four players, and Take the Helm.

Next

Real phones

Playtests on real phones: frame rate on mid-range Android and older iPhones, touch controls at phone sizes, and a quality preset for slower devices.

Then

More online

Online play with friends is in. Next: finding a match without a code, and 2v2 with a pilot-and-tactician split, one player flying while the other commands.

Launch

Web portals, app stores, and maybe Steam

Free to play on Poki and CrazyGames, then iOS and Android. Some factions will be a small one-time purchase, like Battle of Polytopia's tribes, alongside cosmetics and a remove-ads option. Never pay-to-win: a paid faction is a different way to play, balanced against the free ones.

Later

More factions, one per colour

A Polytopia-style roster, with each new faction built around its own gimmick. Ideas on the board:

The Bloom

Living ships that grow their own turrets and territory, and lose them as they take damage.

The Tidewardens

Currents and flow fields: ships that ride and bend the space around them.

Try it now

It runs right here in the browser on desktop or phone. Start with the Academy, or jump straight into a Sandbox battle and take the helm.

▶ Play Fleetfire