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 10–15 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.

10–15 mintypical match
5 factions7 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. 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.
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. Resource nodes take an extractor for income; control points take a factory and raise your fleet cap. Asteroid fields pay a trickle while you hold them.

02 · Build

Grow a navy

Queue ships at your station or any forward factory. Fighters and bombers launch from carriers and bays; escorts screen the line; support ships patch it up.

03 · Research

Tech up

Tier 2 unlocks cruisers and carriers, Tier 3 the battleship, plus four faction upgrades. At Tier 3 you can raise a superweapon on a control point.

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 the Crossroads map (Vanguard, Hive, Lumen and the Archive), strategic view
A four-player free-for-all on Crossroads (Vanguard, Hive, Lumen and the Archive), seen from the strategic camera.

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.
  • Terrain is real. Asteroids block shots and force fleets around them; nebulae hide ships.
  • 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.
Four ways to fight

The factions

Each faction has seven ships: fighter, bomber, escort, support ship, 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 (640 AI-vs-AI games, all five factions): Blight beats Vanguard and the Archive · Vanguard beats the Archive · The Archive beats Hive and Lumen · Lumen beats Blight · Hive edges Lumen. Overall: Blight 54%, Archive 53%, Vanguard 52%, Hive 46%, Lumen 45%.
Ways to play

Modes and maps

Main mode

Conquest

The full game against the AI: economy, research, territory and superweapons. 1v1, 2v2 with an AI ally, or a four-player free-for-all, on Easy, Normal or Hard. Matches run 15, 30 or 45 minutes, or with no limit.

New

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.

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

Standard, Large or Huge. Huge multiplies supply, income and build speed by four. A Huge 2v2 peaks around 700–800 ships, and a free-for-all around 900.

Map · 2 players

Duel

Two homes facing each other across a contested middle. Ten resource nodes, five control points and eight claimable asteroid fields.

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.

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 what lockstep online multiplayer and replays need.

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, Combat Arcade, Academy, Sandbox, four factions, two maps, up to four players, and Take the Helm.

Next

Real-phone playtests and polish

Frame rate on mid-range Android and older iPhones, touch controls at phone sizes, and a quality preset for slower devices.

Then

Online PvP

Lockstep multiplayer over a light relay server: 1v1 first, then 2v2 with a pilot-and-tactician split.

Launch

Web portals, app stores, and maybe Steam

Free to play on Poki and CrazyGames, then iOS and Android. Cosmetics and a remove-ads option only: nothing sold affects power.

Later

More factions, one per colour

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

Ember Clans

Scrap raiders running on heat: hotter ships hit harder, until they overheat.

The Veil / Chronarchy

Decoys and phase tricks, or ships that rewind time.

The Archive

Blank nanomachine ships that copy their enemies' weapons mid-match.

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