A whole world.
A few friends.
One more turn.

Crystal under every tile

Every land tile holds a little crystal. A crystal harvester yields 1 crystal on an ordinary tile, 2 on a rich deposit (about 6% of land, shown as blue shards breaking through the ground), and 4 on one of the 12 five-sided pentagon vents, plus 1 while a worker tends it. Pentagons in the ocean wait for ships: each race will get a small work boat that builds a platform on them.

Buildings take time

Buildings and improvements take turns to finish and do nothing until then. Farms cost 4 metal, mines 6 (on hills or mountains), and crystal harvesters 10. Supply comes from your bases and your race’s supply source, up to 60.

Room on a tile

Every unit is small, medium or large (1, 2 or 3 points), and a tile holds 3 points of ground units plus 3 of flyers. Your units can walk through a full tile of your own but cannot stop there. Small units such as Marines, Swarmers and Vanguards are drawn as squads of three; a figure falls at two-thirds health and another at one-third, and healing brings them back.

Rest and heal

A unit that neither moves nor attacks heals at the start of your next turn: 33% of its health on your building’s tile, 20% within 2 tiles of one, 10% elsewhere, and nothing within 2 tiles of an enemy building. Rest (the moon button on the unit card) ends its turn at once and marks it with a small moon.

Hills, forests and rivers

A hit does 1 less damage for each advantage the target has: higher ground, standing trees, or a river between. At most 2 less, never below 1, and flyers ignore it. Before you attack, each target shows its damage, such as “4 → 2”, with an icon for each advantage, and rivers are drawn on the planet.

Flyers hover

Flying units float above the ground with a gentle bob, leaning into their turns. A soft shadow and the owner’s coloured ring on the ground under each one show which tile it is on. On a tile with ground units, a flyer hovers behind them so it never hides them. Shots and claws reach up to them, and a destroyed flyer falls out of the air.

Sequential turns, optional queued moves

One player acts at a time. Others may prepare orders while waiting. Queued orders execute only on their owner’s turn and are checked against the current state.

A queued order pauses when the unit sees a new hostile, a hostile moves toward any friendly unit, or the unit sees an attack. Hostiles moving away, known camps, and allied activity don’t interrupt. A paused order waits for its owner and never turns into an attack.

A pace chosen by the lobby

Players vote on turn deadlines, maximum turns, and game-ending conditions. The goal is to support short sessions as well as persistent matches lasting months.

If every unit is fortified or has queued orders, the turn plays itself. By default, the AI plays a timed-out turn for a player who gave no orders. Players can switch on Away so the AI covers for them, then take their seat back; three missed turns in a row turn Away on automatically. Eight-player sequential play will need testing to make short matches practical.

Fog of war and casual play

Current multiplayer sends each player only permitted terrain, units, and events. Planned browser-run AI needs additional simulation data to minimize messages. The UI and AI still respect fog, but an AI executor could inspect hidden information. Read the tradeoff.

Catch up without guessing

Team and global chat support coordination. A visibility-filtered event log explains what happened between turns. Later, a guided replay can move the camera between those events.

Implemented foundation

• Seeded spherical terrain, biome textures, animated water, and Worldmaker controls.
• Multiplayer units, movement, settlements, production, combat, and fog of war.
• Private invitations, teams, lobby voting, turn deadlines, and saved matches.
• Lambda game rules and DynamoDB persistence with version checks and request deduplication.
• Local AI simulations, browser AI workers, validated online action batches, and offline solo saves.
• Three playable races at tier 1, with supply, build times, crystal, and Alien shields (October 14, 2026).

Still to build

• Deploy and playtest the browser AI and offline implementation.
• Fortify, turns that play themselves, AI cover for missed turns, and an Away toggle.
• Queued-order interruptions.
• Wild units of every race and combat promotions.
• Reusable seat links, one compressed snapshot for a new device, and wider mobile testing.
• Automatic match updates and richer event replay.
• Tiers 2 and 3, flying, research, and each race’s special abilities, then bots that play each race well.

Rules stay separate from graphics

A shared JavaScript rules module should describe tiles, legal orders, combat, and city production. The server is authoritative. Visual meshes and animations must not determine outcomes.

Ordinary multiplayer views keep the seed and hidden entities on the server. The planned AI execution payload deliberately relaxes that secrecy for casual games. Offline solo uses the same rules with the full state saved locally.

Design for reconnects and retries

Invitation links should exchange a private token for a seat session; credentials must stay out of logs. Persist state and events before notifying clients. Missed notifications are recovered by fetching updates.

Version checks protect against stale requests and scheduled callbacks. The current minute worker provides approximate timeout recovery; commands also enforce stored deadlines. Decided: a seat link signs any new device into that seat. The device gets one compressed snapshot with explored terrain and the latest 20 chat messages, then only changes.

Offline solo

After the code and required assets load, the browser runs map generation, rules, AI, and local saves without gameplay requests. Cache assets for reopening offline and provide save export/import. Cloud saves are optional separate work.

Online multiplayer

Keep Lambda and DynamoDB for validation and durable state. No host browser must stay awake, and peer consensus or blockchain is not required. Phones can disconnect; confirmed progress remains available to other devices.

One rules engine, two execution environments

Browser simulation and Lambda replay use deterministic rules, pinned versions, and explicit random state. Graphics do not determine outcomes. Run AI in a Web Worker to keep the interface responsive.

Lambda still calculates movement, combat, production, income, and turn transitions. It skips AI strategy and pathfinding, and never trusts a submitted final state. Measure these costs separately before estimating savings.

The visibility tradeoff

A browser simulating discoveries without repeated server requests needs underlying world state. The simplest casual-mode design provides the authorized executor a full simulation snapshot, excluding credentials and invitation secrets.

The AI receives a fresh fog-filtered view after each action, and the UI still hides unknown areas. Someone inspecting browser data could nevertheless reveal secrets or substitute other legal AI moves. Legality checks cannot prove the intended policy ran. Strong secrecy would require extra exchanges or server-run AI.