The Outer Line
A war no one will admit is happening.
Three factions sent fleets to claim the same frontier. None of them have enough ships. They send their best commanders to hold the line. You are one of them. Your Mobile Shipyard. Your sector. Their war.
The Outer Line // 2149
“The first thing you notice about the Outer Line is the silence.”
Humanity colonized a handful of nearby star systems. Then the survey probes found frontier clusters dense with Gravity Wells, rich with raw materials, and close enough to fight over. Three powers sent task forces. Nobody fired first. Nobody stopped.
What followed is not a war. Officially. The Federation calls them security operations. The League says it is protecting existing claims. The Compact frames everything as research with defensive escort. The language is careful. What is actually happening is that armed fleets compete for the same resources in the same space.
Read the full intelligence dossierYour role // Faction Commander
Your Faction. Your War.
You are a military commander on the Outer Line. Your faction sent you here with a Mobile Shipyard and the authority to act before orders arrive from the core worlds. Communications have delays measured in hours. By the time headquarters knows what happened, you have already decided.
You fight under your faction's colors, build with their ships, follow their doctrine. The USF sends you with formal orders and forty pages of protocol. The ORI gives you a handshake and expects results. The NEC runs the numbers and tells you where to be.
Three game modes: Skirmish for single battles, Strategic Campaign where your Shipyard persists across missions, and Global War where every player's victories shift a shared front line. Choose your faction. Hold your sector.
Ship classes
Military ranks
Per operation
Tactical Space RTS // Core mechanics
How It Plays
Real-time combat with a tactical pause. Small fleets where every ship matters, every loss changes the battle, and every decision is yours to make.
Tactical Pause
Freeze time, survey the battlefield, issue precise orders. Resume when you are ready. Strategy should reward thinking, not reflexes.
Gravity Wells
Strategic zones around celestial bodies. Each one is a self-contained battlefield with asteroids, structures, and space to maneuver. The space between them is dead ground.
Jump Drive
Charge up. Transit. Arrive with weapons offline. Every jump is a calculated risk: enemies can see you charging, and your fleet is vulnerable on arrival.
Targetable Hardpoints
Do not just shoot at ships. Target their engines to prevent retreat, their weapons to reduce firepower, their Jump Drive to trap them. Cripple before you kill.
Energy Management
Every ship has a shared energy pool. Shields, abilities, and special systems all draw from it. Running your shields at full strength means your offensive protocols go dark.
Supply Lines
One resource: Supply. Harvest it from asteroid nodes, spend it to build ships and structures. Every vessel costs upkeep. Overextend your fleet and the numbers turn against you.
Small fleets. Targetable hardpoints. Every decision costs something.
Game modes // How you play
Three Game Modes
Every battle you fight shifts the front line on a strategic map. Choose how deep you want to go, from a single skirmish to a war that spans months.
Skirmish: pick a sector, choose your faction, fight a single battle.
Strategic Campaign: your Mobile Shipyard persists across missions. The map evolves.
Global War: a shared strategic map where every player's victories count.
Seasonal campaigns. New theaters. The war resets. Your rank does not.
Strategic overview // Interactive
The Map
Fifteen sectors. 140 Gravity Wells connected by jump routes. Each one a battlefield, a supply depot, a chokepoint. Explore the strategic map and see where the factions collide.
Scanning sectors...
Progression system // Your capital ship
Your Mobile Shipyard
Factory, headquarters, and the most valuable asset you own. Lose it and you lose the war. Build it right and it becomes the foundation of every victory.
Interactive 3D Model
SCAN_COMPLETE: 100% | OBJECT_DETECTED: MOBILE SHIPYARD CLASS I
Mobile Shipyard Class I
Capital Ship
Module system
Modules
Upgrade chains
Tiers
Limited module slots force specialization. Go all-in on weapons production, or invest in repair bays and shield generators. There is no build that does everything. Your Shipyard is your tech tree, and every slot is a commitment.
Field Intelligence // 21 reports filed
Dispatches from the Frontier
Beyond the Line
The first thing you notice about the Outer Line is the silence. Not literal silence. There's always noise on a ship. The air recyclers, the hum of the reactor buried somewhere below your feet, the occasional clang of a wrench against a pipe three decks down. But the silence I mean is the one that sits between people. The crews out here talk less. They eat faster. They check their screens more oft...
Read dispatch →About the dispatches
Short fiction set in the world of The Outer Line. Characters with names and jobs, doing what people do on the frontier: patrolling Gravity Wells, managing supply chains, making decisions that cost lives.
Faction Intelligence // Three powers, one frontier
The Factions
Each faction has a reason to be on the Outer Line. Each one thinks it is right. They all are, and that is the problem. You will fight for all of them. You will be loyal to none.
“Nobody is calling it a war. The operational reports from both sides would describe the engagement as defensive action in response to hostile approach. Both reports would be accurate, from a certain point of view.”Dispatch #01 // Beyond the Line