What Stellar Warfare is
Stellar Warfare is a classic-style space RTS with base building and ship customization, built as a personal passion project by Tense Games. You build an economy, place a base, capture space stations and spawn units to fight the enemy, in full 3D space with physics-based projectiles. The structure will feel familiar if you have played Red Alert, Homeworld or Supreme Commander: gather resources, expand, then push out with a fleet.
The main draw is how much you can shape your own ships. Enemies you destroy occasionally drop blueprints for ship frames, weapons or modules, and you use those to modify your units. There are currently 60 ship frames, 50 weapons and 25 modules to find, which combine into over a million possible builds, with more than 200 ships, weapons and modules in total. Fast raiders, tanky bruisers, building-killing sneaky units and swarms of small ships are all on the table, and once a design is finished you buy it in-game like any other RTS unit.
Playing it with your group
Your group can go at each other in multiplayer skirmish or battle royale, or line up against the AI together. Coop wave defense is in there, along with a coop wave defense infinite waves mode, both added on community request. On the singleplayer side there is wave defense, a campaignette, base assault and skirmish, so there is something to run while the rest of the group is offline.
If micromanaging everything at once is not your idea of fun, the game offers several automation options so you can automate part of your RTS experience. That suits a group where some players want to handle the big picture and others want to be hands-on with their fleet.
Before you start
Base building goes beyond the usual: over 40 buildings to place, including power plants, refineries, turrets, resource enhancers, artillery buildings and repair stations, plus 5 different neutral buildings to capture. Resource buildings can be captured too, so map control feeds directly into what you can field.
Combat runs on smooth, intuitive controls with complete 3D movement, and physics-based projectiles mean positioning matters. The game is in Early Access, so expect the feature set to keep changing as development continues.