Ferrostorm
Ferrite must flow
A base-building real-time strategy game in the classic mold: harvest ore, power your base, out-produce the enemy commander and crush their war-foundry with combined arms. Built touch-first, from the ground up.
In development for iOS · macOS · Android
The world
The storm never stops
Centuries from now, humanity's frontier runs on ferrite: a magnetically-active ore that makes faster-than-light industry possible, and exists in quantity on exactly one known world. Cinder Reach would be a paradise of riches, except for the planet-wide magnetic storms that sever every uplink and make orbital control impossible. No fleet can hold it. No garrison survives it.
So the great powers wage war the only way the storm allows: they drop Cauldrons - autonomous, self-replicating war-foundries - and walk away. Each Cauldron carries a reactor spark, a fabrication template, and the imprinted battle-doctrine of a single human commander. You are that imprint. The machines are your hands.
Cinder Reach
Black basalt flats, rust dunes, ridges of exposed ferrite that glow teal where the storm charges them. No native life, no ruins, nothing to save. A prize, not a home - which is why the wars for it never end.
The Cauldron
Your fabrication hub: half drop-ship, half blast furnace. Everything you field walks out of it or its child-structures. Lose it, and your doctrine dies with it.
The storm as fuel
Reactor arrays harvest the ferrostorm itself for power. Under-powered bases literally slow down - keep the siphon vanes up or fall behind.
The machines
Fabrication manifest
No humans fight on Cinder Reach. Every unit is a fabricated frame running a sliver of its commander's doctrine, and every weapon has an armor type it was made to break. Eight frames, one counter matrix, no filler.
| Frame | Role | Field notes |
|---|---|---|
| Vanguard | rifle infantry | Mass-produced bipedal frame. The anonymous worker-soldier of the war. |
| Lancer | anti-armor / anti-air | Taller frame shouldering rocket pods. Walks like a drawn bow. |
| Technician | repair | Four-armed repair frame. Does not fight; everyone protects it anyway. |
| Hauler | ferrite collector | Beetle-backed ore carrier, teal cargo bed glowing when full. |
| Outrider | fast scout | Low three-wheeler trailing rooster tails of storm dust. |
| Mauler | main battle tank | Squat tracked brawler: all frontal armor plate and dozer jaw. |
| Ballista | long-range siege | Spindly artillery walker that anchors itself before its spine-cannon fires. |
| Skysweeper | anti-air | Radar-dish head, flak battery shoulders, always looking up. |
The conflict
Two doctrines, one basin
Skirmish, in fiction: two Cauldrons drop within reach of the same ferrite basin. The storm isolates them from all command. Only one doctrine walks away - the other is smelted down and incorporated.
You command
The Azure Meridian Charter
A merchant-navy tradition in cool blue livery. The Charter believes ferrite should flow to everyone, which is noble, and that they should own the pipe, which is less so. Clean panels, long horizontals, navy and cyan.
You face
The Rubric of Embers
A machine-ascetic order in rust-red plate that holds the Cauldrons have outgrown their human imprints. Their commanders are dead ones: archived, looping, endlessly refighting. Higher difficulties are older, faster archive loops.
The game
Built touch-first
Ferrostorm is not a desktop RTS squeezed onto a phone. The controls, the interface and the pace were designed for a thumb on glass first - and they scale up to mouse and keyboard on macOS.
Touch controls
Tap to select, drag to box-select, two fingers to pan and pinch, double-tap to grab every unit of a type. Control groups live in the thumb zone.
Real base-building
Placement ghosts, a power grid that matters, a tech tree from Fabrication Hub to Mechanical Bay. Ferrite comes home one Hauler load at a time.
Combined arms
A weapon-versus-armor counter matrix decides fights, not raw numbers. Scout, read the enemy's mix, build the answer.
A worthy opponent
The AI commander runs a real build order: it expands, keeps its economy fed, defends its base and sends escalating attack waves.
Fog of war
Visible, explored, hidden. What you have not scouted can and will hurt you.
A deterministic heart
A fixed 20 Hz simulation fully decoupled from rendering: identical inputs give identical battles, on every device.
