About This Game

Build Your Army. Control The Lane. Destroy The Enemy Base.

ARB: Alien Races Battle is a lane-based alien auto-battler where strategy, economy, positioning, and army composition determine victory. Choose from 5 unique factions, command 62 alien races, unlock powerful upgrades and faction doctrines, and overwhelm your opponents through superior planning, battlefield control, and adaptation.

Unlike traditional RTS games, units are not directly controlled once combat begins. Instead, you focus on building your economy, unlocking stronger technologies, countering enemy compositions, and positioning your army for success before each wave enters battle. Zero micro. Decisions only.

Whether you're competing against friends in multiplayer, experimenting with unpredictable modifiers in Social Mode, or standing together against The Swarm in Survival Mode, every match presents new challenges and new opportunities to master.

Every player begins the match with Mana — the primary resource used to purchase units, generators, upgrades, and technological advancements.

Generators increase your Mana Per Second (MPS), letting you field larger armies and unlock stronger units as the match progresses. Deciding when to invest in economy versus military strength is one of the most important calls you'll make all game.

Both sides deploy a new wave roughly every 15 seconds. Those armies march toward the center of the battlefield, where they collide in large-scale automated combat. The team that controls the center earns additional Mana, creating constant pressure to maintain momentum and deny resources to your opponent.

Expand too aggressively and risk being overrun. Build military strength too early and fall behind economically. Every decision has consequences.

Victory in ARB comes from understanding matchups, counters, timing, and positioning.

As the game progresses, you upgrade your base through multiple technology tiers, unlocking increasingly powerful units, abilities, faction doctrines, and strategic options. Higher-tier units feature more complex mechanics, unique transformations, specialized roles, and devastating battlefield effects.

Different units possess different armor types, attack types, and combat roles, creating a dynamic counter system that rewards adaptation and battlefield awareness. A unit that dominates one matchup may struggle completely against another, pushing you to constantly adjust your strategy as the battle evolves.

The strongest army is not always the most expensive one.

ARB currently features 5 unique factions, 62 alien races, and 98 abilities, each designed with distinct strengths, weaknesses, upgrades, and play styles.

Some factions excel through overwhelming numbers. Others rely on elite armies, powerful abilities, economic advantages, or unique faction mechanics. Every race contributes something different to its faction, creating countless army compositions and strategic combinations to explore.

Rather than simply creating larger versions of existing units, ARB focuses on making races memorable. Unique abilities, transformations, upgrades, synergies, and faction-specific mechanics ensure that every race brings its own identity to the battlefield.

Five factions, grouped not by species but by agenda — what each race wants from Earth.

THE DRACO — Harvest. Reptilian bloodline. Shape-shifters. The deepest infiltrators ever documented. Telepaths who co-founded the Illuminati and, the dossiers claim, run most of your government. Faction mechanic: Blood Frenzy. "Picking them is either brave or foolish. I have not decided which."

THE MAITRE — Harvest. A parasite alliance of predators and abductors. The Council of 5 has blocked them from conquering Earth for 60,000 years. Faction mechanic: Parasitic Bloom. "Play them and you will feel powerful. You will also feel unclean."

THE ANUNNAKI — Return. The returning gods — ancient creators and pantheon seeders. Samael and Lilith ruled as king and queen. Their planet Nibiru rides a 4,000-year orbit, and it is approaching. Faction mechanic: Nibiru Approach. "They made us from primates. When it approaches — and it is — they come with it."

THE COUNCIL — Council of 5. Peacemakers and protectors who have sheltered humanity for as long as alien records exist. Faction mechanic: Council Verdict. "Play them right and humanity survives. That is the bet."

THE UNSEEN — Void / Study. The observers and enigmas — the Invisibles only dogs notice, the Magell who refuse to be watched, the Killimat-Arr who crossed thirteen billion light years to deliver a single message. Faction mechanic: Veil of the Unseen. "I know the least about them. That should worry you. Or excite you. Or both."

For players looking for a more unpredictable experience, Social Mode introduces a constantly changing battlefield through a system of randomized modifiers.

Every match rolls three modifiers — one each from Economy, Combat, and Timing — drawn from a pool of 18, for 216 possible combinations. Some dramatically increase income; others slash cooldowns, alter wave behavior, boost march speed, or change how armies enter combat.

The goal is not random chaos, but controlled variety. Modifiers are designed to stay balanced across different match sizes and team compositions while creating entirely new strategic situations every game.

No two Social Mode matches are exactly alike.

Not every battle is fought against another player.

In Survival Mode, you face The Swarm — an endless invasion that never truly stops coming.

Play solo or team up with friends as you fight through eleven escalating rounds of increasingly dangerous enemies. Each round introduces new threats, unique encounters, and specialized enemy compositions designed to test every aspect of your strategy.

Unlike standard multiplayer matches, The Swarm does not operate on predictable wave timers. Enemies arrive in streams, surges, and coordinated assaults that continuously pressure your defenses.

Every sixty seconds a new round begins. Every round becomes more dangerous. And after Round 11, the assault escalates far beyond what most armies can handle.

Players who endure long enough may earn APEX Trophies, recognizing those who survive the chaos beyond the intended limits of the battlefield.

ARB supports a range of competitive and cooperative experiences with deterministic, cross-platform play.

Compete in:

• 1v1

• 2v2

• 3v3

• Uneven team compositions

• Social Mode

• Survival Mode

Playable on:

• Windows

• Mac

• Linux

• Steam Deck

Whether you're battling friends, experimenting with new strategies, or tackling brutal Survival encounters together, multiplayer remains at the core of the ARB experience.

ARB's factions, units, creatures, and abilities are inspired by The Alien Races Book — a 103-page, 58-race alien-contact compendium documented within UFO and KGB-related materials.

Rather than drawing from traditional fantasy settings filled with knights, dragons, elves, and orcs, ARB explores a battlefield populated by strange extraterrestrial races, each adapted into distinct units, upgrades, abilities, and play styles.

Today the game features 62 alien races across 5 factions, every one bringing its own strengths, weaknesses, mechanics, and visual identity to the battlefield.

Whether you view it as fact, fiction, folklore, or something in between is left to you. What once seemed firmly confined to science fiction has increasingly found its way into mainstream discussion, government disclosures, media coverage, and public debate. Regardless of where you stand on the subject, the source material provides one of the most unusual and distinctive unit rosters found in any strategy game.

ARB launches into Early Access with the depth to keep pulling you back:

• 31 Steam Achievements across six categories, from First Contact to Apex Hunter.

• Steam Trading Cards — Series 1: The Translators, with badges, emoticons, and profile backgrounds.

• An original soundtrack scoring the war for Earth.

• An in-game Codex — full faction lore, the Codex of Races, a Star Map, an Earth Log, and the transmissions of Dante Santori.

Coming during Early Access: faction towers — dedicated defensive structures unique to each of the 5 factions, adding a new layer of fortification and zone control on top of your marching army. More units, abilities, and modes are on the way as ARB grows toward full release.

The battlefield is ready.

Command one of 5 factions. Recruit from 62 alien races. Master 98 abilities.

Control the lane. Build your economy. Counter your opponents. Destroy the enemy base.

Or stand together against The Swarm and discover how long your team can survive.

Welcome to ARB: Alien Races Battle.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

ARB: Alien Races Battle is developed by a solo human author (Raphael Tremblay) with assistance from Anthropic's Claude AI as a coding, art, and writing collaborator throughout production. Specifically:

- Some pixel-art unit sprites, ability icons, and UI elements were generated as SVG code with Claude's help, then reviewed, edited, and approved by the developer.

- In-game ability descriptions, Field Manual codex entries, and supplementary lore text were written with Claude as a writing collaborator, all building on the existing canon of The Alien Races Book (a separate, fully human-authored book by the same author that predates this game by years).

- Game code (gameplay engine, multiplayer infrastructure, UI logic) was developed with Claude as a coding-pair assistant.

Every piece of AI-assisted content was reviewed and edited by the human developer before shipping. The game's core IP — the 60+ documented alien races, their homeworlds, and their first-contact records — comes from The Alien Races Book and is entirely human-authored.

ARB does not use AI to generate content live during gameplay. All in-game content (units, sprites, abilities, sound, text, music) is finalized at build time and shipped as static assets.