Planned Release Date: Dec 14, 2026

About This Game

ORION is a real-time 4X grand strategy game. A young civilization begins on its homeworld, and it falls to you to lead it outward into a procedurally generated galaxy holding both wonders and dangers. To build an empire you have exploration, politics, diplomacy and war at your disposal; should the galaxy itself turn against you, those same tools must keep it standing. Whether you play alone or with others, the game is playable from start to finish today—from the first survey ship to the end-game crisis.

EXPLORE AND EXPAND
Multiple galaxy shape types like Spiral(2,4,6 arms) ring, ellipse or a simple circle.
Across nine planet types, you can explore single, binary and trinary star systems along with neutron stars. Chart hyperlanes, survey systems and investigate anomalies.Worlds rich in energy, minerals and rare resources like Dark Matter and Xenon are yours to claim. Push your borders as far as you can hold them by founding colonies and terraforming worlds.

BUILD YOUR EMPIRE
Develop planetary districts and buildings to keep your people housed, fed, employed and content. Sectors can group colonies together, and an appointed governor runs each one. Operate freighters and trade routes, and trade on internal and galactic markets. A strong economy keeps your shipyards busy and your wars going.

SHAPE YOUR SOCIETY
Choose from different governments,  faiths and ethics as you set policies and doctrines. Rulers carry traits, grow older and die, so plan for succession and contested heirs. In elections, candidates make promises they are expected to keep. When your society outgrows its government, push through reforms, and launch empire-wide campaigns. If running every detail doesn’t appeal to you, hand day-to-day politics to automation,the last word always remains yours.

DIPLOMACY AND INTRIGUE
One civilization’s values, opinions and ambitions differ from the next. Goods, systems and even fleets can be traded. Sign open borders, non-aggression and defensive pacts. Found federations with their own charters and projects, or take subjects as vassals, tributaries, scholariums or bulwarks. Rally coalitions, mark claims on the map, and share or withhold intelligence. Negotiate peace terms down to the last payment, and plant spy networks in rival territory.

SHIPS AND WAR
Physics, Society and Engineering hold nearly 400 technologies to research. From weapons, shields, armor, reactors, drives and stealth systems, design your warships; build fleets from templates and refit them as your technology improves. Fortify key systems with starbases, defense stations and minefields. In the operations planner, plan multi-fleet campaigns, bombard enemy worlds from orbit and invade them with ground armies. Firepower matters, yet objectives, occupation and war exhaustion win wars just as much.
Planetary guns arm your worlds! The first tiers shoot down raiders in their own system. Later tiers strike enemy colonies several jumps away, and the most terrible will collapse a star into a black hole or fold a whole system out of space!
Each shot needs a long charge, giving your enemies time to stop it, and the whole galaxy will remember what you did.

CRISES AND WONDERS
Megastructures such as a Habitat Ring, a Stellar Shroud around a star or a Grand Observatory are yours to build(or take it from another empire) .Stop outbreaks before they spread across your worlds. In the late game you must face one or all of eight galactic crises, among them the Glass Plague, the Rogue Foundries, the Devourer Migration and the Dimming.
ps: you will get a warning :).

PLAY YOUR WAY
Choose one of 50 premade empires, or design your own species, government and ships with ten different ship styles. Conquest, domination or score by science,economy or military power can bring victory, or you can simply survive the crisis.


MULTIPLAYER AND MODDING
Play with friends online through Steam or over LAN. ORION is built to be modded: all game content lives in readable data files, and from the in-game mod manager mods can be published to Steam Workshop.
There is a modding guide that needs some feedback on it so its easy to understand for everybody.

EARLY ACCESS ROADMAP
ORION enters Early Access in December 2026. I expect the full release between Q4 2027 and Q2 2028. Shaped by the feedback the game will get, updates will follow this plan:
Early 2027:
New music and sound; performance work for very large galaxies and huge battles.
Deeper politics and warfare; more crises, events and megastructures.
Mid 2027 - Late 2027:
Work begins on procedural galaxy events (see the note below); balance and quality-of-life updates.
Mid 2028: 1.0 Release.


Procedural events: rather than fixed event chains, the galaxy builds its stories from smaller building blocks, so every playthrough stays interesting. The current hand-written events and anomalies keep working, and new fully written event chains can still be added, by me or by modders.