A real-time war of air defence and industry. Build the economy, bury it, and layer SAMs over what you cannot hide. Read a fading intel picture of the enemy base and aim every missile yourself. Break their will to fight before they break yours.

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Coming Soon To Early Access

The developers of this game intend to release as a work in progress, developing with the feedback of players.

Note: Games in Early Access are not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Close the Sky is a systems-driven war game — economy, research, doctrines, and air-defence balance all interact, and that balance can only be tuned against real players in real matches. We've been running a closed playtest and the feedback has already reshaped the game; Early Access lets us widen that loop while we finish tuning. We'd rather balance the endgame with the community than guess at it alone.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Up to six months. If a specific system needs more time to get right we may extend slightly, but the goal is a focused Early Access, not a permanent one.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The full version will ship with expanded research and doctrine options, more enemy AI behaviors and difficulty tuning, additional scenarios/settings for skirmish and multiplayer, and the balance polish that comes out of Early Access matches. We also expect quality-of-life improvements driven directly by player feedback. The core game — full matches against the AI or other players — is already in place; Early Access is about depth, variety, and tuning rather than missing pillars.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Fully playable end to end. The complete core loop is in: base-building across the surface and underground, industry and economy, research and doctrines, air defence and strike warfare, the will/morale system, skirmish against the AI, and PvP multiplayer (online and LAN). Balance is still actively moving — that's the point of Early Access — and you may hit occasional bugs, but matches are complete and stable.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“No. The price will remain the same when we leave Early Access.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Our Discord is the center of development — patch discussions, balance debates, and direct access to the developer. We post regular devlogs and patch notes on Steam, read the discussion boards, and have already been folding playtester feedback into weekly builds. Balance changes in particular will be argued in the open before they ship.”
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This game is not yet available on Steam

Planned Release Date: September 2026

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About This Game

The war is fought over the sky, and won on the ground under it.


You run a nation's war machine from a single side-on cross-section: industry and air defence on the surface, everything you care about dug in beneath it. There is no fog to march through and no units to shepherd. There is a strip of ground, a sky above it, and an enemy doing the same thing to you at the same time.

Dig, and decide what is worth burying


Every plot goes three levels down. Depth costs x2, x4 and x8 in money and time, and only penetrating warheads reach it — a GBU-57 is the sole conventional way into a deep bunker. But batteries and radars cannot be buried at all: they need line of sight to the sky. So the things that keep you alive are the things that have to stand in the open.

Interceptors are ammunition


Batteries fire from the national stockpile. A SAM site with nothing on the shelf is scenery, and the air-defence panel marks it DRY in red. Every round you produce needs warehouse space, and each type takes a different amount of it — a shell is one crate, a ballistic missile five, a nuclear warhead ten. A line that finishes a round with nowhere to put it jams at 100% and holds up everything queued behind it.

Your ammunition dump is a weapon pointed at you


A warehouse that dies takes its stock with it, and the stock goes off. The blast radius and the damage both scale with how full it was: an empty depot is inert, a full one reaches six slots either side and will chain-detonate any other full depot it catches. Burying one halves the reach per level. It is the best target on the enemy's base, and the worst thing to put beside your own power plant.

You never see the truth, only your last look at it


The enemy base starts completely dark. Recon drones photograph what they overfly and a satellite station sweeps on a timer, and from then on you are working from a snapshot that ages while they rebuild — the view fades from white to amber as it goes stale.

Strikes are aimed at places, not at buildings. A missile hits whatever occupies that cell when it arrives, which may be nothing, or may be something new. Stale intel costs you missiles. Decoy sites exist to make that worse.

Aim it yourself


Arm a weapon, switch to the enemy base, and the cursor becomes a gunsight: aim box, blast footprint, what your intel believes is in that cell, the damage profile, and whether any battery you know about can engage it. Click to fire, and keep clicking to saturate.

Warheads are not interchangeable


Every munition carries a profile across four channels — structure, personnel, electronics and incendiary — following what the real system is built for. A TOS-1A guts a garrison and barely marks the walls. CHAMP burns out a sector's electronics without knocking anything down. Weapons carry their real designations, with the full profile on hover.

Fifty-one technologies, five doctrines


A full-screen tech tree across detection, air defence, strategic, strike and reconnaissance. Hover a node and everything that is not one of its prerequisites dims, so the chain you would have to research first reads as a single path. Research stalls if your labs lose power.

An opponent with a plan


The enemy runs one of three doctrines, chosen by the match seed and announced in the log: Swarm floods the sky with cheap drones and wins on the exchange rate, Fortress digs in behind layered SAM and waits you out, Blitz races to heavy missiles and hits before your defences exist. Difficulty changes only how fast it thinks — never what it is given.

Two players, one war


Multiplayer runs the same war against a person: one nation each, no pause, the war clock locked to 1x. Both machines run the whole simulation and only orders cross the wire, so the game plays as sharply over a bad connection as a good one. Every five seconds the clients compare a hash of their entire state.

You do not win by taking ground


There is no ground to take. You win when the enemy's will to fight reaches zero, and you lose when yours does. Will drains from civilian casualties, lost buildings and lost strategic targets — the command bunker is worth 30 on its own. Nuclear weapons crater the target's will and dent your own.

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System Requirements

    Minimum:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
    • Processor: Intel Core i5-4460 / AMD FX-6300
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti / AMD Radeon R7 260X, 2 GB VRAM
    • DirectX: Version 11
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    • Storage: 4 GB available space
    • Additional Notes: 1920x1080 or higher recommended. Broadband connection required for multiplayer only.
    Recommended:
    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 11 64-bit
    • Processor: Intel Core i5-9600K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
    • Memory: 16 GB RAM
    • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 / AMD Radeon RX 580, 6 GB VRAM
    • DirectX: Version 12
    • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    • Storage: 4 GB available space
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