Luminaris

Guide the light-motes. Take every star.

Luminaris is a little real-time strategy game about big numbers. Every star you hold breeds a swarm of glowing light-motes that orbit it in shells. They're your money, your army and your shield all at once. Send them out to colonise neutral stars, throw them at enemy garrisons where they trade one for one, and keep your swarm growing faster than the other side can burn it down.

No build queues, no tech trees, no fog of war. One resource, one thing to do (send), and the rest is reading the map.

How it plays

• Click one of your stars to grab its swarm, then click anywhere to send it. Drag a box if you only want part of it, or grab a fleet mid flight and point it somewhere else. Orders arc across the map, nothing teleports.

• Every arrival counts. Your own light-motes reinforce a star, enemy  light-motes trade one for one with the defenders. Strip a garrison bare and the next wave takes the star.

• Right click your stars to spend  light-motes on upgrades. Production makes a star breed faster, Fortress puts up a shield bubble that burns off a share of every attack before it lands.

• Drag from a star to set a rally route. Chain a few stars together and your back line turns into a supply artery streaming reinforcements to the front, or straight into someone's face.

• Watch out for black holes. Anything that crosses the event horizon is just gone, and the gravity well bends fleets that fly too close. The shortest path is not always the one that survives.

• Nebula gas slows  light-motes down and quietly dissolves the stragglers, so think twice before flying the swarm through a cloud.

• The AI actually plays properly. It defends threatened stars, evacuates lost causes, runs supply chains around black holes and picks its moments. You can tune how mean it is in the settings, anywhere from gentle to brutal.

Features

Still very much a work in progress, but right now you get:

• A short campaign that teaches the game as you conquer it: colonisation, multi front wars, fortresses, production economies, black hole warfare

• Battles that scale to thousands of light- motes on screen

• Clean, glowing art that stays readable. You always know exactly what's happening

• Mouse only, and a game takes a few minutes

• Plays right in your browser

Inspired by Auralux, Galcon and that whole family of ambient RTS games. Made with Godot.