The gates are dark. The waitlist is open.

For nine centuries the Concordance bound the galaxies: a covenant of worlds joined by a network of gates that made a thousand-light-year crossing a matter of hours. Then came the Sundering. Within a single season every gate fell dark, the core went silent, and the frontier galaxies — the Marches — were suddenly on their own.

Generations later, the Marches are up for grabs. That is where you come in.

What Starmarcher is

Starmarcher is a persistent, browser-based, 2D space grand-strategy MMO shared by thousands of players. You start as ruler of your own small galaxy, build it into a power, and only venture into other galaxies when you are ready — because crossing the void takes real time and real commitment.

It draws on the late-90s galactic grand-strategy games many of us grew up with, in an original universe of its own: planetary loyalty, named heroes running missions, fleets that take real hours to cross space, and two-layer warfare — win orbit, then invade the ground. Unlike those games, it is an online universe that runs for months, with a real endgame.

Time is the key resource

Every move in Starmarcher takes real time. A Corvette rolls off a Light Shipyard in tens of minutes; a Dreadnought takes days. A fleet crossing your home galaxy arrives in hours, and anyone with sensor coverage sees it coming. A planetary invasion is a state machine that unfolds over twelve to thirty hours, with every step visible and most of them cancellable.

That is deliberate. It means someone who logs in twice a day can compete with someone who never logs off, because there is nothing to gain from reaction speed — only from preparation, logistics and judgement. While you are away, AI stewards keep your planets producing within limits you set, and a "while you were away" summary tells you what happened.

Three factions, one universe

Three successor movements claim the Concordance's legacy:

• The Ordane Dominion — the old imperial order. The strongest capital ships and fortress worlds in the game; slow, expensive and very hard to stop.
• The Kestrel Compact — rebels and frontier worlds. Cheaper, faster ships, the best agents in the Marches, and a loyalty bonus on every world they liberate.
• The Meridian Consortium — merchant houses and privateers. Trade and credit bonuses, mercenaries for hire, and smuggling routes no chart shows.

Each faction has one of the three engines of the game — industry, mobility and people, or money — and a matching weakness. Your choice is permanent for the Era.

What we are building first

The design documents are written and approved: a game design document, an art bible, a data model and a ten-phase roadmap. Phase 1 is this site and the waitlist. Phases 2 to 4 build the vertical slice: sign up, pick a faction, arrive at your Throne World, build mines and a shipyard, colonise a second planet, send a fleet to a pirate haven with a real ETA, fight a battle and watch the animated replay. That slice goes to a small friends-and-family group before we add heroes, ground war, diplomacy and the Era endgame.

We will post here as each phase lands, including the open design questions we are still weighing — and waitlist members get the first invitations.

Be first into the Marches

Join the waitlist on the front page. We send one confirmation e-mail (double opt-in), then your personal referral link. Invite three friends who confirm and you earn the Founder's Badge, a cosmetic badge shown beside your name in every Era.

Cosmetic only. Power is never for sale in Starmarcher — that is the one promise we will not bend.

The gates are dark. See you in the Marches.