We’re building a 4X strategy MMO you can actually live with. The genre has a problem we love and hate: it eats evenings. EMPIRES keeps the verbs that make it great, explore, expand, exploit, exterminate, and rebuilds them around an idle core. Your mining runs, your research, your convoys keep moving while you’re away. You check in, make the decisions that matter, and get on with your day.
It runs in any modern browser, and your account follows you from phone to laptop to PC café. The second thing we’re after is harder: a world where the economy is real because the players are real. No NPC vendor buying your junk at a fixed price. Everything in the game can be gathered, refined and crafted by any player, and when something changes hands, it changes hands between two players who both wanted the trade. We call the approach Invisible Web3, you sign up with one click, you never see a seed phrase, and what you own is genuinely yours: inspectable, transferable, resellable.
01One resource to rule them all
Every system hangs off a single scarce input: energy, refined from mined Unbiquadium, the element at the heart of our fiction. Outposts drain power continuously. Every unit you field draws from the grid. Research eats energy in bulk, in our world research is literally purchased computation: every commander is wired into the Eternal Mind Archivist (E.M.A), and technology is what you get when you feed it enough refined energy.
This one decision does a lot of quiet work. An empire has running costs, so you can’t paint the map and log off forever. A standing army is a real expense that has to justify itself, which is why mature empires fight instead of posing. And the humble miner at the bottom of the chain supplies the most important commodity in the game. Peace never comes free, and we think that’s exactly as it should be.
02A map worth fighting over
EMPIRES plays out on a persistent hex world. You survey hexes with exploration vehicles, plant outposts to project power and storage into a region, and push outward ring by ring toward a frontier that opens through collective effort. Outer land is richer and emptier; the centre is safe and busy. New players start in Sector Zero, a permanently protected region with every basic resource, so nobody’s first hours are spent being farmed by veterans.
Wealth on this map is visible. A rival’s outposts and stored goods are open to inspection, and a heavily fortified position is a signal that something inside is worth the trouble. Raids, convoy hijacks and road tolls are all real, and defenders always hold a structural edge.
You can be set back, but you can never be deleted.
Units live on cards. A card is your permit to produce a unit type, and combat destroys units, never cards. Lose the battle, lose the soldiers, rebuild and come back. The permit is yours forever.
03Where CITADELS comes in
CITADELS is the other half of Ashes of Mankind: a AAA extraction shooter on its way to release. You drop in, fight for loot, and try to get out with your kit. It’s a hardcore genre built to be accessible, the tension stays, death still costs you your kit, but you get to the combat without an evening of wiki tabs first. And we went vertical: the Citadel is a skyscraper, 41 floors of close-quarters fighting, instead of another horizontal sprawl.
The two games share one economy, and the bridge is cosmetics. Every cosmetic in CITADELS is crafted in EMPIRES: someone mined the resources, someone unlocked the research, someone held the Order Permit, and someone ran the craft. Then a CITADELS player bought it, not because of anything to do with tokens, but because they wanted to look the part walking into a raid.
In most games a skin comes out of a cash shop with infinite inventory. Ours can’t be conjured. By the time a cosmetic reaches a CITADELS player it carries the whole length of our world behind it, and there are exactly as many in existence as players chose to make. It settles to its owner’s vault and stays theirs, to hold, trade or pass on with its history intact.
04What’s next
CITADELS is heading into its testing phases, with its first alpha gated behind our Founder Packs, and EMPIRES is approaching its own 4X alpha. Dispatches like this one will keep unpacking systems as they lock in: the crafting chain, Corporations, the frontier, and the Consortium Exchange all deserve their own deep dives. Come argue with us about it in the correspondence below · we’re around, and we answer. Find us on X and Discord, and wishlist CITADELS on Steam.
