🕹️ TIMELINE BLASTAR

Memetic Empires

Memetic Empires is a turn-based hex strategy game tucked inside Timeline Blastar. Pick a faction, drop a city on Earth, and play a fast match against three rivals. Harvest ENERGY from real-world resources, build an army, push out into orbit, and use tweet-units to wage memetic warfare on your enemies.

You reach it from the title screen options panel: click 🗺 MEMETIC EMPIRES.

How a match works

You start with a single city core, two starter units, and ⚡ 35 ENERGY in the bank. Three AI factions land on the same Earth map, each with their own city and starter units. There is no time pressure — every turn waits on you.

A turn looks like this:

1. Click any of your tiles, units, or buildings to read the side panel. 2. Click a friendly unit, then click an adjacent tile to move or an adjacent enemy to attack. Each unit can move once per turn. 3. Open RESEARCH to pick the next tech you want. Whatever ENERGY you generate that turn flows into research progress. 4. Open BUILD while a friendly tile is selected to drop a Solar Array, Drone Factory, Research Lab, Counter-Narrative Lab, or — once you've researched the right techs — a Spaceport, Fission Plant, or Fusion Reactor. 5. Hit END TURN and watch the AI factions take theirs.

Match auto-saves every 5 turns. You can quit any time and your run will resume next session.

ENERGY is the only resource

Every tile yields ENERGY based on terrain — solar tiles give a lot, geothermal more, uranium and hydrocarbon even more, oceans and mountains give nothing. Buildings boost yields further: a Solar Array on a solar tile is the cheapest power-up; a Fusion Reactor anywhere is the endgame.

You spend ENERGY on three things:

Memetic warfare

Memetic warfare is the game's signature wrinkle. Build a Counter-Narrative Lab and you can recruit a tweet directly into your army as a unit. The tweet's stats come from how viral it actually is in the wider Timeline Blastar corpus — likes drive HP, comments drive ATK, retweets drive RANGE.

Tweet units only fight other tweet units. A Mech Brigade can't shoot a tweet, and a tweet can't damage a tank. If your opponent fields a memetic army and you don't, your conventional units will roll over their ground forces and still lose because their tweets eat your cities. Build a lab, recruit early.

Tech tree, six branches

Tech is split across ENERGY, ROBOTICS, DRONES, SPACE, MEMETIC, and DEFENSE. The tree is shallow — about 30 techs total — but the branch you commit to shapes your faction's identity.

Some highlight techs:

Three planets, one match

Earth is where the match starts and where v0.1 plays out in earnest. Once you research Lunar Logistics the Moon map opens — a smaller hex grid with regolith terrain and a few helium-3 hot spots. Interplanetary Transit opens Mars: dust, ice caps, rare-earth deposits. The asteroid belt is sketched in for a future build.

You move between planets via the planet tabs in the top bar. Locked planets are dimmed; researching the gate tech lights them up.

Factions

Four factions are playable in v0.1, each with a unique color, sigil, military doctrine, and starting roster of allied research consortiums:

Eight more factions exist as data-only stubs (the Steppe Federation, Bharat Spiral, Yamato Cybercrescent, Verdant Federation, Open-Source Collective, Environmental Coalition, Decentralized Techno-Civ, Authoritarian AI Bloc). They'll become playable in later builds.

What's not in v0.1

Memetic Empires v0.1 is intentionally small — the goal is "can I play one match end-to-end and want a second." Things you'll notice missing:

All of those are on the backlog. v0.1's job is the kernel — hex grid, ENERGY, tech, units, combat, memetic warfare, save state. Future builds layer on top.

Tips

Want to know what's coming next? The roadmap lives in our internal hackend; player-facing release notes will go up here when the next build ships. For now: pick a faction, click a tile, end a turn.