Sanctuary: Shattered Sun Promo Shot
Image: Enhearten Media

Outside of twitchy, highly reflexive games like StarCraft, there's only been one sci-fi RTS formula to see any kind of widespread success - the mega-scale battles of Total Annihilation, which led to the Supreme Commander series and then the likes of Planetary Annihilation. The latest contender for this explosion-studded crown is Sanctuary: Shattered Sun, which made its Kickstarter debut yesterday along with a demo release. Clearly people are on board with what developers Enhearten Media have shown so far, as the game sailed past its initial $100k funding goal within hours.

Sanctuary is set on a massive Dyson Sphere - an artificial mega-planet built around a sun - where three factions fight for control. The Earth Defense Alliance (flesh-and-blood folks), the Chosen (high-tech post-humans who traded up to machine bodies), and the Guard, the Dyson Sphere's native robot defenses which are trying to protect the world itself. Each side has with their own aesthetics and some unit differences within each specific niche.

Judging by a quick playthrough of the demo, Sanctuary seems to be on the right track. While the demo only offers a small subset of units for each faction and a limited panel of commands (it IS relatively early in production and still seeking funding), there's a full set of tutorials here, one story mission, four survival/skirmish mode maps, and online multiplayer, with all three of the playable factions available.

For those who've never played one of these bigger-scale RTS games, they offer a slightly slower but far more grandiose vision than the likes of StarCraft. Instead of micromanaging a small clump of units and trying to counter every small move the enemy makes, the focus is more on constructing a powerful resource base that allows you to churn out tanks, planes, and robot infantry by the hundreds (or even thousands) via ever-active unit factories.

Those units can then secure even more room for resource-gathering, upgrading your factories to deploy ever-larger units to the battlefield until you've got a force of giant superweapons striding and destroying whole regiments in a single shot. Still, defeat can come quickly if you're careless, as your initially powerful Commander unit can be a liability once the real big guns start coming into play.

There's still a long way to go until Sanctuary is anywhere near complete. The earliest estimate given on the Kickstarter page is March 2027. The full game promises five full tech levels (each bringing bigger, more destructive units) for each faction, plus the ability to blow holes in the Dyson sphere itself, collapsing terrain with the potential to send entire armies tumbling into the sun. Interestingly, the studio is looking to the future and already boasts that the game is fully moddable already, ensuring the community can build on their foundations long after release. Some of the bigger features, like full aerial and naval warfare, are stretch goals, but the game is well on track to his those targets already.

While the Sanctuary demo does seem impressive, it's far from the only game in the pipeline for this particular sub-genre. Prolific strategy publisher Hooded Horse recently announced that the currently-free, community-made Beyond All Reason would be seeing a commercial release with multiple solo story campaigns. The venerable Planetary Annihilation is still growing over a decade later, too, with the 2015 game adding 12-player co-op to its roguelike Galactic War campaign just last month. Plus, the freeware Zero-K is still receiving a steady stream of improvements. As big as all these games are, I reckon there's room for all of them, give or take some friendly competition and the occasional nuclear exchange.

You can wishlist and give Sanctuary: Shattered Sun a try now via the demo, and if it tickles your conquest-driven fancies, put some money down early over on Kickstarter. An early pre-order via the Kickstarter page costs around $43 Australian dollars (the dev's native currency), which is roughly £23 or $30 US.