SplinterFaction is a free, open-source real-time strategy game built on the Recoil engine. Command the Federation of Kala or the Loz Alliance in a war where damage is permanent, there is no radar, and the map is the economy.
Produce, build, expand, fight — and the map control funds the next cycle. Everything else is decoration. SplinterFaction strips the genre back to that loop and then changes the rules underneath it.
Fed vs. Loz · in-development capture
Nobody repairs anything. Federation hulls regenerate and their healstations restore what a fight took, so a grinding engagement costs them time rather than army. Loz shields recharge fast — but once a shield collapses, every point of hull damage underneath is gone for the rest of the match.
Loz must make every engagement count. Fed can afford to be wrong, and then come back. Neither faction wants the fight the other one wants.
Seismic contact vs. what was actually there
Seismic sensors tell you that something is moving, somewhere. Not what. Not how many. A still army pings nothing. A cloaked Federation army pings nothing even while it moves.
Scouting isn't a supplement to your radar picture here. Scouting is the picture. If you aren't sending units out to look, you are playing blind, and you'll find out when something arrives.
Both born from the ashes of Iammas. One ruled by vengeance, the other by conviction. Two genuinely different armies — not two colours of the same one.
Speed · Stealth · Sustainability
Fed arrive first, leave first, and choose whether a fight happens at all. Recommended for your first game.
Full dossier
Mass · Protection · Inevitability
Loz don't raid. They arrive. A Loz line that gets into position and stays there is very hard to move.
Full dossierSome of the clearest decisions in SplinterFaction are subtractive. If you've played other games in the Recoil family, these are the adjustments.
Constructors build and reclaim. They do not fix. A tank that leaves a fight at 40% stays at 40%. Every engagement has a lasting cost, and trading efficiently is everything.
One structure, one builder. Factories cannot be assisted. Your production capacity is your number of factories, not your number of constructors.
Seismic sensors detect movement and nothing else. A stationary army is a hidden army. Quiet is never safe.
Damage is damage. No armour classes, no hidden multipliers. What decides fights is numbers, positioning, range and tech — plus two specialist effects you can actually see: heat and disruption.
Neither faction's signature system costs energy. Cloak everything. Shield everything. Your power budget is for converters and construction.
Pack your power plants however you like. One lucky shot will never cascade through a base you spent ten minutes building.
Now
Download Coilbox pre-configured for SplinterFaction. It fetches the game and the maps for you and keeps them current. Nothing to set up.
Now
SimpleAI for a conventional match, SurvivalAI for co-operative wave defence against a beacon network, and official SPADS autohosts for online play.
Living document
A complete commander's handbook: economy, construction, combat, both factions and every unit. Written for people who have never played an RTS.
Planned
Not yet available. We'll say a date when we believe one.
Start placement · the first real decision of a match
One people, one tragedy, and two answers to it that can't live side by side. Where SplinterFaction's story stands today, and the singleplayer campaign being built on top of it.
Read dispatchSplinterFaction is won by decisions about your army and your economy, not by how fast you can click. Here's the lineage behind that idea, and the controls that make every order count.
Read dispatchIn a 1v1 the Commander is the game. In a team game it's more interesting than that: you keep every tech level you had and can never gain another. Here's why that isn't fatal, and what we designed so it wouldn't be.
Read dispatchThe first ten games are supposed to be a mess. Somewhere around game fifteen, the loop clicks — you stop thinking about the interface and start thinking about the map. That's the game. Welcome to it.
