Horu is a sci-fi 4X RTS inspired by Star Wars: Empire at War in which spaceships are spellcasters who can summon black holes

Horus heresy

Clicking a random link this morning, I was dazzled by the glare of a thousand laser batteries firing simultaneously. My ears trembled beneath the trundle of a million caterpillar tracks. Balls of ice, bolts of lightning, shipments of rare alloys, and cascades of drop pods went screaming down my nerves and detonated in my frontal cortex, painting starlanes across the inside of my skull. "Oh god, they've finally found us!" I yelled, hiding beneath my desk. "I for one welcome our new galactic overlords!"

But then I realised that I wasn't looking at a live newsfeed, but merely the Steam page for Horu, a real-time 4X strategy game in which you can "command hundreds of thousands of units across land and space", in the summary of developer David "GlassBeaver" Nadaski. There's also a magic system, this being "the spice that makes your enemy's defeat bitter", which is a very genteel way to characterise glaciating a tank formation or conjuring a miniature blackhole.

In development for years, and running on a custom C++ engine, Horu is inspired by 2006 hybrid RTS Star Wars: Empire at War - good, not great, in the words of turncoat jankonaut Graham, and the subject of many mods. Horu's way of bettering Empire at War is seemingly to add a shedload more of everything. You can engage in a fleet battle that looks like two migrating ant hives colliding, even as a frankly unnecessary quantity of cyborgs pour over the forgeworld beneath and get their shit kicked in by some tornado-summoning sorcerers.

Offensives appear to work like this: any drop ships that push through the fleet battle add meat to the ground invasion, with the option of deploying wormholes to sneak your troops behind the defending armada. On the ground, you're basically out to capture control points. You're allegedly spared from "continuous babysitting" by semi-autonomous squadron commanders and an orders system that lets you queue up objectives, before units engage in battle.

You can still give individual orders to units, but that seems like a recipe for acute wrist injury. There's also a boarding action mechanic whereby your hijackers move through vessels room by room. Again, I struggle to understand how you'll have time and dexterity to oversee such skulduggery when there are a bajillion particle cannons going off all at once.

Outside of combat, there are planets to develop, shipyards to build, spy networks to groom, research trees to water, and stock markets to manipulate. It all looks like business as usual for an imperial 4X. Honestly, I can imagine the maximalist warfaring being a hot mess, and then there's the fact that the dev is running a Kickstarter "to fund the remaining assets needed for a playable build: more spaceships, more units, more animations, more sounds, more music, and everything in between." I've been burned by Kickstarter overpromising before. Still, I can only admire the vindictive intellect that would have me play a little game of FTL inside what looks like one of the larger PvP scraps from Eve Online.

You can read more on Steam. Release date there is currently none. For an equally populous strategy experience that's closer in style to Supreme Commander, check out Sanctuary: Shattered Space.