OrbitSwarm
By Frank Force · MIT license. Source · All credits
About OrbitSwarm
A small real time strategy game across ten to fifteen planets. Every planet you hold builds ships on its own, and you win by deciding when to defend and when to send a fleet at a neighbour.
How to play
Press on one of your planets, drag to a target and release to send ships. Keys 1 to 4 set how much of the garrison goes.
Rules of OrbitSwarm
- Every planet you hold builds ships continuously. Bigger planets build faster and hold more, capped at 30 per unit of radius.
- Arriving ships kill one defender each. The planet only flips once the garrison passes zero, and the survivors become your garrison.
- You win by taking every enemy planet, and lose the moment you hold none.
Controls
- Press on one of your planets and drag to the target, then release to send
- Keys 1 to 4 set the share sent: 10, 25, 50 or 100 percent
- R restarts the game
What makes it worth playing
- Three difficulties from the title screen, changing the map size, both starting fleets and how sharply the computer plays
- On easy it misjudges enemy garrisons by up to 30 percent; on hard it has perfect information and moves twice as often
- You start with 70 ships against 20 on easy, and 40 against 50 on hard
- You and the computer begin on the two planets furthest apart on the map
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-08-26.
Tips from playing it
- Take the neutral planets nearest you before contesting anything defended.
- Send enough ships to win. Attacking with too few just donates them, since each one dies against a larger garrison.
- Count what will be defending on arrival, not what is there now. A long crossing gives the defender the whole trip to build.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
Picked from the MIT-licensed LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force after checking the licence at source rather than trusting the repository label, and after confirming the game makes no requests to any other site. We host it on our own servers, so it loads straight into the game with no third-party ad code and no pre-roll video. It shipped without a mobile viewport setting, so a phone laid it out at desktop width and scaled it down blurry. We added the setting, and it now renders sharp at the phone's own resolution. We played it through on a real phone-sized screen on 2026-08-26 before publishing this page, and the screenshots above are from that session rather than from the original project.
More on how we pick and fix these: what we changed in the open-source games and how we test a game.
- Category
- Strategy
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Players
- One player against a computer opponent.
- Difficulty
- Simple to control, with three difficulty settings underneath
- Typical session
- 4 to 10 minutes a game
- Last tested by us
- 2026-08-26
- Created by
- Frank Force (MIT)
