Active Edge - Early Release

WORK IN PROGRESS. This is early access test build 0.6.5-pre2 and it will change. Play it, break it, and tell me what happened.

It is 1985 and the exercise has stopped being an exercise. Colonel Volkov’s tank regiment is across the border and heading for your river line. You command a British battlegroup: Chieftains to hold the ground, Scimitars to find him, artillery to break him up, and Harrier jump jets flying from hides in the woods behind you.

Active Edge is a base-building RTS in the Command & Conquer tradition, built for the kit and the ground of the British Army of the Rhine.

Colonel Volkov

Volkov probes, masses, or digs in. Choose your difficulty:

• Recruit: a chance to learn the valley.
• Regular: a fair fight.
• Veteran: the regiment at full strength, Hinds included.

What’s in this build

• Tactical pause: Space pauses a single-player battle. You can still select, give orders and move the camera, and your queued routes are drawn on the ground.
• Orders you can trust: the battle runs on a fixed clock, and when a vehicle can’t complete a move it stops and tells you.
• Supply by road: supply comes in by truck. Lose the truck and you lose the delivery.
• Infantry go to ground, take cover and suppress, and are easier to pick out in town fights.
• A battlefield that remembers: smoke hangs in the air, shells leave craters, and burnt-out vehicles stay where they died.
• Bigger ground: larger maps for skirmish and sandbox. In sandbox you can set the field size, crossings, towns, Volkov’s strength and how long he waits. Three campaign missions use the wider ground.
• Voices: Crew, Brigade and Volkov speak their lines. Voice-overs can be switched off.
• Clearer battles: banners call out key events. The strength bar counts your force and only the enemy you’ve actually seen. The build bar is grouped into Armour, Support, Air and air defence, and Structures.
• Intro film on first launch. You can skip it, or replay it from the title screen.

Co-op is supported. Tactical pause is single-player only.

Found a bug?

Use the Report a bug button on the title screen or pause menu. It saves a diagnostics file and opens emperormarkus.com, where you can send it along with what happened. Feedback is welcome in the comments too.

On a Mac, the app isn't signed yet. The first time, right-click Active Edge.app and choose Open, then click Open in the dialog. macOS asks only once.

What’s new in 0.6.5

• A campaign tech tree: a tank workshop (Challenger) and a signals post (Milan 2, Lynx TOW, MLRS), unlocked through the missions.
• Unit stances (hold, defend, aggressive, patrol) and combined-arms bonuses for coordinated attacks.
• Spread-out infantry formations, a quieter event log, and remappable keys with tooltips.
• An optional C64 retro look.
• Mac support: Apple Silicon and Intel downloads, with Ctrl-click and two-finger tap as right-click, two-finger scroll to pan, and a one-button mouse option.
• Fixes from a long overnight error check and thousands of simulated battles, including units getting stuck on attack-move orders.

Credits

Design and direction: Emperormarkus (Stronma). Built with AI tools: code with Claude, art with Grok, music with Suno, voices and sound with ElevenLabs. Engine: three.js.

A work of fiction: the Kreuzbach and Colonel Volkov never existed. The Harrier, thankfully, did.

Watch the one-minute trailer: