Alpha · a persistent world of floating isles
A multiplayer strategy game about holding a piece of land in an empty sky. You are a lord-mage. You claim a Font, you raise an isle around it, and you keep it.
The alpha opens 10pm Eastern, tonight
Claim your account now and the first launch is one click. Armada is a game you install — there is no browser version, because a throttled tab rendering on the wrong graphics card is not the game.
The world was one continent until an overreach of Aether shattered it. The pieces did not fall. They hung.
What remains is the Sky: thousands of isles adrift at every altitude, and beneath them the Deep, an unlit gulf nobody returns from. An isle stays in the air because an Aether Font burns at its heart.
Fonts gutter. Isles sink. Nobody agrees whose fault the Sundering was, and the argument has outlasted everyone who was there.
Every isle has a fixed set of plots. Groves yield timber. Quarries cut stone. Arcane Fonts draw Aether, and it is Aether that keeps the whole rock in the air. Timber buys stone, stone buys Aether. That is the entire economy and you will have it in two minutes.
Your quarries keep cutting while you sleep. Come back a day later and you return to a stockpile that grew without you, not to a save file waiting where you left it. The server runs whether anyone is watching or not.
Walk to the skydock and sail to another isle. Crossing takes real time, because distance should mean something. Other lords are out there building their own holdings, and you will meet them.
Nothing grows in the dark, so your Groves fall idle. Aether runs twice as strong under a night sky, so your Fonts do their best work. The clock is a resource like any other, and soon the dark will bring the Unmoored with it.
Persistent multiplayer games have a habit of punishing you for having a job. These are the rules this one is built on, and they are not negotiable.
Your home isle cannot be attacked. Not by a stronger player, not while you are asleep, not ever. Everything you put at risk, you chose to put at risk.
Play twelve hours and you will have more than someone who played two. You will not be harder to outthink. A new lord is never mathematically shut out of a fight.
No daily login. No limited time events you will regret sleeping through. The content is going nowhere and neither is your progress.
Early alpha, and honest about it. Forty isles, four resources, five buildings, live multiplayer, and a world that keeps running when you close the game.
Territory, host against host fighting, skills, gear, sieges, a market and hand to hand trading have all landed. Crafting, seasons and the nine heroes have not. Come in at this stage and you will watch the thing take shape, and what you say about it will change what gets made.
Every isle, every stockpile, every banner planted in the alpha goes away the day the beta opens, and everybody starts again from nothing on the same morning. A Rust wipe, announced well ahead of time rather than sprung on you.
This is worth being exact about, because the game makes a promise that sounds like the opposite. Your work is never erased is a rule about the world: nobody can raid your home isle, nothing decays while you sleep, no other player can take what you built. It has never been a promise about the alpha itself. The alpha is friends and family finding out what is broken; the beta is the real run, and it deserves to start on clean ground rather than on a world shaped by a fortnight of bugs.
So build like it is a sandbox, because it is one. What survives the wipe is what you told us — and that is the part we actually need.