The demo went live on 15 June 2026 as a separate Steam application. It is free, Windows only, English and Russian, and the developer was careful to frame it: “This is not early access, nor the full game. This is a finished demo, except for some aspects of localization, voiceover, and ability icons.”
What it contains, from the announcement of 3 June 2026: a siege of an industrial city, described as “one of several types of battles focused on macro”; a choice of two opponents, a bandit faction built on light fast units and a mutant faction built on heavy armour and close combat; unlocked technologies so that higher-tier units and buildings are available; a strike-group and reinforcement interface that simulates how armies arrive in the full game; a procedurally varied map with a fixed mission type; and a difficulty multiplier that scales the size of the enemy base.
## What a battle is actually set to
⭐ The build carries its own setup screen, and it can be read. The population ceiling is chosen from four values — 300, 250, 200 or 150 — and the scene opens with 1 000 gears in hand, a difficulty multiplier of 0.7, a base-size multiplier of 0.9 and an enemy-health multiplier of 1.0. ⚠️ Those last four are the values the saved scene starts from, not a list of options: only the population ceiling is recorded as a choice.
⭐⭐ Ten units are authorised in the battle, and no more: Riflemen, the AT squad, the Assault squad, the BTR, the MLRS “Vortex”, the BREM, the Armored car, the Howitzer “Molot”, the tank and the Dreadnought. Everything else in this site’s Empire roster exists in the files and is not available to you here — which is worth knowing before you plan a build around something you have read about.
⭐ The tactical strikes are rationed rather than merely cooled down. The battle grants three uses of the heavy bombs, three of the incendiary trail, three airdrops and five interceptor patrols. The cooldowns you see on the buttons govern the pacing inside those allowances; the allowances govern the battle.
The playing field is a grid of 200 cells at a scale of 2.0. ⚠️ That figure belongs to the demo’s battle scene, ⛔ and the files do not attach it to any of the nine named map templates — so it describes what you play on, not any particular map. Capture points, where the mission uses them, take effect within a radius of 7.94.
## The rest of what was announced
The 15 June post added the quality-of-life list — repositioning a building’s placement ghost after ordering it, correcting a bomber’s flight path after targeting, setting attack priorities, drag-formation movement, selecting all objects of a type across the whole map rather than just the screen, and control groups bound with T plus a number. It also confirmed trenches and defensive structures.
The reception has been strong. Measured on 17 August 2026: 3 401 reviews, 3 173 of them positive, 93 percent, rated Very Positive by Steam. The developer noted on 22 June that players had gone far past what he planned: “I had planned for only about two hours of content… But many of you have played over 30-70 hours, which is surprising.”
Two things arrived with that same 22 June post and are worth knowing. The first is update D-30, which he calls a gift and did not plan to ship: “I have added an additional difficulty modifier that multiplies the durability and health of enemies.” It is optional, and he is candid about what it is for — “there is not much fairness in it. But it is not for fairness anyway. It is for fun and challenge!”
The second is a credit the game gives and nobody else repeats. The soundtrack was written for it by the composer EDLISE, and the developer’s phrasing is not a formality: “it was written specifically for the game by composer EDLISE, many thanks for his work, without him the demo would not have been born.” For a game made by one person, that is the only other name attached to it.
On how long it stays, he has been clear and deliberately vague at once. On 22 June he announced one extra week. On 29 June he reversed that: “Demo will remain available for an additional indefinite period… Demo will be shut down anyway, but later, when the time feels right, most likely, when online numbers drop significantly or the demo’s resources are finally exhausted.” He closed with a sentence worth repeating exactly: “Don’t ask me when the demo closes.”
At the time of this check, the demo is available and no removal date has been announced. Those statements do not establish whether the developer will give advance notice before removing it.
Values read from game files · version 23882143