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Pitch & Core Loop

AxonRush is a 1–24 player real-time strategy game blending Risk (territory control on a hex board), factory / logistics games (designing unit-flow networks across owned tiles), auto-battler (stat-based combat resolves automatically), and light MOBA (a single hero unit with a buff aura and on-demand abilities).

You don't micromanage soldiers. You design the flow: what each tile spawns, where its units march, what happens when units arrive, what your tile network transforms them into. Your leader is a roving commander who buffs nearby allies, swings key fights with abilities, and hunts enemy leaders across the map.

Win by destroying every other player's home base.

Genre Framing

The product sits at the intersection of four reference points:

ReferenceWhat we takeWhat we change
Risk Hex-territory control. Comeback-friendly board state. Real-time, not turn-based. Logistics layer underneath.
Factorio / Mindustry Network design as the core puzzle. Routes, throughput, conversions. Adversarial network design — opponents cut your supply lines.
Auto-battlers (TFT, etc.) Combat is stat-driven, not micro-driven. Composition wins fights. No discrete combat phases — combat happens continuously on contested tiles.
MOBAs (DotA, LoL) Single hero, on-demand abilities, escalating respawn timer. Hero is the support, not the main attacker. The army is your main attacker.

The Five-Step Loop

Every match runs the same loop. Skill is in execution speed and routing quality.

  1. Claim tiles to expand your network.
  2. Set tile rules from the 9-rule enum (Pass-through; Spawn-Army / Spawn-Gather / Spawn-Engineer / Spawn-Defender; Resource Producer with a chosen resource slot; Upgrade with a chosen unit type; Tower; permanent Home Base) and draw paths per unit type that route spawned units through your network.
  3. Pilot your leader to claim contested tiles, defeat special tiles for XP, hunt enemy leaders, and tax enemy supply lines.
  4. Upgrade tiles and leader via engineer projects (resources from tile stockpiles + engineer time-investment) to scale into stronger units and abilities.
  5. Push offensives along path endpoints, grinding enemy tiles down level-by-level and eventually their home base.

The strategic puzzle is supply-chain shape: where do raw spawns flow, where do they upgrade, where do they convert to currency, where do they march to attack — all under fog of war, with limited info on enemy intent.

What Makes It Different

Network design as the verb

Most RTS games make you click units. AxonRush makes you draw the graph. The unit-level decisions are pre-committed in your tile rules and path weights; the moment-to-moment is reading the board and re-routing.

Asymmetric defense

Tiles only take damage at path endpoints. Pass-through traffic doesn't chip away at terrain. This makes flanking and end-point selection a real skill layer separate from raw army size.

Supply-line warfare

Paths persist through captured tiles. Cutting an enemy's path mid-route turns their own supply line into a damage-soaked corridor. Logistics raids matter.

Player-count flexibility

1v1 is the tight competitive shape; 24-player FFA is the social shape. Same rules, different match length. Comeback bonus scales defense the smaller your territory gets, so being last-place doesn't mean instant elimination.

Target Audience

Scope at a Glance

Players
1–24 per match. Any mix of human and AI.
Match length
~30–60 min on small maps; multiple hours possible at 24-player marathon scale.
Platform
PC-first.
Engine
Unreal Engine 5.7 (C++).
Networking
Server-authoritative. Fog-gated replication.
Content at MVP
3 leaders, 3 armies, 1 map shape, 1v1 LAN.
Content at launch
12 leaders, 12 armies, multiple map sizes, biomes, full meta progression.
Read next: Map & Board for the physical layout, or Press Kit for the share-friendly summary.