Iron Tide

Overview

Iron Tide is a compact naval real-time strategy battle over a three-island sea. Your port in the lower-left and the enemy port in the upper-right each print a trickle of steel, but the real economy sits between them: park a ship near an island with no enemy contesting it and your steel income jumps by three per second, so map control literally builds your fleet. Three hull types form the counter triangle. Destroyers are fast, cheap screens and the only hull that reliably spots submarines at close range. Submarines hit hardest per shot and stay invisible until they fire or a destroyer closes in, making them the ambush pick. Carriers cost the most but launch planes that fly their strikes across a hundred and fifty pixels of open water. The enemy AI builds the same roster, contests islands, and periodically masses for a run at your harbor. You win by sinking the six-hundred-point enemy harbor; if yours goes down first, the tide goes out for good.

How to Play

Press Start Game and your first destroyer is already afloat. Tap a ship to select it, tap open water to move, tap an enemy ship or the enemy harbor to close and attack — all gunnery is automatic once in range. The build bar launches destroyers for sixty steel, submarines for eighty, and carriers for a hundred fifty straight from your port. Select Fleet grabs your whole navy at once. On keyboard, arrow keys move the command cursor and Space selects or orders at the cursor. P pauses, R restarts the battle.

Tips & Strategy

The opening race is for the center island: send your starting destroyer there before firing the engine on anything else, because the side that holds two islands for the first minute usually launches the first carrier. Build destroyers in pairs — a lone destroyer chasing a submarine reveal will eat a second torpedo before the first kill lands. Submarines win harbors: their seventeen-damage strikes arrive without warning, so once you have two, park them just inside torpedo range of the enemy port while your destroyers screen the approach lanes. Carriers are artillery, not brawlers — keep them behind your screen at maximum plane range and let the aircraft do the traveling. When the enemy masses for a harbor run, do not chase their raiders across the map; recall to the harbor, let its presence anchor your formation, and counter-attack the islands they abandoned to fund it.

What Makes It Distinct

Iron Tide ties its economy to geography rather than a build queue: every steel coin above the base trickle is earned by a hull sitting in the right water. Combined with genuine stealth rules and physical carrier planes, it plays like a fleet chess match compressed into five-minute rounds.