Live · Browser game
Timeline Commander
Wage a one-lane war across five eras of machines or lead a squad through eight operations, and rewind any fight that goes wrong.
Overview
A browser strategy game with two modes. Timeline War is a one-lane base battle: two bases face each other across a road, and you spend gold on war machines and turrets and evolve your army through five eras (Primal, Iron, Powder, Steel and Chrono) against an enemy commander on Recruit, Veteran or Paradox. Machines counter one another (ranged machines pierce armor, the front line runs down ranged machines, heavies splash crowds), and the commander reads your army and answers it. Operations is a real-time squad tactics campaign of eight operations. In both modes a fight that goes wrong can be rewound, and the future you abandoned keeps playing beside you as violet ghosts.
Before you try it
What to try
Start a Timeline War
Choose Timeline War on the title screen and start on Recruit. The first match is coached one step at a time: train machines, build a turret, evolve to the next era, call the era’s special attack and rewind. Hold a machine card on touch, or hover it, to see its role, what it beats and its stats. Chips under each base bar count the machines on the field by role, a Counter badge marks the machine that beats the enemy’s leading role, a card you cannot afford yet counts the seconds until you can, and the strip map draws every machine by its role. A Veteran match usually runs 12 to 19 minutes, with both sides reaching the Chrono Era.
Rewind a lost fight
Press R or the Rewind button, scrub back up to 30 seconds and confirm. Both armies, gold and the enemy commander return to that moment while the abandoned future plays on as ghosts. Marks in the rewind panel show every base assault, evolve and special attack in the window; press one to jump to two seconds before it. While you pick the moment, the health bars, gold and clock show that moment. Recruit gives three rewinds, Veteran two and Paradox one, and a lost match can be rewound from the defeat screen while charges remain.
Command the Operations campaign
Lead a lance of combat machines through eight operations, from First Light to Chronoforge. Pause at any time to give orders, rewind when a plan fails, and later use Fork to bring a unit’s abandoned self into the present as an Echo that repeats its old orders. Press ? or F1 for the controls; the rewind step buttons move one second per tap and five while held, and an idle squad gets a hint for its next move.
How it works
- Deterministic 30 Hz simulation
- Both modes run fixed-tick simulations at 30 Hz, built from plain arithmetic with no unseeded randomness, and keep a checkpoint every second. A battle is its settings plus the player’s inputs, so a rewind re-simulates from a checkpoint and a share link replays a finished battle exactly. Every build replays reference solutions and seeded bot matches and requires identical results.
- Everything built in code
- Machines, turrets, bases and battlefields are procedural low-poly Three.js models, and the sound effects and adaptive music are synthesized with Web Audio. In Timeline War the sky, light, fog and roadside props change with your era.
- Desktop and touch layouts
- The React interface gives every command a keyboard shortcut and a large touch target on phones, and moves keyboard focus to each new screen; Lighthouse scores its menus, briefing and HUD 100 for accessibility. The Timeline War camera follows the front until you pan it and frames the road in the space the HUD leaves free, on desktop and on phones in either orientation.
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