A real-time strategy game about a metal-and-power economy. Build a base with engineers, mine metal, keep the power on, and command tanks, warships, submarines, helicopters, bombers and nuclear or EMP warheads across land, sea and air. Play a nine-mission fictional Gulf-war campaign, Conquest against AI on 22 named maps or a random one, Breakthrough (attackers against defenders), paint your own maps in the editor, or join a player-run multiplayer server. English, Chinese and Korean. The title screen calls this v0.8.5 Public Beta and the site calls it Early Access.
Steel Tide (钢铁浪潮) is a real-time strategy game in pixel art, seen from above, about a war economy. You start with a headquarters and two engineers, and engineers are the only units that can build. Metal is your money and it only comes from extractors placed on metal deposits; power keeps everything else running. From there you raise factories, airbases and naval yards and send out tanks, artillery, warships, submarines, helicopters, bombers and, late on, nuclear or EMP warheads. The game is in English, Chinese and Korean, and the title screen calls this build v0.8.5 Public Beta.
There is a lot in it. Single Player offers a nine-mission Campaign, Conquest (a skirmish against computer opponents on 22 named maps or a random one, with weather, day and night, fog of war and three AI difficulties called Relaxed, Standard and Veteran) and Breakthrough, where one side attacks a chain of checkpoints and the other defends them. There are also a map editor, a mod browser, a community map list, replays with video export, achievements and a Multiplayer screen. The game's own code defines about 38 units and 29 buildings.
It is made by Rene Wang, whose name is on the game's About screen (linked to rene.wang) and in its terms and privacy policy, and it is free. The game is billed as Early Access on its website and is changing quickly: the game's GitHub organisation was created on 19 September 2026, and its changelog lists recent additions such as EMP warheads, sandbag walls, an amphibious vehicle and community maps. Our copy is the build that play.steelti.de served on 24 September 2026, and it will fall behind; the original stays linked from this page. The game's site links iPhone, iPad and Android apps, and a Steam version is marked "coming soon" on the game's site.
Its licence matters for this page, so here it is plainly. The game's terms say it is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0: you may share and change it for non-commercial purposes as long as whoever you give a copy to also gets the licence and the copyright notice, and anything commercial needs the author's written permission. They also say the name, artwork, music and narration are the author's and protected by copyright. This site is a non-commercial collection with no adverts, sales or accounts. Our copy carries a notice file and the licence text next to the game, and it is not tagged open source, because that licence does not meet that definition.
How to play Steel Tide (钢铁浪潮)
- Open the game and wait for the loading screen (it says "Loading unit sprites" and takes about ten seconds), then press any key or tap. The menu offers Single Player, Multiplayer and Map Editor, with an achievements button and a settings button in the corner. Single Player has Campaign, Conquest, Breakthrough and Load Game. After you quit a match a Continue button on the menu takes you back to it.
- For a first game, choose Conquest, pick a map, look at the list of factions (you and one AI by default, and you can add more) and press Start. A "Getting started" panel opens over the paused game and gives five steps: claim metal with an engineer on the nearest deposit, add a power plant, build a factory facing the enemy, put an MG turret or two by the extractors, then gather a group before attacking. It is worth reading, because the game does not lay out a build order for you after that.
- Select an engineer and a build grid appears with the buildings and their prices in metal. In our game an extractor cost 120, a power plant 140, a war factory 320, an airbase 350, a naval yard 380, an MG turret 130, a cannon turret 320, a radar 400, a nuclear reactor 1,400 and a nuclear silo 1,800. An extractor and a power plant each took about ten to twelve seconds of an engineer's time at normal speed; we did not time the others. A green ghost shows where it can go and a red one where it cannot; an extractor only goes on a deposit. A war factory made engineers (200), recon buggies (60), Wolf light tanks (120) and Flak Tracks (170) in our game; heavier units come from upgraded factories. Right-click a factory to set its rally point.
- Left-click selects and dragging draws a box. Right-click moves or attacks, F then a click is attack-move, R stops, X holds, H jumps the camera to your headquarters. Space pauses, and the speed button steps through one, two and four times. F5 saves and F9 loads, and the game also autosaves about every three minutes of game time. Power is shown as supply over demand; when demand is higher, production and mining slow down.
- The Campaign screen lists nine missions and locks all but the first. Mission one is "Desert Shield", set on 8 August 1990 in a made-up Kingdom of Sarab, and it opens with a briefing and four objectives: build two metal extractors, build a war factory, build six combat units, destroy the border post. The other eight are called Instant Thunder, Sarsar Hunt, Rasfa, Bayan Channel, The Breach, 73 Easting, Hadid Ridge and The Hundred Hours, and include a naval mission and a defence of a town. We only played the first mission's opening.
Controls: By default the right mouse button gives orders and the left button selects (drag for a box); the setting can be swapped. WASD or the arrow keys pan, and the mouse wheel zooms. F then a click is attack-move, R stops, X holds position, H jumps to your headquarters, C follows the selected units, Space pauses, F5 and F9 quick-save and quick-load, and the = and - keys change speed (1x, 2x, 4x). Select an engineer and the build grid appears; placing a building shows a green or red ghost, and a right click on a factory sets where new units gather. Shift queues orders. A Classic key layout (A for attack-move, S for stop) and a full rebind list are in Settings. On a phone: tap to select or move, drag to pan, and use the on-screen order buttons. The code also reads a gamepad; we did not try one.
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
Why our copy is complete, and how we checked. The game loads its screens as separate script files on demand: the first version of this copy only had the Conquest screens, and Campaign, Multiplayer, Load Game and the map editor failed with "Failed to fetch dynamically imported module". We found that by playing it, and rebuilt the copy with every screen, the 32 achievement badges, the nine campaign pictures, the map thumbnails, 59 narrator lines and 13 music files (from the game's own list of tracks, each checked against the original). We then opened Campaign, Multiplayer and the Map Editor from our copy with every outside address blocked: all three opened, and the only failed requests were files that the original also answers "not found" for (its menu and setup music, which the game treats as optional) and the analytics script we do not host.
One repair to the copy, listed in the notice file. The game builds its sprite and sound addresses in code with a version tag on the end, and our mirroring tool stores such files under a hashed name that the web host never asks for, so 209 sprites and sounds would have been "not found" on the live site. A small script (tools/patch-mirror-steel-tide.py) puts those files back under their original names. The contents are unchanged, and nothing in the game's code, art, music or voice files was edited beyond the collection's standard address shim at the top of index.html.
What we played, on 24 September 2026, in Chromium with a real graphics chip. We played a Conquest match on Greenfield against one Standard AI, with 1,200 starting metal and fog on, for about 17 minutes of game time, by scripted keyboard and mouse. Engineers built extractors (+1.4 metal a second each) and power plants (supply went from 10 to 30), a war factory turned out tanks, box-select and right-click orders worked, attack-move worked from the keyboard, and quick-save and quick-load worked. We lost. The AI's first attack came at about 14 minutes and wiped out our units and headquarters, at 17:01 by the clock, with two extractors, no turrets and an army parked at its rally point. That says a lot about how we played and almost nothing about how strong the AI is. An earlier five-tank raid on the enemy base was destroyed and we did not see what killed it. We did not try Breakthrough, the replays, video export or a full campaign mission.
Rough edges we hit, in this build. Queueing a second extractor with Shift while over open ground gave "Must be built on a metal deposit" and left the first extractor half built. F followed by a click on the minimap only moved the camera. Campaign mission one starts with the camera at the top-left corner of a black map in our test, and clicking the minimap fixed it; we did not check whether the original does the same. A plain reload during a match dropped us straight back into it from the autosave, not from the quick save, which surprised us. The settings dialog keeps its old language for its title until you reopen it after a language change.
Multiplayer, and what our copy can and cannot do. The game has no matchmaking of its own. The Multiplayer screen has Browse, Join and Host tabs. Browse lists public servers (in our test with outside requests blocked, six of them: three marked Official, two in Chengdu and one in Singapore, and three named Shumengya, each marked Unreachable), Join takes a server address and a join code, and Host explains how to run a dedicated server on a Linux machine with a one-line installer; browsers can only reach servers that have a domain name and a certificate. LAN games are only found from the store apps. We typed no address and connected to nothing, so we have not tried a multiplayer game, and we do not know whether the servers accept connections from a page served from this site. Treat multiplayer as something to do at the original address.
What the page contacts, from its code and our checks. The mod list and the community-map list fetch from raw.githubusercontent.com (repositories steel-tide/mods and steel-tide/maps); with the network blocked they say "The registry could not be reached", and the game works without them. The Browse tab fetches a server list from steelti.de and probes the listed servers. The original page also loads Vercel Web Analytics once the game has started, which its privacy policy says counts page views and a few in-game events (a match started, a mod installed) without cookies or names; we do not host that script. In your browser the game keeps settings, saves, your last Conquest setup and your commander name in local storage (keys begin steeltide.) and holds an empty database called steeltide for mods and recordings. It sends none of that to the author.
It can be played by a language model. The game's website has an Agent page for a command-line tool, steel, and a skill so that a coding agent (it names Claude Code, Codex and Cursor) can take a seat on a server and command a faction while a built-in autopilot fights. That is about who can play it; it says nothing about how the game was made, and we found no statement of that anywhere, so this page makes no claim either way.
Sound. There is a soundtrack (13 music files in our copy), narration for alerts such as base under attack and unit ready, and sound effects. Every sound effect also has a synthesised twin built into the game, which it uses when a recording is missing. We saw the files being requested and did not listen, so we cannot say how it sounds or how loud it is.
How it was made and where it lives
Hosted on Vercel. The author publishes as Rene Wang. Original: https://play.steelti.de/. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
If you like Steel Tide (钢铁浪潮), try these
For other strategy games here, DUST FRONT is a single-player real-time strategy game with a base, an economy and one AI opponent, and Three Kingdoms Chronicles is a turn-based one. Last Beacon takes the power-grid idea into tower defense.
Frequently asked questions
- Is it free?
- Yes. The game's terms say it is free to play. Its licence, PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0, allows non-commercial sharing with the licence and notice attached; commercial use needs the author's permission.
- Can I play it offline?
- Once the page has loaded from our copy, the campaign, Conquest and the map editor work with the network off. Multiplayer, the mod list and the community maps need the internet. The original can also be installed as an app that works offline; our copy cannot.
- Is there multiplayer?
- Yes, on player-run servers that you find in the Browse tab or join by address and code. There is no matchmaking. We did not play a multiplayer match, and we do not know whether servers accept players coming from our copy, so use the original address for that.
- Does it work on a phone?
- Held sideways, yes: we started a match in an emulated iPhone, tapped to select and move a unit, and dragged to pan. Held upright it asks you to rotate, with a Keep portrait button and a portrait-play setting. There are also iPhone, iPad and Android apps. We did not try a real handset.
- Who made it?
- Rene Wang, according to the game's About screen and its website. The game is in Early Access and changing often.
- Was it made with AI?
- We do not know. Nothing on the game or its site says how it was made. The site does describe a way for AI agents to play it.
- How different is this copy from the current game?
- It is the build served on 24 September 2026 (v0.8.5 Public Beta). The original is updated often, so it may have newer units, maps and fixes.
- Is Steel Tide (钢铁浪潮) free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed Steel Tide (钢铁浪潮) on your site
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