Features & Game Systems

Flotillas Adrift is a free, persistent browser ocean strategy game — a real-time nation simulation about building and running a floating salvage-city. No download, no install, runs in any modern browser (and installs as a PWA if you want it on your home screen).

City-building

Your flotilla is a real place, not an abstract stat sheet — you buy platform (raw deck space) and infrastructure (housing, capped relative to your platform) and place improvements across an isometric lattice of docked modules, rendered from the buildings you've actually built and arranged with a drag-to-place layout editor. Ordinary economy, housing, and production buildings complete instantly; dedicated defensive improvements queue on a real-time build timer so hardening your flotilla is a genuine decision, not a last-second panic-buy. Six production buildings can be leveled up (1–10) for more output per copy. Wonders are the one-of-a-kind megastructures — buying one lays the keel, several real tides pass before it graduates and its effects switch on, and completing one starts a long real-world cooldown before your next.

Economy & the 26-resource trade web

Every tide you collect a levy and pay bills — civic upkeep, military upkeep, and welfare — with a Laffer-curve tax slider (push too hard and revenue actually falls), treasury interest via Banks, and honest, itemized breakdowns of exactly where every dollar comes from and goes. Layered on top is a CyberNations-style resource system: 26 base resources plus 5 bonus combination resources, each pulling a real economic lever (income, happiness, build cost, military strength, and more). You own 3 resources at founding and can connect up to 4 trade partners for 3 more each — pool enough unique resources across your network and the bonus combos unlock automatically. Two-party exchange deals let you trade resources and goods directly with AI rivals or real players; offers are sent, answered, and settled — nothing gets stuck in limbo.

Population & health

Citizens, assimilating workers, slaves, disabled veterans, and prisoners of war are all tracked as distinct groups with their own rations and fates. Food and water production has to keep pace with population or people starve; a shared infirmary bed pool triages the wounded first, sick civilians overflow into real mortality when beds run out, and disease outbreaks are a genuine crisis to manage — not a background number. Government and religion doctrines, family policy, immigration stance, labor policy, and conscription all shape birth rate, morale, and manpower in real, opposing ways — there's no single dominant strategy.

Military & war

Combat is fought by the forces you actually commit, not your whole standing army at once. Ground assaults run raid / siege / overrun postures against a defender's fortifications and militia; standoff strikes cover helicopters, drone swarms, naval battles, and nuclear torpedoes, each with their own defenses, interception odds, and cooldowns (nuclear torpedoes carry a long real-world production timer before they're usable at all). Wars are opt-in, bounded to a strength-ratio "war band" so you can't be blindsided by a wildly mismatched opponent, and run a short, fixed real-time campaign length rather than dragging on forever. Ground battles take prisoners, and what you do with them — ransom, prisoner swap, execution, enslavement, or parole — feeds a lifetime infamy reputation score that other commanders can see, and that makes defenders fight harder against a known butcher. Floating mines (a real consumable minefield, not an invincible wall) and defensive improvements round out your options before a fight ever starts. And rival captains remember: every AI commander has a distinct voice and a persistent grudge ledger, so a declared war, a hard-won battle, a nuke, or how you treat their prisoners all shape whether they answer you as a wary rival or a sworn vendetta.

The living ocean

The ocean itself has moods, and every flotilla shares them. A global, deterministic weather cycle (calm / chop / squall / fog) affects helicopters, drone swarms, naval defense, and even how fresh your intel on a rival reads. A slower current-waters cycle drifts every flotilla through eight named waters over time — each with its own trade, technology, birth-rate, and happiness effects, steerable for a limited window if you want to chase a particular water. Daily flotsam guarantees something washes up on your deck every day. Weekly Shoal Season lets you send part of your population out to trawl a shared fishing ground. Monthly, the Leviathan surfaces near you — tribute it, harass it, or hunt it. And scattered wrecks of the old world are salvageable via real-time expeditions. None of it is required to play well, but all of it makes the ocean feel alive instead of static.

Alliances, diplomacy & the live world

Flotillas Adrift is built single-player first, with a genuine live social layer on top — not forced multiplayer combat. Real players show up on the World Map and Rankings with a LIVE badge and a scoutable country page, but they are never war targets; the social layer is trade, messaging, and alliances, never mandatory PvP. Real, persistent alliances carry a shared fund, mutual aid grants, temporary shared improvements, and leadership-posted charters and documents (public or members-only). Player-to-player direct messaging, a shared global news wall with community voting, and full diplomacy round out the social game. If you'd rather not keep checking in, opt into Signal Flags — a strictly opt-in, at-most-one-per-day push notification when the tide turns or something you set in motion completes.

Identity — flags, about pages, and charters

Every flotilla — and every alliance — can carry a real identity: a parametric flag builder (colors, patterns, and crests), an "about" blurb shown on your public country page, and (for alliances) posted charter documents. Custom uploaded flag images are supported too, human-reviewed before they go live. It's a small thing, but on a real social/ranking layer, a flotilla with a real flag and a real name reads as a real place.

In active development