Achron



""Paradox resolution in my favor. All right. Take that causality!""

- Shadowfury333

The colonization of the Remnant system was a breakthrough in humanity's outward expansion. The colonists awoke to discover that the Remnant system was far more than they originally thought: Vast alien ruins tens of thousands of years old were discovered on the surfaces and in the orbits of the third, fourth and seventh planets. Evidence of inhabitation was even found on a few of the moons in the system.

Research on the found ruins began immediately, and led to the discovery of the principles of instantaneous teleportation. Very quickly, Remnant became a research and development focus for the best minds in the human empire. In just a few short decades, humanity's colonies were interconnected by a far-reaching network of bi-directional gates.

The humans' hopes for discovery of another intelligent race, however, were not fulfilled. Each new world was as barren of intelligent life as the next. Then communications from one of the border colonies winked out...

Mechanics:

Achron refers to itself as the first "Meta Time Strategy Game", i.e. it uses Time Travel as a functional game mechanic. It's possible to issue commands to units in the recent past or near future, and even send them to different times.


 * 1) In additional to the standard real-time strategy user interface, players have access to the Time Window, which lets them track, switch perspective to, and order units to time travel to various points in the game timeline.
 * 2) Only a small segment of the timeline is actually playable: a range that usually extends from around 6 minutes in the past up to approximately 1 minute in the future. Any events that pass beyond the past edge of the playable timeframe are finalized and cannot be changed.
 * 3) 'Timewaves' are regularly spawned at the event horizon between the mutable and immutable sections of the timeline. These progress up the timeline at high relative 'speed' (default settings have it at 3.1 seconds / second), carrying changes to the timeline with them. Players also act as ad-hoc timewaves; propagating any changes they observe.

A trailer can be seen here

Information on the game and ordering can be found at achrongame.com and also on Steam. There is also a helpful wiki. Additionally, there is a small demo version of the game.

Time Travel Tropes
Time Travel: Basically the entire point of the game.
 * Players can control the rate they move through time. This leads to:
 * Time Stands Still: Usually used to set up a complex queue of orders for some units while making sure they hold still.
 * Bullet Time: Used to better micromanage battles.
 * Adrenaline Time: Extension of bullet time: since players tend to slow down during pitch battles and then speed up after the battle to 'make up for lost time', a lot of Ramping occurs.
 * Delayed Ripple Effect: A gameplay necessity, since if changes to the timeline were instantaneous, games would basically boil down to who sent something to the past first. Timewaves typically travel at three time the speed of time.
 * Futureshadowing: Standard multiplayer game mechanic. There's also a commonly used tactic based on this called "echo scouting" where a player orders a scout to rush into the enemy's base, skips to the future to see what the scout will find, then skips back to the present and tells the scout to cancel its suicide order in the first place.
 * Grandfather Paradox: It's possible to build a mech, send it back in time, and have used it to have destroyed the factory that was going to have built it. The devs' explanation of how this works out.
 * Temporal Paradox: Why should the Grandfather Paradox get all the love? Ontological paradoxes occur pretty often too.
 * Just One Second Out of Sync: This trope occurs in a tactic called "Timewave Dodging". If a unit dies in the past, any passing timewaves will propagate its nonexistence into the present. By time traveling it right across the approaching timewave, you can prevent it from being erased from existence. Weirdly enough, you're not hiding from other time travelers; you're hiding from causality itself!
 * In a more straight play on the trope you can play one second in the past - you will be able to see your opponent's actions, but he won't see what you're doing until a timewave passes.
 * Meanwhile in the Future: You can watch and issue commands from any point within a short interval, so it's possible to, say, attack your opponent in the present in order to distract them from an attack that you're about to have begun a minute earlier.
 * Mental Time Travel: Your primary ability as an Achron. Explained in the campaign as a cross-temporal radio.
 * My Future Self and Me: Ever-present occupational hazard for any soldiers in this game. The duplicates are referred to as 'chronoclones'. Can often lead to...
 * My Own Grampa: The Grekim are able to pull this off in gameplay (see here for directions how). It has little practical use though, so it doesn't happen often.
 * Help Your Self in the Future: You can send units from the future to help their past selves defend the base.
 * Place Beyond Time: A really strange version of it, at least. There's a section of the timeline that's hard to reach if you don't already know of its existence: "The Beach". It's a completely empty version of the map you're playing; a region in the future where causality from the present never reached. This is probably the only mechanical version of the Place Beyond Time (other video games simply create an extra, perfectly normal level and give it some backstory).
 * It's also completely emergent from the timeline mechanics in such a way that the creators probably didn't foresee its existence. This feature was kept in, as it has a few strategic consequences (it's possible to smuggle units across hostile borders by shunting them through the Beach).
 * To elaborate on the mechanics, the Beach is the very front edge of the timeline: Stuff that has scrolled onto the timeline but has not been touched by a timewave. In the space between 2 timewaves (50 real-time seconds), that area is "beyond time." After 50 real-time seconds, Reality Ensues.
 * Real Time with Pause: In multiplayer, no less. Bonus points for it being an actual ability as opposed to a medium mechanic.
 * Reset Button: You can undo botched attacks.
 * Ret-Gone: Yet another occupational hazard for your forces.
 * Retroactive Preparation: A very basic tactic in game.
 * Ripple Effect Indicator: Various symbols on the timeline are used to indicate various events happening.
 * Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Achrons. The game makes a strong distinction between entities that exist inside and outside time (chronals and achronals respectively). You're a general precisely because of your ability to exist outside the time stream and effect changes to it without being personally affected by it.
 * San Dimas Time: The way time travel works actually does a pretty good job of justifying this.
 * Scry vs. Scry: Future-sighting, cancelling your orders in the past, creating red herrings to confuse your opponent's future-sighting and cancelling...
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong: An elementary tactic in the game. Which naturally leads to...
 * Make Wrong What Once Went Right: ... the dual of the above tactic.
 * Stable Time Loop: You can defend your factories with units that they are going to build.
 * Tele Frag: Averted with teleportation. Played straight with time travel.
 * Temporal Sickness: Units glow softly right after you chronoport them. They're perfectly functional, with the one exception being that if they chronoport again before the glow wears off... they'll be destroyed. The effect has thus earned the nickname "rechronoport delay".
 * Terminator Twosome: Your standard two-player game.
 * Time Is Dangerous: You need to be careful when sending units back in time that they don't end up occupying the same space as another unit. Especially their past selves.
 * Time Masters: The titular achrons.
 * Time Travel Tense Trouble: The fans refer to the two orthogonal timelines as "time" (in-game time) and "metatime" (real-life time). Once you hang around the community long enough, it becomes second nature.
 * Timey-Wimey Ball: Averted hard. The rules for time travel are completely consistent both within the story and the gameplay.

RTS Tropes
Real Time Strategy: The game is fundamentally an RTS.
 * Awesome Personnel Carrier: All CESO tanks can carry infantry with them, making CESO armies into battlegroups of these. Each race also has a dedicated carrier unit.
 * Command and Conquer Economy: Partly justified as the structures are all military installations. Which leads to...
 * Construct Additional Pylons: Primarily Vecgir Power and human Reserves.
 * Do Not Run with a Gun: No units can move and shoot simultaneously.
 * Dual Mode Unit: All base class and -pod class Grekim units can enter progeneration mode. They become immobile and unarmed, but can create new units, provided other units of the same class and different type/gender are nearby.
 * Easy Communication: Played straight in the present and future, averted in the past: giving units commands in the past costs chronoenergy. This leads to an interesting game mechanic of assigning units commanders to create chains of command: you can minimize chronoenergy expenditure by just giving orders to commanders and letting them communicate your orders to their underlings. Also averted with the Comm Jam ability that prevents affected units and buildings from being given orders.
 * Easy Logistics: Played fairly straight.
 * Enemy Exchange Program: The CESO Heavy Tank, Grekim Octoligo, and Vecgir Shin Halcyon have the ability to infect enemy units and structures with nanites. The subverted units still retain the colour and the ability to take orders from their original faction... but you can give them orders whenever you want to too. Instant spies and/or traitors!
 * The user interface itself helps you combat this. Whenever any of your units perform friendly fire, a message is sent to the player warning them about possible nanite infections (and letting them quickly zoom to the offending unit). This message is sent even when the player purposefully attacks his/her own units; it really doesn't know who sent those orders.
 * A good use of nanite infection is infecting units that can build. Just let them build turrets somewhere completely useless and watch your opponent's resources dwindle. If you do that far enough in the past, he will probably not have enough Chronoenergy to stop it.
 * Faction Calculus: If we equate time travel with sneakiness, then we get... Vecgir (Powerhouse) vs. CESO (Balanced) vs. Grekim (Subversive).
 * Fog of War: Arguably features a four dimensional variant; players need to reconnoiter the timeline for data as well as the physical map.
 * Instant Militia: Inverted. Resourcing is automated by "Resource Processors" and all the constructors from all the factions are military units that just happen to have the added bonus ability of being able to drop buildings (or morph into them, in the Grekim's case).
 * Non-Entity General: Played with. The game makes a strong distinction between chronal and achronal entities. You are the general precisely because of your achronal nature; which makes a lot of sense since battles in the game are won or lost on the basis of who can out-time-travel his/her opponents.
 * Averted in some campaign missions, the AI you play as downloads himself into a unit on the battlefield. If this unit is destroyed you are unable to command your forces for the period when it doesn't exist.
 * Refining Resources: All three factions can convert QP (Quark-gluon Plasma) into LC (Liquid Crystal), which is tantamount to converting the more "advanced" / rare resource into the more "basic" / common one... inefficiently to boot. This has less to do with game balance and more to do with realism, since it stands to reason that a player should be able to convert a more refined version of a resource into a less-refined variant in case of an emergency.
 * Ridiculously-Fast Construction: It is explained that the build speed is due to rapid teleportation of building materials to the site.Though, that doesn't explain it for the Grekim.
 * The game makes a distinction between the teleporters/chronoporters that you have access to and industrial ones which have much higher range and only exist in the backstory (for now). Carrying or building an industrial teleporter in the battlefield is risky, expensive and takes way too long. It's not excluded that Grekim have teleporters, just no field-ready ones. Since it's currently unknown where resources are kept, it might be either Fridge Brilliance or Fridge Logic.
 * They do exist in the campaign, but largely as plot points ("Get 10 units to the industrial teleporter to win") and only exists on the map as a model. Occasionally a cutscene will long-range teleport units out (or the game will spawn units on one, simulating a long-range teleport in), but they don't exist as a usable building of any kind.
 * Shoot the Medic First: The CESO Blackbird can repair units at speeds so fast it can greatly affect the outcome of a battle. This leads to it attracting a lot of focused fire.
 * The auto-attack algorithms have now been tweaked so that units prioritize targeting medics like the Blackbird or MFB first! Heck, the trope is even referenced by link within the manual on the Achron Wiki.
 * Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors: It is unclear, but this seems mostly averted. Units have at most 2 weapons, generally one for ground targets and one for air targets. Apart from this, the damage is the same against all targets. For Air and Ground units, though, the trope is in full force (some units are significantly stronger against one or another)
 * Tech Tree: Each faction has a very small, very flat tech tree (usually amounting to around six upgrades or so) and they are explained away as "improving infrastructure" (as opposed to "research"). The interesting bit is the way this interacts with the time travel mechanics: It's possible to arm your units with weaponry from the future, or reinforce your army with units you can't technically build yet.
 * Teleporters and Transporters: It is fantastically easy to teleport in this game. The demo tutorials teach you cross-map teleportation before they tell you about control groups. One race can even upgrade units to teleport without a gate, but it isn't as long range. The same race even has a superweapon, a missile, that can teleport into the enemy's base.
 * Teleport Spam: Vecgir units tend to do this once they've been upgraded, which occurs automatically once you get Gate Tech.
 * You Require More Vespene Gas: All of the races require 'L-Crystal' and 'Q-Plasma', which are found in supply crates left scattered across the maps. Word of God is that L-Crystals are basically raw materials for the Nanomachines to build useful things out of, whereas Q-Plasma is used to create the more exotic types of Phlebotinum. CESO (the humans) also has a resource called 'Reserves' which ostensibly looks like Population (its icon is a small stick-figure person, and all units have a small integer cost), but it doesn't act as a unit cap; Importers continuously generate more and more Reserves over time... its closer to a cap on the number of units you can generate per unit time. The Vecgir also have a resource called 'Power' which is provided by most buildings, used by vehicles, and must be above 0 for unit energy pools to recharge.
 * Weather of War: Not implemented yet, but its on the todo list. Which is hilarious when you think about it, because it will let you exploit your ability to observe the future for weather forecasting.
 * Worker Unit: Averted. Each race has units that can build structures, but they are all combatant units who happen to build structures, not workers that happen to have a gun. The Vecgir don't even use mobile units for most of their structures, building them instead from existing structures.
 * Zerg Rush: the Grekim can do this the most easily, thanks to progeneration. May occur with all species in certain situations.

Story

 * A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Largely Averted. A sentient, economy-controlling AI did participate in a massive colonial revolt, but the reason was actually programmed in: The AI was designed to do whatever it took to avoid long-term macroeconomic collapse. After this event no further AI of the same type were legally allowed to be created.
 * Aliens Are Bastards: The only explanation humanity can find for the destruction of a number of their colonies... for now.
 * Arc Number: The AI Echo is fond of the number '76,013',.
 * Civil Warcraft: In part 1, two of the human factions fight each other at some points.
 * Cool Gate: Teleporters, Chronoporters (that facilitate mass teleportation and mass time travel respectively) and Slipgates (that facilitate both) look like cool spinning stargates. Which is a bit unnecessary since no unit actually walks through them.
 * Crate Expectations: The resources are kept in highly advanced containment devices that can safely store materials which should by rights destroy the continent by a teleporter mechanism that continuously teleports its contents back into the center of the container faster than they can leak out. They still look like crates though.
 * The Dragon: Guardian, a Grekim Keeper (essentially senior officer, but not leader) is trying to rebuild the Coremind to re-unify the Grekim.
 * Enemy Civil War: The Vecgir suddenly break ties with the Grekim near the beginning of the story, for no clear reason.
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation: The intention is to avert this. Speaking to the devs reveals that the story is being carefully edited to avoid plot holes or softness with respect to the in-game mechanics of time-travel, among other things. However, It is possible something might slip through.
 * Hive Mind: The Grekim  are controlled by the Coremind, essentially a giant distributed AI that uses the Grekim Arcticuses as nodes, and which connects to all Grekim   via neural radio transceivers.
 * Portal Network: Occurs in the backstory as the human transport backbone. Also occurs in-game to a fashion if you're a fan of the 'slingshot' structure, which can shunt any units that approach it automatically to a point in space anywhere in a wide radius around it. If you build enough slingshots, you can chain them into teleport-bridges that can shunt your forces between all your bases.
 * Portal Slam: The focus of the story will be on a group of survivors of the invasion left behind after the aliens destroy the Cool Gate which connects them to the humans' Portal Network.
 * Starfish Aliens: In addition to being essentially sentient, technological, time-traveling space squid, the Grekim have 3 genders, Octo, Sepi, and Pharo, which double as unit types. Any 2 genders can reproduce, or progenerate, together to produce a member of the 3rd gender, either of the same unit class or of the next class better.
 * Nanomachines One of the main resources in Achron is called Liquid Crystals (LC for short) and is made of a mix of common atoms and nanobots in a liquid-crystal framework. When you order a unit to construct a building the unit drops a tiny transponder seed which signals local teleportation infrastructure to teleport the right quantity of LC to that location. The nanobots in the LC then assemble the building using the atoms contained within it. When you build a unit the LC is teleported into the factory where it assembles into the units gear in a similar way (and the pilot is supplied separately).
 * Portal Slam: The focus of the story will be on a group of survivors of the invasion left behind after the aliens destroy the Cool Gate which connects them to the humans' Portal Network.
 * Starfish Aliens: In addition to being essentially sentient, technological, time-traveling space squid, the Grekim have 3 genders, Octo, Sepi, and Pharo, which double as unit types. Any 2 genders can reproduce, or progenerate, together to produce a member of the 3rd gender, either of the same unit class or of the next class better.
 * Nanomachines One of the main resources in Achron is called Liquid Crystals (LC for short) and is made of a mix of common atoms and nanobots in a liquid-crystal framework. When you order a unit to construct a building the unit drops a tiny transponder seed which signals local teleportation infrastructure to teleport the right quantity of LC to that location. The nanobots in the LC then assemble the building using the atoms contained within it. When you build a unit the LC is teleported into the factory where it assembles into the units gear in a similar way (and the pilot is supplied separately).
 * Starfish Aliens: In addition to being essentially sentient, technological, time-traveling space squid, the Grekim have 3 genders, Octo, Sepi, and Pharo, which double as unit types. Any 2 genders can reproduce, or progenerate, together to produce a member of the 3rd gender, either of the same unit class or of the next class better.
 * Nanomachines One of the main resources in Achron is called Liquid Crystals (LC for short) and is made of a mix of common atoms and nanobots in a liquid-crystal framework. When you order a unit to construct a building the unit drops a tiny transponder seed which signals local teleportation infrastructure to teleport the right quantity of LC to that location. The nanobots in the LC then assemble the building using the atoms contained within it. When you build a unit the LC is teleported into the factory where it assembles into the units gear in a similar way (and the pilot is supplied separately).
 * Starfish Aliens: In addition to being essentially sentient, technological, time-traveling space squid, the Grekim have 3 genders, Octo, Sepi, and Pharo, which double as unit types. Any 2 genders can reproduce, or progenerate, together to produce a member of the 3rd gender, either of the same unit class or of the next class better.
 * Nanomachines One of the main resources in Achron is called Liquid Crystals (LC for short) and is made of a mix of common atoms and nanobots in a liquid-crystal framework. When you order a unit to construct a building the unit drops a tiny transponder seed which signals local teleportation infrastructure to teleport the right quantity of LC to that location. The nanobots in the LC then assemble the building using the atoms contained within it. When you build a unit the LC is teleported into the factory where it assembles into the units gear in a similar way (and the pilot is supplied separately).

Miscellaneous

 * Awesome but Impractical: It would be possible to create a carefully executed Batman Gambit using the Grandfather Paradox to confuse your enemies to no end - except for the sheer accuracy you would need in timing your actions.
 * Also, it would be incredible to somehow make your enemies chrono-frag themselves to death. The question is really, "How?"
 * The fandom compiled a Long List of strategies making use of time-travel (apparently lost when the fanbase migrated to the official forums). Almost all of them fit this trope.
 * The list has been reconstructed within the Achron Wiki. It's a lot more scattered though, and could use consolidation.
 * A version of the list also exists on the forums here
 * Awesome but Practical: Time travel. Play the demo. It's very, very easy. In fact, most of the time you'll be playing a minute or so in the past, and won't even notice because you're using so little chronoenergy.
 * Names to Run Away From Really Fast: The game is developed by indie studio Hazardous Software, which was founded by Dr. Chris Hazard. Which doubles as...
 * Awesome McCoolname
 * Big Name Fan: Shadowfury333, whose Youtube channel has become (starting from late 2010), the main channel for casts of games. Also a source of many maps.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: So far, every even half-skeptical comment has been met with a promising rebuttal (often backed up by math and/or science). This includes concerns about the story, questions about balancing, and even the scientific hardness of the game mechanics.
 * While the current game generally involves around four players fighting across seven minutes of time, this is simply a computational constraint of modern hardware. The devs have future-proofed the Resequence Engine by making it scalable: it can theoretically support up to fifteen players fighting across a two-week long active timeline populated with thousands of timewaves.
 * Gambit Pileup: The obvious result of two enemies with time travel technology trying to turn the tide of the same battle.
 * Meaningful Name: Achron is derived from Greek -- the "a-" prefix means "not" or "without", and "chron" is from "chronos", meaning time. In-story, an Achron is free from causality, and therefore outside of time.
 * No Body Left Behind: Destroyed units immediately disintegrate in a pretty storm of polygons. This is mostly to make the game kid-friendly.
 * Tron Lines: Units are depicted as mostly-translucent silhouettes with edges that glow with the unit's team colour. This is an interface concession to make your troops easier to spot: according to the setting, all three of the species use advanced camouflage on their military units, making them near invisible.
 * This doubles as an explanation for why your units have extremely short sight (insofar as they have RTS-standard near-blind line of sight radii). You can actually hear battles occurring outside your vision radius.
 * Your Head Asplode: Referenced on the official site several times, as what happens whenever anyone realizes the exact implications of this kind of game engine.
 * Xtreme Kool Letterz: Averted. "Achron" looks like a corruption of "Acheron", but its actually the in-game moniker for an entity free from causality... like the player.
 * Loads of people initially assume the name is a misspelling of "Archon" and are subsequently saddened when they realize that they aren't seeing a remake of that old strategy game.