DRONECOM

EMCON is everything

DRONECOM is a real-time sensor-warfare game played from the seat of a combat information centre. If you can't detect something, it isn't there, and every emission you make to find the enemy is an emission the enemy can use to find you. Radiate and you see further, but you light yourself up. Run silent and you survive, but you fight half-blind. Managing that trade-off: emissions control, EMCON, is the whole game.

A sensor model that actually models sensors

Detection isn't a stat check. Whether you get a contact depends on the emitter's power, the target's signature, the range, the terrain, and the curvature of the Earth.

• Four sensor domains: radar, sonar, IR and optical, active and passive.

• Run passive, track on bearings: RWR/ESM and passive sonar give you a bearing, not a range. Turn bearings into a firing solution: target-motion analysis over time, cross-fixes from two or more receivers, or frequency-difference (FDOA) geolocation between paired ESM sensors.

• Real propagation: earth-curvature radar horizons (fly low to stay under them), terrain line-of-sight masking, and look-down ground clutter with a Doppler notch.

• Deep acoustics: thermocline layers, convergence zones, shallow-water loss, and speed-dependent cavitation that gives you away when you push your boat too hard.

• Authentic CIC displays: read the plot in NTDS symbology, and watch contacts develop on a B-scope and a bearing-time recorder (BTR) waterfall.

• Battle damage assessment: a contact you've struck stays uncertain until your other sensors confirm the kill. No automatic confirmation.

Design your own everything

No fixed rosters. A built-in blueprint designer lets you build drones of every kind: submarines, surface ships, aircraft, helicopters, missiles and torpedoes, from chassis, sensors, warheads, engines and flight models. Trade payload against speed, signature against sensor power, range against stealth. The submarine you design plays by exactly the same rules as the torpedo hunting it.

Carrier warfare

Launch, recover, refuel and rearm your drones from one or more drone carrier flight decks, well decks, VLS cells and torpedo tubes. Manage your inventory, your fuel and your economy, find the enemy carriers before they find you, and destroy them.

Friend or foe

Identification is a problem, not a given. IFF works on detection confidence, allied teams share a datalink picture, and misreading a contact means friendly fire is on the table.

Command solo against the AI

Take the CIC seat against AI opponents across procedurally generated archipelagos. The whole loop: design, deploy, detect, attack plays single-player, against an enemy that has to find you the same way you have to find it.

Or take it online

Play over Steam: host or join through the Steam overlay and invite links. Fight head-to-head, or put two commanders on allied teams and take on the AI together. Spectators can watch the whole tactical picture unfold from the CIC.

A moddable sandbox

Every unit is data, so everything is moddable with a text editor: chassis, sensors, warheads, flight models, AI tuning. Map seeds are shareable procedural archipelagos. DRONECOM isn't a historical sim of real hardware and it isn't sci-fi: it sits in the gap between — a grounded, near-future sandbox.

Sound and style

DRONECOM leans all the way into the combat-information-centre aesthetic:a dark, dense, mil-standard tactical console rather than a 3D spectacle over an original, adaptive synthwave soundtrack that scores the battle in real time. The information is the game.

For players who like

The sensor depth of Cold Waters and Sea Power, the tactical picture of Command: Modern Operations, and the design-your-own-fleet freedom of Nebulous: Fleet Command, without committing to pure historical simulation or full sci-fi.

A note from the developer

DRONECOM is built by one developer, in the open, alongside a community that's shaped it since the first prototype. The full core loop already works, solo and online, and I'm building outward from there. If sensor warfare, EMCON doctrine and moddable sandboxes are your thing, wishlist the game and come help decide what it becomes.

On the roadmap:

• Deeper sensor & electronic-warfare modelling: decoys, countermeasures, and a fuller fire-control kill chain

• More capable and varied AI opponents: distinct personalities, deception, AI-designed fleets

• Expanded combat, tactics and scenario options

• Richer terrain and environment

• Ongoing online-play polish

DRONECOM is in active development: wishlist to follow along, and join the Discord is where the day-to-day decisions get made.