Battle Drones

Battle Drones is a real-time strategy game inspired by Command & Conquer, built to run in a browser and on a phone. Two armies of flying and ground drones fight over territory and resources across six maps in five biomes. You harvest scrap, build a base, pick an opener and push for the uplink relays in the middle of the map, while an AI commander with six personalities and three difficulty levels does the same thing back to you.

The unit roster is deeper than the pick-up-and-play framing suggests. There are 16 units, including Stinger light tanks, Flak Crawlers, long-range Mortars, super-heavy Mastodons, water-crossing Lancer hover tanks, Wasp strike drones, Raptor interceptors, Hornet bombers, Mender repair drones and the Condor dropship. Robot infantry squads — Troopers, Rocket Squads and Sniper Teams — lose robots one by one as they take damage and shoot weaker with each loss, which makes them feel like squads rather than single health bars. Ten buildings and a tech tree lead to the Goliath, a walking mech that anchors as a base on legs and trains infantry wherever it stands. Counter-play matters: armour classes, damage types, dodgeable artillery, splash damage, veterancy and cover all feed into fights.

Matches are tuned for comebacks rather than snowballs. Capturable uplink relays pay scrap, light up the fog and charge commander calldowns; supply drops arrive every 75 seconds, announced ten seconds ahead, and the first unit there takes them. At six minutes both sides get the Sky Hammer orbital strike, with a public warning circle so it can be dodged. Every end screen can export a replay as JSON, which feeds a battle record viewer. You can duel a friend online through an invite link: both browsers run the simulation in lockstep and only orders cross the network, about one small message every 100–200 ms.

The strangest and most impressive feature is the sound duel. Two phones on a table can play a full match with no network at all, trading orders through their speakers and microphones using an audio modem — a constant high-pitched link the developer openly warns is unpleasant to listen to. Battle Drones was made by Simon Willison and published on 20 October 2026, after twelve major iterations and 321 commits, mostly from agents working in Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5. The README itself notes that the rest of the document was written by Claude. It is Apache-2.0, free, and one of the strongest examples this month of what “vibe coded” can actually mean when the design is taken seriously.