Is this a clone of Stellaris?

No. It is a much smaller real-time 4X with no diplomacy, no espionage, no ship designer and no story events. It shares the empire-building shape and the space setting, and finishes in about twenty minutes instead of forty hours.

What is the closest free alternative to a paid 4X?

It depends what you want from it. For a long turn-based campaign, FreeOrion is free and open source. For the fleet-and-conquest part in one sitting with nothing to install, Nexas Code 2D is built for exactly that.

If you came from another game

Came here from another space strategy game?

Nexas Code 2D is smaller than most of the games people arrive here looking for, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Each page below says what genuinely carries over and what does not, so you can decide in a minute instead of a download.

Play free in your browser No download, no installer, no account needed to start a match.

How to read these pages

Every comparison carries a section called "what it does not have", and it is not decoration. This game has no campaign, no diplomacy, no espionage, no trade, no ship designer and no modding. If one of those is the reason you love the game you came from, the honest answer is that you will miss it.

What it does have is the fleet arriving, the guns breaking, the troops landing — on a twenty-minute clock, for free, in a tab.

Pick the one you came from

The full list is in the footer of every page. These are the comparisons most people land on.

Galaxy to ground, one continuous zoom

Scroll out and you are reading a galaxy map. Scroll in and it unfolds into a single star system. Keep going and you are standing on the planet, watching a real-time ground battle for the bunker. No loading screens between the three.

A 4X match that fits in a coffee break

You take your first world in under a minute. The research ladder, doctrine drafting and planet specialisation are all there — they just resolve in the time a grand-strategy game spends on its tutorial.

Up to 30 commanders on one map

Solo matches run at 4, 8, 16 or 30 commanders against bots. Multiplayer is a live 30-player free-for-all with private lobbies if you would rather bring your own.

Runs in the tab you already have open

No installer, no launcher, no account required to play. It is a WebGL build that starts on a laptop, a Chromebook or a phone held sideways.

Questions people actually ask

Is this a clone of Stellaris?: No. It is a much smaller real-time 4X with no diplomacy, no espionage, no ship designer and no story events. It shares the empire-building shape and the space setting, and finishes in about twenty minutes instead of forty hours.
What is the closest free alternative to a paid 4X?: It depends what you want from it. For a long turn-based campaign, FreeOrion is free and open source. For the fleet-and-conquest part in one sitting with nothing to install, Nexas Code 2D is built for exactly that.