Stellar Bastion

Stellar Bastion is a space defense game. Your station sits at the center. Enemies come from all directions. You aim the main gun yourself while an auto-turret handles the nearest threat on its own. Early waves bring small and large meteors. By Wave 6, Unstable fragments split on impact. Wave 7 adds Cloaked Mines drifting invisibly toward your hull. Wave 12 sends Frigates that park just inside your firing range and shoot back.

The upgrade system has four tabs. Weapons covers main gun damage, fire rate, range, multi-shot (up to 5 projectiles), and extra auto-turrets (up to 5). Defense handles hull HP (base 200), shields, regen rate, and armor that cuts damage by up to 50%. Systems adds Salvage Drones that mine nearby asteroids for ore and a Scanner to identify ore tiers from Iron up to Plasma. Research turns ore into Explosive Rounds, Frag Shots, homing Missile Batteries, Point Defense, and EMP Burst. Press E to stun everything in range for up to 3.5 seconds at max level.

Boss waves hit every 10 rounds. The Battleship fires spread volleys. The Colossus is a massive armored asteroid that soaks damage. The Hive Queen spawns fighter drones constantly. The Phasing Phantom cloaks and teleports between shots. Bounty ships marked with a gold ring appear from Wave 3. They have 3 times the HP but drop 5 times the credits. Go for them when your damage can handle it.

Fixed-shooter defense has two main ancestors. The first is Atari's 1978 arcade game Space Invaders. A static cannon fought descending waves from one horizontal axis. The second is the tower-defense genre that grew from Warcraft III custom maps in the early 2000s. Those maps led to games like Desktop Tower Defense (2007) and Kingdom Rush (2011).

Stellar Bastion mixes both lines. You manually aim like in classic fixed-shooters. But you also manage an upgrade economy and face waves with many enemy types, like in tower defense. The secondary auto-turret, upgradeable to five, lets the game get more complex without forcing you to watch every corner of the screen. You handle what you see. The turrets handle the rest.