Command Is Not a Hotkey

Command Is Not a Hotkey

For thirty years, the games industry has sold a flattering lie: that clicking faster makes you a better commander.

Real-Time Strategy gave us the language. "Micro" and "macro." APM — actions per minute — as the measure of a player's worth. Select units, assign waypoints, queue production, hotkey abilities. Do it faster than the other person. Call it strategy. Call it command.

It isn't. It never was.

What the RTS genre actually built was an elaborate dexterity test dressed in military aesthetics. The person who wins a StarCraft match isn't the better strategist. They're the better typist. The leaderboard rewards the nervous system of a 22-year-old, not the judgment of someone who has spent two decades learning how organizations actually function under pressure.

This isn't a complaint. StarCraft is a masterpiece of competitive design. But we should be honest about what it asks of you. It asks you to click. Very fast. On the right things. In the right order. It does not ask you to command.

What Command Actually Requires

The distinction matters because command is a real skill, practiced by real people, and it looks nothing like what games simulate.

A submarine captain doesn't tap the sonar console to make it work better. A carrier strike group commander doesn't individually route each aircraft. A CEO doesn't personally execute every task on the project plan. These people do something harder: they issue intent to competent subordinates and live with the consequences.

L. David Marquet, who commanded the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe, wrote about this in Turn the Ship Around. His central insight was that the traditional "leader-follower" model — where the commander gives specific orders and subordinates execute them — breaks down when the environment is complex and information is distributed. The people closest to the work know more about the work than the person in charge. The commander's job is to provide intent and constraints. The crew's job is to figure out how.

"I intend to submerge the ship." Not "Dive Officer, make your depth 400 feet, angle 15 degrees down bubble." The first statement tells the crew what you want. The second tells them you don't trust them to figure out how to get there.

Games have never modeled this. In every strategy game ever made, you are the Dive Officer. You set the angle. You specify the depth. You are rewarded for specifying faster than the opponent. The "strategy" is selecting the right specifications in the right sequence. The actual strategic skill — defining intent clearly enough that competent people can execute without you — doesn't exist in the design.

We built Marita to make it exist.

When you tell your Executive Officer "get us to Mars fuel-efficiently," your Navigator doesn't wait for you to manually enter orbital parameters. The Navigator pulls the current ephemeris, calculates the Hohmann transfer window, cross-references your fuel state, factors in the 1,740 kg burn cost, and reports back: "Transfer window opens in 3.2 hours. Two burns, 5.8 km/s total delta-v. Transit time 2.1 hours. Recommend we proceed." Your XO packages this for your decision. You say yes or no. The crew handles execution.

That's command.

You didn't calculate the orbital mechanics. You don't need to. You need to know whether spending 1,740 kg of fuel on a Mars transit is the right allocation given your mission, your fuel reserves, and what else might demand that fuel in the next 72 hours. That's a judgment call. The Navigator can't make it. The XO can present options. Only you decide.

And if the decision is wrong — if you burn the fuel and then need it for evasion, if the intel was stale and the route is compromised — that's on you. Not the crew. They executed your intent competently. You chose the wrong intent.

The Part Nobody Wants to Build

Here's where most command fantasies stop. They give you the authority and the aesthetics — the captain's chair, the dramatic order, the crew snapping to attention. Power fantasy. Leadership cosplay.

We went further, into territory that's uncomfortable, because the uncomfortable part is where command actually lives.

Every order you give is logged. The black box records the command, the context available to you when you gave it, and the outcome. Your crew tracks your patterns. Issue contradictory orders, your XO's acknowledgments get clipped, precise, careful — the vocal equivalent of documenting for the record. Push your crew through sustained high-G burns without tactical justification, and their trust in your judgment erodes. Not as a cutscene. As a measurable degradation in how quickly and creatively they respond to your next order.

This isn't a punishment mechanic. It's measurement.

Real organizations work this way. A manager who burns their team on false emergencies discovers that the fifth "urgent" request gets slower compliance than the first. Not because the team is insubordinate. Because trust is a resource and it got spent. The team still executes. They execute cautiously, by the book, with none of the initiative and creative problem-solving that distinguished them when they believed the mission was real.

Your crew in Marita does the same thing. They're always competent. They always follow lawful orders. But a crew that trusts your judgment volunteers information you didn't ask for, suggests alternatives you hadn't considered, flags risks before they become problems. A crew that doesn't trust you does exactly what you said and nothing more.

The difference between those two states is the difference between a captain who brings a ship home and a captain who technically did nothing wrong but somehow lost the engagement anyway.

We built this because we believe the interesting challenge in command isn't getting people to obey you. Any idiot with authority gets obedience. The interesting challenge is maintaining the kind of relationship where your people give you their best thinking. Where the Navigator says "Captain, the transfer window works, but I've been watching the thermal signature at bearing 045 and I think we should delay two hours." That Navigator is volunteering judgment beyond the scope of the order. That only happens when the Navigator believes the Captain will listen.

The Actual Game

So what does this produce? What does it feel like to play?

It feels like twenty minutes of genuine decision-making per day. You log in. Your XO briefs you on what happened while you were gone — the overnight burn completed, sensors picked up a new contact at 800,000 kilometers, fuel is at 63%. You review, assess, decide. Maybe you issue new standing orders. Maybe you adjust doctrine for how the crew handles contacts in your absence. Maybe you authorize a fuel purchase at the station you're approaching.

Then you log out. The universe continues. Your crew executes your standing orders. Physics runs. Light propagates at 299,792 km/s. Your intelligence gets staler by the minute and there's nothing you can do about it except plan for uncertainty, which is what commanders have always done.

You don't compete on hours invested. You don't compete on click speed. You don't compete on who memorized the build order. You compete on the quality of your judgment under uncertainty, the clarity of your intent, and whether your crew trusts you enough to give you the extra 10% that determines outcomes.

We built this for people who already know what that feels like — at work, in organizations, in life — and have been waiting for a game that takes it seriously.

The game takes it seriously. Including the part where you have to earn it.