Yourself and up to five other players will explore the dark reaches of space, which mix hand-crafted and procedurally generated content with historically relevant easter-eggs offering insight into the Mandate's rich lore. Perihelion Interactive have not only focused on space exploration, but also human exploration – the bond between captain and ship, crew and officers.

In a unique turn for the genre, relationships between captain, crew, and officers will directly affect battle situations, and with rogue-like elements, officers trained over time can be lost – literally vented out through the side of your ship - which will suffer irreparable radioactive and other atmospheric cosmetic and detrimental effects, rendered in DirectX11 on the Unity Engine for PC, with a release schedule for Mac and Linux too.

For the first time in the strategy RPG genre, players will orchestrate boarding operations isometrically in the vein of X-Com and Jagged Alliance, while your friends support you in real time from their ships. If more manpower is required, they can join you in boarding the enemy vessel, allowing you to switch back to your ship and offer them support – or you can fight together and double your numbers.

Strongly inspired by the ethos of 18th century Russian history and literature, the world of The Mandate sees a dystopian Tsarist future, ruled by bureaucracy – with an iron hammer. As a disgraced captain, you’ve to leave your past behind you and face the unbeatable threat of The Mandate, gaining as much control over each sector of space as you can, undertaking quests, trading, and fortifying your assets; build Star Bases, and create allegiances with one of the many factions in the game, inspired by many other European and global cultures.

With The Mandate Kickstarter campaign reaching the half-way mark and already raising $215k, Perihelion Interactive has released information on stretch goals.

Ole Herbjørnsen, Executive Producer, Perihelion Interactive said: “As well as our first stretch goals, Perihelion is delighted to be embracing the Kicking It Forward initiative pioneered by Brian Fargo, and we will commit ourselves to allocate 5% of the profits from The Mandate to fund new and interesting Kickstarter projects. We feel that the crowdfunding experience so far has been amazing, and it’s vital that this alternate avenue for developers is maintained to get games funded that players actually want. Sadly, some of these games would otherwise never see the light of day due to lack of publisher interest.”

The following elements will be incorporated into the game if the applicable funding targets are achieved:

$600k - Away Missions on Planets: Perihelion has a long list of possible away missions planned, with both combat and non-combat options that can switch depending upon the scenario. The developer is inviting fans to visit The Mandate forums to suggest their favourite style of away missions and planet-side encounters.

$700k - Starbase Boarding Operations: At this stretch goal Perihelion will model starbase interiors to allow for boarding operations to take place. The developer will also make it possible for the player to walk around on and interact with his/her starbase outside of combat.

$800k - Mod Support: Perihelion is a huge fan of the mod communities that have sprung up for the likes of Total War, Mount & Blade and The Elder Scrolls series. At this stretch goal it will be in a position to allocate more programmer and designer time to plan the code and data structures to greatly simplify the process of creating total conversions for The Mandate. Developer tools will receive extra polish and documentation so they can be used both by the devs and by the mod community. Start planning your mod or total conversion project today!