Stardock Entertainment announced that Siege of Centauri will have a beta test made available for founder’s who pre-purchase the game ahead of March 28th. The beta access will allow you to play through the tower defense game, which is scheduled to enter into Early Access before it launches in full.

Over on the official Siege of Centauri website they reveal that for $9.99 you can join the founder’s program, which will net you access to the upcoming beta on March 28th, along with a forum badge, and access to a private forum where you can discuss the game and offer feedback to the developers.

The idea is that the game takes a lot of the core concepts of the RTS genre and then dumps in a lot of tower defense-style micro and macromanagement both with units and resources. Derek Paxton, the lead designer on Siege of Centauri, explained…

“With tens of thousands of enemy machines pouring toward your base, we want to give players a very new experience of what it means to defend yourselves against overwhelming odds. It takes little explaining to the player on the benefits between a rail gun that fires 1 deadly round every 10 seconds, and a high-speed plasma arc array that does low damage, but to dozens of enemies at once, when you can visibly see a huge mothership surrounded by hundreds of escorts coming at you.”

The idea is that you’ll need to weigh the risk and rewards in utilizing different strategies so that you can take out as many enemies as possible while also gathering up the resources they drop and then using them to build new equipment or upgrade your gear.

But the risk comes in attempting to gather the resources after destroying enemies while also producing new units and gear, while also trying to prevent certain areas from becoming overrun with the enemy swarms.

Founders will be able to play-test the beta ahead of the Early Access for the general public, allowing them to find out what works, what doesn’t, get an idea of what the pacing and difficulty is like, as well as work through the mechanics to see how balanced everything is.

You can buy into the founder’s program now or you can wait and see how the game works out in the beta phase before diving into the game. Siege of Centauri is themed around the Ashes of the Singularity universe and is also running on Oxide’s Nitrous engine. The game will be available exclusively on PC.