User Summary
Skylancers: Battle for Horizon was a free-to-play MMORTS available from alaplaya.net. When starting the game, a player must join one of three factions: the Empire, Alliance or Renegades - all conveniently color coded, red for Empire, blue for Alliance, and green for the Renegades. The player could never change factions, and would stay with that faction throughout the entire game. Each faction had access to different tactics and abilities when in battle.
The game focused around building up the player's personal floating island. When the player built specific places on the island, the player could unlock more resources which could be used to build a navy. This navy would be used to raid locations around the world when on quests. The player had the option of fighting AI creatures, or you could battle other players directly.
There were quests that players could complete scattered around the world. Some were quests where the player had to kill a certain number of sky pirates, others were quests to control certain islands in the vast seas of Horizon. There were new quests added at different times throughout the year too.
A unique point of the game was that each faction was competing to control the moon. The moon would travel around the planet of Horizon, and once a month would be tethered to an island in the ocean. Whatever faction controlled that island, everyone of that faction could complete the quests on the moon - and no one else could. This meant entire factions would do focused strikes against specific islands during the month, leading to some very cut-throat battles.
While the game was a browser game, it did require Microsoft Silverlight to run. It also followed a pay-to-win model, where the more money a player put into the game, the better ships, cards, and equipment that player would receive. While someone could play the game without buying such things, but it would take much longer to achieve the more advanced levels than if that player had spent money.
Unfortunately, in May 2013, alaplaya stopped hosting Skylancer. There is currently no way for anyone to play or access this game. The game is now owned by GamesInFlames, but there has been no recent news on what is going to happen to it.