So how the hell did they make it
work?!  The best way
to explain it to you is through
a few examples.

See this gauge? 
Yeah,
it looks like something they use on you after a heart attack at the
hospital.   Don’t
be intimidated, but
this is the ‘timeline’.  
You have a
Chronoenergy gauge that affects your ability to make moves in the past.   Note that I said
make moves.  You are
free to jump around various points in
time with no cost so long as you do not act.   
It is when you act that you begin spending energy.
Let’s start simple. 
Say you’re walking around with a raiding party and you
waltz right into
your enemy’s defenses/army on accident and your raiding party gets
instagibbed.  Well
shit. Any other RTS
and you would have set yourself back a fair chunk or possibly a fatal
amount
against an equally skilled opponent. 
In Achron, you say
screw this; I’m going to
undo my mistake.   When
combat and losses
happen, you’ll see them show up on the timeline. 
So you can jump back a second before, 15
seconds, or even a minute or two and correct your mistake.
You correct your mistake by reversing
your orders.  Note
that the game still saves every order you made. 
So if you have them moving east, and you give an order in
the past to
move west, they will still try to move east if you were following them
and
clicking east along the way.  Those
of
you are that are super active players, Achron
may be your downfall.  But
fear
not!  You can
highlight a unit or group
of units and delete all orders to a certain point the in the past… at a
hefty
cost of Chronoenergy, as shown by the yellow consumption portion in my
example.  Every
single unit
you order, including all of those selected in a group, costs additional
Chronoenergy to issue an order to in the past. 
You can limit your costs, but also your flexibility, by
setting platoon
leaders and having units mimic their orders. 
That way, you spend a minimal amount of energy readjusting
your
army.  However, if
the leader is killed,
all orders are lost!  Guess
who has to go
back to the past and fix everything again!
Fear not, Chronoenergy is an infinite
resource
that merely takes time to replenish. 
But
say you actually go back in time, and save that army from the previous
example.  Do they
just show up instantly out of thin
air, you might ask?  Not
quite.  Take a look
at the graph here again and note
that it’s marked off into sections by fading color waves, like a sonar
pulse. 
These are Time Ripples. 
If the continuum
is changed and units survive (or are thrown back in time!  Yes, your future army can
go back in time and
save your ass!) you’ll see everything ‘update’ when a ripple hits the
Present.  Time is
still marching forward
when you are in the past, and every minute, the entire game may change.
“Holy shit
that is a
lot to digest!”
Yeah. 
Now wait until
you see it all multiplayer!  Time
travel
aside, you have your standard RTS fare of air and ground units, with
three
sides that have standard builders, one that sacrifices workers to build
buildings, and one that summons multiple buildings at a time if they so
desire.  Gosh that sounds familiar… but
you know, I’m not going to give them shit, because the time system is
the most
innovative RTS idea since squad combat was introduce back in Kohan.  The
units themselves have a lot of unique abilities such as deploying into
factories that can produce different units depending on what other
types of units are doing the same nearby, so you've got some unique
toys to go alongside your flux capacitor.