Fog

You command an army you can't fully see. The map shows what your people have reported, not what is true.

Orders: click a formation, then click the ground to move there. Right-click the ground, or click an enemy, for a menu of what else you could ask for. Shortcuts: H hold, S scout, R retreat, W shadow an enemy, E escort one of yours.

Time: orders travel by rider from your HQ. “Dispatched” means it left. “Received” means it arrived. Far away takes longer. The rider goes where your staff reckon the formation to be by now, from its last report and the orders it was following; if it is not there, the rider must search, and may come back empty-handed.

Scouts: shift-click several points with S and they patrol between them. When the enemy gets close they slip away, then go back to it once things are quiet.

Reports: formations send a rider on their own when something happens: they sight the enemy, come under fire, a fight ends, they lose a tenth of their men, they break or rally, they arrive, or they change their plans on their own. Otherwise they check in every so often. Each formation has two riders of its own, and a rider rides home again after delivering (a hollow ring on the map): with both out, its news waits until one is back, and its panel says so. Inside HQ's circle no rider is needed; you see them live. Faded markers are old news. Red markers are sightings, and the enemy may have moved.

Live, last report, or guess? Each of your markers sits inside a faint blue circle: how far that formation could see as of its last report, wider from a hill, narrower in woods; select it and the circle firms up. Under every marker is one word for what it was doing — fighting, broken, re-forming, falling back, marching, holding, dug in — and how old that news is: green live means HQ can see it right now, a time like 48s is the age of its last report. The marker sits where it was then, and the blue dashed line is where it was going. An order on its way shows beside the marker as ✉ due ~23s (your staff's estimate of the ride), then awaiting word, then order taken. Under a red marker is how long since the enemy was seen there, and the pink ring is how far it could have moved since. Nothing on the map is predicted.

Saying what you want: you mostly do not move pieces, you say what you want done. With one of yours selected, click a red marker and a short menu asks what about it: attack it (march on where it was last seen and fight what is there), skirmish with it (come on, hurt it, and fall back before it can close, again and again — horse are made for this), shadow it (keep it in sight from a distance, never fight, and send a rider every time it moves), or what we know, which sends nobody anywhere and just opens its card. Click a red marker with nothing selected and you get that card straight away.

And with ground: left-click open ground to go there. Right-click it and the same kind of menu asks what the ground is for: go there, attack toward there, hold it loosely (take it, but pull back rather than be destroyed for it), hold it at all costs (they will break before they leave), fortify it (go there, find the best ground within a few hundred metres, and construct defenses on it), or scout it. Each is one order and one rider. Esc closes the menu.

If nothing moves: look at the ticker. A rider takes time, and an order that could not be sent says why, usually because HQ has been overrun and command is passing to another regiment.

The map fills in by rider. You see live only what your HQ can see. The ground your formations see reaches your map when their rider reaches HQ, and every rider marks the country he rides through. Dark ground is ground nobody has told you about yet.

Fighting: an orange pulse means a formation reported itself in action. An orange glow with nobody in it means you heard firing from roughly there. You may not learn who, or who is winning, until a rider arrives.

How they are doing: the small symbol at the top right of each of your formations. In a fight it climbs and falls a ladder: winning (giving more than they take), steady, shaken (their nerve is going: about 1 in 20 to break in any ten seconds), wavering (could go any moment, though nearly half still hold), broken, then re-forming. Out of a fight it reads ready, or shaken if their nerve has not come back. means worn out or hungry, low on ammunition.

Chance, and what you do about it: every volley's losses are a roll of the dice, and so is every second a formation under fire holds or breaks. You cannot stop the dice; you move the odds. Fresh losses and falling morale shorten them, discipline and experience lengthen them, and so do works, good ground, a friend beside them, and not being taken in the flank. Shaken is the warning: that is when help still counts. The panel keeps the last three minutes of a fight as a strip, as your reports told it, with a hatched gap for the time since the last rider.

Your army: you buy it before the battle out of a fixed budget, and so does your opponent, from the same menu at the same prices. Infantry hold ground. Cavalry are fast and terrifying for one charge, then ordinary. Artillery reaches far — but only at what someone of yours can actually see, so guns without scouts are expensive noise. Scouts are your eyes. A supply train carries ammunition and rations to whoever is near it. “Default army” is a sensible one; you never have to think about this again if you do not want to.

Banners: an army can march under one of four, or none. Woodland (The Greenwood Free Company): marksmen, hard to spot, deadly in forest. Mountain (The High Hold): steady and tireless, strong on high ground, and their foot can cross crags nobody else can. City (The Gilded City): more men for the money and more supplies, fast on roads, but poorly drilled and organized. Plains (The Endless Plains): the best cavalry, well fed, strong in the open. Each trains its own strengths for less. Every pairing was played out many times between bots before it shipped, so none of them simply wins; which one suits the ground in front of you is the choice. You can see the enemy's banner from the start, and nothing else about them.

Designing a formation: open “Name and design your formations” to give one a name (shown to you alone, never to the other commander), change how many men are in it, train it, place an upgrade you bought, or set its standing orders — its stance, whether it constructs defenses, where it stands on arrival, and whether it helps anyone else — before the first shot rather than after. A formation you leave alone behaves exactly as it always has.

Ammunition and rations: regiments shoot off what they carry and eat what they brought. A regiment running low sends a rider to say so. There is no “send supplies” button, and that is deliberate: you move the wagons to the men. Park a supply train within about 350 m of a formation and it fills them back up out of its own stock, every second, without being told and without a click. The only decision is where the wagons sit — which is a real decision, because they are slow, they cannot fight, and losing them loses the army's supply. Hungry troops get tired and stay tired; they do not starve to death.

Your troops: every regiment is a little different. Its card rates accuracy, damage, nerve, awareness, speed, consistency and adaptability as bars from 0 to 100, where 50 is a standard regiment of its type. The pale band on each bar is how far the day's luck can move them either way; the fill is where it did. Training moves the bar, and consistency narrows the band (less for awareness and speed, which the ground and the weather swing whatever the drill). The enemy's army is the same mix, so nobody is handed better troops. A formation's firepower is its men × accuracy (how many shots find someone) × damage (what each one does) × how fresh and how steady they are; then range and facing decide how much of it lands. Damage costs half again as much to train as accuracy. Nerve decides how long they stand under losses; speed, how fast they march; adaptability, how fast they learn. Training is priced by the man: the bigger the formation, the more it costs to drill. Each card also says where it fights best — select a formation and the same is drawn on the map.

Your HQ: the diamond. You, your staff, and a 40-man escort that will fight. Click HQ then the ground to move it, or press “Join a formation” in its panel and click one of yours. Move it closer to the fight for faster orders and fresher news. If the escort is worn down and the enemy closes in, HQ is overrun: no orders leave for a while, then command passes to your strongest regiment and rides with it.

Which way they are looking: a formation fights best straight ahead of it, and worst with its back to you. Hitting a flank is worth about half again; getting behind them is worth more than double. They will wheel to face you — but turning a firing line through a right angle takes about twenty-six seconds, and while they are turning they shoot at half effect. That is why a march that arrives on somebody's flank beats a bigger army walking straight at them. A short bar across the front of every marker shows which way it is facing; a small red arrowhead, when there is one, shows which side incoming fire is coming from — the same thing its report says in words, under “Under fire.”

The ground itself: some of it you cannot use. Crags are bare rock: no formation crosses them, so routes go around and so does the enemy, which makes them worth thinking about. A lone rider can pick a way over, slowly. Marsh is the mud: foot and horse crawl through it and guns and wagons cannot enter at all, and anyone caught in it is easier to hit, not harder. And a big formation strings out in woods: two hundred men go through at the ordinary rate, four hundred take much longer.

Construct defenses: works go up only where you order them. Switch on Construct defenses in a formation's panel, or while designing it, and wherever it halts it digs: prepared after about 14 seconds, dug in after about 55 seconds, entrenched after about 2 minutes. The three cells beside the switch fill light red, red, then deep purple, and the lines in front of the marker take the same colour: the darker, the more of the fire from the front they turn, from about 23% to about 47%. Digging costs energy and rations while it lasts, and moving throws the work away. Engineers, an upgrade for infantry and artillery, dig half again as fast and build works that turn more fire (up to about 54%).

The panel: select a formation and the right-hand panel shows what is happening to it at a glance (what it is doing and how old that news is, its strength, the one thing worrying it, the fighting, and your rider on the road), then three commands. Where: click the map to send it; on arrival it stands exactly where ordered, or takes the best ground nearby. Stance: Aggressive (go for them, chase a beaten one, march to the sound of guns it can hear but not see), Defensive (hold and fire where you sent it, even when a neighbour sends for help), Responsive (fight only if attacked, and much harder to spot while it waits), or Elusive (slip away from contact). Defenses: construct them or not. Everything else (hold, take good ground, scout, retreat, shadow, escort, request a report, divide, fold, and whether it goes to help anyone else) is under More orders, and the whole report is under Details. A change of stance or defenses rides out like any order but does not stop a march.

Dividing and joining: a regiment can be split into two commands, and two of the same kind standing together can be folded into one. Both happen where the men are, so the rider has to get there first, and neither can be done under fire — men are not re-told off into new companies while they are being shot at. Both cost cohesion for a while. A divided regiment is named after its parent, so 2nd Infantry becomes 2nd Infantry and 2nd Infantry (B), and the reveal at the end shows what came from what.

Covering each other: press E (or the Escort button) and then click one of your own formations, and this one will keep station beside them and move when they move. It holds whichever flank it was on when the order arrived, so where you start it is how you screen: put the horse on your open flank and they stay on your open flank.

Your people are not stupid. Without new orders they defend themselves, hold good ground, and pull back when it is hopeless. A regiment that is hard pressed sends a rider to its nearest idle neighbour, and the neighbour marches to its aid and then goes back to its own orders, unless you told it to hold and be defensive, to stand fast, or to avoid contact. Either way you hear about it in their next report. You never set which way they face: they face the way they march, turn toward whatever shoots at them (slowly, so a flank attack still hurts), and, standing still, turn just as slowly to face the last place they saw the nearest enemy (or the enemy's side of the map if they have seen none), and dig their works facing that way. They go by what they have seen themselves, not by your map.

Objectives: a field battle is about losses: you win by putting more of their army out of the fight than they put of yours — the share of theirs destroyed against the share of yours kept, a broken formation counting half — or by destroying it outright. In “overrun their HQ” the battle ends the moment either headquarters is caught. In “breakthrough” you are each trying to get past the other: a gold line is drawn across the far end of the map and a red one across your own, and getting 40% of your fighting strength over the gold line ends it. You cannot simply all run for it, because they are running the other way. In “hold the crossroads” a marked hill sits on the middle of the map, the same distance from both armies: hold it with nobody else standing in the ring, without a break, and it is yours; otherwise whoever held it longer wins. You only know what is happening on the hill if one of yours is there to tell you — the panel shows what your last report from it said, and how old that is.

The news: the lines at the top right are what has just reached you. One with a ⌖ is about a place: press it and the map shows where, and selects the formation if it is one of yours. earlier opens the rest.

Learning as you go: field notes explain each thing the first time it happens in your battle, with a “show me”. Notes on/off by the clock turns them off. Press F to flag a moment that surprised or confused you; at the end, Copy playtest notes gives you the whole battle, your flags included, to paste wherever you like. Nothing is sent anywhere.

After the battle: the reveal shows the truth, and says what decided it — where each side's losses came from — and how much was luck, measured against the odds of every shot and every morale check.

Sound: off unless you turn it on with the button by the clock. On, a distant volley rolls in when firing is heard or one of yours reports itself in action, closer fights louder.

Tab next formation · Esc deselect · Space center on HQ · scroll to zoom · drag to pan · ? this screen