1. Conquest
Conquest is the strategic mode. Pick a map, your power and your rivals, then take the world one province at a time. You can generate a world, or fight over the real one. Hold every province to win.
Each province you attack, or that attacks you, is settled on the tactical map. The AI powers do not wait for you: between battles they attack each other, trade with each other and come for you. Provinces nobody owns are held by Red Raven Security, a selectable AI opponent, so every neutral province is a fight.
The strategic layer and the tactical layer share the same units, heroes and rules. Heroes carry over, and what you lose on the world map stays lost.
2. Cities and order
On the real-world map, every city of 100,000 people or more appears as a dot with a tooltip. Each has two ratings:
- Stability
- Public order. A province produces between a floor (35% at default tuning) and 100% of its output, depending on the average stability of its cities. Order drifts back toward its resting value each turn.
- Support
- How much the city favours whoever holds its province. It feeds coups and uprisings: an unpopular government falls easier.
Coloured markers show what is happening to a city: a yellow ring for a cyber outage, black for a blackout, and an orange blink while someone is paying for street protests. The territory card lists a province's cities with their bars.
3. Armies and fleets
Armies
Units are grouped into armies that you station in provinces. Units committed to a covert mission, a no-fly zone or an airborne assault are locked until the job is done.
Naval groups
Ships form fleets under a commander and move along sea routes with a heading, a speed and an ETA. Detection works by sensor range: a contact is either trackable or untrackable, so the same fleet can be a clear plot to one power and a rumour to another. When fleets meet, the battle is fought on a generated open-sea map. A fleet that includes a missile submarine becomes a launch site for strategic weapons (see section 9).
Units also carry a unit patch, a small insignia assigned at random and stable from then on, which you can change from the army and fleet windows.
4. Economy and trade
- Income. Each province pays its owner every turn, scaled by the order in its cities. A province under a cyber strike pays nothing while it lasts.
- Resources. Provinces also produce resources, which the powers trade with each other.
- Harbor, Arms Market and contracts. Weapons and resources are bought on a living market. Their prices all follow a market index per resource, which is what sanctions push around.
- Currency. The four powers keep their own currency symbols ($, €, ₽ and ¥) on every price and balance.
5. Embassies and pressure
An embassy with each power tracks favour, the standing of your relationship. Embassies close when a power declares war on you. Beyond that you have four levers, all in the Embassy window:
| Lever | What it does | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Travel ban | Their agents are harder to run against you: their operations are about 1.6 times as likely to be caught and take a turn longer. | Favour with them slips 1% a turn, capped at 5% in total. |
| No-fly zone | Pick provinces and a duration. Nobody, you included, can land paratroopers or run drone and air strikes there, and AI attacks on covered provinces are weaker because they lose air support. The zone is washed in sky blue on the map. | Money every turn for every province, plus combat aircraft pulled out of your pool. It lapses if you cannot pay or lose the aircraft. |
| Resource sanctions | Choose a power and the resources it sells. Their market index jumps, then climbs each turn, so everyone who buys those resources pays more. The sanctioned power loses part of its funds every turn and cools on you, and its trading partners pay a burden too. Each sanction and each lifting makes the news. | Favour with the target, and some with its partners. |
| State visit | Book a future turn. On the day, favour jumps, a hybrid war can end and a closed embassy reopens. | A fee, and a cooldown before the next one. Cancel in time and you get half back. |
Default tuning: the travel ban caps at 5% favour; no-fly zones cost 1,500 per province per turn and need half an aircraft per province (rounded up); sanctions raise the index by 0.08 a turn up to 1.8 times, and take 4% of the target's funds each turn; a state visit adds 25 favour points, lifts relations to at least 50% and waits 8 turns after the last one.
6. Intelligence operations
You run agents. An operation takes turns to prepare, costs money, and has a chance of being discovered. When one is discovered, the province goes on alert and the target may declare war: every operation has its own war chance.
The classic toolkit includes Improve Relations, False Flag, Coup and Fund Rebels. A coup or an uprising is likelier where support is low. The covert pack adds four more:
| Operation | Effect (default tuning) |
|---|---|
| Prepare Surprise Attack | Maps the province's routine. Its first battle against you opens with the defenders caught off guard. The window lasts about 4 turns. |
| Fund Street Protests | Pick a city. Its stability falls by about a quarter and its support for the government by nearly a third, and about 40% of the damage spills into cities within 400 km. The city blinks orange while it runs. |
| Cyber Strike | For 3 turns the province pays its owner nothing, order slips by 8 points a turn and cities can black out. The next battle there starts with the defenders' power down. |
| EMP | One device per city, each at full price. Each device blacks out a city for 3 turns, largest first, and costs it stability. |
The AI runs operations against you too. When a rival starts planning a first strike, the plan lands in a secret log that your spies can intercept.
7. Surprise and airborne assault
Surprise attacks work on a province's first battle only. The defenders cannot act for the first turn and start with their funds cut to 60% by default. A province that has just caught an operation of yours is on alert for 3 turns and cannot be surprised.
Airborne assault is launched from the territory card. Choose paratroopers and the transports that carry them, pay a fee per transport, and watch them fly across the world map. A landing can take the province outright: your odds rise with the force you send against the garrison, and with surprise. If the garrison holds, you have a battle to fight before the next world turn. Only the dropped force fights, deployed around the enemy HQ. Lose it, or let the turn pass, and the force is gone.
8. Covert missions
Covert missions are short, hands-on breaks from the turn-based war. You order one as an intelligence operation and attach a force. When it is ready, a differently coloured node appears on the target. Click it to open a live feed of 30 to 90 seconds.
| Mission | Force | How it plays |
|---|---|---|
| Raid | Infantry and special forces | Acquire, ingress, assault, exfil, then the damage assessment. You are watching from overhead in thermal. If it fails, your people die on screen. |
| Drone strike | A drone | The drone loiters over a town. You cycle through four tracks, read the intel on each and confirm one before it has to leave. One of them is a crowd of civilians. |
| Missile strike | A ship or launcher | Cuts to the 2D battle scene of the launch, then a drone feed with a time-of-flight countdown. A failed shot is intercepted. |
| Air strike | Armed aircraft | Cuts to the 2D battle scene of the aircraft, then a targeting-pod view as the bombs fall. A failed run ends with a SAM launch and a lost aircraft. |
The feed switches between thermal, night-vision and day views, and you can zoom and pan it while a status terminal ticks beside it.
What is at stake
- Success destroys a few enemy vehicles; a raid also takes out the garrison's commander. Heroes on the force earn experience, and commandos who come back become heroes.
- Failure costs you the vehicles you sent, and heroes on the force are gone for good.
- The trap. Hit the civilians on a drone strike and you lose favour with every power, with a good chance the target declares war.
Success odds start from the mission type, climb with the strength of your force and fall with the target's counter-spies.
9. The nuclear football
A red Football button on the command bar opens a black, phosphor-green console in the spirit of WarGames: a vector map of the world, DEFCON in the corner, strike arcs, shield coverage and a terminal.
- Authorize. Turn both keys within six seconds. A code appears. Then authorize nuclear or chemical weapons. This unlocks them for your silos on the battle map, and it lasts only a few turns. The moment you do it, every capital is alerted, favour drops with everyone and the AI presses harder while it is open.
- Order a strike. Choose the weapon and the region, then add decoys and, for nuclear, a MIRV bus that puts three warheads over the target and its neighbours. Choose a launch site: any of your uplink territories, a fleet with a missile submarine, an army with a deployed ballistic-missile launcher, or a stealth bomber that flies the weapon in.
- Wait a turn. The order sits on the map as a red arc with a pulsing reticle and launches when the world turn advances. Stand down before then and the stock comes back.
- Launch. The target's nuclear shields and lasers get shots at the volley. Decoys fly first and draw fire. Whatever survives lands. Reopen the console and the volley replays: arcs, INTERCEPTED flashes, DETONATION rings.
A nuclear hit irradiates the province for five turns and destroys the army stationed there. A chemical hit poisons it: no production, cities lose stability. Either way every power loses 25 points of favour toward you and the holder declares war. The arsenal for a campaign is small: 6 warheads, 4 chemical weapons, 6 decoys and 2 MIRV buses by default.
10. Space
Space is a map of its own, with orbits, ground tracks and the reach of your uplink stations drawn on it. You launch satellites of five kinds: spy, comms, Rods from God, space laser and nuclear shield. They follow real orbital mechanics: you plan delta-v manoeuvres to move them, they need an uplink to talk to the ground, and any of them can be a target for an anti-satellite strike.
- Capturing a spaceport grants Rod From God, Spy Satellite and ASAT even to a commander who never had them. An uplink grants reconnaissance only.
- A nuclear shield in the right orbit will try to intercept a missile in flight, with a visible burst when it does.
- Strategic launchers obey the battle rules: a ballistic-missile launcher must deploy before it fires, a missile submarine must surface, and both spend a missile.
11. The AI opponents
The AI plays the same systems you do. Each turn its commander weighs every special it can afford, such as cyber attack, spy satellite or a strike on the juiciest cluster, and it will not nuke its own front line. It dips sonar, resupplies, deploys, boards civilian ships, protects its damaged heroes and, on the world map, runs operations and trades. Difficulty is a tier:
| Tier | Plays | Mistakes | Specials | Funds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recruit | Moves and shoots only | 45% | Never | 0.85× |
| Regular | Supply, deploy, dive, boarding | 30% | Occasionally | Even |
| Veteran | Every system | 15% | Readily | Even |
| Elite | Every system | 5% | Eagerly | 1.1× |
| Legendary | Every system | None | Constantly | 1.25× |
Lower tiers do not play stupidly. They skip decisions they should have made, so they feel inattentive. The funds multiplier is a one-time starting grant.
12. Playing together
Up to four players can fight a battle together over Steam or a local network. Host a game and pick the map and rules, browse internet, friends and LAN games, or sit two players down at one PC for hotseat. Empty slots can be filled by the AI with a faction and commander you can see in the lobby.
- Host options: AI difficulty, starting funds, fog of war, whether research labs unlock tiers, and whether the 5% UFO encounter is on.
- Voice chat is built in for online matches.
- Profiles record rank, wins, losses and rating, and banned accounts are refused at the door.