Campaign Overview
A campaign is the strategic layer that ties battles together: a turn-based contest for several players or AIs, played at your own pace. You research, build, expand and fight for world control; every commander's orders resolve together at the end of each turn. This guide will walk you through the basics - how a turn actually works, who you're playing against, and how the game ends. Other campaign guides go into more detail about individual pieces.
The structure of a campaign
Every commander starts with a capitol province, a small starting force, and an empty chunk of the map to grow into. From there, you're expected to earn resources from the land you hold, spend them on research, buildings and new units, send out armies to take more ground, and conquer the world.
You never play in real time. A campaign advances one turn at a time, and nothing on the map moves until a turn resolves - so you can think, step away, and come back. It's designed to be played like correspondence chess or a play-by-email game: lock in your orders, and the world catches up when everyone else has done the same.
A turn, start to finish
During a turn you queue up what you want to happen. When the turn resolves, the game works through everyone's orders in a fixed sequence, so the outcome is the same no matter who submitted first:
- Armies move along their standing routes.
- Battles are fought wherever forces meet on contested ground.
- Territory changes hands based on who won and who's left standing.
- Income is collected from the provinces you hold.
- Research advances by your science income.
- Upkeep is paid on your standing army.
- Construction and production tick forward on every funded hex.
- Sight is recomputed, defeated commanders are eliminated, and the game checks for a winner.
Giving orders
"Orders" are everything you set up before the turn resolves. Across the turn you can:
- Route armies to new destinations (see Armies & Movement).
- Queue research and start construction.
- Fill factory production queues.
When you're done, you commit your orders from the HUD to tell the game you're ready. You can withdraw and keep tinkering right up until the turn resolves. The turn only advances once every human commander has committed - or the host force-resolves it - so a campaign moves at the pace of its players.
While the turn resolves
Resolving a turn - running every army's move and every autobattle - can take a while, so it happens in the background rather than making you sit and wait. Once the last commander is ready, the turn is handed off and the HUD shows a "RESOLVING TURN…" indicator with a progress bar. The bar is an estimate based on how long recent turns took; when it fills and the new turn lands, the map updates on its own.
You don't have to keep the page open and staring - it polls for you and picks up the resolved turn automatically. If something goes wrong mid-resolution the game retries on its own; a turn that truly gets stuck (usually due to a bug) shows a "RESOLUTION FAILED" state that the host can force through.
Bot commanders
A campaign can be filled out with bot commanders - you only need two commanders total to start, so you can even play solo against the AI. Bots are full participants: they hold territory, research, build, produce units and attack, all by the same rules you play by. They decide their orders automatically while the turn resolves, so they never hold a turn up waiting for input.
A bot's difficulty changes only how it behaves - how aggressively it commits forces and whether it keeps a garrison at home - not how much it earns. Bots get no economic handicap in either direction; a harder bot is a smarter general, not a richer one.
The dispatch feed
The left rail is your dispatch feed - a running log of what the last turn changed. Province captures, research and construction completions, launch-strike hits, eliminations and the final victory all report here. Some events are public (a capitol falling is news to everyone); others are private to the commanders involved, so you won't see the details of a fight on the far side of the map you had no part in.
The rail also holds your battle history: every engagement you fought, newest first, each opening its replay. Hover a row to see both sides' losses at a glance. Full detail is in Campaign Battles.
Winning and losing
Victory is domination, plain and simple: the campaign ends the moment exactly one commander still holds their original capitol. Take everyone else's home ground - or drive them off the map entirely - and the war is yours. There are no point totals or timed objectives to juggle; the whole game (for now) is capturing capitols and defending your own.
A commander is eliminated when they have no provinces and no armies left - fully wiped from the map. Losing your capitol short of that isn't the end, but it's dire: while an enemy holds your capitol your income, construction and production all shut off (the HUD flashes "CAPITOL LOST") until you retake it. So a lost capitol has to be answered fast, before your war machine starves.
Where to go next
That's the loop. Each moving part has its own guide: The Campaign Map for the board itself, Armies & Movement for moving your forces, Economy & Production for paying for them, Buildings and Research for growing your power, and Campaign Battles for how it all comes to blows.