Direct Command
You are the commander, not the camera.
There are two things you can look at, and neither of them is the battle.
Look down and you see the map on your table, a sheet with lead weights on the corners, showing the country as your surveyor drew it. On it are counters marking where you last heard your companies were.
Look up and you see the room you are standing in before the battle, your five captains in the lamplight; after the horns, only the three riders of your retinue, waiting for something to carry.
The wheel tilts your head between the two. That is the whole camera.
Nothing on the map is true. It is the last word you had.
Every counter carries a timestamp.
Ground you can see from the knoll by the tent updates live. Everything else arrives by runner, at the speed of a man or a horse, and is already out of date when it reaches you. A company you ordered to the bridge forty minutes ago may be at the bridge, or halfway, or broken and running and the only way to find out is to spend a rider going to look.
You have three riders. That is your whole bandwidth.
Sending a man is the move.
Click a rider and you compose an errand in three steps: who to go to, with the ride time shown what to do, carry an order or just bring back word and where, put your finger on the ground you mean.
He leaves the tent. You watch his marker cross the sheet. He arrives, delivers, looks around, and rides back and only then do you learn anything. If the company has moved since you last heard of it, he arrives at empty ground and has to cast about for them, which costs more time.
With all three riders out, the lines go dead until one of them comes home.
Eleven fields, in seven wars.
The sheet you pick decides everything else. You do not fight An Nasiriyah with knights: load a modern sheet and your companies become armour and mechanised infantry with a radio net, load Montbray and they become the corps of the Empire with aides-de-camp, load the Kurgan and they become a German battalion in a cellar, load Qadesh and they become the chariots and spears of Hatti.
The names, the counters, the map's whole drawing convention and the men in the room all change with them.
A river across the west with three bad ways over it, a long ridge in the east, and a village on the road between them.
A road along a valley floor with high ground on both sides. Whoever holds the crags shoots down into everything that moves.
Open heath from edge to edge. Nothing to hold and nowhere to hide but one great wood — the fastest and most dangerous ground in the book.
A valley floor under water in the growing season, one raised road across it, and the war-god's ridge above.
A stream, three crossings, and a plateau behind. The only level ground is on your own bank, and the green flank in the east is a bog.
An Nasiriyah. Two bridges four kilometres apart and a built-up gauntlet between them.
A canal, one bridge, a town on the far bank and a date grove beside it, at night.
Route 7 goes straight through the town and there is no way round it a wheeled column can take.
The Mamajew-Kurgan. A kilometre of bare steppe, then a bald hill that sees every metre of it.
The city stands on a tell in the fork of two rivers and both armies are outside it. Four ways in, all of them watched.
A graben floor five kilometres below the shelf, and one slump fan wide enough to walk a crawler down.
| Halsey Field · medieval | |
| Kartsis Ughelt'ekhili · medieval | |
| Sedgemoor · medieval | |
| Akitsugahara · 1543 | |
| La Bataille de Montbray · 1806 | |
| Ambush Alley · 2003 | |
| Muwaffaqiyah Bridge · 2003 | |
| Al Gharraf · 2003 | |
| Hoehe 102,0 · 1942 | |
| Qadesh on the Orontes · 1274 BC | |
| Noctis Fan · Mars |
And a different room for each of them.
Controls
Mouse for everything. W and S, or the wheel, tilt your head between the tent and the table. Escape drops a sheet of vellum over the day and stops the clock.
Comments are open. The thing I most want to know is whether three riders feels like too few, about right, or a gimmick.
Comments
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Yooooo mr developer this is a very cool game. Took a couple tries to get used to the unit types and the way they respond to orders. Only played the medieval missions so far. Three riders seems a good amount for the battles once you know to plan around the limitation. I assume your units moving to attack adjacent units or pursuing enemies without getting orders to do so is intentional, since that is realistically what happened during battles (frustrating as it may be). This is when having 3 riders does feel a bit limiting because your units are far away, the riders take too long to return and you kind of lose control of the battle and any sense of what's going on (again one could argue that this situation is true to life). Sending a rider with or without an order to a unit didnt seem to make a difference to the rider's speed, maybe no orders could be slightly faster?
Another note is that it's a bit unclear how the scouts work and what watching ground does specifically and i do wish that at least their unit didn't charge enemies since you cant send them forward to do what their name entails and"scout" without them charging an enemy unit and getting murdered. Finally i assume the development of this game begun with medieval battles before the more modern ones were added. The commanders are still called "captain of the bows" "captain of the horse" even if they are ww2 or futuristic soldiers, and the maps are more easily readable on the medieval levels.
Very fun game! Inspires me to wanna make something similar if i ever learn game dev!
hey playa, I integrated some of your notes into the game. fixed the naming conventions so you won't have bowmen on mars haha. the scouts also no longer charge into enemy controlled segments head first. they might close some distance if needed, but their hq stays atleast a segment away from the province being watched at all times.
thanks for the feedback, the input really is appreciated.
btw i vibecoded this game over a weekend so Im sure you can do the same and more with relative ease