Cut their lines. Starve their war.

Every tile is one of six terrains. The same terrain does two jobs at once: it sets how fast you cross it and how well it hides and shields whoever holds it. Roads and bridges override the terrain underneath — they're the fast lane, and the only way across water.

Defence multiplies a defender's fighting strength — forest is the best cover on the map (×1.4), high ground and snow strong (×1.3). Projecting control matters in the campaign: only open ground, roads and bridges throw a zone of control (see Moving). Forest and hills shield you but don't let you seal a road — that takes a unit sitting on the tarmac.

Sightlines. Terrain height also blocks line of sight, and forest canopy adds a little more cover to anything seen through it. You see farther from high ground, and a drone sees over woodland but not over a mountain — so the ridge that's slow to climb is also the one worth owning.

No tech tree — just four operators. Integrity is a unit's staying power (for infantry, its men); ammo is its magazine; reach is how far it strikes; energy is the fuel-and-food clock every unit burns each turn. Learn this table and you know the whole order of battle.

Unit reference — the exact stats

Unit	Integrity	Ammo	Move	Reach	Energy / turn	Role
Infantry	100	—	6	1	10	Takes & holds ground; the only unit that captures
Artillery	60	5	7	5	18	Cuts roads & convoys, grinds dug-in infantry
Drone	30	2	5	4	18	Recon deep, then strike; flies over the ground net
Engineer	50	2	6	—	14	Repairs cratered roads; never fires

Infantry is your only ammunition-free unit — it fights hand-to-hand with its men, so its integrity is its punch, and it crosses any land. Artillery and the engineer are road-bound off the tarmac: off a road they can only cross open grass. Drones fly — they ignore the road net and zones of control entirely, and an empty-tile sortie costs no ammo, so scouting is free.

Each turn a unit spends its move points crossing tiles, paying the terrain cost of each. Infantry has 6, so it can walk three grass tiles (2 each), or one snow tile (8) under the minimum-move rule. Roads cost 1 — a unit on a road covers real distance; the same unit wading marsh barely moves.

Zones of control · Campaign. An enemy unit throws a zone of control onto the vehicle-passable tiles around it — roads, bridges and open ground. Enter an enemy's zone and your move ends there; you can't slip through it or chain from one zone to the next. This is how a single unit sitting on a road seals it. Drones ignore zones of control — they fly over.

Combat is fully deterministic: the same orders always resolve the same way. Each turn resolves in a fixed order — ranged fire first, then infantry assaults, then plain moves. Because fire happens before movement, a spotted target can't dodge the shell already inbound. You can hit almost anything you can see; the hard part is seeing it.

Drone strike

Flies a path to the target sweeping a recon footprint with line of sight, then strikes: shaves infantry, or strips a vehicle's whole magazine. Only spent when it actually hits — an empty sortie is free reconnaissance. Reach 4.

Artillery

Halves infantry it hits; destroys any vehicle outright; kills convoys; and craters an empty road to slow it. One shell per shot, five shells in the tube, reach 5. The instrument of interdiction.

Assault

Infantry steps onto an adjacent enemy (reach 1) and fights close. Strength is men × energy × the defender's cover & entrenchment — a dug-in defender in forest is brutally hard; a starving one folds.

The melee maths is worth knowing: effective strength = base × energy factor × (defender's cover × entrenchment). Energy factor runs from 0.5 (empty) to 1.0 (full), so a starving unit fights at half. Hold a tile and you dig in — up to +50% defence after four turns. Attack a fresh, dug-in, well-supplied line head-on and you will lose. Cut it off first.

Attrition & reveal · Campaign. In the campaign, melee grinds instead of instantly killing: both sides take losses in proportion, and a defender beaten badly enough retreats toward its depot — an encircled unit with nowhere to run takes even heavier losses. And a gun that fires is lit up to the enemy until it next moves, so shoot-and-scoot survives while a static battery gets hunted.

This is the heart of the game. Every unit carries an energy clock from 0 to 100 — food, fuel and morale in one number. It drains every turn and refills only if a supply route still runs home to your depot. Cut that route and the number falls; when it hits the floor, the unit starves.

At the end of each turn a unit burns its energy (infantry 10, engineer 14, drones and guns 18 — vehicles run hot) and then takes back up to +35 if a route home is open. The farther the route, the less it recovers; beyond supply range, nothing comes. A depot that's been overrun or is off the map supplies nobody — take the enemy's depot and their whole army starts to wither at once.

Trucks resupply automatically: a unit low on ammo or below 70 energy requisitions one, which takes the cheapest route home, routing around enemies — but a single enemy sitting on the road blocks it outright. A delivered load tops the unit back up and refuels it to full. So the whole game bends toward one move: don't trade blows with a supplied enemy — sever his line, then walk in.

You issue orders, then press End Turn and both sides resolve at once. The end-turn button doubles as your command-point counter — a running tally of how many units you may still order.

Command points · Campaign. You can only order max(4, half your units) units per turn — a real staff can't micromanage everything at once. Re-ordering or clearing a unit you've already given orders to is free; it's the number of distinct units that's capped. The 16×12 skirmish removes the cap: order everyone, every turn.

After you commit, the turn resolves in a fixed pipeline: orders (fire → assault → move), then supply trucks run, then reinforcements, then engineers repair, then every unit burns and resupplies energy, then spotting updates, then victory is checked. Units that held their ground dig in; units that moved lose their entrenchment.

Reinforcements · Campaign. Every fifth turn each side gets one fresh unit at its depot — the kind it's most short of — up to a force cap. But a reinforcement is skipped, not banked, if your depot is cut off or occupied. Interdiction throttles the enemy's replacements too.

There are two paths to victory, and the whole rulebook points at the second one.

If both win conditions land on the same turn — mutual elimination, or both depots held — it's a draw. The end screen also rates the campaign by how much of your force survived, from a Pyrrhic one-star win to a five-star decisive one. Winning cheaply is its own scoreboard.