A campaign of powder, gold and cold steel
You command a brigade: a battery of guns and the regiments that keep it alive. Each round you give every command its orders, end the turn, and watch the field answer. Win the day and the war chest fills with gold — spend it in the barracks on fresh regiments, riflemen, cavalry, and heavier metal for the battery. The enemy grows with every round you survive.
Round shot kills by ricochet — a flat trajectory that grazes the earth short of a target skips onward through everything in its path. Canister bursts into a cone at short range and is the only thing that reliably stops a charge. The howitzer lobs an exploding shell that cares nothing for cover.
Musketry is honest now: every man rolls his own ball, and most of them miss. Regiments that live long enough become veterans — steadier under fire, deadlier with a volley — and their veterancy follows them from round to round. Bleed a veteran regiment white and its hard-won craft bleeds away with it; recruits bought to fill the ranks water it down further.
The field is long, and the ground matters. Villages stand between the armies — troops holding one are harder to hit and harder to push out, and every village in your hands when the day ends pays into the war chest. High ground matters too: volleys and charges delivered downhill land harder than those struggling up.
A battle ends only when one side has nothing left that fights — every gun wrecked, every regiment dead, broken or marched off the field. Losing your battery is a wound, not the end: foot and horse can still overrun the enemy. And a regiment retired off your own edge of the field lives to fight the next round.
Raise a brigade — choose the quality of your crews:
What gold buys, between rounds.