Everything the ? key shows in battle, and a little more.
Line is fire: every musket bears, but the line wheels slowly. Column is movement and the bayonet: faster, steadier in the charge, a third of the fire. Square is the only thing that stops a charge of horse — it cannot move and fires a quarter rate on every face.
Every man rolls his own ball and most of them miss. Range, veterancy, the target's density and cover, and high ground all tell. A battalion breaks when its nerve goes, not when the last man falls: losses, every volley and every ball that tears through it, a flank or rear attack and neighbors breaking all bleed morale. Nerve comes back only when no enemy stands within two hundred paces, so a line under fire does not recover; pull it back out of range to let it breathe. A broken battalion rallies once it has run clear (it then marches back to the post you last gave it, if that ground is still clear), but each break leaves a scar: it comes back with less nerve than before. A battalion that breaks with half its men gone does not rally at all; it leaves the field, and one down to a quarter of its men is finished as a fighting body. A mêlée tells on both sides and is settled in seconds. An army is beaten when the men it still has fighting fall below two in five of the most it had on the field, or when everything it has left has been running for a quarter of a minute.
The arms. Line battalions are the backbone. Grenadiers are fewer and dearer, but load faster, aim better, hit far harder with the bayonet and hardly flinch when a neighbor breaks. Landwehr are many and cheap, slow and poor shots, and quick to catch a panic: good for holding a village and soaking up fire. Light battalions carry rifles: a longer reach (110 paces against a musket's 80), a better aim, and the only foot that can take open order. Cavalry (sabres) is fast and murderous on a flank, a battery or broken men. Cuirassiers are heavy horse in breastplates: slower and very dear, the armor turns three musket balls or canister shot in ten (round shot cares nothing for it), and they win a sabre mêlée. Lancers are the one horse that can hurt a square, and they ride down skirmishers and runners, but sabres get the better of them once the first shock is spent. Horse artillery limbers and unlimbers in three seconds and gallops with the horse; rockets reach twice as far as a field gun and are quick to serve but wildly inaccurate, and a rocket bursting in or near a body shakes it far more than it kills (horses worst of all); they carry no canister.
Cavalry that finds an open flank, a broken battalion or an unguarded battery ends a battle; cavalry that meets a steady square or a whiff of canister ends itself. Villages give cover to the foot inside them and are worth gold at the end of the day.
Cartridges and the train. Every man carries forty rounds and every gun sixty; a volley spends one, and a company with an empty pouch stands mute (its card shows the count). The village is the depot: a company within a hundred and thirty paces of it refills from the coal. Beyond that, powder wagons fitted out at the village (village card) drive out on their own to whichever company is shortest, hand over their load and go back for more; a wagon caught by the enemy with none of yours near is theirs. Cut the road behind an army and it will run dry.
Fatigue. Marching tires a company, the double and the mêlée more so, and every volley a little; a tired company marches slower, loads slower and breaks sooner. It recovers standing still, and fast in camp. The card reads fresh, winded, tired, exhausted.
Camps. A company left holding for a minute and a half with no enemy in sight pitches camp: tents, a fire, the men scattered. In camp fatigue mends quickly and a wagon refills it twice as fast — but a camped company cannot fire, fights at a third of its weight, and needs twelve seconds to fall in before it can move or fire again. No company camps with an enemy within four hundred paces, and an enemy coming within three hundred sounds the alarm on its own, so the sentries give it time to stand to before horse can close. Catch the enemy in camp at dawn all the same.
Cover and works. The ground shelters a line: a wood, standing corn, a hedge or fence, the houses of a village, and a breastwork a company digs for itself (⛏ Dig in, I: a minute and a half standing still, then an earthwork along its front that stays on the field for whoever holds it). The card names the ground and its cover; cover takes that share out of the enemy's fire and gives it back in the mêlée.
The ground. Beyond the border ridges the middle country now rolls in long downs — crests to hold and reverse slopes to hide behind — with dry hollows between, and sunken lanes worn into the lowland that shelter a line lying in them (cover 40%). Hedges and dry-stone walls are obstacles: a company scrambles over them at a third of its pace (the men climb), and a line standing behind one, facing it, is sheltered by it (wall 45%, hedge 35%, fence 25%) — the enemy coming over it is not. Between the bridges a river usually has a ford: a gravel bar wadeable at half pace with no cover at all, the second way across when the bridge is held.
Drill and officers. A new company is raw: it hits and loads worse than a drilled one. It learns its trade standing on the green by the village (fast) or anywhere it is not fighting (slowly), and the card reads raw, drilled, well drilled. Every company has an officer; each man lost may be him, and a company without one rallies at half the rate and barely learns until a new officer rides out from the village three minutes later.
Prisoners. A broken company caught in the mêlée gives up men rather than losing them all: half are taken prisoner. March them home and they join your people at the village.
The people. Hunger, a tax above 45% and conscription from the works stir unrest (village card). Past half, men desert the colours by night; past four-fifths the village riots and the treasury bleeds. War weariness climbs with your dead, your burned buildings and hunger, less whatever you have made the enemy suffer (three-fifths of his dead and burned count against yours), measured against the size of the war (its population cap); at 100% a people sue for peace and the war ends — on either side. A side winning the exchange does not tire of it.
Smoke, scouts, guns. A line's own powder smoke builds with every volley and blows away with the wind; in the thick of it a company hits a third worse and is a little harder to hit. Cavalry see nearly twice as far as foot, so a squadron out in front is your eyes — and finds the enemy's camps. Foot that overrun a battery in the mêlée turn the guns round: eight men a gun leave the company and serve the captured pieces where they stand, raw and short of shot.
Hamlets. Independent hamlets (seven by default, set up before the war) lie between the two villages. A company standing in one takes it, and it pays 18 gold a minute to the treasury while it is held and not contested; the enemy can take it back the same way, and will: it sends companies to hold the hamlets on its side of the country, and raids the ones you leave empty.
A company under fire closes its ranks as the drill has it: every man who still has his place keeps it, and only the men whose places are gone step up into the gaps — so the line stands and fires rather than shuffling about after every volley; it dresses itself properly once the firing stops. On a bridge a company is held between the parapets: a line folds into a column to cross.
The day and the weather. A day of the war is fourteen minutes: the sun climbs out of the east, shadows swing with it, and at night the lines see and hit a good deal less, though the moon gives light enough to read the field by, gas lamps stand round the green and at the bridges, and torches burn at every door; a company on the march carries torches of its own. Cloud, rain, storm and morning mist come and go (the hour and the weather stand beside the clock). Rain damps the powder — misfires and slow loading — and turns the ground to mud; a storm is worse; mist hides everything beyond a hundred paces; the wind carries the smoke, and on a still day it hangs over the field.
The enemy's commander reads your line, keeps his brigade in an order of march, swings a wing round your weaker flank, forms square when your horse comes on, and in Conquest holds the bridgehead or gathers to cross it together. How he fights depends on the difficulty. At Easy he spreads his foot over every village at once, charges only at long odds, leaves his guns where they stand and sends his horse straight at loaded batteries. At Standard he takes one objective at a time with the whole brigade, keeps a battalion in reserve until a line breaks, limbers and pulls his guns back from foot that close on them, and rides round to a battery's flank instead of into its canister. At Hard he also forms his brigade abreast and goes in together, lays every musket and gun in reach on the same shaken battalion, and charges the moment yours waver.
Reading a company. Over its head are its name, its number and a strength bar; the card at the bottom carries morale, fatigue and the reload with their readouts. Under an enemy building being put to the torch, a bar shows what is left of it.
Rallying. A broken company runs for the nearest refuge — your village, a barracks, a township or a hamlet you hold — and re-forms the moment it gets there, under your hand again. Out in the open it rallies only if it still has half its men.
Building. Nothing is raised, and no work goes on, within about 140 paces of an enemy body: stand a company on a burned farm and it stays burned.
Torching. Right-click an enemy building with foot or horse selected and they march to its yard; standing there with no defender near, they fire it — brands fly, it burns, and in half a minute it comes down. Guns lay only on what your side can see, and only within a gunner's eye (about 340 paces, 440 for rockets) unless you lay them by hand or bombard a point of ground.
Setting up a war. The Conquest page sets the country before it is built: the map style (open lowlands, highlands, riverlands, the pass, the forest, or a random draw), its size, a seed (the same seed, style and size give the same country again), the number of hamlets, both sides' colours, the enemy's difficulty and pace, the starting stores and the season.
Batteries lay their own pieces on whatever you point them at and correct on the fall of shot — or take the lay yourself: elevation and charge, straight ahead, so wheel the battery to bear. Delete returns the lay to the crews. Bombard ground (the button on the battery card, O, or Ctrl+right-click on the ground) lays the battery on a point of ground, seen or not, and it keeps shelling it until cleared — for a wood or a village you suspect is held. A battery that cannot bear wheels to face it. A moving battery limbers up and cannot fire.
Round shot ricochets through everything in its lane and shakes every body it plows through, a column or a square worst of all; canister is a cone of musket balls that is murderous inside fifty paces and still tells at its full reach (85 paces for a 6-pounder, 110 for a 12-pounder), so a charge into loaded guns from the front empties saddles. The crews hold their canister for horse coming at them rather than spend it on round shot at long range. The 12-pounder's heavier ball plows a deeper lane and its canister sweeps a whole front; the howitzer's shell bursts among men behind walls and rattles any body it lands in. In Conquest every round burns coal.
A war is fought in one of two countries, chosen when it begins: the Low Countries — hedgerows and poplar lines, oak and beech woods, stone and half-timbered villages under red tile, a church spire — or the Eastern Seaboard — hardwood forest in autumn colour, split-rail fences, white clapboard farms and red barns, a steepled meeting house, rocky ridges. The farmed lowland is a patchwork of pasture, crop, plough and fallow either way.
Farms need fertile ground (the rich green lowland); lumber camps stand by a wood; iron mines and the foundry on iron outcrops in the hills; coal mines on coal seams higher up. Resource works may stand any distance from the village, so long as a road can reach them. Villagers fill the works on their own; the rest idle on the green. Enlisting takes men from the works when the green is empty — the newest works go short-handed first, and the ledger (J, or 📊) shows where the hands are. Recruits on the rolls and soldiers under arms still need housing. Farms, lumber camps and mines can be improved twice from their card: more hands, more out of each — and the building shows it.
Everyone eats. The village grows while it is fed and has room. The tax, set at the village, is your main gold: at the usual 30% every villager pays about a gold a minute, and a heavier tax pays more but slows growth and, above 45%, stirs the people. A market sells surplus food for a little more. Housing is a choice: cottages are cheap and breed (+4% growth each, up to +20%), a villa pays a wealth tax of 12 gold a minute and an estate 30 and calms its district, and a new village houses 170 cheaply but crowds and stirs them. Too much gold in the treasury for the people to spend and every gold price climbs — spend it or lower the tax.
Barracks, stables and the foundry enlist villagers one at a time (guns are cast one at a time with their crew). The first recruit forms a company in the yard that takes every order at once; every man after him joins the company of his kind standing in the yard. March it away and the next recruit starts a fresh one. M merges companies of one kind; K splits one. A unit beside its own buildings can be disbanded back into the village. The barracks also raise cheap Landwehr and, once improved with a Grenadier school, grenadiers; the stables raise lancers and, once improved with Heavy remounts, cuirassiers; the foundry casts horse artillery and Congreve rocket frames besides the field guns.
An enemy company beside a building with none of yours near burns it; a village so held for forty seconds falls, and the war with it. Cliffs are impassable; the bridges are the crossings, and the choke points.
Make a battlefield on the Custom battles page: name it, choose a size (small, medium or large), a country, and what to start from — open meadow, rolling hills, a river valley with its bridges, ford, villages and woods, or flat and empty ground. It opens in the map builder, the battlefield itself in 3-D, rebuilt a moment after every change.
Ground: Raise, Lower, Level (to the height where the stroke began), Smooth, and Pond, which digs below the waterline. Water: draw a River point by point and finish it with a double-click or Enter (run it off the edge of the map); put Bridges and Fords on it. Field: Roads, Hedges, Walls and Fences are drawn the same way; Woods paints trees and Clear takes them away; Village sets one down. Armies: choose yours or theirs, the kind of unit and its veterancy, and click to place it — up to sixteen units a side. Select picks up a unit, village, bridge or ford to drag it; R turns a unit; Delete removes whatever is selected.
The view: WASD or the arrows pan, so does dragging with the right button; Q and E turn, as does dragging with the middle button (which also tilts); the wheel zooms. [ and ] size the brush. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo. Battle settings holds the enemy commander's difficulty, the season, the hour, the weather, whether the lowland is farmed (standing corn hides foot lying in it), and the country.
A battlefield is kept in this browser as you work. It can be downloaded as a file and opened again anywhere, and with an Apex account it can go in one of three cloud slots. Fight this battle plays it: your units stand where you put them, the enemy is the commander AI, and the battle ends when one side has nothing left that fights. A broken unit runs for its own edge of the field. Nothing carries over; fight it again or change it whenever you like.
The catalogue, at period strength. Prices are the campaign's; in Conquest men are enlisted one at a time.
Four presets — Low for a laptop with no graphics card, Medium for most machines, High for a gaming card, Ultra for a strong one — and every knob behind them. Far-off men are drawn as blocks and small ground detail is dropped as you zoom out; the two distance knobs set where, man by man, measured from the camera. Hold frame rate lowers the render scale (and then the shadows) a step at a time while the game runs slowly and gives it back when there is room. Color chooses the filmic look or the classic one; Sky a sky with a sun and drifting clouds, or a plain graded one.