A siege game in the manner of Vauban
Draw a bastioned fortress on a plan-relief map, man its walls, and watch a royal army besiege it by the book: trenches, three parallels, a breaching battery, mines and the storm. Hold out until the relief army arrives.
Free. No install. Your designs and chronicles are saved in your browser.
The besiegers are no mindless horde. They read your design, pick its weakest front and attack it the way Vauban taught.
Drag bastions, ravelins and hornworks into place, dig wet or dry ditches, and post cannon and musketeers on the walls.
Saps and parallels creep toward your weakest front. Sortie against the trench head or blow it up with a countermine.
Breaching batteries and ricochet fire pound the walls while miners tunnel beneath. Throw up retrenchments behind a breach.
Columns storm the breach in waves. Hold the citadel until the relief army appears, or watch the place fall.
Design a single fortress, guide a town through seventeen centuries, or dig up what is left of it.
Start from a square, pentagon or hexagon trace, a random landscape or a real city. An engineer's assessment scores your design out of 1,000 and a heatmap shows its weakest front. Run trial sieges, then lay siege for real with up to four armies.
From the Celtic oppidum to the age of Vauban, a town grows by itself while you fortify it. A siege comes every 10, 25 or 50 years. Lose, and most of your works are razed and buried under a new layer of earth.
When the chronicle ends, the archaeologists arrive. Slide through time, move an excavation pit across the site, cut a cross-section through the ground and find the oldest wall still standing.
Technology climbs slowly. Your troops keep the weapons they were raised with until you pay to re-arm them, and old stone darkens with age.
A wandering river. The Dreisam shifts its bed across the plain, sweeps away what stands in its way, and dries into fords in a drought.
Plague and fire. The Black Death can empty two thirds of the town and leave its old heart shunned for generations.
Raids on the churches. Every town needs a temple or church to pay taxes, and raiders come for them.
Kings and generals. Lose five times and the king builds you a new town. Win too often and a famous general takes command.
Wealth draws enemies. A rich treasury brings coalitions of armies from every side, and once in a millennium a great invasion.
Time and erosion. Ditches silt up, ruins crumble into mounds, and a long-lived town rises on its own hill.
Two historic sites are ready to rebuild and test, with terrain taken from real relief maps.
The town on the plain, the castle on the Schlossberg, the Black Forest all around. Both must fall before the place is taken, and the castle has only days of food.
The old town in a loop of the Doubs, Vauban's citadel across the neck, and the heights of Chaudanne and Bregille looking down on it.
Rivers, hills, marshes and mountains, surveyed fresh each time. Raise a castle on the heights for the advantage of plunging fire.
Will your walls still be standing?