Idle Dominion

March · Break · Hold

You do not fight. You invest, and you watch.

Idle Dominion is a siege you win with a supply chain. A wall comes down because a workshop a hundred leagues away has been building trebuchets all night — and the trebuchets exist because somebody widened an iron mine a week ago.

Your works are the only thing that carries

Twelve siege works — a battering ram up to a bombard, a levy up to your own household guard. Build one with what the workshop and the training grounds made, level it with gold, and it stands on the field for the rest of the campaign. Everything else about a castle is left behind when you take it. The ladder is not.

Twenty-eight castles, in any order

The map is uneven and there is no way to skip a road. A crag wants siege weapons; a plain wants men, and your works are checked against both before you set out. Where you go next is worth about a third of the whole campaign.

A realm that works while you are not looking

Put a steward on a building and it collects itself, for ever. That is the promise the middle of the game is built on: eight holdings, all of them running, none of them waiting on you.

What is not in it

Gold can be bought, and it sharpens what you have built. It cannot build it: a new engine on the field costs materiel, and materiel comes from a workshop you widened, fed by a mine you widened first. Nothing you can buy skips that, and nothing you can buy shortens a wave that is already in the air.