Close the Sky

The war is fought over the sky, and won on the ground under it.

You run a nation's war machine from a single side-on cross-section: industry and air defence on the surface, everything you care about dug in beneath it. There is no fog to march through and no units to shepherd. There is a strip of ground, a sky above it, and an enemy doing the same thing to you at the same time.

Dig, and decide what is worth burying

Every plot goes three levels down. Depth costs x2, x4 and x8 in money and time, and only penetrating warheads reach it. A GBU-57 is the sole conventional way into a deep bunker. But batteries and radars cannot be buried at all: they need line of sight to the sky. So the things that keep you alive are the things that have to stand in the open.

Interceptors are ammunition

Batteries fire from the national stockpile. A SAM site with nothing on the shelf is scenery, and the air-defence panel marks it DRY in red. Every round you produce needs warehouse space, and each type takes a different amount of it: a shell is one crate, a ballistic missile five, a nuclear warhead ten. A line that finishes a round with nowhere to put it jams at 100% and holds up everything queued behind it.

Your ammunition dump is a weapon pointed at you

A warehouse that dies takes its stock with it, and the stock goes off. The blast radius and the damage both scale with how full it was: an empty depot is inert, a full one reaches six slots either side and will chain-detonate any other full depot it catches. Burying one halves the reach per level. It is the best target on the enemy's base, and the worst thing to put beside your own power plant.

You never see the truth, only your last look at it

The enemy base starts completely dark. Recon drones photograph what they overfly and a satellite station sweeps on a timer, and from then on you are working from a snapshot that ages while they rebuild. The view fades from white to amber as it goes stale.

Strikes are aimed at places, not at buildings. A missile hits whatever occupies that cell when it arrives, which may be nothing, or may be something new. Stale intel costs you missiles. Decoy sites exist to make that worse.

Aim it yourself

Arm a weapon, switch to the enemy base, and the cursor becomes a gunsight: aim box, blast footprint, what your intel believes is in that cell, the damage profile, and whether any battery you know about can engage it. Click to fire, and keep clicking to saturate.

Warheads are not interchangeable

Every munition carries a profile across four channels (structure, personnel, electronics and incendiary), following what the real system is built for. A TOS-1A guts a garrison and barely marks the walls. CHAMP burns out a sector's electronics without knocking anything down. Weapons carry their real designations, with the full profile on hover.

Fifty-one technologies, five doctrines

A full-screen tech tree across detection, air defence, strategic, strike and reconnaissance. Hover a node and everything that is not one of its prerequisites dims, so the chain you would have to research first reads as a single path. Research stalls if your labs lose power.

An opponent with a plan

The enemy runs one of three doctrines, chosen by the match seed and announced in the log: Swarm floods the sky with cheap drones and wins on the exchange rate, Fortress digs in behind layered SAM and waits you out, Blitz races to heavy missiles and hits before your defences exist. Difficulty changes only how fast it thinks. The AI gets no extra resources on any setting.

Two players, one war

Multiplayer runs the same war against a person: one nation each, no pause, the war clock locked to 1x. Both machines run the whole simulation and only orders cross the wire, so the game plays as sharply over a bad connection as a good one. Every five seconds the clients compare a hash of their entire state.

You do not win by taking ground

There is no ground to take. You win when the enemy's will to fight reaches zero, and you lose when yours does. Will drains from civilian casualties, lost buildings and lost strategic targets. The command bunker alone is worth 30. Nuclear weapons crater the target's will and dent your own.

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