A campaign RTS that runs in a browser tab
Oathband
A warband you raise, a country you cross, and battles of a few thousand individually simulated men that you fight by hand. Mount & Blade's campaign over Total War's battles, with classic RTS controls, in pixel art.
Access is by invitation — you will be asked for an email address at the door.
What it is
A campaign
A generated country of realms, settlements, roads, prices, wages, food and weather. Parties trade, patrol, raid and go to war without you. Ride between towns, take work, hire men, hold land — or take a crown.
A battle
Up to a few thousand soldiers, each one simulated: his own target, his own nerve, his own corpse. Six formations, cavalry charges with real impact, arrow ballistics, high ground, fire, and a morale model that breaks a line long before it is killed.
A year that adds up
Survivors, wages, promotions and the dead all fold back into the roster. The men who lived are the men you march tomorrow.
One campaign year, one warband, one player. There is no multiplayer and no live service.
What is actually in it
- A world with mechanical weight. Winter costs a fifth of your marching and a third more grain; fog shortens a bowshot and narrows how much of the field a company can weigh. Roads are a graph rather than a decoration, and a dangerous one can be ambushed.
- Five realms and the outlaws. Names, arms and borders come from the seed. Realms fall out and make up on their own, and territory is a wash under the map — drawn only for the ground you have actually found.
- What you know, and what you don't. A settlement is a grey shape with a question mark until you ride within sight of it. Battles you did not witness are reported at faction level.
- A warband that is yours. Name it, roll its arms, pick a livery, choose an origin. Your captain has a face, a level and twelve skills. He can be wounded, he can die, and his best lieutenant inherits.
- Land, and losing it. Do work for a realm and you are granted a fief: a garrison you pay for, walls you can raise, a market that pays you back. Secede and become your own realm.
Nothing on disk
There are no art files in this project. The spritesheet, the tileset, the battle maps, the world map, the heraldry and every sound are generated from a seed the moment the page loads — which is why it opens in a tab with no download, no launcher and no install.
The simulation runs headless and deterministic, so the same seed and the same orders replay identically. Every picture on this page was made by driving the real game in a headless browser and photographing it, one command, from the seed it names.