Idle Dominion

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.

MARCH · BREAK · HOLD

BREAK. You send a wave at the wall and it lands whether or not you are watching. The first wall falls in about a quarter of an hour. The last one takes days. What you cannot do is hurry it, and what you never have to do is sit there.

HOLD. Every castle you take starts its own yard from nothing — lumber, stone, iron, a forge, a workshop, houses that pay rent. Buildings are local; the purse is shared. A holding you have not opened in three castles is still cutting timber for the siege you are watching.

MARCH. An army walks to the next castle, in real hours. Bring more than the minimum and the road is shorter.

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.

STEWARDS Put somebody on a building and it collects itself, for ever. That is the promise the whole middle of the game is built on: a realm that keeps working while you are not looking.

DEEDS Eighteen things worth having done, from your first wall to a realm where every holding runs without you. They are the near horizon in a campaign whose far one is twenty-eight castles away.

ONE ADVERT, AND YOU HAVE TO GO LOOKING FOR IT Nothing plays between screens. Nothing interrupts a siege. There is a single row in the store that hands you the same chest the timer gives you, without the four hours — four a day, if you want them. Ignore it for the whole campaign and the game is exactly the same game.

NO ENERGY BARS. NO TIMER ASKING FOR MONEY. Gold 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.

NO ACCOUNT AND NO SIGN-IN Your campaign lives on your device and follows you between your own devices through your iCloud. There is no server of ours, and there is nothing to log in to.

NOTHING ASKS TO TRACK YOU There is no permission box here, because there is nothing to grant. The one advert is not personalised — it is not chosen from anything you did in another company's app, and no identifier from this game is linked to one. That was a choice, and it cost what personalised adverts pay.