Steel Umbrella

Steel Umbrella is a real-time air defense strategy game played on a satellite map of the Earth. By day, you place launchers, nets and radar around a city. By night, the drones and missiles come out of the dark, and every one that gets through puts part of the city's lights out.

Build by day, fight by night

Day and night cross the map the way they cross the real globe. While the sun is up, you have time to think: where the attacks will come from, what each launcher can reach, which site you can afford to leave open. Once night falls, your layout is set. Only your mobile crews can still move, and the raid is on its way.

Find them in the dark

You only see what your defenses can see. A launcher shows the contacts inside its range. The radar's sweep leaves a fading mark wherever it crosses something. Press G to ping: every contact the ring reaches lights up for four seconds, and your launchers lock on at once and hit more often. Then the radar needs 45 seconds to recharge, so choose the moment.

Every hit costs something

Each city depends on three sites: a civic center, a power station and a factory. They feed three ratings:

• Trust: the people's faith in you. It falls with every hit on homes and power. At zero, you lose.

• Functionality: power and industry. It sets how fast your defenses set up, reload and repair.

• War power: what the factory can supply. It sets how well your launchers hit and how many reloads reach them each night. Below 50, your upgrades lock.

Damage carries over from night to night, and repairs only come at dawn. Survive ten nights to win.

Choose how to hold

• Four defenses: launchers with long reach and limited missiles; nets that catch drones over a site; early-warning radar; and pickups, mobile machine-gun crews that hunt drones and can be driven anywhere, even mid-raid.

• A choice every three nights: one card out of three. New defenses, upgrades, emergency items, or, in the United States, a new region to defend.

• A talent tree with three branches: Intercept, Shield and Home Front. You earn a point every night.

• Four emergency items: repair every site, reload every launcher at once, a net on every site for one night, or an early warning that shows where tonight's raid will launch from.

About the setting

Steel Umbrella takes place over real countries, some of them under air attack today. It is a game about defense only: you never launch an attack, and in every theater the job is the same, protecting the city beneath the sky. Every site in the game is fictional, and no real weapon system is named. The borders are there for orientation; they are not front lines.