FreeLances: Blood for Profit

Plan the battle, then watch it

Merciless autobattler action. There are no dice, so the ghosts don't lie. Then the battle plays itself. If it goes wrong, it was your plan.

A siege can take days. Each dawn you fight on the same field, among your dead, at a gate as broken as you left it. The enemy has new men and a new plan.

Both lords are hiring

A Bishop and a Duke are at war over a march on the kingdom's edge. The King wants no war there, so they hire one. Work for either lord, or both: storm castles, raid towns, ambush grain carts.

The trade

• Several battles at once. Up to four captains, each battle in its own tab.

• Reinforcements between battles, from the country round the field: ladder crews at a castle, handgonners in a town.

• Wages and winter. Pay the men every 5 days, or a tenth of every unit deserts. Out of supply, men eat what they carry, then leave. The snow creeps south every day.

• Scars and names. A man wounded in a won battle rises a rank and earns a name. When he falls, you learn what killed him and how many he took with him.

• Ransom or the rope. A captured knight buys his life with Silver, or buys you a lord's favour with his neck.

• A new war from every seed, on three maps. Share a seed, or play the Daily Seed.

It gets ugly

Hundreds of men to a field. Horsemen hit a line of crossbowmen at the gallop and ride on through. Arrows stand in the turf, and now and then a head comes off. Blood and gore each switch off in Settings.

Somebody has to do the dying. You hire men for that.