01 / Begin Your Campaign
Choose New Game, name your operation beneath the introduction, then press Enter Command when you are ready. The transmission waits for you.
Keep Britain alive for 60 days and finish with national civil order above 60%. Command collapses if no loyalist cities remain, the surviving population falls below 50,000 or national order drops below 12%. Infrastructure repairs are useful, but there is no repair quota.
Progress saves automatically on this device. Resume returns to your saved campaign; starting a new campaign replaces an existing save after confirmation.
02 / Read the Command Screen
Start with the national statistics and incoming transmissions at the top. Red reports flag serious events. Scroll the log for earlier messages; Latest returns to the newest one. Click Survivors for cities ranked by population, or Citizens lost for the recorded city death breakdown.
- Select a city on the map or in the command directory to inspect it. The regional tabs hold your orders.
- Click the city again, click empty map space, or press Escape to deselect it.
- Scroll to zoom and left-drag to pan within the bounded UK theatre. Weather lines stay anchored to map coordinates. Fit restores the default view.
- Choose an overlay to inspect a threat. No overlay or × clears it. Soldier figures show troop numbers; red fists identify rebel-held cities and purple biohazards identify mutant-held cities.
03 / First Orders: Food, Water and Jobs
Before advancing the first day, inspect each city’s food and water reserves. Hover over either stock figure, or focus it with the keyboard, to see daily production, consumption and the net change.
In the Civil tab, assign workers and set rations. One food unit and one water unit support 1,000 people for a day at standard rations. Farms, pumps and clinics share the available workforce; understaffed facilities work less effectively.
Restricted rations conserve supplies but reduce happiness. Generous rations cost more and improve happiness. Prioritise cities whose reserves are falling: shortages kill residents and raise disease risk. Employment also supports happiness.
04 / Move Supplies Before They Run Out
Open the Supplies tab in a loyal city with spare stock. Select a destination, choose food or water, set a quantity and dispatch it. Supplies leave immediately and arrive after the journey, so send help before the receiving city runs dry.
Arrows show the route and days remaining. Travel is distance based: about 130 km per day, or 200 km per day from a repaired truck depot. Belfast routes add a ferry day. Civilian supplies cannot be dispatched from or sent to rebel-held cities.
05 / Earn Salvage and Rebuild
Once essential jobs are staffed, assign Salvage recovery crews in the Civil tab. Each crew uses 1,000 available people and earns 8 salvage per day, or 12 with a repaired truck depot. Do not take essential workers away from food, water and clinics.
Spend salvage in Repairs. Buildings take two days to complete. Start with whichever shortage or risk is most urgent.
| Facility | Cost | Effect |
|---|
| Farm | 45 | Produces food when staffed. |
| Water pump | 40 | Produces water when staffed. |
| Housing | 30 | Supports 3,000 residents; reduces overcrowding. |
| Clinic | 55 | Staffed clinics reduce disease and help contain outbreaks. |
| Regional HQ | 65 | Improves civil order. |
| Barracks | 60 | Recruits 20 troops per day, up to 1,500. |
| Truck depot | 55 | Speeds convoys, adds 3 daily salvage and improves recovery-crew yield. |
| Nuclear bunker | 80 | Shelters up to 5,000 residents; reduces their exposure and civilian losses. |
06 / Contain Disease and Fallout
Keep supplies available, provide enough housing and staff clinics. High disease risk can trigger outbreaks: respond to red emergency transmissions before losses escalate.
Radiation is a fictional 0–100 index. London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh begin most irradiated. Radiation decays gradually; wind carries contamination and rain deposits airborne fallout.
Bunkers reduce sheltered residents’ exposure by 75%. Distribute Nuclear Protection Gear costs 35 salvage for +25% coverage; equipped residents receive 60% less exposure. Gear coverage falls by 5 percentage points each day as equipment wears out. Repair nuclear bunkers for lasting protection: bunker capacity does not decay. These measures reduce harm rather than removing ground contamination.
Use Wind & rain direction for pressure contours, curved wind paths, rain hotspots and amber airborne fallout from continental sources. Weather changes each day. Use Radiation / fallout for ground contamination. Topography / impact craters shows generalised 100-metre contours and enlarged fictional crater rings, not measured crater sizes.
07 / Maintain Happiness, Liberty and Order
After securing essentials, check happiness and civil order. Low happiness weakens order; low liberty increases unrest. A city can rebel when order falls below 30%.
Use Appeals for radio broadcasts and poster campaigns. Broadcasts and posters improve morale, but repeated propaganda erodes liberty. Assemblies restore liberty. Open the Liberty tab to review local freedoms and hold an assembly.
Public execution generates a named report and costs one civilian life. It adds 8 happiness and 3 order, removes 10 liberty and is limited to once per city per day. The death is included in your casualty archive.
08 / Deploy Troops and Reclaim Cities
Move troops from a loyal city through Security, or right-drag its marker onto another city and confirm the troop count. Troops leave immediately and become available only on arrival. Longer routes take longer.
Click a troop movement line to inspect cancellation. Before the halfway cutoff, cancellation returns troops to their origin. The cutoff is half the travel time rounded down, with a minimum of one day: a three-day deployment cannot be cancelled the following day.
Troops contain mutants. An Anti-mutant patrol requires 300 troops, costs 10 salvage and loses 10 troops. Keep enough troops to defend cities at risk of rebellion.
Rebel-held cities lock civilian orders, supply convoys, production, construction and salvage income. Deploy reinforcements from a loyal city, then choose Reclaim City. Victory restores civilian command.
Battles start both sides at 100 fighting strength. Press Attack for each combat phase. Larger forces improve your chances; tactical reports describe advances and retreats. Victory restores control; defeat leaves the city overrun and surviving troops retreat where possible. Battle reports record troop and rebel deaths separately from civilian losses.
09 / Advance and Repeat
Once you have issued your orders, press Advance Day. The simulation resolves production, rations, construction, convoys, weather and threats. Complete active battles before advancing again.
Each morning, read new transmissions, inspect falling reserves and rising risks, staff vital facilities, send relief early and review garrisons. Then advance again. You win on day 60 with at least 50,000 survivors and national order above 60%.
10 / Review and Export Your Campaign
At the end, the Timeline shows the training-scheme pass or fail result, daily statistics, every recorded transmission and battle casualties. Reopen it with the Timeline button.
Set your campaign name and choose Export PDF to download the Civil Defence report. Older saves can only include retained historical messages; missing records cannot be reconstructed. Offline editions also offer save export and import in Settings.
11 / Adjust Your Terminal
Open Menu → Settings to change language, UI colour, ambient hum and interface volume. The background stays black. Audio starts after your first interaction.
Screen flicker adds CRT scanlines, brightness flicker and a slow rolling band. Switch it off at any time; the preference is saved on this device. A separate Vertical traces toggle controls faint lines drifting upward. Reduced-motion preferences disable the effect by default.
Fictional scenario. Coastline data: Natural Earth, public domain. The map uses a Lambert conformal conic projection; its scale is approximate. Elevation contours: NASA/METI ASTER GDEM, sampled through OpenTopoData and generalised for gameplay. National borders: Eurostat / European Commission via geoBoundaries, CC BY 4.0; simplified and projected. Fist icon: Twemoji by Twitter and contributors, recoloured, CC BY 4.0.