Skirmish and Campaign
The ways to play alone: the voiced tutorial, generated skirmishes against the Crimson AI at four difficulties, and custom campaigns strung together from your own maps.
These are the ways to play on your own — the tutorial, a straight fight against the computer, or a guided series of missions.
The tutorial: The First Fold, Refolded
New Game on the main menu starts the tutorial. You are the Prime — the Silk Sovereign — and the Herald walks up to you on the field and teaches one thing at a time across eleven beats: folding workers, gathering, raising the Press and keeping it supplied, penning patterns, walling, and weathering your first Ink Storm. Every line is voiced and shown as text, the briefing film sets the scene, and the whole thing takes about fifteen minutes. It is an authored Use Map Settings map, built with the same triggers you can use yourself.
Skirmish
A Skirmish is standard RTS: build a base, grow an economy, and destroy the enemy. You win by destroying every enemy’s Palace or Prime — losing either eliminates that player.
Skirmish maps are generated: pick a size (56, 72, 88 or 104 tiles — the game suggests one for the player count), a biome (meadow, desert, tundra, wetland, volcanic, autumn), a water style (river, lakes or cove), and whether the map is symmetric for a fair start. Or play any ⚔ Melee map from the Library.
You face the Crimson AI, which runs a real economy and build order: it gathers, expands, walls, fields aircraft and Prophets, shelters from storms, and at higher difficulties prays a storm still when one bears down on its base. Difficulty runs from Easy to Brutal and is set per computer player, so you can mix easier and harder opponents in the same match. Pick your province — ⛩ Pious or 冥 Profane — and the AI’s, in the lobby.
Campaign
A Campaign is a series of custom maps played in order, launched from the Campaign menu:
- Per-mission briefings set up each map before you play it.
- Unlock rules gate progression — after the previous mission, after any earlier mission, or always open.
Because missions are just maps, a campaign can mix Melee maps and scripted scenarios.
Building your own
Skirmish maps and campaign missions alike are made in the Map Builder. The author chooses whether a map is ⚔ Melee or ⚡ Use Map Settings when creating it; the Campaign Designer strings them together.