Hold the line until the ceasefire

Iron Wall Protocol is a hybrid of real-time strategy and tower defense about holding a border. Most of the time you defend it. Sometimes you go and hit back. You run one sector for a small nation called Kav. Across the line, the Ash Front keeps testing you: rocket salvos, suicide drones, infiltration teams with wire cutters, tunnels that surface where you least want them. They don't need to beat you. They need you to bleed slowly, or to overreact and lose the world's patience.

What you do all day

• Draw the roads. Everything comes in from the town behind you: materiel, fresh personnel, the reserve convoys. Roads are free. What they connect isn't, and a cut road starves everything past it.
  
• Raise the wall. Fence lines and gates, sentry towers with a pop-up gun, missile batteries, minefields, a net over the one building you can't afford to lose.
  
• See first. Radar, thermal towers, seismic sensors for the tunnels, and one tethered observation balloon per match. If they shoot it down, that's it, it's gone. Contacts start as a question mark. Overlapping sensors turn them into targets.
  
• Run the standing force. Tanks, APCs, patrol rovers, rifle squads. Give a unit a patrol route and a quick-reaction role and it will answer a breach without waiting for you.
  
• Call up the reserves. Reserve packages arrive as an actual convoy through the rear gate. Nothing teleports. Drill them during the quiet hours and they show up faster and fight better.

Or go offensive

Sitting behind the wall forever is a slow way to lose. Switch to the Black posture and the map opens up: deep recon sweeps to find the enemy outposts hiding past the fence, air strikes on the ones you've marked, a gunship on call, counter-tunnel charges, and an airborne insertion of eight soldiers on any point you click. Every wave you've been weathering comes out of those outposts. Destroy all of them and the war ends early, on your terms. The catch: going offensive cuts your defensive Mandate regeneration by more than half, switching postures takes real time, and the enemy can catch you halfway through it.

Mandate is the real currency

Building and training cost materiel and personnel. The heavy calls cost Mandate: political permission that comes back slowly, at a rate set by your posture, and doesn't care how much materiel you have stockpiled. A strike costs Mandate. A reserve call-up costs Mandate. Declaring a critical situation, the moment every battery switches to fire-at-everything and the reserves come at double speed, costs 15 the first time, 30 the second, 60 the third. Let rockets through onto the town and the pressure comes back at you as slower supply and tighter limits. The enemy's whole plan is to make you spend it badly.

Seven days, then a ceasefire

A match runs on a compressed clock. Day one is probes. Day two, the first salvos. By day five they combine things: a drone screen while a team cuts the fence, then a salvo and a car rush through the gap. The last night is the storm, ten minutes of everything at once, and then the sirens stop. Survive to the ceasefire, or find every enemy outpost on the map and end it early.

Every campaign is a different war

Only the prologue is hand-built. Campaigns are generated from a seed: the terrain, the town, the threat mix, the twist written on each mission card. Three fronts open at once, wooded hills, a basalt plateau, desert flats, and you fight them in whatever order you want. The generator watches what you lean on and builds the next mission against it. Same seed, same war, every time.

Also

• Skirmish mode: one generated mission, a few toggles, go.
  
• Commander profiles with ranks, a medal rack, and a flag that flies on your HQ.
  
• Flat-shaded low-poly art with no textures, made to run on an old laptop and still read clearly when a lot is happening.
  
• Made by one person in Godot.