The Citadel Must Hold Press Kit

Short description

Build a fortress, command your army, and survive escalating Monster Tides in a fantasy base-building RTS. Explore the wilderness with your hero, claim Places of Power, and shape every run through powerful Oaths and Decrees.

Longer description

Build a fortress-city, explore a dangerous wilderness, and hold against increasingly deadly Monster Tides. The Citadel Must Hold is a base-building survival RTS where pausable real-time battles, hero-led exploration, and powerful choices shape every run. It sits between They Are Billions, Heroes of Might & Magic, and Against the Storm.

Build Your Citadel

Grow a settlement around the Citadel heart. Secure resources, expand production, train soldiers, and surround your city with walls, gates, and defense towers. Every expansion makes you stronger, but gives you more ground to protect.

Explore and Claim Power

Send your hero into the fog-covered wilderness between Monster Tides. Discover valuable resources and mysterious Places of Power, defeat their guardians, and choose your reward. Each Place of Power offers different rewards - some grant monsters that fight for you, some strengthen your hero, army, or buildings, and some reshape the map itself.

Survive the Monster Tides

Between Tides the world is calm: build, explore, and prepare for the coming Tide. Position your hero and soldiers at critical chokepoints, garrison your towers, reinforce threatened walls.

Then the horns sound and the wilderness descends upon your gates. Every Tide is larger and more dangerous than the last. Pause the battle to assess the field, issue orders, and respond when monsters break through. Adapt when your defenses fail, and hold the Citadel against everything the world sends at it.

Shape Every Run

Begin each game by choosing a Founding Oath that changes what you can build and how you fight. Make your hero legendary, but give up the ability to train other units. Empower your army, but abandon walls entirely. Or choose a less restrictive blessing and build around its strengths.

After every Monster Tide you survive, select a Rally Decree to reinforce your strategy, cover a weakness, or transform how your forces fight.

Key features

• Build, wall, and hold: Grid-based construction with drag-to-build walls, gates, garrisoned towers, and an economy of seven resources fed by deposit-based extraction.
• Survive the Monster Tides: Escalating waves strike from shifting directions, with 16+ monster types forming hordes that probe your walls for a breach.
• Command a hero and armies: Lead a leveling hero with spells, skills, and exploration rewards; when they fall, they are wounded, not lost.
• Claim Places of Power: Discover landmarks guarded by monsters - shrines, crypts, goblin camps, ancient towers - each with its own rewards and mechanics.
• Shape each run with Oaths and Decrees: A run-defining Oath at the start and a new Decree after every survived Tide keep each run distinct.
• Explore a living map: Seed-based procedural terrain of forests, mountains, and lakes, with fog of war rendered as drifting cloud.

About the developer

The Citadel Must Hold is the debut game of Klenisho Games, a solo developer handling design, code, and art integration in Unity. It grew out of a love for classic base-defense RTS and hero-driven strategy, and aims to bring the two together with a clear, readable presentation.