Most auto-battlers are a duel. You build, someone else builds, the two boards collide, one of you wins. Ringfort starts from a different shape: a ring. Six forts sit in a circle, and every round all six fight at the same time. Your left neighbour hits you, your right neighbour hits you, and you hit both of them back.
This post is about why we chose that shape and what it changed. Everything else in the game follows from it.
Four ideas in the pot
Ringfort began as a short list of ideas:
- Five to ten seconds of footage should be enough to see why it’s fun. Any round, any fight. Social video is how small games get found now, so the game has to make good clips on its own.
- No tutorial. The path through the game should be so clear that you learn it by playing.
- A ring of players, joined end to end. Everyone is both attacker and target. Win, and you discover you’re standing in a bigger ring, which gives you an endless mode for free.
- Opponents that grow. Most async games freeze an opponent’s power at one moment. A ring needs opponents who level up alongside you.
The ring was the idea that tied the others together. It’s the battlefield, it’s the progression, and it’s an image you recognise in one glance in a clip.
The version we threw away
An early proposal split your fort in two: a raiding party to hit the fort on one side, walls to hold off the fort on the other. On paper it was richer. Every item asked “attack or defend?”, aimed at two different opponents.
We cut it. Choosing between attack and defence is a natural source of agonising. Some agonising is good, but this kind gets in the way of the fun. So Ringfort has one lineup that fights both neighbours at once. It’s head-on combat, all the time. The hard decisions moved to where they belong: what to buy, and how to arrange it.
That became the rule for the whole design. Put the hard thinking in the build. Make the battle a payoff you get to watch.
Everyone fights at once
When all six forts fight at the same moment, timing starts to matter in ways a duel doesn’t have.
Damage lands when the projectile arrives, not when it’s fired. Different races throw things at different speeds: beasts are quickest at 0.2 seconds of travel, then humans (0.3), elves (0.4), dwarves (0.5), undead (0.6), and orcs, the slowest, at 0.8. Fire and poison take their own time, and soldiers march along the road between forts. If your target falls before your shot arrives, the shot misses. If you fall, anything you already fired still lands.
When a fort’s walls hit zero, it’s out, and the ring tightens: you now face whoever stood beyond it. Knocking out a neighbour isn’t a clean win. It brings you a new, often stronger, neighbour. The last fort standing is crowned and moves up.
You can see the fight coming
In a one-on-one auto-battler you usually build blind. In Ringfort, while you shop you can see what your neighbours are fielding this round. You have exactly two problems, both in plain view, and one set of eight wall slots to answer both.
The tools for that answer come in two families, and you can follow either one:
- Race bonds. Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Undead and Beasts each gain a rule at 3, 6 and 8 items of one race. Eight different items with six or more stars between them make a Legendary bond, and six duo bonds unlock combos between two races.
- Cross-race styles. Weapon, Shield, Fire, Poison, Control, Command, Repair and Economy items grant bonuses at 2, 4 and 6 of a type, whatever their race. Run several at once and they resonate.
Each item acts on its own cooldown: arrows, fire, poison, freezing foes, shields, repairs, boosting allies. You place them and then the battle plays itself.
Cattle
Ringforts are real. Tens of thousands of their remains still dot the Irish landscape: circular earthworks that once enclosed farmsteads. Ireland’s great epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, is literally a cattle raid, and in early Irish society cattle were how wealth was counted.
So in Ringfort you spend cattle to buy items. We didn’t need a heavy Irish setting, just the bones of one: forts on a ring, cattle as currency, and kingship that climbs from small to high.
Rings inside rings
Win a ring and you move up to the next one. From ring 2 on, everyone you face was crowned in another ring, and some of them are seasoned veterans. With three or two forts left, the fight turns into a showdown. Climb six rings to become High King.
We wanted the progression to feel like a camera pulling back: you win your valley and find out the valley was just one fort in something bigger.
About your opponents
Ringfort is asynchronous, so you never need anyone else online. To be upfront: for now, the forts you face are simulated player snapshots with made-up names, drawn at random from tens of thousands each run. We match them to your strength at the start of each ring, so a lucky draw doesn’t hand you an impossible elite. Once online play opens, they’ll be replaced by lineups left by real players.
The ten-second test
We keep coming back to the first idea: could a stranger understand a random ten-second clip? A ring of six forts, every one of them shooting at once, walls dropping and the ring closing in, passes that test better than anything else we tried. It’s the reason the game exists.
Ringfort is coming soon to Steam. The store page isn’t public yet. Follow @Fervo_Q7Q on X or our YouTube channel and we’ll post the wishlist link the day it goes live. More about the game is on the Ringfort page.