NULLFALL — A hundred turn-based sectors against a machine mind

What is NULLFALL — A hundred turn-based sectors against a machine mind

NULLFALL is a turn-based tactics game played on a grid small enough to read at a glance and tight enough that every action point matters. You are one operative against a machine intelligence that holds the grid, and each sector is a single self-contained fight. Moving costs one action point, firing costs two, and you begin with four. There is no fog of war and no hidden information: everything you need to solve the turn is on screen, which makes a bad turn entirely your own fault.

Four machine classes rotate through the hundred sectors and each one breaks a different habit. The Husk-Frame is slow, armoured and lethal in melee, so it punishes standing still. The Stalker-Wing fires at range and needs a clear line of sight, so it punishes open ground. The Mimic-2 reassembles once after you destroy it, so it punishes spending your last action point on a kill. The Sentry Post never moves at all, which makes it the easiest to ignore and the most expensive to ignore. Between every sector comes a system breach: a routing puzzle where you carry a signal from entry to core before a trace timer runs out, and the reward is your choice of repair, an EMP cell or points. A Nexarch node awakens every ten levels.

How to play

1. Click a lit tile to move there — one action point per tile — and click a red-marked hostile to fire for two. Firing has a range of four tiles and needs line of sight. When the action point counter reaches zero, end your turn.
2. Rubble and walls are cover. An enemy shooting at a target in cover does half damage, so a turn that ends beside a wall is almost always better than a turn that ends one tile closer.
3. The EMP blast costs three action points and one cell, and stuns everything in a three-by-three square for a turn. Cells are scarce and the Nexarch Prime shrugs the stun off entirely, so treat them as a way out of a bad position rather than as damage.
4. Energy nodes on the floor give two extra action points to whoever steps on them. They are usually placed in the open, which is exactly where you do not want to be — deciding whether to take one is most of the tactical game.

Strategies that work

• Count backwards from the end of your turn. Four action points is two shots, or one shot and two moves. Before you spend the first, decide which tile you intend to be standing on when the enemy phase begins, because that tile is what decides how much damage you take — not how much you dealt.
• Break line of sight instead of running away. The Stalker-Wing cannot fire through a wall, and a single tile of wall between you and it is worth more than three tiles of distance. On open maps, the shortest safe route is usually a zigzag between rubble, not a straight retreat.
• Never kill a Mimic-2 with your last action point. It gets back up once, and if you have nothing left it gets a free turn at point-blank range. Cut it down with two points to spare, or leave it and kill something else first.
• Sentry Posts are worth the detour. They never move, which means they are the one enemy whose behaviour you can plan around for the entire fight — and the one enemy that will keep shooting you for the entire fight if you do not. Break its line or spend the EMP and finish it.
• In the breach minigame, trace from the core backwards, and do it before you touch anything: there is a trace timer. The entry point usually offers two or three plausible routes and only one avoids every firewall, but the core almost always has a single approach. Working from the fixed end turns a branching puzzle into a nearly linear one.

A little history

Turn-based tactics on a small grid is one of the oldest ideas in strategy games, and its central problem has never changed: how do you stop the player from simply standing behind cover forever. NULLFALL answers with energy nodes. Two extra action points is enough to change what a turn can contain, and the nodes are always placed where cover is not, so the game is continually asking you to trade safety for capability. The machine classes exist to stop any one answer from working twice, and the routing puzzle after every sector exists to let the player think without a clock. The setting — a single operative, a hundred sectors, a machine mind that summons reinforcements — is there to explain the numbers rather than the other way round. In the daily challenge the sector layouts and the enemy rosters are built from the day's date, so everyone fights the same hundred fights.

Frequently asked questions