story mode
The Margin Wars — the TANKS campaign
Twelve missions, each with its own map, its own kit and its own problem. A campaign where the shape of the ground is half the fight — so no two of them are the skirmish map with the numbers turned up.
The campaign is not a second copy of the game with harder numbers. Each mission is data — an opening position, a catalogue of what you are allowed to build, a list of objectives and a list of ways to fail — handed to exactly the same simulation the skirmish runs on. What changes between missions is what each side is permitted to do, and the ground.
The twelve missions
1 · First Blood
issues: power plant, barracks, wire, gun turret, rifleman, rocket soldier
A squad holding a village square, with red coming in one man at a time from every side. The company relieves you when you are down to your last man — which is a promise and a threat in the same sentence.
2 · Hold the Line
issues: refinery, harvester
A base already built and no economy to run it. Survive four minutes of waves with exactly what you were given.
3 · The Ore Road
issues: tank factory, light tank
Build a refinery, bank 6,000 credits, and take the red outpost. The first mission that is actually about money.
4 · Break the Wire
issues: MCV, service depot
An impregnable fortress with no power plants inside it, and a lightly held power farm in the south that runs the whole thing. Take the farm. The fortress is genuinely not worth attacking, and the mission knows it.
5 · The Convoy
issues: radar dome, heavy tank
A canyon road with one wire fence across the middle of it. Escort an MCV to the town at the far end, unpack it, then hold the town for five minutes.
6 · Crossfire
issues: V2 launcher, tesla coil
Full base each, no tricks, no gimmick. Flatten red. If you want to know whether you have actually learned the game, it is this one.
7 · Thunder Line
issues: mammoth tank
Shell a fortified line flat from outside its range, then walk in and take the construction yard. Artillery is the mission.
8 · The Long Hour
issues: nothing new
Ten minutes in a fort with no construction yard. Nothing can be repaired and nothing can be replaced, so the coils and gun pits go down for good and you plug the gaps with troops. Hold it, and eight lifters come in over the walls.
9 · Two Fronts
issues: nothing new
An amphibious landing with no base at all — six craft, four helicopters, and one reserve if you get down to four men. You watch the landing craft come in before its contents walk off it.
10 · The Last Page
issues: nothing new
Everything unlocked on both sides. Red is rich and fortified. This is the skirmish you have been training for.
11 · Lights Out
issues: the commando — given, never buildable
Part one. One commando and a section of four against a rocket works ringed with thirty tesla coils. Eight uprated power plants north-west run all of them; take the farm down plant by plant and somewhere around the sixth, the works goes dark. Then get the commando through the gate. That is the whole win.
12 · The Inside Page
issues: nothing new
Part two, and it picks up where eleven stopped: inside the building. Blow both generators in the plant room, come up the cable gallery into a checkpoint whose coils have just gone out, take the plans off the satellite — then carry them back out of the one door the building has, with every alarm in it going.
What makes each one different
The ground
The skirmish map is one fixed, mirrored composition. That is fair, and it is completely wrong for a campaign, where the shape of the ground is half of what makes a mission its own fight. Every mission draws its own map from ridges, woods, villages and roads — and roads are carved after the rock and houses are made solid, so a street is a gap cut through a village rather than a line painted over it. Two roads through a village reads as a crossroads. Three demolishes it.
What each side may build
The sidebar only carries what the story has issued you, and the opponent has its own catalogue and its own list of things it will never put up. That last part matters: a mission whose objective is “destroy every rocket works” has to be able to say “and you may not simply build another one”.
Pressure, in two flavours
A push masses the army and sends it at your nearest building; it is the men who set off on it and nobody else, and it ends when it is spent. A raid sends a small party out on a clock regardless of what else is happening, and a raider that runs out of things to shoot goes and finds the next one. A base with only pushes goes quiet the moment one dies. A base with raids never stops being a problem.
Inside a building
The last mission is not a landscape. It is a floor plan, and it is cut rather than drawn: fill the sheet solid, then carve the rooms and corridors out of it, and whatever is left is wall. Everything that used to ask “is this open ground?” now asks “is this ground?”, because otherwise nothing could stand on its own floor.
Reading about it is slower than playing it.
TANKS runs in this browser tab. No download, no account, no launcher.
Questions people actually ask
Do I have to play the campaign in order?
Yes — finishing a level unlocks the next one, along with whatever kit that level issues. Progress is kept in your browser, and you can reset it from the campaign screen.
Can I save in the middle of a mission?
Yes. A mid-mission save carries the mission, the objectives you have ticked off and the wave the enemy has reached, so you can stop halfway through mission eight and come back to it.
How hard does it get?
Mission one is four men in a square. Mission ten is a rich, fortified opponent with the whole tech tree unlocked and no tricks left. The difficulty comes from what each side is allowed to build and how hard the enemy pushes, not from giving the AI free money.
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