I recently had the privilege of being part of the pre-alpha test for a game called Anvil Empires. It’s made by the same developers as Foxhole, Siege Camp, it’s a medieval, persistent world military battle simulator, surival crafting, MMO. There really aren’t a lot of games like it, to be perfectly honest, so it’s hard to describe.
Because there were no other games like it, when I first heard about it, my instinct was to actually play the developer’s first game, Foxhole, just so I could understand the bare bones of what Anvil Empires was going to be. I enjoyed my time in Foxhole for a couple of months and participated in a few of the wars, which take place over a real life period of over 30 days. Literally. I found myself gravitating toward the engineer class, helping build up fortresses, building turrets, focusing on the defense aspect. But the top down perspective just didn’t work for me for the gunplay. I’ve played games like Hell Let Loose and Over The Top, so it’s not that military sims don’t catch my interest. The top-down view just wasn’t it for Foxhole.
Anvil Empires is a totally different story, and I guess this is where this turns into more of a first impressions piece, because that’s really what this is. Tests for this game have been going on for at least a year, this first test I was in lasted 7 days. After it ends, the devs make some changes, and then another test starts the following month. I don’t have a full grasp of the entire game yet, and I’d rather be upfront about that than try to pass this off as something more definitive.
There isn’t much in the way of tutorials for Anvil Empires right now, which is understandable given its current state. Most information exists on the wiki, and if I’m being honest, I don’t think I read more than one page during the entire testing period, and that was only to try to understand housing upkeep.
When you start the game, you spawn naked outside of a town keep along with all the other players when the server starts, and everyone scatters like roaches. People start building up their houses and then begin building the walls around the towns. It takes about two or three days (irl) just to get supplies together, build up a defense, and get weapons and armor made for factions to be able to wage war. And that’s mostly done by big organized groups that have roles amongst each other and focus on certain aspects of the war.
I came at this as a solo player for the Ancients. Not that I wouldn’t be interested in clan play down the road, but I really wanted to experience the game on my own before I had people telling me how to play. At first, I was literally just helping people pick up logs and bring them to their sawbucks, not realizing these were clans doing their own thing. I thought, like in Foxhole, all these little instances of helping would add up to something. In Foxhole you grab your hammer and start repairing things, and you’re actively helping the battlefield.
Anvil Empires is different. It feels like you’re playing a survival crafting game first. After you’ve built yourself up from peasant to what I’ll call “citizenship,” having of your own basic gear, silver, and crafting mats, that’s when your contributions start to carry more weight. And even then, it doesn’t feel the same as Foxhole. I think this is something the developers are actively trying to balance, creating pipelines for solo players to feel effective while keeping the reward system in place for clans doing group activities. Right now the game is very heavily weighted toward the clan playstyle. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s what makes this type of game unique and builds the kind of community it does. But at this current rate solo play is not for the faint of heart.
My first days of testing, I spent mostly just walking around, examining what people were doing. Not a lot of fights were happening yet because everyone was still gathering supplies. I collected resources and figured out the crafting, and that was basically it.
When I logged back on a couple days later, the towns were already well built up and players were building homesteads, player built houses, not pre-set locations. I thought it was an opportunity to build my own. I found a spot outside of a city that didn’t look like it would be taken anytime soon and got to work. You choose whether to build inside or outside town limits, and that dictates what type of homestead you have. Inside town limits you can be a cook or a smithy. Outside, you are considered a wild homstead meant for farming. I chose inside town limits, thinking it would be easier.
Once you place your foundation, you have to quickly wall and roof it before it decays. The decay and upkeep system is one of the more controversial aspects of this test. It currently costs silver to keep your house afloat, and if you don’t have silver in your house’s storage, the building slowly falls apart. The amount of silver required is honestly a lot, and from what I understand it scales with the size of your building. I, of course, didn’t know that, so I built mine about six tiles big, which is huge for a one-person smithy.
I tried to funnel as much silver as I could into it by doing bounties, which the developers were pushing players toward as a reliable source of income outside of the player marketplace. I did my best to keep up, but I just couldn’t.
Then I noticed something. If you run out of silver, the decay doesn’t actually start until after a grace period. So in theory, you could drop one silver in your house, wait for decay to begin, drop another silver, let the house repair itself, and the grace period resets. I don’t know if that’s a real trick or just something I stumbled onto in a twelve-hour window, but it seemed to work.
There’s another thing about the homestead I hadn’t figured out yet, and that’s claiming it. This is another area where the game nudges you toward clan play, because in order to claim a homestead, you first have to start a family. A family is basically the clan system I think. Because if you just build a homestead without claiming it, another player can walk in and take it for themselves.
Ask me how I found that out.
I logged on one morning, checked on my house, thought it was looking great, and then saw it was owned by another player. I went to the Discord to post about it and was met with a few laughs from other players who said the same thing had happened to them their first test. I was supposed to create family of just myself to claim the house. I moved to another town, and tried to build myself back up, but I got bored. It felt like I’d missed my window to be part of the group, and playing catch up two days before the test ended just wasn’t an attractive option.
As much as I enjoyed the game, I didn’t feel fully part of it. There were events happening, battles waging, that I simply couldn’t participate in because I didn’t have the gear. I could have run in naked with a spear, but the time it takes to run to a battle just to get killed right way or get chased down by cavalry when you get separated from the group just isn’t worth it. There is a system where towns can release public storage to players so they can participate in battles, but because of the high cost of heavier gear, what’s normally available to randoms is the cheaper light weapons and gear. It’s generous to be offered anything for free when times are tough, but towns didn’t open that up very often. Only when absolutely necessary, given how much work goes into producing that equipment.
By the last day of the test, though, the community was ready to go all out. That’s when the fights really started. We lost the first town I had settled in, the one I thought wouldn’t get hit right away. Gone to the remnants.
In the screenshot above the enemy was forming up on a camp outside the towns walls towards the north. We were all gathering at the gate getting ready to engage them. I spent what silver I had stored on the marketplace to get some gear together and form up with my fellow Ancients.
We managed to take down their fort in a brutal push and they eventually fell back to a rear camp and we were able to reclaim one of the forward forts.
Even though I wasn’t part of the bigger battles and wasn’t an integral part of the faction as a whole in any way, it did feel nice to be part of something. And I think that’s something games try to capture all the time but it’s just really fucking hard to pull off. In Anvil Empires, because of the voice chat, the tight-knit community, and the sheer amount of work that goes into producing supplies — that combination creates a situation where you really do feel part of something much bigger than yourself. As a solo player you don’t feel as important as you do in Foxhole, but I believe there is room for solo play in Anvil Empires. I want to spend the next test trying to figure out what that looks like.
Other players are experimenting with solo play too and running into their own difficulties, but I think that’s more about where the game is right now and the devs working to find a balance. And honestly, hats off to them for even attempting to make a game like this. There’s just simply nobody doing anything like this right now.
All that to say, I enjoyed my first experience with Anvil Empires. I was so happy to get my key after watching so many videos about it, one YouTube in particular, Robert LuvsGames, whose content genuinely inspired me to get into this game. It inspired me to buy Foxhole just to get a taste of what Anvil Empires could be. Now that I’ve finally played it, I think this is a game I’m going to spend a lot of time with. And I’m very much looking forward to the next testing period.
May 21st 2026