Tartaria: Frozen Frontier

You are the leader of the ruling clan, whose decisions determine the fate of an entire alliance of clans belonging to a single people.

Tartaria: Frozen Frontier is a turn-based survival strategy game about life and struggle in early medieval Siberia.

Your clan directly governs its own cities. You choose where to found them, allocate the population, and establish small, specialized settlements around the urban centers, shaping your own economy.

But the ruling clan is only part of the alliance. Under your authority are vassal clans, each with their own settlements, populations, interests, and relationships. Each of them specializes in a single primary craft, while the player’s own cities can develop in several directions at once.

Your task is to make this entire system work together and guide it through years of development, conflicts, and harsh winters.

The Ruling Clan and Specialized Vassals

The number of your own cities and the opportunities for their development are limited. You can’t simply build everything at once.

In your cities, you determine the settlements’ specializations yourself and can combine different crafts and production chains. Vassal clans are structured differently: each one focuses on a single main area—for example, woodworking, pottery, or leatherworking.

Therefore, you must decide what to produce yourself and what to rely on your vassals for. The loss or weakening of an important clan can disrupt production far beyond its own lands.

Manage a Clan Alliance

Vassals are not merely a source of resources and bonuses. Each clan has its own interests, needs, and relationships with the ruler and other clans.

Trade with them, provide resources, collect tribute, and support those on whom the alliance’s economy or security depends.

Important decisions are made by the Council. Clans have their own representation based on their population, and these relationships influence their willingness to support your decisions.

The ruler must consider not only what benefits their own cities, but also how these decisions will affect the entire alliance.

Prepare for Winter in Advance

Tartaria’s entire economy is governed by seasonal cycles.

The population needs food, and in winter, firewood as well. Production requires workers and raw materials; supplies are limited, and population growth simultaneously provides new labor and increases consumption.

The warmer seasons are the time to develop settlements, extract resources, and build up reserves. In winter, movement slows down, production comes under additional pressure, and shortages of food or fuel begin to directly threaten the people.

A mistake made in the summer may not become apparent until several turns later, by which time it’s already too late to correct it.

Build an economy, not just one perfect city

The city center is surrounded by small settlements, each of which fulfills its own role: producing food, engaging in crafts, trade, military affairs, or another aspect of the economy.

Raw materials are transformed into fuel, tools, weapons, clothing, and other essential goods. But every new production chain requires people, resources, and space.

A strong economy in Tartaria isn’t about having the maximum number of buildings. It’s a system in which your own cities and specialized vassals complement each other and are capable of surviving the next season.

Defend What You’ve Built

Recruit individual units, unite them under the command of generals, and move armies across the strategic map.

An army requires people and resources that could otherwise be used for farming, but raids can take a toll on the population, livestock, production, your own cities, and vassal settlements.

When armies meet, the battle moves to a separate battlefield. Its conditions are tied to the surrounding strategic terrain: rivers, forests, hills, and other regional features become part of the battle.

Sometimes it’s more important to expand. Sometimes—to build up reserves. Sometimes you’ll have to send an army far from your own cities to save a vassal on whom the entire alliance depends.

Tartaria isn’t about building a single massive settlement or conquering the entire map to bring it under direct control.

You manage an interconnected system consisting of your own cities, specialized vassals, population, economy, and army. The larger it becomes, the harder it is to maintain balance.

The question isn’t just how quickly you can grow—it’s whether the alliance you’ve created will survive the coming winter.