Close the Sky

Close the Sky is a war game about building a city, defending it from air strikes and trying to break an enemy nation's will to fight. You choose one of seven nations, develop its city and military systems, and use weapons against an opponent building a city of their own.

Build and defend your city

Each housing block you place grows a neighbourhood. Combine blocks to create denser clusters, with towers rising into downtown areas. The seven nations each build a different kind of city, where cars fill the streets and lights come on at night.

You place radars, guns and surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries around the city, and the map shows what each covers. Drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles approach over the skyline, and you can watch every interception. Batteries draw ammunition from the national stockpile; when it runs out, the air-defence panel marks the battery DRY in red.

Ammunition production requires warehouse space: a shell takes one crate, a ballistic missile five and a nuclear warhead ten. Production stops at 100% if there is no space for a finished round. Radars and batteries must stay on the surface, while other structures can be built one level underground. Underground construction costs far more and takes four times as long, and only penetrating weapons can reach it.

Manage your ammunition

Destroyed warehouses explode along with their contents. The fuller the warehouse, the larger the blast: a full one reaches six plots in every direction and can set off nearby depots. A buried depot has half the reach.

Gather intelligence

The enemy's land is hidden by cloud until you photograph it. Recon drones capture images of the ground they fly over, while a satellite station scans the entire surface every three minutes. As information ages, it fades from white to amber, and the enemy continues building. Strikes target a plot, so a missile hits whatever is there when it arrives; decoy sites appear in your intelligence as housing blocks.

Aim and launch weapons

Press TAB to send the camera across the globe to the enemy city. When you arm a weapon, the cursor becomes a sight showing what your intelligence says is on the selected plot, the blast area and damage, how far the weapon can miss, its flight time, and how many known batteries can intercept it. Click to fire, or keep clicking to saturate the enemy's defences.

Damage the city

Weapons that get through damage buildings directly. Towers break and fall, blocks burn, and the ruins remain. A nuclear strike can flatten an entire downtown.

The game includes real weapon systems under their real names, including Shahed and FPV drones, Storm Shadow, Iskander, Tomahawk and Patriot. Each weapon distributes damage among structures, personnel and electronics according to the real system. A TOS-1A clears a garrison while barely marking the walls; CHAMP disables electronics while leaving buildings standing. Hover over a weapon to view its full profile.

Choose a nation

You can play as the United States, Ukraine, the European Union, Russia, Israel, China or Iran. Each nation has its own air defences, weapons and research. The research tree has nine branches, covering areas from detection and electronic warfare to naval forces and logistics. Research stops if your laboratories lose power, and a tutorial guides you through your first war.

Face an enemy doctrine

The AI follows the doctrine of its nation. Ukraine maintains a drone line, Russia relies on massed fires, China launches mass salvos, and Israel builds a layered shield. The match log identifies the doctrine you are facing.

Fight online

In 1v1 online matches, each player controls one nation. There is no pause, and the war clock runs at normal speed. Only orders travel over the network, so the game plays the same on a weak connection.

Break their will

There is no ground to capture. You win when the enemy's will to fight reaches zero, and lose when yours does. Will drains when civilians die, buildings fall or strategic targets are hit; using a nuclear weapon also costs you will.