Free quiz · 12 questions · no account

What Kind of Commander Are You?

Twelve questions about tempo, risk, supply and what you do when the plan is already dead. Four doctrines, a rank, and — because this quiz sits on a strategy game's site — the real numbers behind whatever it makes you.

What it is measuring, and what it is not

Not one of the twelve questions is about soldiers. That is deliberate: a quiz that asks which unit you like tells you which unit you like. These ask how you behave when there is one hour left and one decision to make, what you would rather lose, and what you do the moment a plan has visibly failed — and derives the rest.

Every answer pushes two or three doctrines at once, so no option is a straight vote and no doctrine can be reached by picking the obvious box four times. What comes out is whichever way you leaned across the whole twelve.

Nothing is sent anywhere. There is no account, no email, no server: the questions, the scoring and the result all run inside your own browser, which is why it still works if your connection drops halfway through, and why the result can be shared as a link rather than a screenshot.

The numbers behind the result are real ones

This quiz sits on the companion site of a strategy game, and it uses that game's actual combat model rather than inventing one. The four doctrines are the four troop types that game fields. What each one beats, and by how much, is measured from the same function the game resolves battles with:

Infantry beats cavalry beats ranged beats infantry, at +25% when you counter and −25% when you are countered. Siege sits outside the triangle entirely: it is worse than useless against troops and it is the only thing that breaks walls — which is why an engine commander wins campaigns rather than battles.

Your result also names a rank, and prints the real statistics for your doctrine at that rank from the game's own tables. The rank is decided by how consistent your answers were rather than how good they were — somebody who answered in one direction throughout reads as a specialist and gets a high rank; somebody who spread their answers reads as a generalist and gets a low one. It is a measure of focus, not of quality, and a general who is right about several things at once is not being insulted by a low number.

The four doctrines

Every question it asks

Written out in full, partly so the page says something to a reader without JavaScript and partly because knowing what is being measured does not make an answer less true — it just makes it more deliberate.

1. You have one hour before contact and time for exactly one decision.
   • Choose the ground. Everything after that is arithmetic.
   • Find their flank. There is always a flank.
   • Get the bows onto the high ground and let the rest improvise.
   • Send for the engines. I would rather fight on Thursday with a ram.
2. Scouts report the enemy is one third larger than you were told.
   • Then we stand somewhere narrow and let the number stop mattering.
   • Then we hit them tonight, before the rest of them arrive.
   • Then we do not close at all. Make them come to us across open ground.
   • Then we withdraw to the walls and make them do the expensive part.
3. Which of these would you rather lose?
   • A week.
   • A hundred horses.
   • The element of surprise.
   • The high ground.
4. Your supply line is four days long and somebody has to be told it is now six.
   • Tell them, and cut the ration today rather than next week.
   • Do not tell them. Take what we need from the country we are standing in.
   • Fix it. Find another road, pay whatever the ferrymen ask.
   • Shorten the war instead of the line.
5. A subordinate disobeyed an order and it worked.
   • Punish it anyway. The next one will not work.
   • Promote them. I need people who can see what I cannot.
   • Say nothing, and give them a harder job to see if it repeats.
   • Ask, in private, exactly what they saw that I did not.
6. What actually wins a war?
   • A line that does not break when it should have.
   • Arriving somewhere three days before anybody thought possible.
   • Killing the enemy at a distance they cannot answer.
   • Walls, and patience, and somebody else's granary running out.
7. The enemy has offered terms. They are slightly worse than what you would have taken yesterday.
   • Take them. A slightly bad peace is cheaper than a good battle.
   • Refuse, and attack within the hour while they are expecting an answer.
   • Refuse, and make them offer again from a worse position next week.
   • Accept the terms and keep the army where it is.
8. Which report do you read first?
   • Casualty returns.
   • Where the enemy's baggage is.
   • The weather for the next five days.
   • How much is left in the stores.
9. A town on your route will not open its gates and has no garrison worth the name.
   • Leave it. It is not a threat and a siege is a fortnight I do not have.
   • Invest it properly. A town behind me is a town that arms itself.
   • Sit outside it visibly for two days and let them think about it.
   • Take the gate at dawn with fifty people who volunteered.
10. It has gone wrong. The plan is dead and everybody is looking at you.
    • Hold. Nothing improves while we are moving backwards.
    • Move. Anywhere. A stationary mistake is the only fatal kind.
    • Break contact, reform out of reach, and start again in an hour.
    • Fall back on something we built and make them come to it.
11. How should your soldiers feel about you?
    • That I will be standing where I said I would be.
    • That following me is the most interesting thing they will ever do.
    • That I will not spend them on a plan I would not walk into myself.
    • That the work will be dull, long, and survivable.
12. The war is won. What did you do that you would do again?
    • Refused a battle that everyone wanted, twice.
    • Marched at night, for six nights, and arrived first.
    • Held a bridge for a day and a half with nothing to spare.
    • Chose ranges instead of ground, and never once let them close.

The rank ladder

Thirteen rungs, from a levy who was handed a spear last week to a name that outlives the war. They are the game's own ladder, in its own order: Levy, Footman, Man-at-Arms, Veteran, Sergeant, Guardsman, Knight, Vanguard, Champion, Warlord, Myrmidon, Paragon, Legend.

Reaching the top of it here means your twelve answers pointed one way with almost no scatter. That is worth knowing about yourself either way: a specialist is formidable and predictable, and a generalist is neither.

Can I use my result?

Yes — for anything, including commercial work, with no permission and no credit required. Short strings like a name or a two-word motto are not the kind of thing anyone can own, and the crest you compose is your composition, not ours. Take it to a novel, a tabletop campaign, a stream overlay, a band, a boat, a business card.

We ask for exactly nothing in return: no account, no email, no sign-up, no watermark. Nothing you type or click here is sent anywhere — every one of these tools runs entirely inside your own browser, so there is no server that could keep your design even if it wanted to. If you want to tell somebody where it came from, a link back is kind, but it is not a condition.

More free tools

If you would rather be sorted by temperament than by doctrine, the which dragon would you ride quiz asks a different question entirely, and what would your job be in a castle asks the least martial one on the site. The tabletop tools will roll you a tavern, an NPC or a whole settlement, and the heraldry forge will design the banner you command under.