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Curse of War
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About the game
Curse of War is a real-time strategy game with the usual parts taken out. There are no units to select and no orders to give. The map is a field of hexagonal tiles, you rule one small country, and your people are the only resource: they spread out on their own, and fight whoever else is standing on the same tile. What you control is where they want to go.
You do that with flags. Put a flag on a tile and the people of your country start drifting toward it; take it off and they settle back. Flags on your own towns make them grow. Flags on the border pile up an army. A flag on an enemy fortress sends that army straight into the walls. The fight resolves itself, tile by tile, and the side with more people on a tile wins it.
Growth comes only from settlements. A village adds 10% to its population every step, a town 20% and a fortress 30%, and you can build a village into a town and then a fortress. Gold mines are the other half of the economy: surround one with your people and its gold is yours, to pay for new buildings. When a siege goes badly for the defender, the city can be burnt down, so winning a city sometimes means winning a smaller one than you attacked.
The game starts with four countries in the corners of a map of 21 by 21 tiles; you rule the green one. Pick the Hexagon map and there are six countries. Each computer ruler has its own personality, so they do not all attack the same way. The game does not show a victory or defeat screen: you have won when no other country has people left on the map, and lost when your own people are gone.
It was written by Alexey Nikolaev in 2013 as a Linux game that started out in a terminal, and then got a graphical version. The code and the pixel graphics are his, and he released everything under the GNU GPL.
Playing it here
This is Curse of War 1.3.0 compiled for the browser from the author's source code. The game has no menu of its own, so before it starts you pick how strong the computer rulers are, how fast the game runs and which map to use. The multiplayer mode over the network was removed: here you play alone against the computer. The download is about 1 MB. The game does not save anything, and each match starts from a new random map. It is in English.
Click the game after it starts if the keys stop working, so the page gets the keyboard back.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys or H, J, K, L | move the cursor |
| Space | put a flag on the tile, or take it off |
| R or V | build on the tile: village, town, fortress |
| X | remove all your flags |
| C | remove half of your flags |
| P | pause |
| F / S | faster / slower |
| Q | quit the match |
Getting started
Start easy. In the box before the game, pick the easiest computer players and the Slow or Normal speed. A match against hard opponents on a fast setting leaves little time to think.
Learn the tiles. Mountains cannot be settled. Gold mines cannot be settled either, but whoever surrounds them gets the gold. Villages, towns and fortresses are the only places where people multiply. Everything else is grassland, which people cross and fight on.
Read the dots. On grassland, the dots show how many people the owner of the tile has, from one dot for a handful to three groups for the maximum, 499 people. A white P on the right of a tile is your flag; an x on the left is a flag of the computer.
Tips
Feed your cities first. A flag on your own village or town keeps your people there, where they keep multiplying. A big population at home is also the army you will send later.
Take the mines early. Gold pays for building: a village costs 160, the step to a town 240 and the step to a fortress 320. Send your army to the closest mine, and keep it there.
Do not spread yourself thin. Flags pull people away from where they are. If you put flags everywhere, nowhere has enough people to win a fight. Use X to clear the map and start again with a plan.
Attack with more. A fight is decided by who has more people on the tile, so gather a large army on the border, with a flag, before you move the flag onto the enemy.
FAQ
Is there a campaign or a save? No. Each match is a single game on a new map, and it does not save.
Can I play with other people? The original has a multiplayer mode over the network. It is not included here: the site never makes connections to other computers.
How do I win? By being the only country with people left on the map. There is no message when that happens, so check that no flags or people of the other colors remain, then quit with Q.