Real-time strategy · The Great War · 1914
They said it would be over by Christmas. It was not.
Found a town with twelve workers. Dig the trenches. Raise armies of thousands, and break a front that will not move with artillery, gas, cavalry, tanks, aircraft and battleships.
In development · Windows and macOS
The war as it was fought
Built in the old school of mass strategy, Cossacks and The Entente: Battlefields WW1, and rebuilt for today. Every soldier is simulated, and a single front can hold thousands of them.
I · Mass warfare
Squads of up to 126 men march under an officer, who makes them hit half again as hard and shrug off a third of every hit. Drag a line with the mouse and the army forms on it: tanks ahead, cavalry on the wings, foot behind, guns at the back.
II · Fortified fronts
The original game never had trenches or wire. Here they are the heart of the war. Workers dig trenches, wide trenches and barbed wire cell by cell. Men in a trench duck under shellfire and stand to the parapet when the enemy comes close. More riflemen will not cross that ground. Grenades, gas, flame and tanks will.
III · An economy you can see
Workers walk into the mines and sawmills, harvest fields that shells can tear up, and carry food home 80 at a time. Mines, sawmills, oil rigs, houses and power stations climb six levels. Every man eats. There is no population cap, only what your nation can feed.
“You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.”Attributed to Kaiser Wilhelm II, to his troops, August 1914
The wire at night, captured in the game
Order of battle
Damage types meet armour classes: bullets never scratch a tank, shells hurt everything, flame empties a bunker and leaves its walls. Every shell flies a real ballistic arc, at 1.5 metres a cell.
Riflemen carry four grenades and walk up to bunkers, tanks and trenches to throw them. Machine gunners set up in a second and sweep the ground in overlapping bursts that pin men down. Snipers vanish when they stand still. Medics find the worst-wounded man in sight.
Line cavalry deals two and a half times its blow on the first hit after a run of five cells. Scouts see farther than anyone on the ground. Woods slow horses to 60%, wire to 25%, and a trench stops them until a passage is made.
Drag a circle and the guns move into range, set up and bombard it for 10 to 60 seconds, with real scatter and friendly fire. Fire smoke to blind direct fire for both sides, star shells to light the night, and gas once the academy has researched it.
The siege howitzer is a building: a pit with a mounted gun that traverses at 20° a second and lays a sector you choose. Its shell carries a blast six cells wide. The gun itself cannot be targeted. To silence it, find the pit and destroy it.
Tanks shrug off bullets and fire on the move at half accuracy. They fell every tree they drive over, tear enemy wire and cave trenches in where they cross. In marsh a moving tank can bog down for up to 22 seconds. Each nation fields its own: the Mark V's sponson guns, the A7V's six machine guns, the Renault FT's turret.
Aircraft roll out of the hangar and take off down the Airfield's strip. Fighters duel planes and strafe troops; bombers drop sticks of bombs and refill their racks in the air. A plane shot down falls along a real crash path and bursts where it hits.
On the Sea map the two coasts never touch, so every crossing is by ship. Ships gather way slowly, turn on a circle and swing their broadside to the enemy, each turret training at its own rate. A transport carries 300 units of any kind to a landing.
One battle, one frame
The same battle, the same frame: four seasons, six hours of the day, 24 captures from the game. At dusk the windows light up and searchlights sweep the front. Season and hour change the look only, so no side gets an edge.
Summer · 13:00Midday
Battlefields
Every map is generated in the order real land forms: relief, then the rain that drains it, the rivers it cuts, the villages by the water and the roads between them. Each stage reads only what came before it.
| Battlefield | Woods | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Flanders | 9% | Flat, wet lowland |
| Somme | 13% | Chalk plateau and dry valleys |
| Verdun | 16% | Deep ravines with rocky sides |
| Argonne | 28% | Forest, the thickest woods |
| Champagne | 6% | Open chalk downs |
| Sea | 832² | Two coasts, cliffs, beaches, 3–5 islands |
Maps 200, 280, 420 and 832 cells a side. Up to four sides, random or corner starts.
The opponent
The computer opponent is built like an army headquarters. It plays a whole side, from the first worker to battleships, through the same orders a player gives, and it knows only what its own men have seen.
One pass over what its side can see.
A memory of the enemy that fades with time.
Predicts a fight before it starts one.
Posture, main effort, the home guard.
Task forces, routes, fire plans, the town.
Every order priced, then issued as a player's.
Fair play
Enemy units count only while seen, buildings once seen. A building you destroy out of its sight is still believed to be standing.
Counter-battery
Every enemy shell that lands in sight is traced back along its flight to where the battery may stand, within ±8° on Veteran. Several reports make a target.
Routes
Routes cost more the more fire covers them, and after being thrown back it comes again from a new bearing.
Fire plans
It ranges its guns, cuts the wire, halves the forts on the breach and shells the trench before the break-in: armour first, riflemen in narrow blocks, a bite seven cells deep.
Drill
Companies form up under their officers, rifle line in front and guns at the back, and march in legs, waiting for the slowest.
Measured
Every change is judged in headless AI-against-AI leagues of 40 and 60-minute matches. Every number it uses lives in one data file.
Answers what it sees: guns against armour, machine guns against massed infantry.
Attacks early and often and keeps few men at home.
Fortifies, then shells you from behind its lines.
Builds the biggest economy, then comes with guns and tanks.
The Arena Lab
Two Hard generals on the Sea map. The red one has landed on the blue coast and holds a bridgehead; squares are buildings, lines the routes of its task forces.
Four difficulties. Easy thinks every 3 s and telegraphs its attacks. Veteran thinks every second, sends scouts ahead of each task force and gets the only economy bonus, +25%.
Two blocs, five nations
The bloc is flavour: any nation can fight any other. Each brings a bonus, one extra infantry unit and two units of its own in place of the common ones.
Entente
Vehicles +10% HP; the Tank Plant trains 15% faster.
Entente
Artillery fires 10% faster.
Entente
Infantry costs 15% less food; houses hold 10% more.
Central Powers
Infantry +10% accuracy.
Central Powers
Forts, trenches and wire +20% HP, built 20% faster.
Under the hood
Big battles usually cost a game its multiplayer, its economy or its AI. This one keeps all three, because the whole war runs in one deterministic simulation.
No floats in the rules. Every machine computes the same battle to the last bit, on any number of cores, so players exchange only their orders: deterministic lockstep.
Parallel phases give the same result on one thread or eight. The view draws in between.
On the Huge 832 map. Shared flow fields steer whole armies instead of a path per man.
Animated in the shader from baked clips, with far detail levels built at run time. Every soldier keeps his shadow and animation at every zoom.
All of the game's numbers live in one data file, hashed in the multiplayer handshake, so every machine plays by exactly the same rules.
People and AI together, with version and data checks and desync detection. Saves keep the whole state, and old saves keep loading.
Ways to play
You and up to three AI generals on a generated map, free-for-all or in teams. Switch off tanks, aircraft, artillery or gas for a different war, or let an AI play your side and watch.
Hold out with allies against ever larger waves. Every fifth wave is heavy, and tanks arrive from wave 13.
Up to four sides, people and AI together, under skirmish rules.
A guided start on a small map: build a base, train an army, take an enemy outpost.
Field notes
Somewhere in a pile of cheap CDs was a disc of random demos, and one of them was The Entente: a few minutes of a war in miniature. That was enough. The day the full game came home in its own box is still one of the happiest days of a childhood. Then came Cossacks, and long afternoons of strategy side by side with a cousin at one computer.
Every match ended with the same wish. More men. A smoother battle. A front that feels alive.
The kid grew up and became a programmer. Years later the skills, the tools and the timing finally lined up, and there was no reason left not to build the game that was always missing, starting with what the original never had: trenches and barbed wire.
Over by Christmas is made by one developer, working alongside today's AI tools as modellers, programmers, testers and a sound department that never sleeps. Most of it is built in the quiet hours, after the house has gone to sleep and before it wakes up again.
Every number in this game lives in one data file. All but one: the love that went into it.