TunaWars

TunaWars is a turn-based strategy game of the ancient world. You rule one nation among many — Hellenic cities and their triremes, Macedon’s pike phalanxes, Rome’s maniples, Carthage’s elephants, Persia’s cataphracts, Celtic sea-raiders, Scythian horse nomads, and, in the Late Bronze Age, the chariot kingdoms of the Amarna letters. Expand your cities, work your land, feed your armies, keep your provinces loyal, out-scheme your rivals, and lead them to a conquest — or outscore everyone when time runs out.

Four things make TunaWars feel different from other 4X games:

Everyone moves at once. You give standing orders — marches, stances, recruits, trades — then end your turn, and every nation’s orders resolve together. There is no waiting for your opponent’s go: the game is about committing to a plan under uncertainty.

News travels by courier — and so do your orders. Word of a distant battle physically rides from where it happened to your ruler’s seat. Far-off events reach your chronicle turns late, marked “Word reaches you (N turns old)” — and your commands ride back out the same way. Roads aren’t just for marching: they are how you govern.

Armies eat, and provinces sulk. Grain doesn’t teleport: your produce travels to a physical supply depot, and an army in the field must be able to trace a line home to one. Meanwhile every city you hold has a loyalty of its own, and a distant, mismatched, over-garrisoned province will eventually stop being yours.

The world remembers. Rival nations bear grudges for lost land and lost battles, rulers and generals have hidden characters your wars slowly reveal, beaten enemies submit and scheme for independence, and in an endless campaign your own dynasty ages, dies, and passes the crown on.

TunaWars runs on macOS and iOS, with async multiplayer over Game Center.

Eras

An era is chosen when you create a world and stamped on it for good. Each era is a complete content pack — its own cultures, unit rosters, name catalogs, map chrome, and trained AI opponents.

Classical — the default — is the Mediterranean of the Peloponnesian War through the Successors and the Roman wars: hoplites and triremes, legions and war elephants, steppe nomads and Nubian archers. Thirteen civilizations, twenty-four unit types.

Late Bronze Age is the eastern Mediterranean of the Amarna letters: nine kingdoms — Egypt, Hatti, Assyria, Babylon, Mitanni, Mycenae, Alashiya, Kush and Elam — across fourteen unit types built around the chariot. Levy spearmen and bronze swordsmen, composite bowmen, skirmishers, light and heavy chariots, Mitanni’s maryannu, palace elites (Boar-Tusk Champions, Sherden Guard) capped at two per nation, and the Battering Ram, the era’s siege engine — recruitable natively only by Assyria and Babylon, and learnable by anyone who storms a city that knows the art.

Bronze is the point. Metals deposits are rare, remote and concentrated — clustered on Alashiya the copper island and out at the map’s tin-road edges — so every bronze unit is metals-expensive. Losing the tin road doesn’t starve you; it stops you replacing armies. The era’s agent is the envoy rather than the spy: same rules, era-correct name.

The Collapse

Every Late Bronze world carries a scheduled Collapse — on by default, switchable off only at generation. An onset turn is seeded somewhere in the 96–120 window. Twelve turns of public portents come first — refugees, grain-price drift, advisor lines darkening, visible to every nation alike — and then the Sea Peoples arrive: a cityless, unplayable raider culture that spawns on seeded coasts at war with every coastal nation, in three waves across a ten-turn aftershock. The tin-edge metals halt, harvests fall 40%, and a one-time loyalty shock sets the revolt contagion cascading through every vassal in the world.

Nothing beyond the shock itself is scripted — no forced loss, no scripted city destruction. The simulation plays it out, and surviving it well is the endgame.

What is free and what is bought

The app installs for nothing. The free game plays randomly generated Classical worlds with five of the thirteen cultures — Hellenic, Iranian, Celtic, Italic and tribal — with every system present: couriers, sieges, spies, generals, city politics, satraps, the chronicle. Two non-consumable purchases sit on top:

• TunaWars Classic — the other eight Classical cultures and all seven historical scenarios.
• TunaWars: Late Bronze Age — the Late Bronze era and its three scenarios.

The gates are world-creation inputs only. Worlds you have already made stay playable, and multiplayer joiners are never gated — a free player invited into a Late Bronze world experiences the full era. Anyone who bought the app while it was paid is granted TunaWars Classic outright.

Getting Started

Choose a game mode

• Solo Player — lead one nation under fog of war; conquer the rest to win.
• Campaign — an endless single-nation campaign with no turn limit, led by your ruling dynasty across generations of rulers.
• Alkibiades — the exile’s game: lead a nation, but dominate too visibly (five straight turns with a 25%+ score lead) and you are exiled — forced to pick a rival nation and carry on from the other side, like Alkibiades between Athens and Sparta.
• Multiplayer (hot-seat) — two or more players share one device, each leading a nation.
• Multiplayer (Game Center) — asynchronous online play: take your turn, and your opponents are notified to take theirs whenever they like.
• God Mode — full visibility and control of any nation; a sandbox for exploring and learning the systems.

Pick a world

Start from a historical scenario or a random world.

Classical scenarios — the Peloponnesian War (Greece and the Aegean, 431 BC; barter economy: no coin), the Italian and Sicilian Wars (264 BC), the Successors Wars (Alexander’s empire divided, 323 BC — full map, or the Eastern Mediterranean cut from Greece to Syria and Egypt), and the Roman wars: the Second Punic War, the Second Macedonian War, and the Roman–Seleukid War.

Late Bronze scenarios — The Amarna Age (seven great kingdoms, seventeen cities), Ahhiyawa (a small, naval, raid-heavy Aegean), and The Trojan War, a scenario of asymmetric aims: a coalition sails to take one prized citadel, Wilusa, against a fixed deadline, while its defender wins simply by still standing when the limit falls. Wilusa is a storied citadel — worth many ordinary cities in the final score — behind a wall no nation in that scenario can breach. Only a blockade can starve it out: the beached-ships siege of the epic.

Tutorial Island — a gentle first campaign on one small isle.

Random world — a generated hex map built from seeded fractal noise: continents, sea, lakes, hills, impassable mountains, woods, forest, desert, cultivated fields, and rivers running along hex edges to the coast, with a road network linking the cities. The default world is 20×20 with eight cities, one per nation; you can push it to 200×200 with up to a hundred cities, and hand each nation a founding cluster of up to nine.

Whether a world uses gold is set by its scenario (the Peloponnesian War runs on barter alone) and can be overridden in Advanced settings. Gold is not a minor knob: mercenaries, the generals market, spies, local provisions markets and enslavement plunder all exist only in a coined world.

World creation also lets you tune the rules themselves — economy yields, combat odds, walls and sieges, razing and founding, market behavior, diplomacy, seasons — every number in this guide is a default you can change. You can even train the AI opponents for your custom rules before you start (see The AI, below).

Your first turn

A Welcome sheet opens the campaign and introduces your realm, your ruler, and — under Your Neighbours — every power that shares a border with you: their people and their way of war. Rumour of a neighbour’s temperament may reach you here; a firm reading never does.

The map opens on your capital. Tap any hex to read it. A hex holding a known army or city shows a brass Explore pill on the hexagon itself — tap it to open that hex’s forces and cities. (The pill clears whenever you pan or zoom; tap the hex again to bring it back.) A mini-map in the corner keeps the whole world in view.

The command bar carries your nation’s seal, the Planning ⇄ Chronicles pill, the book seal that opens your chronicle, and Seal Orders to end the turn. The HUD holds Armies and Cities — two doors into one browser of your forces and everything you know of your rivals’ — plus Market and Supply, which shows your depots, what is on the road, and which armies are fed. Behind More: Suggest Move, Take a Vow, Battles, Rankings, Diplomacy, AI Settings, and the Strategika — the in-game rules handbook, always showing your world’s live numbers.

Armies are moved with the Move pill on their card, not by dragging them across the map.

When you’re done, end the turn: every nation’s orders resolve at once, and the turn summary — your chronicle — tells you what happened, from battles to omens to word arriving from afar.

The World

Worlds are hex maps: plains, cultivated fields, woods, forest, hills, impassable mountains, desert, lakes, rivers, and the sea. Mountains block line of sight as well as movement. Thirteen Classical civilizations can hold cities, each with its own troop roster and character:

Your cities recruit the troops of their own culture, so conquest changes what you can field — a captured foreign city musters your customs, not its old ones. Five peoples build no warship at all — Scythian, Nubian, Numidian, Mauryan and Iranian — and none of them will be seeded on an open coast; the sea belongs to those who can sail it. To win a fleet, take a coastal city from a people who has one.

Resource tiles — grain, cattle, wood, metals, stone, gold mines, fish shoals — dot the map at about 15% density, with guaranteed resources near cities. Everything you own is worked automatically: there are no workers to micromanage. What that produce is worth to you depends on whether it can reach a depot — see Supply.

The Campaign Turn

Turns resolve simultaneously. You queue standing orders; when you end the turn, movement, battles, production, sieges, growth, supply, trade, city politics, diplomacy and news all play out together in one deterministic pipeline, and the chronicle reports the results.

Movement

Each army has a movement budget of ticks (default 6). Open ground — plains, fields, cities, water — costs 1 tick per hex; woods 2; hills and forest 3 (2 for Tribal peoples); desert adds 2 for any army not fully mounted; crossing a river adds 1. Roads halve the cost of a step, so a road march covers roughly three times the ground of a cross-country one. A pure-cavalry force rides 2 ticks faster; an army hauling a supply wagon — or escorting a spy — moves at three-quarters speed.

Set a destination and the army marches toward it turn after turn until it arrives — you can reroute or halt it at any time. The command ring overlay shows how far the army can reach this turn and in the turns after.

Your march preview is drawn from what you can see. The world halts marches on zones of control you may not know about, so a column can stop short of the line you drew — when it does, the chronicle says so: "…was halted by an enemy zone of control short of its goal — it holds and will try again."

Zones of control

Any army of real strength (25+) projects a zone of control over the hexes around it. Marching into an enemy zone halts your army for the turn, and supply lines cannot be traced through one. Enemy zones show as a faint wash on the map — screen your borders, and remember a battered remnant is too weak to hold a line. Resting armies and spies project nothing.

Breaking contact is free. The halt applies to marching into a zone, not out of one, so a beaten army can always disengage. What you cannot do is walk through an enemy: a hex holding a hostile force may be entered only to fight it, however weak, resting or wagon-laden it is. A single cheap company on a bridge is a door, not a speed bump. Nor may troops land on a beach inside an enemy zone — a contested landing is impossible; clear the shore first, or land elsewhere.

Recovery

Idle armies mend slowly (half rate). Give the Rest & Refit stance for full recovery — 1% of strength per unused tick in the field, 2% in a friendly city — but a resting army projects no zone of control. Armies that fought this turn recover nothing.

Seasons

A year is 10 turns: three Spring, three Summer, two Fall, two Winter. In Fall and Winter, units in the open take attrition (2% and 8% a turn), marching costs an extra 2% strength per moving unit, being out of supply hurts 10% more — and winter ice breaks every naval blockade. Shelter armies on or beside a friendly city to spare them. Once a year, on a warm turn, the great tuna run lands a windfall of fish (+8) in every unblockaded coastal city — the game’s namesake.

Supply, Depots & Plunder

Your nation’s bulk stores — grain, cattle, fish, wood, stone, metals — do not float in an abstract treasury. They sit in physical places, and they have to get there.

Depots

A supply depot is a city that holds one, or a mobile depot riding with a wagon. Depots run in every world; a nation may hold several, they can be relocated, and a lost one re-founds itself. They hold the six bulk goods — gold stays in the treasury, since coin needs no cart. Working a resource tile through the depot economy doubles its yield, so what your land is worth to you depends on whether its produce can get home.

Move a depot forward and you shorten a campaign’s supply line. Lose one — an enemy army standing on it — and the stores go with it.

Supply lines

A land army is supplied when it can trace a path to a friendly depot without routing through an enemy zone of control (fleets trace to a home port). Cut the corridor and the army starves whether or not it ever loses a battle. Besieging the one relay town on a road can starve out everything beyond it.

Units eat by their weight: a tribal warband eats little (1), hoplites more (2), cataphracts and elephants the most (4). Ships and wagons draw no rations at all — only fighting men on land eat. An army cut off from supply bleeds strength; a partly-fed one bleeds in proportion to what it lacked. An army pressing a siege pays a further tithe of its strength every turn, and mends nothing while it sits there.

Living off the land

A land army with no supply line survives anyway if the country around it can feed it: foraging draws from up to three hexes per unit within a radius of two. It feeds a cut-off force for a while — and strips the ground it stands on. It still draws nothing from a depot and takes no reinforcements; it merely stops dying.

Wagons

A supply wagon carries 10 units of stores. Without one an army can carry nothing: no plunder, no provisions, no evacuation. Wagons slow the march to three-quarters speed.

An unescorted baggage train — wagons or merchantmen with no fighting screen over them — caught next to an enemy force is run down: 80% of the time captured intact, otherwise scattered.

Pillage

Set an army’s stance to Pillage and it stops taking ground and starts burning it. Marching onto an enemy field hex ravages it instead of capturing it, mints a wagon of plunder to haul the spoils, and books half again the grudge a conquest would. City hexes are exempt — a pillaging army besieges and sacks them normally.

A ravaged hex yields nothing to anyone — not to its owner, not to you if you later take it — until it recovers. Burn a field in high summer and it is dead until the next growing year. And the victim remembers.

Pillaged gold is dead weight — no one can spend goods carried in a cart. Take the grain.

Loot

Goods ride in wagons, and wagons change hands. When an army is beaten, its entire baggage goes to the victor — up to what the winner’s own carts can hold; the rest spoils on the field. This applies even to a force annihilated outright. The battle summary reports the seizure, and the loser’s chronicle records the loss.

Local provisions markets (coined worlds only)

A city holding a depot sells food and materiel locally at three times the usual gold value, capped at 10 units per good. It is the fast way to convert coin into supply on campaign — and the cost is that the same gold buys mercenaries.

Cities

Cities are your engine. Each yields 1 grain a turn and has a 50% chance of 2 stone; population starts at 1 and rises to 3, each level adding +1 metal and +1 food, and each level of civic works adding the same again. Growth is a meter — every 5 turns a city banks 10 points toward 100, with the surplus carrying — and you can foster it (5 food + 5 wood) to bank 10 more. Fostering is in practice the only way a city reaches population 3 inside a 60-turn game. Civic works (12 wood + 6 stone, two levels) add permanent yield — the mid-game outlet for surplus timber and stone.

Walls start at level 1 and rise to 3, one level per 10 stone, each level adding 18 defense to the garrison — about two full-strength hoplite companies. Never leave walls unmanned — an undefended city is the easiest to storm.

Your ruler’s seat anchors the realm: hired companies muster there, the “To Capital” rally marches there, and couriers ride to and from it. You may move it to any city of your own culture; it travels at half courier speed, with your command radius in tow.

Scythian cities are nomad camps: no walls, ever — but they can pick up and move a hex per turn.

Recruiting

Across all your cities you may raise two units per turn, mustering once the courier bearing the order reaches the city; warships only in coastal cities. A nation fallen far behind the leader may raise one extra — a desperate levy that keeps the game close. Allied cities add one more recruit per turn, of their culture. Disbanding an army refunds up to 80% of its recruit cost, scaled by its remaining strength — and the disband order rides out by courier like any other.

Recruiting on a far frontier is a decision, not a formality.

Loyalty and politics

Every city carries a loyalty from 0 to 100, shown as a band — devoted, content, restless, seething — that drifts up to 3 points a turn toward an equilibrium built out of its politics:

• whether the city’s own faction leaning matches your declared alignment (up to +20 matched, up to −25 mismatched);
• prosperity: +5 per civic level, +2 per population level above the first;
• distance from your seat: −2 for every courier-turn beyond the second;
• your ruler’s traits, resentment at your garrison, ravaged fields nearby, and the wound of a recent pillage.

Conquest sets loyalty low, and the city works through a shock-and-recovery arc under its new master.

Every ruler stands “For the Few” or “For the Many” — derived at accession, and reversible by any ruler on a ten-turn cooldown. Four levers work a city directly:

• Largesse — 6 food + 2 gold per population level; +12 loyalty and a populist shift; 8-turn cooldown.
• Festival — 4 gold; +6 loyalty.
• Purge the council — 8 gold; swings the city’s faction 20 points toward your pole at a one-shot −10 loyalty. Once per city, per ruler.
• Remit taxes — forgo the city’s gold for 3 turns; +4 equilibrium while it runs.

A seething city — loyalty below 25, ungarrisoned and un-cowed — rolls to revolt each turn at (25 − loyalty) × 2 percent. It defects to a sympathetic patron nation if one exists: alignment match first, then its original owner, then the nearest by courier. With no patron it digs in under a rebel banner — loyalty pinned at 10, yields down to a quarter, walls no longer repairing, and rebel troops mustering on its doorstep until it is pacified.

An empire is not a list of cities. It is a set of arguments you are having with each of them.

Satrapies

Distance is the empire-killer, and the answer is delegation. A ruler may appoint a general as satrap — under his culture’s title: satrap, harmost, proconsul, shophet, kumara — and seat him in a distant city.

His catchment is no drawn province but a courier map: every hex his seat reaches faster by courier than your own seat does, recomputed every turn. Move your court and his writ reshapes itself.

Inside it he acts every turn at zero lag, running the nation’s own AI brain over his own roster on couriered intelligence: levying troops from his own treasury (15 gold each), moving his armies, setting city defenses. He never founds, razes, trades, or touches your armies. Cities in his catchment pay their gold into his treasury, and he remits a share you set (default 50%) home at courier speed. Every order to him — appointment, recall, the remittance rate — rides a courier too.

A satrap’s fealty is hidden; you see only the band. It is dragged down by distance from you, by his own hidden ambition, and by faction mismatch. A recall arriving on a loyal man brings him home. On a wavering one, home humiliated — and every other satrap takes note. Below that he refuses, and word of the refusal reaching your court is the pre-revolt siren. A seething satrap defects, handing his whole catchment — cities and armies both — to a hostile patron, or, with no patron to take him, simply sulks in place: sovereign in name only.

Delegation is not free. It is just cheaper than the alternative.

Razing a city

An army standing in a city it has already taken, whose walls have been thrown down, may put it to the torch. Razing is not always allowed:

• never your own kin — your captains refuse to burn a city of your own civilization, so the torch is only ever for a conquest;
• never your own last city — you cannot burn your way out of the world;
• not while a siege is still live on the hex.

The order rides out by courier like any other, and can be recalled while it rides.

The torch pays: 2–5 of every bulk good, 85% of any depot in the city, and — in a coined world — 10–20 gold from enslavement, half as much again for every population level above the first. It also books three times the grudge a conquest would, and every power that has met you takes note. This is the single most resented act in the game, and the reputation follows you into every negotiation afterwards.

Nomad camps scatter rather than burn — and catching one takes cavalry: at least three mounted units, each still at half strength or better. Even then, half the time the horde is simply gone by dusk and you hold empty grass.

Ruins, rebuilding and refounding

A razed city leaves ruins — a named, permanent scar carrying the dead city’s people and harbour. The map draws it in the faded colours of its old owner; the hex keeps its resource and its owner but produces nothing as a city.

Standing on ruins you hold, you can rebuild the city as it was, restoring its name, its culture and its harbour, at wall level 0 and population 1.

Founding a city

You can also plant a new one on virgin land, by an army at half strength or better, at 150% of the rebuild cost and no closer than three hexes to another city. It takes an eponymous name from your ruler, and a unit of the founding army lays down its spears to become the colonists.

A founded city bears your civilization and recruits your troops — which makes the ruins of a conquered city the sharpest tool in the game. Capture, raze, found: a foreign city becomes a city of your own people, able to raise your own kind of soldier. It costs half again what rebuilding does, plus a unit, and it leaves a grudge that will outlive your ruler.

Scythians found no new cities; the steppe does not settle.

Resources, Trade & Gold

The stockpile

Grain, cattle and fish are all food, freely interchangeable. Wood and metal build and arm your forces; stone raises walls. Owned tiles yield automatically and travel to your depots; merchant ships net 1 fish a turn on or beside a shoal (scared off by enemy warships within two hexes); enemy raiding cavalry on or beside a worked tile zeroes it for the turn, and a blockaded harbour lands no fish.

Don’t hoard. Any resource above 40 loses 20% of the surplus every turn to spoilage and graft. Spend it, trade it, or field it. The game will teach you this once, in a chronicle entry you will not enjoy.

The barter market

Each turn a caravan market posts about three barter offers — “give so much of one good, receive so much of another” — priced by world-wide scarcity: a good sits at base value when the world holds roughly ten per nation, clamped between a quarter and four times that. Offers are contested across all nations and settle at end of turn; if a rival snatches the deal first, your reserved goods return untouched. You can post your own offers too — a fair or slightly generous deal by market value is likely to be taken. Gold trades here as well, at about ten times a common good.

Gold & coin

Gold stands apart: mined from gold tiles (1 a turn), taxed from cities (1 inland, 2 coastal, and nothing at all while a city is besieged or blockaded, or for five turns after it has been sacked), and plundered in war — 3–4 from a stormed city, and 20–60% of the national treasury from a fallen capital. Unlike bulk goods, gold is credited the moment it is taken. It pays for:

• Mercenaries — free companies offered for hire from turn 3, contested like market offers. They muster at your seat beyond the recruit cap, cost their full recruit value up front, draw a wage each turn scaled to their worth, and begin rolling to desert after two unpaid turns. At most four companies at once. The Late Bronze palace economy has no sellsword market: no LBA world offers, hires or trains mercenaries.
• Professional troops — 2 gold promotes an ordinary land unit to Regular (at most two a turn). Professionals — mercenaries and Regulars alike — fight 20% harder. Regulars draw the same wage but never desert; unpaid, they simply lose the standing.
• Spies — 4 gold each (see Espionage).
• Generals — the officers’ market posts a slate of two for 30–70 gold apiece.
• Provisions — the local markets described under Supply.
• Rebuilding and founding cities, and the levers of city politics.

Armies & Units

Twenty-four unit types in the Classical era across six categories; the Late Bronze roster is its own fourteen. Every unit has terrain-dependent combat ratings — a phalanx that is irresistible on plains collapses in a forest; tribal warbands that own the woods are cut down in the open. Strength is normalized by unit size, so a 300-strong band of psiloi and a 100-strong hoplite lochos compare by quality, not headcount.

• Heavy infantry — Hoplites rule open ground and collapse in forest. Phalangites are the strongest open-field wall and the worst in rough terrain. The Italic Classis fights like a hoplite but holds the hills far better. The Roman Maniple relieves its line rank by rank — it tires far slower each contact round — and keeps most of its strength in the woods and hills where a phalanx dies. And the Siege Train: an engineers’ park, feeble in the field, that adds its full attack again to breach rolls.
• Medium and light infantry — Peltasts (competent everywhere), Psiloi and Tribal Infantry (rough-terrain masters, weak in the open, and the cheapest real fighting value in the game), Roman Velites, Longbowmen (defensive) and Archers (cheap offensive volleys).
• Cavalry — Light and Medium Cavalry are fast, plains-strong, and the only troops that can raid: parked on or beside an enemy worked tile, they strip what it produces for the turn. Horse Archers are the Scythian way of war. Cataphracts and War Elephants are shock troops, up to +20% against armies thin on spear and shock resistance; horses fight 20% worse near enemy elephants, and elephants add their full attack again to breach rolls as living rams. All cavalry fights at 20% effectiveness storming a walled city.
• Naval — Triremes (elite rammers), the Makedonian quadrireme and Punic quinquereme (heavier, more lift), pentekonteres (cheap galleys), Veneti ships (weak in battle, 110 carrying capacity), and Merchant Ships (120 capacity, fish, and no combat value to speak of). Warships carry a few land units; merchantmen carry many — escort them.
• Supply — the land wagon.
• Espionage — the spy.

Siegecraft is learnable. The Siege Train is native to Makedonian, Punic, Mauryan and Iranian cultures — but storm a city that knows the art and your nation learns it too. Rome, notably, carries the aptitude for siegecraft without recruiting the train natively: its engineering is taken by conquest, and then amplified.

Experience and morale

Every unit carries two hidden qualities, both shown as words rather than numbers.

Experience is a rank: Raw → Green → Regular → Veteran → Elite. Battle seasons a unit; your founding troops start Regular, fresh recruits start Raw. It scales attack and defense from −10% at the bottom to +20% at the top — and replacements dilute it, so a rebuilt veteran company loses its edge. Protect your best units rather than endlessly refilling them. Experience also gates what your generals may attempt: several manoeuvres need troops who can actually execute them.

Morale is a mood: Faltering → Wavering → Steady → Resolute → Zealous. It rises 5 for a quiet turn and 5 more for a victory, falls 8 for a defeat and 5 for a march in a harsh season. A unit only begins checking for a rout once its morale has fallen below 80 — which in practice means an army that has already lost two or three battles. Beaten armies come apart; fresh ones do not.

Espionage

A spy is a lone agent posing as a trader. It crosses land and sea, is ignored by armies and cities alike, projects no zone of control, consumes no supply, and is immune to weather and supply attrition. It never attacks and never besieges: moving a spy onto a hostile force or into an enemy city is an infiltration, not a battle. A spy sees and reveals to a radius of 3 while abroad, and its reports ride the same couriers as everything else.

Each nation starts with up to two. More come from gold (4 each) or from taking a city — a 75% chance the captor gains one. A spy sharing a non-city hex with an enemy army is captured 10% of the time, and when it is, the captor learns which nation sent it nine times out of ten.

The Spy stance is the only order a spy party may hold, and no fighting army may take it. The AI never commands spies — this is a tool the player has and its rivals do not.

In the Late Bronze era the agent is the envoy: same rules, era-correct name and art.

Generals

Armies are commanded. A general’s skill is never shown to you as a number, and neither is his gift for intrigue; you learn what he is by what he does.

Finding them

• Every nation opens with two or three generals in its pool.
• In a coined world the officers’ market posts a slate of two for 30–70 gold, refreshed every eight turns. The price says nothing about the man — you are buying an unknown.
• Rarely, the gods send one: a commander arrives as an omen.
• And when a general falls, the army promotes someone from the ranks the same turn. No army is ever leaderless — the question is only who leads it.

What you can read

Public: his name, his temperament, and his battles and victories. No hired or promoted officer is ever a legend — that crown belongs only to a born king, and only one may live in the world at a time (see Rulers in the field).

Also public, and the thing to watch: his reputation, as a standing rather than a score — Unproven, Promising, Respected, Renowned, Feared. Reputation is earned by winning against the odds, and it is also quietly manufactured: a schemer’s name grows without a battle, and a guileless man’s fades. A general who is Feared may be a great captain or a great flatterer. Reputation buys nothing on the battlefield directly — but it moves courts.

Hidden, always: his actual tactical skill, and his talent for intrigue — which is what feeds the siege stratagem, and nothing else.

A foreign general’s record only advances when word of his battle reaches you. What you know of him is stamped as of when your courier rode.

Temperaments

Seven, each fixed for life and visible from the moment he appears: Steady, Daring, Furious, Schooled, Cunning, Rash, Charismatic. They bend which manoeuvres he reaches for — the Furious and the Rash charge and will not refuse a battle, the Cunning flanks and slips away, the Schooled drills — and they bend how likely he is to die doing it. A Charismatic commander is the exception that carries a plain number: his army starts every battle with steadier nerves.

Appointing one

A general does not appear at his new command by decree. He rides out from wherever your ruler sits — your capital in peacetime, the front if your king is campaigning — faster than any army but not instantly, and the army keeps its current commander until he arrives. His card shows an ETA, and you may cancel the appointment while he is on the road. A general already riding elsewhere cannot be sent twice. Relieving a commander rides out the same way: he holds the standard until the stand-down order reaches him.

Dying

Generals die in battle and nowhere else — never of age, never in bed. The base risk is small (2%), and it climbs with how badly his own army bled, climbs again if he lost, and climbs again if he ordered the charge; a steady man is safer, a furious one is not. Rank buys no protection whatsoever: legends die like anyone.

A commander who loses catastrophically — his army all but destroyed — is taken alive, and then he is not.

Rulers in the field

In a dynastic campaign your ruler may take command in person. On his accession there is a small chance he is simply a great captain — a legend, the highest rank in the game, and the only way one ever appears. The game tells you when a king like that is crowned. Manoeuvres closed to every hired officer open only for him, and only in the army he is personally leading.

A ruler in the field carries the seat of government with him: your command radius and the latency of all your orders originate from wherever he is standing, not from your capital. A king at the front hears the front instantly and his home provinces late — and his distant cities feel the distance in their loyalty. While he is away a sacked capital costs your treasury only half what it would.

Battle

When armies meet, each side’s effective power is its units’ terrain ratings scaled by current strength and normalized by size — then shifted by stance, veterancy, professional training (+20%), culture bonuses, national and dynastic traits, shock and elephant-fear, omens, the ground itself, and the generals.

Rules worth internalizing:

• The attacker fights on the worse of the two hexes. Charge into woods, hills or a walled city and you fight at what that ground allows — defenders always fight on their own ground. Pick your battlefield.
• Damage is capped at 30% of the enemy’s strength per clash — 55% with clear dominance — so battles are grinding campaigns, not single-turn annihilations. A side outmatched ten to one in the open (twenty to one in a city) is simply overrun.
• Casualties fall on the fighters: losses land in proportion to fighting power, so cheap padding cannot shield your elites.
• Doomstacks waste swords: only six units strike at full power; each beyond adds half. Two armies on two fronts hit harder than one column in a valley.
• The loser gives ground — a beaten army falls back a hex away from the victor (a garrison in its own city holds), so victories push the front.
• Spoils: about a third of the ships and wagons the loser loses are captured, left at the field for the victor — along with everything the loser was carrying.
• Attacking across a river costs you 30% of your fighting power — your men don’t die in the water, they just arrive in no shape to fight. A fleet storming the shore fights at one-fifth power on land, and cannot land at all into an enemy zone of control.
• Cavalry cannot storm walls. Horsemen assaulting a walled city fight at a fifth of their field power. They are as useful as ever for investing and starving it.

How a battle runs

The approach. When two armies come into contact, the bowmen open — archers, longbowmen, psiloi, horse archers and light cavalry loose a volley before the lines meet, capped at 15% of the enemy’s total. Javelinmen do not: the peltast’s throw is part of the melee.

The clash. Up to four rounds of contact, on shrinking effective strength and rising tiredness. A charging army tires three times as fast; a Roman maniple, relieving its line, tires far slower than anyone. When one side’s effective power falls to a quarter of the other’s, it collapses early.

Nerve. Each side enters with the average morale of its units, plus whatever a charismatic commander adds. An army already carrying two or three defeats may simply come apart — and a rout beats the butcher’s bill: the side that breaks is the side that lost, whoever was killing more.

The pursuit. Victorious cavalry runs down a broken enemy for extra losses — cancelled horse-for-horse by the loser’s own screening cavalry, forbidden to elephants, and immaterial against an army that harassed its way out.

The battle report shows all of it: the order of battle with every unit’s veterancy, a Course of Battle timeline naming each side’s tactic and whether it worked, a role-based disposition map with the wings, centre and skirmish screen as they actually formed, the loot seized, and each army’s history.

Stances

You set the stance; the general picks the manoeuvre. Eleven are yours to give:

• Defend City — hold a friendly city: defense multiplied ×1.6–1.8, never retreats, and the garrison strikes back at half its attack power.
• Defend Area — project a wide, range-2 zone of control.
• Try Ambush — in rough terrain, roll to surprise the enemy (30% if seen, 60% if hidden) for a ×1.4 attack. An ambushed general’s own plan comes apart.
• Try Skirmish — 50% chance to halve your losses, at a quarter off your own blow.
• Attack City — press the assault on a city within reach.
• Pillage — burn enemy country instead of taking it (see Supply).
• Rest & Refit — full recovery, no zone of control.
• Escort Convoy, Haul Convoy, Raid Supply — the logistics orders: shield a baggage train, move goods, or go hunting for someone else’s.
• Spy — the only order a spy may hold, and one no army may take.

A twelfth is not yours to give. Sortie is a one-turn garrison sally the AI sets when a garrison outweighs its besieger by half again: the garrison attacks as the aggressor — so the besieger fights as the defender — holds the city hex, forfeits its wall bonus, breaks the quiet of the siege for that turn, and is back on Defend City immediately after. If you have ever watched a besieged city suddenly come out at you, that is what happened.

Tactics

Beyond the stance you set, your general chooses how to fight — you do not pick his manoeuvre, and you cannot overrule him. What you control is who commands which army, and the troops you give him. Learn your captains’ habits: one always refuses his left on open ground, another cannot be stopped from charging.

Eight manoeuvres exist, each with its own gate:

Four things decide whether a plan works:

Reading the enemy. A general judges what he is facing by the enemy’s cavalry. The better he is, the less obvious the tell has to be. Read a charge coming and the counter is already forming.

Rank. A general badly outclassed by his opposite number never gets his plan off the ground at all — he is forced back onto the standard line. Against a legend, merely being outclassed is enough. Most battles between evenly-matched commanders run Standard on both sides, and that is by design.

Troops. The clever manoeuvres need soldiers who can execute them. A brilliant plan and a raw levy is still a raw levy — a manoeuvre half-executed pays half.

Surprise. A general who has been ambushed executes nothing. His plan is worth zero.

When one plan meets another, the better answer wins the exchange — but the matchup bonus itself is deliberately modest, 6–10% scaled by rank difference and netted against the enemy’s. What actually decides battles is what the manoeuvres do to the rounds: a charge that doubles a first round, a harassment that eats 80% of the damage, a decline that erases the battle entirely.

At sea the two rowing manoeuvres work differently. Veteran crews are what makes them possible — no admiral can order the diekplous with green rowers — but what makes them decisive is outclassing the enemy admiral. A commander two or three grades above his opposite number turns the periplous or the diekplous into a serious advantage; an ordinary captain with superb crews merely sails prettily.

Declining battle dissolves the engagement entirely: no volleys, no rounds, no losses, no entry in anyone’s service record. It is how an outmatched army survives to fight where it chooses.

Sieges

A siege needs a real corps: at least four combat units above half strength. The besieger spends its first turn raising siege works and rolls no dice. From the turn after, it rolls to breach one wall level — and the ramp is split by equipment. This is the heart of the system:

• Without a wall-breaching unit: a flat 4% a turn, with no per-turn increment at all. Time alone never brings a wall down. Against a level-2 wall, halve it again.
• With engines: base 20%, plus a per-turn ramp that grows with how much of your army is actually engineering. One token elephant in a large stack earns only a fraction of the ramp; a proper siege park earns all of it.

On top of that: the garrison’s strength shifts the roll, a deliberate assault adds 25%, and elephants and siege engines add their breach power. Cavalry contributes at 20%.

A level-3 wall cannot be stormed by infantry alone. The only roads in are engines, a stratagem, or starvation.

Siegecraft is an identity

Some peoples and some kings are simply better at this. Assyria leads the world at it; the Makedonians and Romans follow; everyone else is ordinary. Ruler traits add a second axis across every culture — an aggressive or a brilliant king presses a siege harder than a cautious one. Aptitude multiplies the ramp your engines earn, and divides the attrition your besiegers pay. Note the asymmetry in Rome: the aptitude without the native train, so its siegecraft has to be taken from someone who has it, and is then amplified beyond what the original owner could manage.

The quiet blockade

A settled besieger and the garrison it presses do not fight. The quiet lifts only when a third army closes onto the hex, when the approach is a deliberate assault, or when the garrison sorties. A siege is a clock, not a nightly grind.

A repulsed escalade costs blood

A failed breach roll under assault inflicts an attacker-only loss, scaled by how stoutly the wall is manned — with a floor even against an unmanned wall, and a cap of 15%. Storming is a decision with a price.

Starvation and surrender

A city encircled for three turns begins to starve, wasting 5% of its garrison a turn. But hunger persists: the starvation clock no longer resets when the siege lifts. It decays one point a turn and is wiped only on the first Fall — harvest — turn of the year. A city bled once is easier to break next spring.

The surrender roll reads that hunger clock, not the siege record. The onset threshold rises with the city’s size and its walls: a pop-1, wall-1 town gives way after about five hungry turns; a great wall-3 fortress not before seventeen. A hope term cuts the odds sharply when a same-faction field army of four or more land units stands within three hexes — or a fleet lies offshore of a harbour city. A relief column visible on the horizon stiffens a garrison before it ever arrives.

A harbour city with the sea open cannot be starved out by a land army. The ships keep coming. Its garrison still wastes, and you may still batter its walls down and storm them — but to force a port you must close the sea.

Naval blockade: a warship crewed above half strength on the sea beside a harbour cuts its fishing and counts toward the encirclement. Every blockade breaks in Winter.

Winter costs the besieger — the siege attrition surcharge doubles in a harsh season, and siege aptitude divides it. Sitting outside a wall through January is a strategy with a bill.

After the storm

A relief force that destroys the besieger the same turn saves the walls. Stormed walls drop to 0 and regrow slowly: one level a turn toward the world’s base height — but never under an enemy zone of control, and never on the turn the city was hit. Keep the pressure on.

The AI besieges properly

It raises a siege train for any fortified enemy city, marches a fresh corps onto its own sieges that are at risk of lifting, holds a relief floor, and reaches for the sortie when the garrison outweighs you. Since siegecraft became winnable, the trained opponents have noticed: the shipped AI mix leans markedly toward conquest.

What You Know — Fog, Couriers & the Chronicle

TunaWars is a game of imperfect information, and the information system is physical.

• Fog of war has three states: unexplored, explored, and visible. Explored-but-unseen land shows as a faded, sepia memory — the map as you last knew it, not as it is. Mountains block line of sight.
• The map remembers who owned what. A province that changed hands out of your sight keeps its old colour and its old name on your map until word arrives. Your own captured city does not turn foreign the instant it falls; it turns foreign when you are told.
• What you last saw lingers: enemy forces you observed remain marked at their last reported hex, ageing rather than blinking out, until you scout again. Re-sight the same army and its marker moves — it does not leave a ghost behind.
• News rides by courier. Battles, sieges and great events are carried by messenger from where they happened to your ruler’s seat, at 16 courier points a turn — a plains hex costs 2, a road hex 1, a sea hex 3, so eight plains hexes or sixteen road hexes a turn. Move your seat and news in flight re-routes to follow it. Hearsay of battles you weren’t part of arrives with the numbers distorted, as rumor does.
• Your own distant armies report by courier too. “In contact” does not mean “in sight”: an army beyond one courier-turn of your seat shows you its last report even while you are looking straight at it, because its true state hasn’t reached the throne. An army silent too long is shown as presumed lost — and you can still send orders into that uncertainty.
• Your orders ride out the same way. Marches, stance changes, recruits, general appointments and reliefs, disbands, embarkations and promotions all take time to reach the army they are meant for — and can be recalled while they ride, if the recall can outrun them. Order latency is the real ceiling on how big an empire you can actually run, and roads double your command radius. The AI plans under exactly the same delays.
• Take a ruler’s seat and you take his post. Couriers riding to a captured capital fall into your hands, and their intelligence appears on your map once, as a fading sighting.
• Rival rulers and generals are unknown quantities. Every AI nation is led by a named ruler with a hidden character — bold or cautious, gifted or hapless. Fight them enough and your scouts begin to read them: first rumor, then a firm assessment in your chronicle. War is your intelligence service.

Everything you are shown carries a stamp of when it was true: “As of now”, “Word reaches you (N turns old)”, “Last seen turn N”, or, for an army you have simply lost touch with, “No word — presumed lost.” The Forces & Cities browser groups your world by that stamp: what you know now first, then what you knew, then what you have lost.

The chronicle (turn summary) is where it all lands: battles and sieges freshest first, older courier-borne word after, alongside production, city politics, omens, diplomacy and rankings — written as a historian’s account, with a per-turn briefing on your neighbours.

And you can watch the turn unfold. The chronicle banner offers a Movement Replay of the season just resolved — marches, captures and battles played out over the borders as they stood, at whatever speed you like, and showing only what you were entitled to see. It is the clearest way to understand why a march stopped where it did.

The voices

On Apple-silicon devices an on-device AI writes the chronicle’s prose (optional, chosen at world creation; the facts beneath are always the engine’s own). It writes in four distinct registers, and which advisor speaks is settled by the event itself — the same battle is always narrated by the same voice, on every device and every rereading, but the next event may be taken up by another:

• The Scribe — the minute-book: flat, exact, unadorned.
• The Veteran — a campaigner’s report: concrete, causal, blunt.
• The Herald — a proclamation for the agora: formal, meant to be read aloud.
• The Chronicler — the historian’s full voice.

A turn summary therefore reads as a court of advisors rather than one narrator, and each piece of genuine prose is signed. In the diplomacy hub, rival courts speak through a fixed per-nation mouthpiece: it explains decisions the engine has already made and voices the court’s appetite for terms — and it never invents a fact, a deadline, or a demand. All of it is presentation. A deterministic line always stands beneath the model’s prose.

The Annals

The whole campaign binds into a third-person volume, assembled at read time from the deterministic record: a proem and a colophon (“What couriers have not brought, this book does not record”), chapter openers and year summations, battle plates set as figures with full orders of battle, a yearly State of the Realm census, your dynasty’s reigns with the deeds behind each epithet, a Legends appendix of generals, and a Gazetteer of known cities and rulers. Every model-written block is verified at bind time against the record and replaced by a terse deterministic line if it strays. The book exports as a print-ready PDF.

Diplomacy

Grudges. Nations remember. Holding land that was once theirs breeds a grudge that deepens with every ancestral hex — washed away only by reconquest. Defeats in battle, spurned offers, ravaged fields (×1.5) and razed cities (×3) leave a memory that recapture does not heal; only quiet time does, a point every couple of turns without fresh cause. A deep grudge closes a nation’s market to you and hardens its armies against you. And beat a nation others already hate, and those rivals may warm to you — the enemy of my enemy.

Truces. Propose a non-aggression pact from the Diplomacy screen: all war between you — battles, zones of control, raids, blockades — stops for six turns. Weary and weaker foes accept; a dominant power that hates you fights on. AI nations strike truces among themselves too, so the map never locks into total war.

Gifts. Promise a rival goods to warm their opinion — delivered at end of turn, so a well-timed gift can tip that same turn’s truce. One gift per turn. Generosity is the cheapest campaign you will ever wage.

Letters. Diplomacy itself travels. Every act — a truce proposal, a gift, a truce break, an ultimatum, a barter offer, a submission — is sealed into a courier-borne letter that departs your seat, arrives some turns later by distance, and sends the reply riding back. The diplomacy panel shows what is in flight and when to expect an answer. AI courts are lagged the same way. And an intercepted dispatch is a second intelligence channel: it reveals, read-only, where that rival’s forces are marching.

Ultimatums. A nation may issue a demand — terms, a deadline turn, and a named consequence. Compliance is judged deterministically when the deadline falls; refuse, or simply fail the terms, and the consequence lands. Both you and the AI issue them, and a foreign court’s appetite for terms is voiced through its mouthpiece before you commit.

Submission & vassals. A nation beaten to its knees — capital besieged, cities dwindling, armies broken — weighs its plight and may offer to submit to its besieger and fight on as an ally, in the manner of Rome’s socii or the Delian League. As besieger you choose to accept or refuse; refusing is remembered. Allies hold their own lands, defend nearby friends, pay tribute from their two best-producing resources (less imperial overhead for every ally beyond the first), and open their cities to your recruiting — but they never wage conquest, and every turn a restless ally may revolt, on a chance that never falls below 5% and rises with its grudge, with your defeats, with enemy pressure and with the sprawl of your hegemony. Garrison a vassal’s capital to cow it. Vassal cities count toward your conquest victory at sharply diminishing worth — a half, a third, a quarter — so vassals speed a strong realm; they don’t substitute for one. And if the sovereign falls, every vassal goes free.

And when you are beaten low, you may sue for peace and play on as a vassal — biding your time for the revolt that wins your independence back.

Every enemy army and foreign city card carries a Diplomacy button that opens the hub with that power already selected. The overture is always one tap from the war.

Rulers, Dynasties & the Gods

Ruler traits. Every nation’s ruler has a character, running in three channels. Military: a Tactician (+8% attack), a Besieger (+10% storming cities), a Stalwart (+10% defending home walls), a Drillmaster (an extra recruit every other turn), or the Hesitant, whose armies fight 8% below their weight. Economic: a Good Steward or a Wasteful hand on the treasury. Diplomatic: a Magnanimous name that coaxes submission sooner, or a Tyrant’s that hardens resistance. Yours are shown; your rivals’ must be learned through war.

Alignment. Every ruler also stands For the Few or For the Many, and every city in your realm has an opinion about that. See Loyalty and politics.

Dynasties. In endless and long campaigns your nation is led by a ruling house. Rulers accede between 15 and 50 and reign until death — by age (the odds climb each year on the throne), by an assassin’s blade (a small chance every turn), or by catastrophe: a capital lost, a great army destroyed. Expect roughly one succession per 60-turn campaign. Each heir brings new traits, may declare a new alignment, and may take the field in person.

Your rivals’ kings are mortal too, and an heir is usually — not always — cut from the same cloth as his father. A rival’s whole way of making war can change the day its king dies.

Omens. Each turn there is about a 5% chance the gods stir: Prosperity or Wrath (a resource windfall or forfeit, scaled to the size of your realm), Favor or Dread (±5% in combat next turn), a gifted commander arriving at your court — or the demanded sacrifice: the priests call for a tribute of food, and a realm with a granary reserve buys the gods’ favor while one living hand-to-mouth suffers dread. Keep a buffer against the altar’s call. Rivals court the gods unseen.

The Rite of Offerings. You need not wait on them. Take a Vow and pledge an offering at one of three tiers — Modest, Rich or Lavish — costing one, two or three and a half times a levy scaled to your realm’s size, in any resource (gold priced at market). The gods answer next turn in two stages: first the tier’s odds of a favorable answer — 55%, 70%, 85% — and then which omen within that side. The omen itself is guaranteed; the offering buys only its colour. A bad omen is always possible: even a Lavish vow keeps a real chance of wrath, and that floor is a promise, not a bug. Ten turns must pass before you may vow again. AI rulers weigh the same rite.

Victory

Two roads to victory:

1. Conquest — hold a majority of the world’s cities (vassal cities folding in at diminishing worth). Conquest ends the game immediately, whatever the score says.
2. Standing — when the turn limit falls (default 60; endless games have none), the highest score wins.

The score reads:

  cities × 250  +  population × 125
+ enemy value destroyed × 2  −  own value lost × 1
+ decisive battles won × 60
+ land tiles × 3  −  ancestral tiles lost × 6  +  resource tiles × 6
+ min(stockpile, 50) × 2
− restless cities × 25  −  seething cities × 60

Three things about that formula are worth reading twice.

A standing army earns nothing by existing. Only what it does counts: the enemy value it destroys, less the value it loses. A favourable exchange is a net gain, and sitting on a great host you never spend scores you exactly nothing. Battles won pay in proportion to how badly the loser was beaten — a skirmish between handfuls pays nothing; breaking an army and running it down pays double.

A city you hold but do not govern counts against you. Restless and seething cities are subtractions, not assets, until their loyalty recovers. A wide realm of sullen towns is worse than a compact one that is actually yours.

Ceding ancestral ground costs twice what holding it earned. Losing land you once held is the heaviest ordinary penalty in the game.

Special cities. Each city tile carries a victory weight — 1 everywhere by default, so ordinary worlds score exactly as before. A scenario can bake a prized citadel worth several: the Trojan War’s Wilusa is worth twenty, which is why holding it when the deadline falls decides that scenario outright. It shows in-game as a tier — a storied citadel — on the tile inspector, the Cities ledger, and a gold star on the map. The AI reads the same weight you do, so a prized city becomes a magnet for attack and for garrison alike.

Every weight here lives in the world’s config and can be tuned before you start; the in-game handbook reads the same numbers, so neither drifts from the other. The Rankings screen tracks the standings all game, and a defeated player’s campaign ends with a full historical result sheet.

If your last city falls, a short grace to retake it stands between you and elimination — and a destroyed nation passes into history, its name still spoken in the chronicle.

Multiplayer

Hot-seat: any number of human players on one device, each leading a nation, passing the device between turns. Fog of war is kept per player.

Game Center (async): play across devices at your own pace. Each player takes their turn when they like; everyone’s orders resolve together when the round completes, and every device computes the identical result — the simulation is fully deterministic, so there is no host and no server doing the math. Miss several turns and the game carries on without you, with a digest waiting when you return. Fog, chronicles and known-world views are yours alone; the shared state syncs as a compact, versioned blob that old clients can still read.

Multiplayer resolution adds a grace period against instant majority snatches, and a deterministic tie-break when the turn limit falls on a dead heat.

Make It Yours

World creation exposes the whole rulebook:

• Map: era, size (up to 200×200), sea fraction, cities (2–100), lakes, resource density, rivers, which civilizations may appear, starting cities per nation (1–9), water-adjacent cities, fog on/off, turn limit or endless, and — in the Late Bronze Age — whether the Collapse comes at all.
• Economy: every yield, depot and courier behaviour, wagon mechanics, recovery rates, market cadence and scarcity reference, spoilage, pillage yields and recovery, razing, rebuilding and founding costs, wall and siege numbers, zone-of-control threshold, seasonal lengths, raids and blockades on/off, tuna-run size, gold on/off.
• Combat: ambush odds, damage caps, stance trade-offs, stacking, shock and fear, river and coastal penalties, the tactical advantage table, how much a general’s rank is worth.
• Units: per-unit costs, sizes, supply, capacities, and combat multipliers.
• Politics: loyalty drift and equilibria, the cost and effect of every civic lever, revolt thresholds, satrap fealty and remittance, vassal tribute and revolt odds.
• Victory: every weight in the score formula, and the per-tile victory weights that make a storied citadel.
• Flavor: player nation traits (Skilled Sailors, Fierce Warriors, Takers of Cities, Successful Traders — each a small edge with a matching weakness), omens on/off, AI-written prose on/off, dynasty odds, the chance a new ruler is a legendary captain.

The AI. Rival nations are driven by evolved genomes — decision weights bred by playing thousands of full deterministic games against each other. The genome covers stance and movement scoring plus dedicated channels for satrap governance, vows, ultimatums, the Late Bronze doom clock, and relieving a besieged city of its own. The game ships not with one champion but with a spread: ten trained Classical opponents and twelve Late Bronze ones, of deliberately varied strength and archetype, dealt out at random among the AI nations. Your rivals are not all equally good, and a nation that crowns a new king may pick up a new strategy with him. Each AI ruler’s hidden character and its generals sit on top, so no two rivals play alike.

On top of the genome sit hand-built subsystems doing most of the strategic work: rally and march doctrine, trade evaluation by market scarcity, recruitment and city development, siege and raid targeting, supply heuristics, truce and gift and submission decisions, satrap appointment, and a grudge-driven memory.

The AI plays under the same fog you do, and under the same courier delays for both news and orders — it plans from what its own scouts have reported, not from the truth of the board. Two things it does not do: it does not propose truces, and it never commands spies.

If you change the rules, you can retrain the AI in the app — choose generations, population and simulation length — so your custom world gets opponents that learned your rules.

Quick Reference (defaults)