Roadmap

The port is a hobby project. This page is the honest state of it.

What is new

The latest additions, with screenshots.

Hunting grounds you draw yourself

Press "угодья", drag a rectangle over the map, and the squad works that patch only: it takes on any beast that walks inside and never chases prey across half the map. Select a group first and the patch belongs to that group alone, with a bow drawn over every hunter in it. A personal order pulls a man out of the hunt, and meat he is already carrying home is not cancelled. Press the button again to clear the patch.

The hunting rectangle, a bow over every hunter, and the button in the bottom row

A hand-written squad AI that plays the campaign

The "автобой" button now hands your tribe to a squad AI written by hand rather than to the old script. It picks prey by an exchange estimate taken from the engine itself — weapon and shield tables by target type, the mage bonus table, the attack cadence and even the regeneration the engine grants every sixteen ticks — pulls a beaten fighter out of the front line, breaks away from a pack or from a single beast too strong to trade with, sleeps the whole squad when it is truly spent, and picks up meat and gear between fights. It clears stage one for almost every tribe.

The status line: mode, the chosen prey, who is striking and who stepped back

Quick buttons along the bottom

Share (G) hands loose weapons and shields to whoever is empty-handed, drop (Y) puts everything unworn on the ground, retreat (R) sends the selection home, score shows the tribe table, plus patrol (V), hunting grounds and the auto-play switch. Everything that used to need the side panel and several clicks is one button or one key now.

The bottom row: quick buttons, hunting grounds and auto-play among them

The map window is as wide as your screen

The game used to draw into 512×480 and no further: sixteen tiles by fifteen. The old zoom did not help — it thinned out the pixels of an already drawn scene, so the picture blurred and the frame stalled. Now the magnifier grows the window itself: the game renders into its own frame the size of the browser window, one to one, and the map area goes from 16×15 tiles to something like 45×27. The panel moves to the right edge, the minimap draws the bigger viewport rectangle, the cursor and the edge scrolling work at the real edges of the screen, and the aspect ratio is kept. The page always opens at the native size — only the magnifier buttons change it.

The wide window: the same pixels one to one, about three times more map

The net is trained, and you can play against it

The computer no longer has to be the hand-written script. In the lobby every computer seat picks its brain: the script, the unit network, the tactician network, or both at once. The unit network was first cloned from 767 thousand decisions taken in real matches, then trained further with PPO inside matches — after which it beats the script head to head 4:1, and the pair of networks leads the round robin 19:9. The weights ride in the start packet, so everyone in the room runs the same brain and the replay plays back exactly.

A computer seat with both networks chosen instead of the script

Squads keep their group number

Bind a selection to a digit and the number is drawn next to every unit in it, so you can see at a glance who belongs where without clicking through the map. Pressing the digit brings the group back, and the binding survives losses and reinforcements.

Two squads: the first one selected, the second marked with its number

Orders in a queue, and three new keys

Hold Shift and click several times: the unit walks the points one after another, and attack steps follow a moving target, not a spot on the ground. The plan is drawn on the map as a dashed line with numbered stops. T collects every piece of meat within ten tiles, B sends everyone selected to carry what they hold to the store, and a double click picks every unit of the same kind on screen.

A queued route: dashed line, numbered stops, and the unit walks them in order

Replays are kept on the server

A match records itself and the recording now also goes to the relay, so it does not die with the browser profile and other people can watch it. The list has two sections: your own recordings, and what is on the server. A server replay is downloaded and played on the fly, and any of them can be saved as a file.

The replay list: my own recordings above, the server ones below

Food keeps coming, and the seat colours are honest now

An optional rule for the lobby: every base with a Sanctuary gets 2000 food a minute. Hunting alone caps the economy on a poor map, and with this the match becomes a normal strategy game. Also the seat swatches in the lobby finally match what you see on the map — before that the list of colours was simply made up and matched nothing.

The lobby: seat colours as on the map, and the match rules with the new one

The computer plays better

It scouts with several runners who never fight, remembers the ground it has walked exactly like a human does, builds an armoury and orders as much gear as it has hands for, and pours the experience into one champion instead of spreading it thin. When it meets a force half again its size it stops trading units and goes to grow instead.

The whole map at a glance

Zooming out used to redraw the scene screen by screen — on the biggest map that is 192 passes and the frame stalled. Now the far step draws the map from tile colours, the way the minimap does: 5 ms instead of 79, and the view follows the camera instead of always showing the top left corner.

Item tooltips and the artifacts that never worked

Hovering an item prints its name, kind, numbers straight from the game tables and what it actually does, in English, Russian and Polish. The artifacts in slots 9 to 11 have numbers in the data but nothing reads them in the original; a switch turns those bonuses on, and with it off the memory is byte for byte as before.

The tooltip is printed in the game font at the bottom, where the engine writes its own messages

Done

The simulation. Movement, combat, growth, economy, magic, production and the built-in computer opponent, ported function by function from the original executable at the original addresses.
The renderer. Terrain, units, buildings, fog of war, the side panel, fonts and the original screens, drawn from the original sprite banks.
Campaign. All twelve stages for all eight tribes, with briefings, victory and defeat screens, music and the intro video.
Skirmish. Start kits by seats on the twenty original multiplayer maps, with computer opponents and a quick-start option.
Online multiplayer. Deterministic lockstep with per-turn state hashing, a lobby with seats, colours and tribes, observers with three fog modes, chat, kick, surrender, reconnect after a drop and automatic resync.
Replays. Every game is recorded, can be played back, and is kept on the server so it outlives the browser profile.
Its own computer opponent. A scripted AI with four difficulty levels and seven characters: it hunts, scouts, builds, equips its fighters, grows a champion and does not see through the fog of war.
Pathfinding. A* over the original grid, which fixes the units that used to get stuck on buildings.
Localisation. English and Russian interface, with the original Korean and English game texts intact.

In progress

A learned opponent. A neural policy for a single unit trained on scenes: retreating, distracting, kiting with ranged units, judging when a fight is lost. The goal is a computer that uses its magic and does not walk into a tyrannosaurus. Watch the training scenes ↗
Small-squad tactics. Three against three as the next training stage, then generated skirmishes with mixed tribes.
Many games on one screen. A tiled page for watching several matches at once, used for testing.

The original lobby and score screens, instead of the current custom panel.
Touch controls that do not fight the player on a phone.
A map editor in the browser, and loading community maps.
Sharing a replay by link.

Not planned

Rebalancing, new units, new mechanics. The point of this port is that the game behaves exactly as it did in 1996, bugs included. Ideas for a different game belong in a different game.