Ruin or Victory

Ruin or Victory is a real-time strategy game in which you develop an economy, equip and direct warriors, and adapt your plans to the map and your opponent. Its mechanics are straightforward to use, but success depends on balancing them, choosing where to focus and managing risk. Battles have uncertain outcomes, and a single mistake does not necessarily decide the game.

Game modes

• Journey: Fight AI tribes for control of a continent across a turn-based map layer. Meet strategic, tactical and economic challenges over multiple games while building your tribe’s persistent strength through technology, units and resources.
• Scenario: Play against one or more AI opponents, setting their personalities and difficulty, starting and maximum strength, and teams.
• Quick battle: Fight a random AI army in field, siege or naval battles.
• Free-build: Play without an opponent, with optional tutorial hints. A complete user manual and how-to guide are available in-game while paused.

Maps and strategy

Randomly generated maps vary in terrain, resources and starting positions. You can fight across sand and snow, through forests and swamps, and around rivers, lakes and boulders that form natural chokepoints. You can cross water to expand onto islands in the open ocean, and save custom map-generation settings that control many parameters.

The branching technology tree runs from the Stone Age to the early medieval age. It offers new items and buildings as well as abstract benefits; some paths exclude others, with advantages and disadvantages that shape your strategy. The AI uses the same mechanics as you and does not cheat: it bases decisions on what it has spotted, and varies its strategies and equipment between games. In skirmishes, it develops its economy dynamically.

Economy and logistics

Resources and crafted items remain physically present in the world. You must move resources to construction sites and deliver supplies to workshops; finished items then need to be moved and stored in armories. Population grows organically, with real-time food consumption, starvation deaths and overcrowding to account for. You must balance population growth, food production and military size while dealing with hardships such as disease and crop failure.

Humans develop skills that improve their efficiency. Skilled crafters produce higher-quality items and can become strategic targets, while warriors take time to train but are dangerous in battle. You can lure and tame wild animals for more efficient farming and transport, and to enable cavalry; domesticated animals need food and training. Animals can also be captured after their owners abandon them.

Warriors, ships and buildings

You design custom equipment sets for your warriors, from armored archers to light spearmen suited to facing cavalry. Each piece of equipment affects a warrior’s speed and combat abilities. Warriors drop carried items and resources when they die, leaving them for the victor to loot.

You can build ships to fish and fight, crew galleys with trained and equipped warriors, and engage enemies with ranged attacks or boarding. Buildings and siege machines need humans to operate them and can be captured when abandoned. Captured enemy buildings can be looted, burned or put to use as your own.

Controls and interface

The game scales its detailed systems to the strategic level for fluid RTS play. Resources and items can be managed in any quantity with a few button clicks, without inventory screens, pop-up windows or right-click menus. You can queue orders to chain actions and display them in the world. The interface has customization options, hotkey navigation, unlimited map zoom and scalable icons, alongside original stylized artwork and fonts.