Age of Knockout

A browser RTS in the spirit of Age of Empires I (1997), played as a 32-player knockout bracket of 1v1 matches against AI. Five rounds, each a different game type: Standard (conquest), Death Match, Regicide, Wonder Race, Capture the Relics. Lose once and you're out.

Or play Kingdom Conquest, a standalone round against three AI civilizations: kill kings to capture entire empires.

Play it in the browser: https://ggrocco.github.io/age_of_knockout/

Run

npm install
npm start                       # node serve.js, then open http://localhost:8000/
npm test                        # simulation, rounds, bot, bracket, data and render-model tests
npm run lint                    # ESLint
node test/bot-sim.js 12         # bot-vs-bot termination check, 12 seeds x 5 rounds
node test/bot-sim.js 12 medium,medium islands   # the same on island maps
node test/kingdom-sim.js 12     # four civilizations, both map settings

No build step: plain ES modules, with three.js loaded through the import map in index.html. The development server listens on 127.0.0.1:8000 by default. Set PORT (or pass a port to serve.js) to change the port; set HOST only when your preview proxy requires a different listening interface. For hardware render measurements, start the dev server and open http://localhost:8000/test/tools/render-audit.html?quality=high. The diagnostic reports CPU and asynchronous GPU timings, restores your saved graphics preference, and is excluded from the nginx image.

How a tournament works

Pick a difficulty, set the Time limit slider, and press Begin Tournament, or jump straight into one game type with a Quick match tile. Both choices are saved in this browser. The keyboard and mouse (or touch) controls are under Controls at the bottom of the menu. The difficulty sets the opponent for each of your five rounds:

Level	Round 1	Round 2	Round 3	Round 4	Round 5
Relaxed	relaxed	relaxed	easy	easy	medium
Normal	easy	easy	medium	medium	hard
Hard	medium	medium	hard	hard	hard

Relaxed opponents work at half your speed and wait 30 minutes, and until the Bronze Age, before attacking. Easy opponents keep a smaller army than medium and hard ones, but put their economy into reaching the next age and quickly replace lost villagers. Medium and hard opponents change their attack plan from one wave to the next, so no single defence answers them all: a raid (an early, smaller party that goes for your villagers and the buildings they work from, fights off the soldiers that come at it, and pulls back home once it stops getting kills or loses half its men, while the soldiers trained meanwhile stay home on guard), a siege (a bigger, later wave that knocks down your Towers first, then the buildings that train units), a pincer (half the army swings round the side of your base and comes in from there) or a straight assault on your army. The plan is never the same twice in a row, and differs from match to match. Whatever the plan, a wave forms up first: the army gathers just outside its base, walks out as one group and gathers again short of yours before it attacks, so it arrives together instead of one soldier at a time. It never sets out while its own base is under attack, pulls back home when the fight around it turns clearly against it, and is called home when a big attack hits its base. Its villagers run home from your soldiers and stay off that work while they are about, and any villager you kill is trained again: near the population limit its soldiers leave the room for them.

Before each round the bracket shows the rules, the time limit and your opponent. Back to menu returns to the main menu before round 1; from round 2 on the button reads Leave tournament and asks to confirm, since leaving loses your progress. The other matches in each round are played out by bots in a background Worker so the progress screen stays responsive. If the Worker cannot run or is stopped (a phone may suspend it), the remaining matches are played on the page instead, with the same results; if the round still cannot be finished, Try again replays it without losing your result.

Round	Game type	Goal
1	Standard Game	Destroy all enemy units and buildings
2	Death Match	Start in the Iron Age with 20,000 of every resource; destroy the enemy
3	Regicide	Kill the enemy king, protect yours
4	Wonder Race	Build a Wonder (Bronze Age) and keep it standing for 3 minutes
5	Capture the Relics	Hold all 5 relics in your Town Center for 3 minutes

Time limits. The slider applies to quick matches and all five of your tournament rounds, in every mode and difficulty, including Relaxed.

Slider value	Match time limit
25 (default)	25 minutes of game time
1–120	Choose a limit in one-minute steps, up to 2 hours
0	No time limit

If no one wins before a finite limit, the higher score wins. Speed controls change how quickly game time passes; pausing stops the clock, which shows elapsed / limit. The Quick buttons and bracket show your chosen limit before you play. On desktop, hover or keyboard-focus a Quick button, a bracket round heading, or the in-game objective or clock for a card with the mode's goal, time limit and scoring.

At 0, the clock shows elapsed / ∞, and normal victory conditions, Wonder/relic countdowns and resigning still end a match. A saved choice from the former No time limit checkbox becomes 0. Off-screen AI bracket matches keep their finite mode/difficulty limits so the bracket always resolves.

Kingdom Conquest

Press Kingdom Conquest · 4 teams, or open ?mode=kingdoms. You play Blue against Red, Green and Yellow, starting in Stone Age. The existing Rivers / Islands and time-limit settings apply. Difficulty selects three relaxed, medium (Normal), or hard opponents; &opp=easy also works. The five-round tournament keeps its original rules.

Kill a civilization's king to inherit its surviving units, buildings, resources, explored land, territory, and production queues, including civilizations it already conquered. The higher completed age and both sides' researched upgrades are kept, without stacking duplicate bonuses. Damaged assets retain their health fraction. Existing armies survive above the population limit, but new training must wait until there is room.

Your king has 250 HP, ten times a villager, and automatically walks into the nearest reachable, completed friendly castle. While sheltered he cannot act or take damage. Destroying or deleting the castle releases him alive with his remaining health; he can then shelter in another castle. Inaccessible castles provide no protection, and a king aboard a sunken transport dies, awarding his empire to the team that sank it.

Every completed building claims dry land within eight orthogonal ground steps of its footprint. Claims stop at water, including shallows; the nearest building wins overlaps and equally distant opposing claims remain neutral. The standings show territory tiles, percentage of all dry land, and each king's health/protection. Territory colors appear on the minimap within explored land and follow fog shading.

The last surviving civilization wins. At the deadline, most territory wins; the existing game score breaks territory ties, and an exact remaining tie is a draw. Choose 0 on the time slider for unlimited conquest. If your king falls, choose Spectate to watch the remaining teams with full visibility, or Back to menu. Spectators cannot issue commands. Resigning eliminates your civilization without awarding its assets to an opponent.

Four-player maps use quarter-turn symmetry and equivalent starting resources. Rivers connects all four starts by land crossings; Islands has four home islands and a contested central island. Resource replenishment also uses four-way groups. Blue, Red, Green and Yellow can be previewed in both the building/unit gallery and the Age Ladder.

Playing

You start in the Stone Age (Death Match: Iron Age) with a Town Center and a few villagers on a 112-tile map, at a random point on a ring around the centre (the opponent mirrors you). Gather food, wood, gold and stone, build houses for population, and advance through nine eras: Stone, Tool, Bronze, Iron, Medieval, Age of Sail, Industrial, Modern and AI Future. Each era unlocks units and buildings and changes how your buildings look. To advance you need a Town Center and two finished buildings of your current era, as in AoE1, and every era but the last has exactly two of its own:

Leaving	Build both of
Stone	two of House, Granary, Storage Pit, Barracks
Tool	two of Archery Range, Stable, Market
Bronze	Government Center and Temple
Iron	Academy and Siege Workshop
Medieval	Castle and University
Age of Sail	Arsenal and Trading Company
Industrial	Factory and Railway Station
Modern	Power Plant and Airfield

The new gate buildings each research one upgrade: Sacred Harvest (Temple, food +20%), Phalanx Drill (Academy, infantry +20 HP), Torsion Engines (Siege Workshop, siege +10 attack), Masonry (University, stone +25%), Bayonets (Arsenal, ranged foot units +2 melee armor), Colonial Trade (Trading Company, gold +20%), Railways (Railway Station, every unit 10% faster; the station also trains the Armored Train), Electrification (Power Plant, all gathering +10%) and Air Support (Airfield, Tanks, Armored Trains and siege +30 HP). The Airfield also trains the Combat Drone once you reach AI Future. Farms, Mines, Docks, Towers, Walls and the Wonder never count. On a phone, selecting the Town Center lists the buildings that still count towards the next era, with a tick on those already finished, and the Advance tile shows how many are still missing. Soldiers trained in an earlier era take on the current one's look too: uniforms and weapon finish change, horses give way to motorbikes and hoverbikes, and catapults and trebuchets become mortars and rocket batteries from the Age of Sail on. Villagers, the King and ships keep one look. Each era also raises the population limit that houses can reach: 50 in the Stone Age, then 65, 80, 100, 120, 140, 160, 180 and 200 in AI Future (each house adds 4, the Town Center 10). Farms grow with the eras too: a Farm holds 400 food in the Stone Age, then 500, 600, 750, 900, 1050, 1250, 1500 and 1800 in AI Future, and villagers work it faster (normal speed in Stone, up to 2.4x in AI Future). When you advance, every Farm you already have grows to the new size and keeps its share of food left.

Towers and walls get stronger when you advance: every existing tower and wall section re-scales to your current era, and the tower's weapon changes with it (arrows, cannon, machine guns, beams). Draw a wall by dragging its line (on touch: tap where it starts, tap where it ends, then press Place); an enemy army with no way round it attacks the wall to break through. Walls may run right up to the map's edge (other buildings keep one tile off it), so a line can close the gap along the border. No building or wall may be placed where it would shut in a small pocket of open ground (under 25 tiles), so a villager can never get stuck between buildings; the ghost shows such a tile red. A walled base is far bigger than that. The opponent puts a short wall line in front of each of its towers, on the side facing you, so attackers walk round it under fire or stop to break it; it never walls in its own base, and it rebuilds lost sections. It also repairs damaged buildings, finishes foundations its builders left, and rebuilds a lost Town Center.

Mines and rocky ground. The map has grey rocky ground: gold veins (yellow flecks) and quarries (grey). From the Tool Age a villager can build a Mine (100 wood, 50 stone) on one; only rocky ground will take it. Right-click the finished Mine with villagers and they dig gold or stone from it, carrying it to the nearest Storage Pit or Town Center. Every Mine on a patch draws on the patch's one shared reserve (the inspect line reads "Gold left N"). When the reserve runs dry the Mines collapse, the ground turns back to grass, and a fresh pair of patches of that kind appears elsewhere on the map, one for each side, each holding a third of what the emptied patch started with. The rocky ground thins out: once that third would be under 400 no new pair appears, and at most 8 gold and 4 stone patches exist at once. Loose gold and stone piles run out too: when a kind drops below a quarter of its starting total, new mirrored piles appear (a block for each side, away from both bases and the centre). The opponent digs Mines on its own half of the map when its piles run low.

Maps. The menu's Map setting (saved, like the time limit; ?map= overrides it) picks the map for quick matches and the whole tournament, the bracket's other matches included:

• Rivers (default): the river map below, where soldiers can always walk to the enemy.
• Islands: each side starts on its own island, and a third island in the middle holds the relics and rich gold and stone. No ground joins them: build a Dock and Transport Ships to attack, fetch relics or claim the centre. Every home island holds enough wood, gold and stone (with Farms for food) to advance at least four Ages, to the Medieval Age, without leaving it.

Water and ships. On a river map a river runs between the two bases, from edge to edge, opening into a lake past each ford, and each player has a home bay off it, a short walk from the Town Center. There is always a way to attack on foot: soldiers wade the light-blue shallows over the centre (where the relics are) and at a ford on each side, and only deep water stops them. From the Stone Age a villager can build a Dock (100 wood) on deep water against the shore; it trains the ships, which sail the deep water and the shallows of the whole river, so the two home fleets can meet:

Ship	Age	Cost	Role
Fishing Ship	Stone	75 wood	Fishes the shoals in the bays and the river, lands the catch at a Dock
War Galley	Bronze	135 wood, 30 gold	Oared warship, shoots arrows
Transport Ship	Bronze	150 wood	Carries 8 soldiers or villagers; unarmed
Frigate	Age of Sail	200 wood, 100 gold	Cannon broadsides that splash and batter buildings by the water
Destroyer	Modern	150 wood, 200 gold	Fast, armoured, long-ranged guns that splash

A ship can hit anything within its range of the water, ships first; soldiers on the bank can only hit a ship with ranged attacks, but a ship in the shallows can be attacked by anyone, and Towers shoot ships too. Ships alone don't keep a beaten side in the game (a Dock does). The opponent builds a Dock in its bay (never on a pond: only on water of 200 tiles or more), fishes from the Medieval Age, and keeps a small fleet that answers yours and patrols to your bay during its attacks.

Transport Ships. Right-click your Transport Ship with soldiers or villagers selected (tap it on a phone) and they walk to it and board; it sails to the shore nearest them if it is out at sea. With it selected, right-click the far shore to land everyone there (they walk on to the spot you clicked), or press Unload to land them on the nearest shore. Or just order soldiers or villagers to a spot on another island (right-click it, or the minimap): your free Transport Ships (the selected ones, else the nearest empty ones) come to the nearest shore, take them across a boatload at a time, land them in formation and go back for the rest until everyone is over. Passengers are out of sight and can't be attacked, but if the ship sinks everyone aboard is lost; a relic they carried washes up on the nearest land. A relic carrier landed at home takes the relic on to a Town Center. On an island map the opponent ferries its attack waves to your island and sends squads to fetch the relics from the centre.

Controls (desktop)

Left click / drag select (double-click: all of a type) · right click move / gather / build / repair / attack / fetch relic (with Fishing Ships selected, a right click on the water near a shoal fishes it) · WASD or arrows pan, wheel zooms · . or the round button above the minimap (badge = count) next idle villager or Fishing Ship, H Town Center · hold Space and drag with the left mouse button to pan · Esc pauses and resumes (a Paused dialog stops everything, working villagers included; during a building placement Esc cancels it instead) · click the minimap to jump. Select villagers to get the build menu, select a building to train units or advance the Age.

Villagers go back to work. Order a villager that is gathering or building to build something else and, once the new building is done, it returns to what it was doing: the unfinished building first (several interruptions unwind newest first), then the tree, mine, berries or farm it was working. A Farm or Mine it builds becomes its job at the end of that chain instead, as in AoE. Move, attack or gather orders replace the whole chain.

Repair a building: select villagers and right-click (tap on touch) one of your finished, damaged buildings. They put its HP back as fast as they would build it; full repair costs half the building's cost, paid as the HP goes back on, and they stop when a resource it costs runs out. Selecting a damaged building shows what a full repair would cost. Like a build, a repair returns the villager to the job it interrupted. A damaged building trains units and researches at its share of full HP (a Barracks at 60% HP works at 60% speed, never below 25%); the info panel shows the slowdown, and repairing brings it back to full speed.

Delete a building: select it and click Delete, or press Delete / Backspace. A confirmation dialog names the building and pauses the match. Choose Cancel (or press Esc) to keep it, or Delete building to remove it without a refund; queued training and research are lost. Closing the dialog restores your previous pause state.

Group moves: several units sent to one spot (right click on the ground or the minimap, or a tap on touch) spread out around it in a block facing the way they march, one unit per tile: melee fighters in the front rows, then ranged units, siege, and villagers at the back.

Controls (phone / touch)

Tap your unit or building to select it; with a selection, tap a target to order it (ground = move, enemy = attack, tree/mine/farm = gather, fish (or the water within about a tile and a half of a shoal) = fish with Fishing Ships, own Transport Ship = board, unfinished building = help build, damaged building = repair, relic = pick up). One finger drags the map, two fingers pinch-zoom and pan.

Round buttons: next idle villager or Fishing Ship (badge = count), Town Center, box-select mode. The panel at the bottom shows what is selected; its ✕ deselects, and it hides when nothing is selected. Building placement: tap or drag to position the ghost, then press Place. The menu button (top right) has pause, speed, graphics, full screen, install, resign and quit.

The top bar shows each resource as a chip with its icon, then population (red when full: build a House or advance), the Age (a green arrow while advancing) and the match clock. In portrait it takes two rows: resources first, then population, Age and clock.

Full screen: on Android (and on iPads and desktops) the main menu and the in-game menu have a Play full screen button. For the whole screen with no browser bars at all, install the game as an app (below).

The Delete tile opens the same Cancel / Delete building confirmation as desktop, including for unfinished buildings, towers and walls.

Both orientations are supported; use ?touch=1 to force the touch layout on a desktop browser.

Install on your phone (full screen, no browser bars)

Added to the Home Screen, the game opens like an app: full screen, no address bar or toolbar. No web page can add itself to the Home Screen on an iPhone, so there it takes the steps below. On Android, Chrome may offer its own install prompt: when it does, the menus show an Install app button that opens it in one tap. Otherwise, Install as an app in the main menu (on a phone) or the in-game menu opens this same guide, with a tab for each browser.

If you added the game to an iPhone Home Screen before November 2026 and a dark strip runs along the bottom of the screen, remove the icon and add it again: iOS keeps the status-bar style an app was installed with.

iPhone, Safari: Share, then Add to Home Screen, then Add.

iPhone, Chrome: the Share button at the right of the address bar, then Add to Home Screen, then Add.

Android, Chrome: the ⋮ menu, then Add to Home screen (or Install app), then Install.

On an iPhone the installed game keeps its own settings, separate from the browser's.

Buildings and units by era

Open http://localhost:8000/buildings.html to see every building in every era, rendered with the game's own models. Under each era it lists what the building trains by then and any upgrade it can start researching in that era, with what the upgrade does. Switch Blue/Red team and Fit/True scale; click a building to orbit it or see it under construction. The page reads src/data, so new eras and buildings appear on reload.

Choose Units, or open http://localhost:8000/buildings.html?view=units, to compare villagers, fighters, cavalry, siege engines and ships across all nine eras. Each row shows the same unit in its owner's era from its unlock onward, with training location and base stats. Blue/Red and Fit/True scale also work for units. Click a unit to orbit it and preview walking/sailing, attacks, or a villager chopping wood. The King retains its royal appearance. The Age Ladder's Unit Evolution link opens this view.

Age Ladder

Open the Age Ladder (or http://localhost:8000/ages.html) to see every Age side by side: the buildings and units it brings, rendered with the game's own models; which buildings you need to leave it and what advancing costs; its upgrades; and what grows by itself on arrival (population limit, Farms, Towers, Walls). Tap a building, unit or upgrade to trace everything its building trains and researches across the Ages. Below the map, a chart prices each age-up (research plus the cheapest gate buildings) and a list shows where the ladder trips players, checked against the data on every load. Like the buildings page, it reads src/data, so changes show up on reload.

How it's built

flowchart LR
  subgraph Browser
    input["src/ui input<br/>(mouse, keys, touch)"]
    view["src/render<br/>Three.js view"]
    hud["src/ui HUD"]
  end
  bot["src/ai/bot.js"]
  cmds["src/sim/commands.js<br/>execute()"]
  sim["src/sim game.js<br/>deterministic · seeded RNG · 20 ticks/s"]
  rounds["src/rounds<br/>win checks · time caps"]
  data[("src/data<br/>units · buildings · ages · techs · defences")]
  tour["src/tournament<br/>bracket + headless runner"]

  input --> cmds
  bot --> cmds
  cmds --> sim
  data --> sim
  sim --> rounds
  sim -. reads state .-> view
  sim -. reads state .-> hud
  tour --> sim

The player and the bot change the game only through commands.js. The simulation in src/sim has no DOM and a seeded RNG, so the same match runs headlessly in tests, in test/bot-sim.js and for the other bracket matches. The renderer and HUD only read its state.

• src/sim: game state, unit orders, A* pathfinding, fog of war, towers and walls, map generation.
• src/rounds: the five game types, their win checks, time caps and score tiebreak.
• src/ai: the bot (relaxed / easy / medium / hard); it also plays your side with &autoplay=1.
• src/tournament: the 32-player bracket and headless match runner.
• src/render, src/ui, src/main.js: Three.js view, per-era building designs (src/render/arch), HUD, input and tournament flow.
• src/data: unit, building, age, tech and defence tables. Unit combat and cost stats are checked against openage's AoE1 manual data; buildings, age-up costs, techs, towers/walls and AI Future content are approximations or invented. See src/data/README.md for every deviation from AoE1.

Rendering

The Three.js view uses warm directional lighting, filtered shadows, sky reflections, textured wood/stone/metal, wind-blown grass, and reflective water with animated normals and shoreline foam. High and Ultra add ambient occlusion for depth around buildings, foliage and units. Every era has its own building designs, from hide tents and thatch through mud brick, terracotta tile, castles, colonial whitewash, industrial brick and modern concrete to AI Future glass. Units have articulated equipment, including separate drone, mech and railgun models for AI Future, and fighters from earlier eras are redrawn in their owner's current era. These are original procedural models (no image or model files), not Age of Empires assets.

Choose Settings → Graphics quality on desktop, or open the top-right menu on a phone. Changes apply without restarting the match and are saved in this browser. The default is High; try High on an iPhone 17 Pro and Ultra on an M2 Max, then adjust for frame rate and battery use. These are starting recommendations, not measured performance guarantees on those devices. Use &quality=balanced|high|ultra to override the saved preference.

Preset	Maximum pixel ratio / rendered pixels	Shadow map	Ambient occlusion	Bloom	Grass clumps	Fire, smoke and dust
Balanced	1.5 / 2 million	1024	Off	Off	2,500	Half as many, up to 600 at once
High	2 / 4 million	2048	Half resolution, 12 samples	Off	8,000	Up to 1,500 at once
Ultra	2.5 / 8 million	4096	Three-quarter resolution, 24 samples	Three-eighths resolution	14,000	Up to 2,500 at once

Lights glow: fire and braziers, lamp lenses, muzzle flashes and the AI Future's cyan and magenta neon give off their own light, so they stay bright in shadow. On Ultra a bloom pass adds a halo around them (sun glints on gold and chrome can sparkle a little too). On an M2 Max it costs about 7 ms a frame at Ultra (16.5 ms instead of 9.5) and would cost about 3 ms at High, so Balanced and High keep the lights a little brighter without the halo.

Battles leave marks: a building below half health burns, with more fire and black smoke the more it is damaged; a destroyed building goes up in fire, smoke and flying debris; a killed soldier leaves a puff of dust; and cavalry and siege engines raise dust as they move (infantry a little, villagers and ships none).

No extra assets, network downloads, or build step are needed. Geometry is shared between models, every model is drawn through one batched mesh, and grass is instanced. Decorative grass respects fog and building/resource footprints. Float render-target support is checked before enabling sky reflections and ambient occlusion; direct rendering remains available. test/render-models.test.js checks every unit and building era for valid geometry and animation transforms, and test/graphics-quality.test.js covers preference handling, pixel budgets and the rendering fallback. Shaders, picking, lighting and visual quality are checked in a browser.

Static model and contact-shadow transforms stay on the GPU until they change. Building flags, machinery, smoke and drone rotors use vertex-shader animation; terrain textures are baked on the GPU at match start and repainted there when ore patches change. Paused and result screens redraw at 10 FPS, while camera and selection changes remain responsive. Pausing freezes the animation clock. The simulation remains deterministic JavaScript at 20 ticks per second.

URL parameters

Param	Effect
?mode=kingdoms	Start standalone four-team Kingdom Conquest; opp sets all three opponents
?round=1..5	Start that round as a quick match, skipping the menus
&opp=relaxed|easy|medium|hard	Opponent for ?round= (default medium)
&seed=N	Replay a map; without it every match gets a fresh map and start position
?map=rivers|islands	Map type, overriding the saved menu pick (default Rivers)
&speed=N	Game speed multiplier
&autoplay=1	A bot plays your side; &bot=easy|medium|hard sets its difficulty (default hard)
?autotour=1	Whole tournament on autopilot
?level=relaxed|normal|hard	Tournament difficulty, overriding the saved menu pick
?timeLimit=0..120	Override the saved time limit in whole minutes; 0 = unlimited, default 25
?noTimeLimit=1|0	Legacy override: 1 = unlimited, 0 = 25 minutes; timeLimit takes precedence
?touch=1	Force the touch layout
&fps=N	Frame cap (default 60; redraws at 10 FPS while paused or on the result card, with immediate camera/selection updates)
&quality=balanced|high|ultra	Graphics preset

window.__app exposes the live game for debugging. Try ?round=1&seed=1 for the starting village, ?round=2&seed=3&autoplay=1&speed=8 to watch two bots race through the eras, and ?round=3&seed=1&touch=1 for the phone layout.

For a custom deadline, use ?round=1&timeLimit=60 for a one-hour quick match or ?round=1&timeLimit=0 for no limit. For four-team play, try ?mode=kingdoms&seed=3, or add &map=islands&autoplay=1 to watch four bots.

Deploy (Docker)

docker compose up -d --build     # nginx image on http://localhost:8080/ (AOE_PORT=9000 to change)

The image is static files only (index.html, buildings.html, ages.html, styles.css, favicon.svg, manifest.webmanifest, icons/, src/, the two three.js folders the import map uses) behind nginx, with a healthcheck. Plain docker build -t aoe-knockout . builds the same image.

Deploy (GitHub Pages)

.github/workflows/pages.yml publishes the game to https://ggrocco.github.io/age_of_knockout/ on every push to main (or by hand from the Actions tab). It runs npm test, assembles the same files as the nginx image (scripts/build-site.sh), checks they start in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit (test/tools/browser-smoke.js) and deploys them with GitHub's Pages actions, so a build that does not start in a browser is never published. One-time setup: Settings > Pages > Source: GitHub Actions (the repository must be public, or on a plan that allows Pages for private repositories). Pages caches files for 10 minutes, so the workflow serves styles.css and src/ from v/<content hash>/, as the Docker image does; a new deploy reaches players within about 10 minutes and never mixes old and new modules.

CI (GitHub Actions)

.github/workflows/ci.yml runs on every pull request and every push to main:

• Tests: npm test and the test/bot-sim.js 12 bot-vs-bot check.
• Browser: test/tools/browser-smoke.js loads the site exactly as Pages serves it (sub-path and all) in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit (Safari's engine). It plays into a tournament round, wins it so the bracket is simulated in the Worker, starts a quick match, Kingdom Conquest, an islands map and the touch layout, opens both design pages, and fails on any console error, uncaught error or missing file. Locally: bash scripts/build-site.sh _site && node test/tools/browser-smoke.js _site chromium.
• Lint: npm run lint (ESLint, eslint.config.js).
• Security: npm audit (fails on moderate or worse) and npm audit signatures; on pull requests, GitHub's dependency review blocks newly added vulnerable dependencies.

.github/workflows/codeql.yml runs CodeQL security analysis on the JavaScript and the workflow files on the same events and once a week; findings show under Security > Code scanning.

CI (Jenkins)

Jenkinsfile runs the unit tests (JUnit report), test/bot-sim.js 12, then builds the nginx image and smoke-tests it (page, CSS, JS and both three.js import-map paths served with the right content type). Everything runs in Docker, so the agent needs only the docker CLI with a reachable daemon (e.g. Jenkins in a container with /var/run/docker.sock mounted and the docker CLI installed) and the JUnit plugin. Nothing is pushed or deployed. Same tests without Jenkins:

docker build --target test -t aoe-knockout-test . && docker run --rm aoe-knockout-test

Contributing

Issues, ideas and pull requests are welcome and much appreciated! Age of Knockout is a one-person project made just for fun, so please expect slow replies and reviews. Contributor and agent notes are in AGENTS.md.

Status

Rules, AI and bracket are covered by headless tests and bot-vs-bot runs; the renderer and UI were checked with browser screenshots and scripted events. Feel, balance and fidelity to the original have not been judged by a human player. progress.md records rulings, known gaps and deferred issues; design specs and plans are in docs/superpowers/. Contributor and agent notes are in AGENTS.md.

Villagers and ships update their appearance when their owner advances: civilian workwear and safety gear, sailing craft, powered vessels and AI Future hulls. Their roles and stats stay the same. Fishing Ships are the first boats available; transports and warships follow in Bronze.