Orcs & Order

A small, extremely tongue-in-cheek turn-based 4X in which orcs slowly discover that two orcs can stand in the same place.

The tech tree is the joke. The Horde advances through First Orc → Let's Orc Together → Idiots Stick Together → The Next Level of Stupid → Beyond Stupid → Not Just Stupid Anymore → And Stupidity for All. The Kingdom reaches the same conclusion via Brotherhood, Join the Army, Bunches of Footmen, and 10 Heads are Better than One. Every advance name comes from the original design doc.

Units stay singleton — one tile, one unit. "Two Orcs" is not a stack; it is a unit type with two orcs drawn on it and double the numbers. Ten of them cost ten orcs' worth of shields, occupy one tile, spend one movement point, and die all at once.

Running it

npm install

npm run dev

npm run build

dist/ is a self-contained static site with no server and no dependencies (88 KB of JS, 30 KB gzipped). It is built with a relative base, so it works unchanged from GitHub Pages, an itch.io HTML5 upload, or a local file open.

npm test

Playing

Input	Does
Left-click	Select your unit, or open your city
Left-click again	On a unit standing in a city, opens the city underneath it
Left-click open ground	Move there, if it is in range
Right-click	Move or attack at any distance — including into your own cities
Move into fog	Allowed. The unit marches on and halts the moment it sights an enemy
Left-drag	Pan · Wheel zoom · Arrows pan
B	Found a city (Peons and Peasants only)
P	Orcpedia — also on the toolbar. Every unit and structure named in the Advances screen links into it, as do a city's standing structures and the ? beside each build option
F fortify · S sentry · Space skip · N next idle unit · C centre
T advances · Ctrl+S saves · G grid · Enter end turn · Esc deselect
M	Mute. The Sound button opens music and effects volume sliders

Reading the map. A blue wash marks everywhere the selected unit can reach this turn; red marks what it can attack. Hovering anywhere shows the route, drawn in two tones: solid for the part walked this turn, faded for everything beyond it, with a ring at the destination and the number of turns the march will take.

Clicking a destination out of reach this turn is fine — the unit sets off and keeps going each turn until it arrives, halting early if it sights an enemy.

Research is never chosen for you. Beakers bank up until you pick a target, so you are asked rather than assigned; the tech tree opens by itself whenever nothing is being researched.

The soundtrack follows the situation: the battle theme cross-fades in whenever an enemy unit is in sight and holds for two turns after the last one is lost from view.

Move into an enemy to attack. Winning a fight does not advance you into the tile — walk in afterwards to take an emptied city.

Where things are

src/
  engine/   rng, grid, A* pathfinding, line of sight   — no game knowledge
  model/    terrain, units, techs, buildings, factions — pure data tables
  sim/      worldgen, turn pipeline, movement, combat, cities, research
  ai/       the opponent, behind a one-function interface
  render/   canvas map, camera, minimap, procedural sprites
  ui/       HUD and panels, plain DOM
  persist/  save format

sim/ never imports from render/ or ui/. The simulation is a pure function of state plus input, which is what makes it testable and what would make hotseat or async multiplayer possible later without a rewrite.

Adding content is editing one data file:

• a new unit → add a creature to src/model/units.ts; every group size in its counts array is generated automatically
• a new advance → add an entry to src/model/techs.ts; the tech tree UI lays itself out from the prerequisite graph
• a new building → src/model/buildings.ts

Art and sound

Raw art goes in art_src/ at whatever size and format it came out of the generator. Then:

npm run art

tools/prepare_art.py cuts out the background (a flood fill inward from the border, so a knight's white armour survives while the transparency checkerboard does not), trims each sprite to its content, bottom-aligns it so every unit's feet land on the same line, scales it down and writes optimised PNGs into public/. The first batch went from 48 MB of 1024² JPEGs to 200 KB.

public/ is generated output — treat it as build artefacts, not source.

Group sprites are composed at runtime and need no artwork. "Two Orcs" through "Ten Orcs" are built by stamping the single Orc sprite N times, mirroring alternate members so a crowd doesn't read as a row of clones. Image generators are unreliable at drawing an exact number of matching figures; stamping one good Orc is exact, free, and picks up any later redraw of that Orc automatically.

Anything with no art falls back to a procedural placeholder, so the game is always playable. See ART_PROMPTS.md for the prompts, filenames, and what is still missing.

All art and prompts describe original characters in a general 90s-fantasy-RTS style. No Warcraft assets, names, characters, or logos appear anywhere in this repo.

The art itself was generated with Google Gemini from those prompts. The sound effects came from Pixabay, found with the search terms in SOUND_NEEDED.md.

Every audio file traces to a named Pixabay download, listed in CREDITS.md with its uploader and id -- including the original download name of each sound effect that was renamed to the event it plays on, recovered by matching byte for byte against the originals.

The processed audio in public/ is tracked, since it is what the game loads. The untouched original downloads in art_src/sfx and art_src/music are not: the game does not need them, and they are credited in full either way.

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Licence

Code, tooling and documentation are MIT -- see LICENSE. The artwork and audio are not covered by it and are not the project's to relicense; anyone reusing the code should assume they need to bring their own. CREDITS.md has the details.

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Status

Everything below is built, tested, and playable end to end. 798 tests pass (npm test), including full AI-vs-AI games, save round-trips, a determinism check, and fixture saves that land the interface straight on a situation worth looking at (fixtures/, loaded through Save and load).

Balance

The authority is the sweep, not the per-commit test: npm run sweep plays 216 AI-vs-AI games -- two arms, two seed sets -- in about 25 minutes, and refuses to compare arms that do not really differ. The method, and every result it has produced, is in DESIGN_QUEUE.md.

The game as it ships -- endings, follies and terraforming all on, measured September 2026 -- comes out Horde 57-51 over 108 games, about as even as it has been. Games end on purpose now: the Demonic Portal and the Mysterious Object decide about half of them, level with each other, and barely one in twenty is still settled on points at the turn limit.

What is in

Three playable factions with their own counting-joke tech trees: the Horde, the Kingdom, and the Hivekin, who grow castes instead of recruiting units, keep one immobile Queen, and go under the ground rather than around it. In an ordinary game they are not on the map at the start -- they emerge from unclaimed ground partway through, earlier on a hard level and later on an easy one -- but they can be chosen, in which case both empires are there from turn one instead.

Singleton units that grow into groups, promotion perks and abilities, supply lines, roads and trade routes, ships and overseas invasion, raiders, ruins with something asleep in them, garrison posts, pillaging, land specials, hand-picked city tiles, a capital that grows a piece at a time, three ways to win by building something, twelve follies (the game's wonders), and workers who irrigate, mine and clear the land once the roads are laid.

Diplomacy, per pair of sides: you meet somebody and hear from them, a standing from -50 to +50 with a name for each band, treaties that bind the two who signed and nobody else, and an AI that reads the number -- it will not come to the table with a side it is Angered at, and it walks at the side it hates before the side it merely dislikes. A council of advisors argues about all of it.

Art status

Every unit, city, terrain set, road piece, building icon, advance icon, advisor portrait and palace piece is in, along with sound effects and music. Prompts for all of it, and the house style, are in ART_PROMPTS.md. npm run art cuts raw art out of its background, sizes it, and re-encodes audio on the way in.

Known gaps and next steps

1. AI is a behaviour list, not a planner. It expands, garrisons, builds roads and follies, works the land, and marches at the nearest known target. It does not concentrate force, defend a front, or decide when to give a war up. An outside review of the codebase named this the single highest-value thing to build next, and it is hard to disagree.
2. No governments. Deliberate for now; it fits the architecture.
3. Spies are designed and not built. SPIES_PLAN.md has the whole thing -- two tiers a side, a disguise you choose, five advances on the shared spine -- and the art is drawn and through the pipeline.
4. The war is the open measurement question. Three levers aimed at it measured as nothing before one finally moved it; DESIGN_QUEUE.md carries what is known.
5. Balance has not been played to a verdict. The sweep says about even; play should confirm or deny it before anything is tuned.