Terrors of War

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An old-school WW2 base-builder RTS in the spirit of the genre's golden age. Big bases. Asymmetric factions. Superweapons. Logistics with teeth. Launching in Early Access.

In the spring of 1945, the Reich is breaking apart above the ground and burying itself below it. What goes underground is not just men. It is doctrine. It is research. It is a promise made in rooms the Allied advance will never reach in time.

That promise will be kept.

Until then, there is still a war to finish. Yours.

Run Supply, Or Run Through It

No second resource. One you have to run. Supply trucks roll from your base, hauling everything you need to build and fight. Every convoy is exposed the moment it leaves cover. Every ambush is a real setback, not a rounding error.

• Field Depots — forward supply hubs. Pick one role: offense aura, defense aura, or mobility aura. Defenses, turrets, and emplacements can only be built within reach of one, and they pull ammo from its reserves. A frontline depot is only as strong as the convoys keeping it supplied.

• Static defenses are not free standing. Bunkers, anti-tank guns, and emplacements burn ammo magazine by magazine, drawn from whichever depot they sit by. Cut the convoys and the rounds run out. Concrete without resupply is just a monument.

• Heavy Reinforcement Convoys. US heavy armor (Pershing, Turtle, T30) arrives from off-map road routes anchored to capturable Nodes. Pick a safe route ending near your base for zero risk, or a forward route delivering them straight into the contested midmap as timed reinforcement. Convoys are invisible unless scouted. How exposed they are is your call.

Defend or blitz — both win matches. A well-placed defense, with depots on key terrain and supply lines committed to the ground you took, can break an attacker who misread the geometry. A well-timed push, with the right superpowers in the right window and the forces stacked behind them, can decide a match before logistics even register. Calculated risks make up the battlefield. The wrong call at the wrong moment leaves you exposed; the right call at the right moment ends it.

What You're Getting

• A classic WW2 base-builder RTS. Big bases you actually build. Faster pacing than the tactical sims. Asymmetric factions where the choice between flexibility and commitment is a real strategic decision

• Rifles do not crack tanks here. Bazookas do, but bazookas get run over without cover. Rear armor matters, cover matters, the matchups have real math

• Heavy USA tanks arrive by Heavy Reinforcement Convoy from off-map. Pick a safe route ending near your base, or a forward route that brings them straight into the fight as timed reinforcement

• Supply lines run to the front under fire. Field Depots pick one role and project it onto everything nearby: an offense aura, a defense aura, or a mobility aura. Defenses must be built near a depot and draw ammo from its reserves. Lose a depot's convoys and everything tied to it dries up

• Procedurally generated maps across 5 biomes: desert, forest, plains, snow, arctic. Find a layout you love? Send the seed. Your friend plays the exact same map. No Workshop needed, just a number

• Three handcrafted Operations, plus Capture-the-Facility — a competitive mode where capturable structures grant the holder a match-deciding weapon: V2 barrages, atomic strikes, or near-total map vision

• Deterministic lockstep multiplayer with ranked ladders, AI-takeover on disconnect, push-to-talk voice, and replays you can scrub, share, and cast with a per-player observer overlay

• A solo-dev game that ships fixes you asked for, in the next patch

• A war the Allies thought they had finished. Until it came home

Escalation, Not Attrition

Matches start with rifles and half-tracks. They end with artillery barrages, heavy armor, and V2 rockets falling on positions that felt safe a minute ago. The US researches what it needs. Germany commits to a doctrine. Two different relationships with the tech tree, by design. Call in paradrops, scout sweeps, strafing runs, artillery, and emergency repairs to break a stalemate, and watch them backfire if you mistime the window. Turtling has a cost. The player who keeps pushing has the advantage.

Cover, Armor, Angle

Rifles do not crack tanks. Tanks crack tanks. Bazookas crack tanks too. And bazookas get run over if they do not take cover before the armor reaches them. Hit a tank in the rear and the math changes hard. Hit it head on and it grinds you down. Machine guns hold a chokepoint until something flanks them or rolls over them.

Engagements move faster than the tactical sims, but the matchups still matter. You can win a fight with the wrong unit in the right spot, and you can lose one with the right unit in the wrong spot. Find the angle. Commit. Or commit to the chokepoint and make them come to you.

Territory That Matters

Supply Nodes across the map grant one of three advantages. Economic nodes feed your income. Population nodes raise your army cap. Vision nodes reveal the ground directly around them. Capturing them forces expansion. Holding them forces commitment. The map is not a backdrop. It is the fight.

Each player starts near a Radio Station Node, a tower wired into HQ. Hold it and you keep two things: your minimap, and your call-in arsenal. Paradrops, scout sweeps, artillery strikes, strafing runs, emergency repairs. Lose it and both go dark until you take it back. It sits close enough to HQ for a natural defense advantage but not impossible to assault. Stealth units and fast scouts can sneak it. Defend yours, take theirs, decide the match.

Maps That Don't Repeat

Skirmish maps are procedurally generated across five biomes: desert, forest, plains, snow, and arctic. New terrain every match. No memorized layouts.

Find a seed worth keeping and the entire map is a single integer. Send it on Discord. Your opponent boots into the exact same terrain.

Multiplayer and gameplay get the focus during Early Access. As those mature, map work expands. More procedural options, handcrafted maps, or both. Diversity stays the goal.

The War You Don't Know

A sub-faction within the regime who went underground in the last months of the war. They called themselves Die Schatten. The Shadows. Scientists, fanatics, and those who refused to end the war on the enemy's terms. They took research with them, and a doctrine that harvests corpses, wrecks, and ruins for raw material.

They were worse than the regime that surrendered. An evil that was nurtured, not born. They are the cost of propaganda that became religion.

They were waiting. They were not done.

By the end of Act II, the war the Allies thought they had finished has crossed the Atlantic.

Act II is told mostly from inside Schatten command. You play their rise.

At Launch (Early Access)

• Two playable factions at launch, US and Wehrmacht, with asymmetric tech and distinct unit rosters

• Skirmish against AI across multiple difficulty tiers, from learning the systems to brutal

• Co-op skirmish: team up with a friend against the AI

• Three handcrafted WW2 Operations, plus a Capture-the-Facility competitive mode

• Procedurally generated skirmish maps across 5 biomes with shareable seeds

• Ranked multiplayer across 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4. Global leaderboards per mode and per faction

• Replays with caster overlay, post-match line graphs, AI-takeover on disconnect, push-to-talk voice

Multiplayer

Matches run on deterministic lockstep. Both peers simulate the same battle from the same inputs.

Quick-match drops you into a game, or browse the lobby list and pick your fight. Invite friends through Steam.

Push-to-talk Steam Voice on your team channel. Team-vote surrender for when the match is genuinely over, so nobody is held hostage by a teammate who refuses to call it. If a player disconnects, the AI takes over their forces until they reconnect.

Global leaderboards for each mode and each faction. Climb where you actually compete, not in one pooled ranking that hides how you play. Friends-only tabs so you can ladder against the people you actually play with.

Every match auto-saves as a replay you can play at any speed and share on Discord. A caster overlay lets you observe with per-player resource and population at a glance. Post-match summaries show a line graph of the things that mattered, so a loss teaches you something.

Anti-cheat runs from launch, in layers that are not listed here for a reason.

The Road Ahead

Early Access is where the game grows. Act I is what ships now: skirmish, three Operations, multiplayer. Act II is the campaign that lands during Early Access. More units. More maps. More superweapons. Balance shaped by people actually playing.

Act II is the long horizon. Die Schatten breaks cover. New faction, new units, new mechanics built around their doctrine of recycling, bioweapons, chemical agents, and anything else their scientists could make work in a lab.

The Soviets are in this war. Not always beside the Allies. Not always opposed. They will need each other when it matters most, whether they trust each other or not.

Seasonal leaderboards, community tournaments, and the features that only make sense once a larger community exists.

Built Alone, Built For Real

Terrors of War is a one-person project. I have been building it for years because the WW2 RTS I wanted to play did not exist. Built in the lineage of the WW2 / Cold War base-builders I grew up on. Big bases. Asymmetric factions. Superweapons that decide endgames. Combat where cover, armor, angle, and matchups all matter, at a pace that lets you commit a push and see it through. The supply system kept getting deeper until it became a battlefield of its own. The faction choice is a real commitment, not a cosmetic swap.

The netcode is lockstep. Anti-cheat is active from Day 1, because the first wave of cheaters can kill a community that is still forming. Workshop support for community-authored AI is planned post-launch.

Friction without payoff is a bug. Where automation, smarter defaults, or fewer redundant clicks can smooth the experience without flattening the depth, they get in. Complexity that earns its keep stays: supply, factions, formations, the decisions that matter. The aim is a game that respects your time, not one that tests your patience.

Your feedback does not go into a suggestion box. It goes into the code, in the next patch. Every system you see on this page came from someone like you asking for it.

Support continues from Early Access through full release and beyond.

Join the Discord

Share replays. Argue about balance. Send me your best clips. Shape the patch notes.