When players break the game

Warsim began as a project to learn to code, I made it by myself for myself and never in a million years considered it would be seen or played by any else unless I was showing it to a friend.

Well obviously that changed, and it became a weird indie cult hit played by 100s of thousands of people all over the world (love you guys) and through that journey I got to experience a lot of things... One of the funnest was watching people break my game.

Now I'm not talking about bugging out some menu, that kind of game breaking was annoying (but necessary) but players doing crazy stuff I'd never thought of and achieving stuff I couldn't imagine as a result.

The most prime examples are these:

THE SPEEDRUN

A longtime Warsim community legend Smilge dropped this video casually into the discord of him speedrunning the games big bad boss faction in under 2 minutes. I remember seeing the title and my eyes bulging, thinking 'WHAT'

Dude destroyed the bank of his kingdom (which I'd made an option just cause players like to destroy things) to get an instant cash injection, and then bought a map to the region where gate was.

What a lot of people don't know is the demon threat actually starts tiny at year 1 of the game and slowly new demons pour out of the gate till the horde is big enough to be a problem...

Well... if you get there early enough, say by raiding the bank and then buying a map to the south. Yeah players are amazing. I'd never even imagined this was possible.

THE IMMORTAL EMPIRE

The mighty Warsim race generator can create nearly 100 million different races, they all have very different traits that can result in a lot of stuff. One particular trait type Deatheater/Souleater grants the race the ability to grow by +1 battlescore per 100 kills their race commits. Now I figured this was a pretty tiny scale and it was unlikely to boost races by more than a few 100 battlescore at most. Oh how wrong I was.

Scale is the important factor here and I encountered a close call with this once during a Warsim run that nearly became the day my own game defeated me. I know every trick in the Warsim book and boy are there a lot of them, so when I tell you that a late game expansion of my kingdom discovering new kingdoms to fight led to a hugely populous Deatheater Kingdom, I didn't think much of it.

During the late game when you've captured or defeated most or all kingdoms, you can explore and discover new ones, these new ones are always typically bigger than the ones before, and this keeps scaling each level. My little old late stage Deatheaters spawned with a huge population, as did the other new kingdoms, no problem I had a massive army.

I carried on playing the game and didn't pay them much mind. Now in the background as the in game years of me fighting bandits and expanding my empire went on, this deatheater kingdom had been in a brutal war with one of the other new massive kingdoms, 10s of thousands of dead each year on each side... no big deal, only the deatheaters were growing rapidly without me realising.

Much later in the game they became my focus, and it was only then I realised they had ballooned into something much more ferrocious than I had EVER faced in my 10 years and 10000 hours of warsimming. I was baffled. Each time I sent my huuuge army to fight them. Win or lose, I made them stronger.

I tried every thing I could, and by the skin of my teeth I just about managed to cut down their final territory. And I knew by the math, that if I had waited only a few years more, the event horizon for the total fighting power I could raise to face them, would have been higher than the game could produce, making them unbeatable. It was there I understood the true power of Deatheaters... and I was not alone.

Enter, Sorceror Khan

Another Warsim community legend (and now immortalised forever in the game)

Khan too had encountered a kingdom of Deatheaters, but he had a different approach. He vassalised and captured them, making them a servant kingdom, but this didn't dull their deatheating powers.

He spent years training them and nurturing them to grow in size and number, and put them against weaker enemy kingdoms, all the while they grew in size.

The leader sent him a champion from their ranks, Maxaus the Word of God... Possibly the strongest Warsim champion of all time when you consider a decent champion to have between 100-200 battlescore.

But Khan wasn't done there, he continued collecting deatheater kingdoms and pushing them to the limit until he literally broke the integer limits in the game. I'd never considered it even possible to hit 2 billion battlescore for a whole army let alone a single unit.

These individual troops more powerful than entire worlds.

So strong they broke the rules of reality within the Warsim world.

And those are a few of the many many reasons I have loved my game dev journey with Warsim. Thank you for breaking my game you beautiful bastards.

-Huw