Increwar is a strategy and simulation game for PC that centers on massive real-time battles featuring up to two million units. Players manage incremental progression through research and upgrades while commanding forces across three distinct campaigns. The game emphasizes large-scale tactical decisions where unit behavior, environmental effects, and skill development all influence outcomes on the battlefield.
Gameplay
The core loop involves building and expanding a keep, researching skills, and deploying armies into realtime conflicts. Each campaign offers unique unit types, strengths, and weaknesses tied to the faction's identity. Humans, Elves, and Undead each maintain separate progression paths that affect population limits, unit capabilities, and resource management. Over 800 skills cover areas such as magic casting, unit enhancements, keep expansion, expedition options, and improved gathering rates. Battles simulate every unit individually with position, health, targeting, and animation data handled efficiently through GPU compute shaders and flow field navigation. Squad-level decisions guide broader movements like charging or holding ground, while shared flow fields direct large formations around obstacles and terrain costs.
Environmental conditions introduce additional layers of strategy. Events including snowstorms, rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes, meteorite showers, and ice rain alter unit performance across the entire field. Players must account for these factors when positioning forces or timing engagements, turning weather into either an advantage or a liability depending on faction composition and prior upgrades.
Game Modes
Progression revolves around three campaign structures, one for each faction. These campaigns serve as the primary framework for advancing through skill research, keep development, and repeated large-scale engagements. Within each campaign, players balance resource collection, population growth, and expedition variety while preparing for battles that can involve hundreds of thousands or even millions of units. The system encourages repeated playthroughs to explore different skill combinations and faction-specific tactics without introducing separate named modes beyond the campaign focus.
Technical Scale and Simulation
Handling two million units simultaneously requires specialized systems that keep the simulation running smoothly. Data for each soldier occupies roughly 84 bytes in GPU buffers, with updates performed via compute shaders rather than traditional CPU processing. Flow fields provide efficient pathfinding that scales regardless of unit count, while coarse collision summaries allow squads to respond to nearby threats without checking every individual. This approach maintains individual unit autonomy even at peak scale, supporting animations, targeting, and health tracking across battlefields spanning several kilometers.
Is It Worth Playing?
Increwar suits players who enjoy strategy games with incremental depth and an emphasis on scale. The combination of faction-specific campaigns, extensive skill trees, and realtime environmental interactions creates a focused experience centered on managing enormous battles. Those interested in simulation mechanics and the technical challenges of large unit counts will find the systems rewarding. The game remains in active development with ongoing refinements to unit behavior and performance, making it a solid choice for enthusiasts willing to engage with its current state of large-scale tactical play.
