Every Last City
An original turn-based strategy game in the tradition of Empire — you begin with one city on a fogged map, cities produce units, units explore and fight and take more cities, and nobody can talk their way out of it.
It is not a reproduction of any existing game. Mechanics and ideas are not anybody's property; specific expression is, and none is taken. Every value in this specification was designed for a stated reason rather than inherited, and where the genre has a known weakness the design is obliged to attack it rather than reproduce it.
Specification
Fifteen documents in docs/spec/, 2,761 numbered requirements. Start with the overview, then the turn model — it is the spine everything else hangs from.
| Doc | Prefix | Reqs | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00-overview.md | OV | 12 | Pillars, document map, cross-document discipline, 47-term glossary |
| 01-game-rules.md | GR | 198 | Map, terrain, movement, fog, the Intelligence Picture, Regions and Landmarks, setup |
| 02-units-and-industry.md | US | 223 | Unit schema, the Industry ladder, the roster, production |
| 03-architecture.md | AR | 123 | Deterministic core, fixed-point arithmetic, event sourcing, saves, testing |
| 04-ui-ux.md | UX | 209 | Orders authoring, Cascade playback, the Dispatch, accessibility, mobile |
| 05-multiplayer.md | MP | 159 | Correspondence, real-time, hot seat, lobbies, fog enforcement, self-hosting |
| 06-ai.md | AI | 218 | The Staff — four layers, six Ranks, honest fairness, the self-play farm |
| 07-modding-content.md | MOD | 138 | Content formats, WASM plugin ABI, editors, workshop |
| 08-services-platform.md | SVC | 126 | Guest-first accounts, sync, notifications, privacy, operations |
| 09-roadmap.md | — | — | Phased delivery plan and risk register (non-normative) |
| 10-turn-model.md | TM | 275 | Orders, the Cascade, the Reckoning — Initiative, Stance, reactions, orders-as-data |
| 11-combat.md | CB | 283 | The Clash, strength and disorder, retreat and rout, emergent encirclement |
| 12-economy.md | EC | 235 | Works and Manpower, Integration, the six visible brakes on growth |
| 13-command.md | CM | 221 | Postures, Sanctions, the order stack, Reflexes, the Dispatch |
| 14-victory.md | VC | 341 | Tracks, the Vigil, Standing and Tenure, the endgame and the comeback path |
Design record
docs/design/ holds the reasoning behind the specification — twelve papers covering the binding direction, the turn-model decision, six subsystem proposals, and four angles on the AI including a red team whose only job was predicting how the AI will fail.
These carry what usually evaporates: what was rejected, and why. 00-direction.md and
01-decision-turn-model.md are binding; the rest are the arguments that produced the specifications.
Code
Phase 0 of the roadmap — the determinism foundation, built before any rules code because it cannot be retrofitted.
corepack pnpm install
corepack pnpm run verify
That runs typecheck, the determinism lint gate, the test suite, and the specification cross-reference checker. Other useful scripts:
| Script | What it does |
|---|---|
pnpm test:browser |
Runs the determinism suite inside a real browser engine (Chromium by default; set ELC_BROWSER for firefox or webkit) |
pnpm golden-hash |
Prints the reference log hash |
pnpm check-spec |
Proves every requirement citation in the specification resolves |
pnpm build-site |
Renders the documents to static HTML in site/ |
pnpm publish |
Publishes the whole project to the server and verifies the live site |
| Package | What it is |
|---|---|
packages/core/src/numeric |
Int and Fixed (signed Q16.16) exact arithmetic. Overflow throws; never wraps, saturates, or yields NaN. |
packages/core/src/rng |
Seeded PCG32 with SplitMix64-derived named streams. Hi/lo 32-bit math, no BigInt on the draw path. |
packages/core/src/hash |
Strict canonical encoder and 64-bit hashing — how two states are proven identical. |
packages/core/src/harness |
Replay-and-compare over a toy fixture. Not the game; the proof that the machinery works. |
packages/eslint-plugin-determinism |
Lint rules banning float arithmetic, ambient clocks and entropy, locale-sensitive comparison, and unordered iteration. |
scripts/check-spec-refs.mjs |
Proves every requirement citation in the specification resolves to something real. |
packages/core/test/reference-hash.ts |
The committed reference hash every supported platform must reproduce — the cross-platform gate. |
The CI job in .github/workflows/determinism.yml runs the suite under Node on Linux, macOS and
Windows and inside Chromium, Firefox and WebKit — the browser is the primary delivery target, so
a determinism guarantee proved only on server runtimes would have a hole exactly where the players
are. Agreement is asserted inside the suite against a committed constant rather than by diffing CI
artifacts: comparing a freshly computed hash to itself proves only that an engine is self-consistent,
which every non-deterministic engine also manages.
Contributing
The server is the only shared state — there is no other remote, and nothing local is visible to anyone else. Clone and push there:
git clone everylastcity@195.26.247.75:git/everylastcity.git
A push to main deploys: a hook checks the tree out to the served directory, removes files deleted
in the commit, and restarts the site service. Pushing is publishing — there is no second step to
forget.
Run pnpm build-site before committing if you changed anything under docs/. The rendered site is
committed deliberately (see .gitignore) so the server needs no toolchain; review the markdown in
docs/ and ignore site/ diffs as generated noise.
Status
Phase 0 is complete except the rights decision, which is an owner's call rather than an engineer's. The fixed-point representation is chosen and implemented, the determinism harness and lint gate exist and are verified to actually fire, cross-platform CI covers three operating systems and three browser engines, and the specification carries no claim to reproduce another game. The design is complete on paper across seven interlocking systems.
Nothing has been played. Every number — combat odds, Integration rates, Industry costs, Initiative bands — is a first estimate by a designer who has never seen the system in motion. That is the project's real risk, and playtesting is a roadmap phase rather than an assumption.
Historical context only: Empire Deluxe Combined Edition (Walter Bright's Empire → Empire Deluxe 1993 → EDIE/EDEE 2002 → EDCE) is the ancestor this game learns from. No asset, value, name, or table is taken from it.