Questions and Answers
Straight answers about the free browser strategy game at solultimus.com: what it is, what it costs, what you need, and how it plays.
Sol Ultimus: The Eclipse War is a free real-time strategy game that plays in a web browser at solultimus.com, with no download, no install and no account. You gather gold, raise an army from your citadel and try to raze the enemy citadel before your own falls. There are four ways to play: a single-player campaign of 21 chapters, a 1v1 skirmish against the computer, an online 1v1 match you share by link, and Arena Duel, where three fighters you pick fight in an orc pit. The two sides are the Humans of the Sun Order and the Moon Elves. The game is built with three.js and runs against an authoritative server that simulates the battle ten times a second.
Capture gold mines, recruit from your citadel, tame a dragon at a roost, and bring down the enemy citadel. Your hero levels up by fighting and casts five powers on Q, W, E, R and X.
Humans build in stone under the sun and keep a dragon. Moon Elves build in living wood under the moon and keep a moon moth. Both sides fight on exactly the same unit values.
STORY MODE, PLAY VS COMPUTER, PLAY ONLINE (1V1) and ARENA DUEL. Three of the four need no other player.
From Rescue the Dragon Egg to The Orc Arena. Each chapter has its own map, objective and briefing, and awards up to three stars.
No price, no trial, no subscription, no in-game purchase, no ads.
One client file draws the world. One server file holds the rules and runs at ten ticks per second, so both players see the same battle.
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Browser | Any current browser with WebGL. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all support it. The client is built on three.js r160 and has its own handling for Safari pinch gestures. |
| Device | Desktop, laptop, tablet or phone. Touch play is built in: tap to select and command, drag one finger to pan, pinch with two to zoom. On phones the game turns off antialiasing and caps the pixel ratio to hold the frame rate. |
| Connection | An internet connection. Every mode, the campaign and the match against the computer included, runs over a websocket to the game server. There is no offline mode. |
| Account | None. You type a display name of two to sixteen characters, and it is kept in your own browser. |
| Install | Optional. The site ships a web app manifest, so you can add it to a phone home screen and it opens fullscreen in landscape. |
| Saved data | Your browser. Chapter progress, stars, best scores, found items, your name and your settings live in local storage on the device you play on. |
Sol Ultimus: The Eclipse War is a free real-time strategy game that plays in a web browser at solultimus.com. You gather gold, raise an army from your citadel, and try to raze the enemy citadel before your own falls. It has a 21-chapter single-player campaign, a 1v1 skirmish against the computer, an online 1v1 match and an Arena Duel mode. The two sides are the Humans of the Sun Order and the Moon Elves.
Yes, Sol Ultimus: The Eclipse War is free to play in full. There is no price, no trial period and no subscription. There is nothing to buy inside the game, and no advertising in the game or on the site.
No, Sol Ultimus runs entirely in the browser and needs no download and no install. You open https://www.solultimus.com and the game loads on the page. Adding it to a phone home screen is possible, because the site ships a web app manifest, but it is optional and it is not an app store download.
No, Sol Ultimus needs no account, no email address and no password. The only thing it asks for is a display name of two to sixteen characters, and that name is stored in your own browser rather than on a server. Online matches are joined through an invite link, not through a login.
Sol Ultimus works in any current browser that supports WebGL, on desktop, laptop, tablet and phone. The 3D client is built on three.js r160, and Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all support WebGL, with specific handling in the code for Safari pinch gestures. On phones the game turns off antialiasing and caps its pixel ratio to keep the frame rate steady.
There is no separate mobile app: Sol Ultimus is the same game on a phone or tablet, played in the mobile browser. Touch control is built in. Tap a unit to select it, tap the ground to move, drag one finger to pan the camera, and pinch with two fingers to zoom, with on-screen buttons for box select, hero, army and attack. You can add the site to your home screen, where it opens fullscreen in landscape.
The Sol Ultimus campaign has 21 chapters. It runs from Rescue the Dragon Egg, where three men come ashore to carry a dragon egg out of a mire, to The Orc Arena, a hexagonal fighting pit with six gates built around a stolen moon altar. Every chapter has its own map, its own objective and its own briefing, and each one awards up to three stars and records your best score.
Yes, Sol Ultimus has a PLAY VS COMPUTER mode: a 1v1 skirmish against the Warlord AI. You pick the difficulty, Easy, Normal or Hard, and the map. The choices are the Standard Battlefield with two citadels, four mines and three dragon roosts, the larger Great Plains with two extra mines and more wild camps, and two Hero Arena maps where only the heroes fight. A skirmish is decided by citadel destruction; in a Hero Arena, the first paladin to fall loses.
Yes, Sol Ultimus has an online 1v1 mode. Choosing PLAY ONLINE creates a room and shows an invite link with a copy button, and whoever opens that link joins your battle. There is no lobby, no matchmaking and no sign-up: the link is the whole handshake, and the game starts once your opponent arrives.
Arena Duel is the Sol Ultimus mode where you pick three fighters and fight in the orc pit with no base, no gold and no army to build. The picker is split into heroes, champions and troops, so your three can be a paladin, a freed champion, a cave troll, a knight, an archer or a war rhino. You choose one duel of three against three, or a gauntlet of four rounds that get harder each time. Ten seconds after the start a gate opens and the challengers charge, and the altar in the middle heals whoever stands in its light.
Sol Ultimus has two peoples, the Humans of the Sun Order and the Moon Elves, and the campaign puts you under the sun with the Moon Elves as your enemy. The two sides use exactly the same unit values; what differs is what they believe, how they build and which beast fights beside them. Humans build in stone, follow a paladin with a war mace and keep a dragon. Moon Elves build in living wood, follow a moon paladin with a spear and keep a moon moth.
Yes, Sol Ultimus is built around one story: the Moon Elves have pulled an eclipse over the land that will not lift, and the campaign is the war to break it. It opens with three men coming ashore at first light to carry a dragon egg out of a mire, and it ends in an orc fighting pit around a stolen moon altar. Along the way you defend a sun temple, hunt a great bear, tame a battle cat, free the old wizard from a cage guarded by three dragons, and hold the warlord's citadel for fifteen minutes under a darkened sky. Every chapter opens with a written briefing that names your enemy and says what winning takes.
A Sol Ultimus match has no fixed length: a skirmish or an online 1v1 runs until one citadel is razed. Campaign chapters do carry their own clocks, and those are exact. Chapter 2 asks you to hold the nest for three minutes until the egg hatches, chapter 4 to hold the fort for five, chapter 11 to survive a siege for seven, chapter 18 to hold a walled valley for ten, and chapters 15 and 19 to hold for fifteen minutes.
No, Sol Ultimus is mostly single-player: three of its four modes need no other person. The 21-chapter campaign, the skirmish against the computer and Arena Duel are all played alone. Only PLAY ONLINE requires a second player, and that player joins through the invite link you send.
Yes, Sol Ultimus saves your progress in your own browser rather than in an account. Your furthest chapter, the stars you earned, your best scores, the items you found, your name and your sound settings are kept in the browser's local storage, and the Save button in the in-game menu bookmarks the chapter you are on. Because the save sits on the device, another browser or another device starts fresh, and clearing site data clears the progress.
No, all 21 Sol Ultimus chapters are listed in the level picker and you can start any of them. The list shows the campaign map with the route across it, plus your stars and best score per chapter, so you can replay an old chapter for a better result or jump ahead to one you want to try.
Yes, Sol Ultimus has a public compendium at https://www.solultimus.com/compendium. It covers the two peoples, the heroes and their spells, the freed champions, the army, dragons, monsters, relics, the seven items and the economy, and it lists health, damage, damage per second, range, speed, supply and gold cost for every unit, stating that each value is the live in-game value. It also sets out the counters: men-at-arms hit knights for 2.0x, knights hit archers for 1.75x, archers hit men-at-arms for 1.75x, and archers hit thick-hided beasts and dragons for 1.8x.
Sol Ultimus is built with three.js and no framework. The browser client is a single file that draws the terrain, models, effects and interface, and the rules live in an authoritative game server that runs the simulation at ten ticks per second. Every mode connects to that server over a websocket, including the campaign and the match against the computer, which is why the game needs an internet connection and has no offline mode.
Sol Ultimus: The Eclipse War is an independent game, built and published by a single developer rather than by a studio or a publisher. The client sits on a static host and the game server runs separately, so websockets stay open. There is nothing to buy and no advertising.