Overview

Bos Wars (short for Battle of Survival) is a free, open-source futuristic real-time strategy game built on the Stratagus engine. It was started in 2004 by Tina Petersen Jensen and François Beerten and has been maintained by its community ever since; version 2.8 arrived in June 2023 after a long gap between releases.

Unlike most RTS games, Bos Wars does not make you pay up-front for each unit. Energy is generated by power plants and magma is pumped from hot spots, and both buildings and mobile units are produced at a continuous rate from that flow. The more of the map you control, the more throughput your economy has — so expansion, map control and holding chokepoints such as roads and passages matter as much as raw firepower.

Key Features

• Dynamic rate-based economy — no unit price tags: power plants provide energy, pumps draw magma from hot spots, and everything is built at a steady rate you have to manage and grow.
• Territory-driven throughput — capturing more land and key points (roads, passages) directly increases your production capacity, rewarding map control over turtling.
• Classic real-time combat — build bases, harvest, tech up, then field infantry, vehicles, aircraft and ships against the enemy.
• Naval warfare and campaigns — version 2.7 added a shipyard that builds water scouts and destroyers, plus new maps, terrains, units and an extensive Islands campaign.
• Built-in map and patch editors — the editors ship with the game, so players can build and share their own scenarios and map add-on packs.
• Multiplayer — play against human opponents over a LAN or the internet, or against the computer.
• OpenGL support — available as a run-time configuration option for smoother rendering.
• Still maintained — development moved from Subversion to Git and continues on Codeberg and Savannah.
• Runs almost anywhere — a lightweight 2D engine that works on Linux, Windows, BSD and macOS, including older hardware.

Why Use It

Bos Wars is a complete, genuinely free RTS with no DRM, no in-app purchases and no account requirement. Its rate-based economy is a real design departure from the build-a-bank-of-gold formula, and because the whole game is small and 2D, it runs comfortably on machines that would struggle with modern commercial strategy titles. The source, the editors and the map packs are all available, so you can extend it as well as play it.

Use Cases

• Skirmish matches against the computer or friends over LAN or the internet.
• Playing a full RTS on low-spec, older or non-Windows hardware (Linux, BSD, macOS).
• Building your own maps and scenarios with the bundled map and patch editors.
• Teaching or studying game design and a long-lived free software game project.

Platforms

Official builds are published for Linux (tarball) and the source compiles on Windows, BSD and macOS; the project states it runs successfully on all four. The game is packaged for several distributions and takes its preferences from a simple preferences.lua file. The interface language is English, with translation files included in the release.

Licence

Free and open source — Bos Wars is released under the GNU General Public License v2.0 (or later). The bundled COPYRIGHT.txt states the work is copyrighted 2004–2023 by Tina Petersen Jensen, François Beerten et al. and licensed under the GPL, version 2 or any later version.

Similar Tools

• 0 A.D. — free and open source, the directory’s flagship historical RTS.
• Warzone 2100 — free and open source, a futuristic real-time strategy game with full unit customisation.

Website

boswars.org · source code on Codeberg · Savannah project page