Ironbound
A free, open-source strategy game: you never place a house — the city grows itself. You mine, haul, and guard the supply lines, then raise an army and win.
Ironbound is a free, open-source real-time strategy game that plays a little differently from most RTS games: you never place a house by hand — the city grows on its own. Your job is mining, hauling goods, laying roads, and keeping the power on, so supplies reach the command center. Once the city is fed, it builds its own workshops and unlocks new tech — that is how you “earn” your army. A match takes about 45 minutes, and there is plenty to juggle: timber, iron, copper, and oil all run out, so you have to keep expanding; truck convoys get raided, so you have to guard the roads; and you can trade with rivals by caravan, sign non-aggression pacts, or go straight to war. Once you reach the Industrial and Electric tiers, you can field tanks, artillery, gunships, and drones, across seven desert maps and one island map. The game has a tutorial, hints, and a manual you can open with F1, plus a helper AI that manages your economy but never attacks on its own, so newcomers can start with the Guided rules and learn at their own pace. A map editor is built in, and units, maps, and resources are plain JSON files — if you want to change something, you can. Three things to know: first, this is an early build, and the author says so himself — it changes every day and rough edges are part of the deal; second, the downloads are not code-signed, so Windows and Mac will both warn you the first time — follow the prompts and choose “run anyway”; third, the repo still has 0 stars, but there was a fresh push on 22 October, so it is not an abandoned project.
@adrian.hammond