Playing in the browser¶
CITAR's client is a single page served by the game server. Everything below works the same whether the server is on your own machine or somewhere else.
Starting, resuming and watching¶
The lobby lists running games and saved ones.
- Create game — map, speed, difficulty, victory conditions and seats. Each seat picks a civilization or takes a random one; you can rename your civ and your cities afterwards. BenchmarkCiv has no unique abilities, units or buildings, which is what benchmark seats use so that a comparison is about the player and not the civ.
- Map generation (the fold-out panel above the seats) changes the world itself:
- Map edges: ice caps north and south (the default), wrapping east-west like a globe, wrapping north-south, wrapping both ways (no edges and no ice at all), or boxed in with ice on all four sides. The ice is a band one to four tiles deep that drifts slowly along the edge. On a wrapping map, units, borders and distances all go the short way round, and the view scrolls without end.
- Rivers: 0% for none, 100% for normal, up to 300%. Every river runs downhill to the sea, and rivers that meet join into one instead of crossing.
- Resources: an overall density, a density each for strategic, luxury and bonus resources, and a rule for any single strategic or luxury resource — Off, At most a number of tiles (1 gives the whole world a single source), or Share % of every resource of its kind. Sparse luxuries, heaps of strategics and no uranium is: luxury 30%, strategic 300%, Uranium off.
- If an AI's model server disconnects: pause the game until it answers again, or skip that AI's turn. Either way the seat first keeps retrying for the reconnect wait (180 seconds by default), so a short drop costs nothing — see AI_PLAYERS.md.
- Load on a saved game with a human seat takes you straight in. Games with no LLM seats resume automatically; games with them start paused so you can check the model settings first.
- ▶ Play resumes a running game. Watch opens a game with no human seat with full vision.
- Delete removes every save of a game.
Games autosave every turn to saves/<game id>/autosave.citar. Save in the game screen writes a
named save beside it.
Watching AI games¶
With no human seat you can watch with full vision, pause, put a delay between AI turns, view the map as a particular civilization saw it, and read each AI's reasoning as it arrives. This is the most useful thing in CITAR for understanding why a model is losing.
On a phone¶
Opening the server on a phone gives the phone site: a check-in rather than the game — running
games and their standings, whose turn it is, what each AI is doing (and whether one is waiting for
its model server), benchmark progress, reports, and which machines are online, with Pause/Resume
for games you manage. Desktop site at the bottom switches to the full client, and the choice is
remembered; 📱 Mobile site in the full client's header switches back. /m always opens the
phone site, which is handy for looking at it from a desktop.
The map¶
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Select a unit | Left-click it |
| Move | With a unit selected, click a tile — hover first to see the route and turn count |
| Attack | Red tiles are targets; the tooltip predicts the damage and the outcome |
| Capture a civilian | Move onto it |
| Pan | Drag |
| Zoom | Scroll |
| Next unit needing orders | N, or it is selected automatically after one finishes |
Clicking a city tile selects, in order: units that still need orders, then the city, then units that have already moved. Whatever else is on the tile appears as one-click chips under "Also here" or "In city", and a city's name banner always opens the city.
Settlers and work boats show suggested sites as green dashed tiles. Tile tooltips show yields.
Keys¶
N next unit · F fortify · S sleep · Space skip · E explore · A automate worker ·
B found city · R road · H heal · P pillage · T tech tree · D diplomacy ·
C centre on capital · Shift+Enter end turn
Cities¶
The production queue can be reordered (▲ ▼) and edited (✕). Now puts something at the front, + Queue adds it to the end, and the gold button buys it outright. Click a tile in the city's area to lock a citizen onto it (🔒). Auto-pick production hands the choice to the built-in advisor whenever the queue empties.
What needs attention¶
The buttons beside End Turn jump to the thing that needs you: a city with an empty queue, the tech tree when research is idle, a city that can bombard an enemy in range, a promotion to pick.
The ⚠ tab in the side panel lists problems — falling gold, unhappiness, threatened cities, starving cities, civilians in danger — and clicking one takes you there. End Turn warns about idle cities or empty research before it lets the turn go.
Empire in the top bar summarises gold, happiness, science and victory progress, and lists every city and unit, with obsolete units flagged and a Disband button for cutting upkeep.
The empire screens¶
In the top bar: the tech tree, social policies, religion (pantheon, founding, enhancing), great people, espionage (spies, coups), city-states (gifts, protection, tribute), and victory progress for every victory type.
Tech tree turn estimates include missing prerequisites, so a tech four steps away shows what it really costs. Clicking a locked tech sets it as a research goal and CITAR fills in the path. The mouse wheel scrolls the tree sideways.
Diplomacy (D) is where you send messages, denounce, and open negotiations. The deal builder
covers gold, gold per turn, resources, open borders, embassies, peace, declarations of friendship,
research agreements, defensive pacts, war on a third party, cities, maps and technologies.
One-click suggestions show what each side has that the other wants. AI players answer in seconds;
humans get a popup. United Nations votes are cast here too.
After the game¶
Recap — available when a game ends, and at any time for AI-only games — scrubs through every turn: territory, cities and units on the map, score, military and tech graphs, per-turn events, diplomatic messages, and every AI's recorded reasoning. You can show the map as a particular player saw it, which is the only honest way to judge a decision made under fog of war.
📊 AI stats (top bar, or Stats in the lobby) shows live per-seat metrics for any game with an AI player: turn times, model steps, tool calls, errors, loops, tokens, and how each turn ended. BENCHMARKS.md explains what each number is for.
Playing with other people¶
Start the server with --host 0.0.0.0 and other people on your network can join with their seat
link. For anything beyond that — accounts, invitations, sharing and budgets — run a server:
server/DEPLOY.md.