Cogwars

Mine it, belt it, smelt it, sell it. Your factory keeps running while you are away.

First time here?

What Cogwars is

A factory game with one shared world. You lay machines out on a grid and belt them into each other, the plot keeps running after you close the tab, and everything it makes goes to a market — or a fleet — that every other player is in too.

MINESMELTBANK

Lay it out on a grid

Extractors sit on ore, belts carry it to a smelter, and whatever comes out the far end is banked in a depot. Nobody has to stand over it — close the tab and what it made is waiting when you come back. You start on the free middle of the plot and buy the rest of the land as you can afford it.

One market, everyone in it

Nothing turns into credits on its own — you sell at an exchange, and what every player sells moves the price for all of you. A big order moves the price against itself, so the preview before a trade is the real total rather than quantity times price.

Research is paid in goods

A node is paid once, in what your factory makes, which is why a mid-tier item is also a currency. Nodes unlock buying a tier — each machine still pays its own upgrade price to take it, Mk1 up to Mk12.

Then a fleet

The top of the tree is a shipyard. Probes scout the galaxy around you, fighters and bombers take what somebody else stockpiled instead of selling, and a radar dish shows you theirs coming. A raid takes goods, not credits, and only what the cargo can carry home.

What else is in there

The first hour is a miner and a belt. All of this is still ahead of it.

Belts that thinkSplitters deal a line out to every open side, filters pull one good off a mixed belt, bridges hop the belts crossing them, and a pair of teleporters carries goods across the plot with no belt in between.
A power budgetTurbines and solar are free for ever, generators burn coal or oil, and accumulators bank what nothing is using. It is plot-wide: over budget, everything runs at supply over demand rather than stopping.
Copy and stampTake a rectangle of your factory and stamp it down again. It is how one line that works becomes four of them, and how a blueprint keeps its recipes.
Trade where it is cheapThe exchanges are national, laid out on a real map. Raw materials cost least where they are mined, freight is charged by distance, and the game offers you the trip only while it still works out cheaper.
Guns, and warningFlak turrets, a pulse laser, a siege cannon and a shield dome, and a radar array that is your only notice a fleet is already on its way. A missile silo, if you would rather take the guns off somebody else.
More than one planetEight hulls, ending at a colony ship. Settle a second planet and switch between them — the ground changes, but your research and credits are the account's and follow you to all of them.

No email, no subscription

Two things worth saying before you make an account, because both are unusual enough to be worth checking rather than taking on trust.

What the account asks for

A name and a password. That is the whole of it.

✓No email address. There is no field for one, so there is nothing to verify, nothing to confirm, and no list to come off later.
✓Nothing to install. It is a web page, in the browser you already have.
✓The factory lives on the server, so it is the same factory from a phone as from a desk.

The trade-off is the one in step 2 below, and it is a real one: no email also means no password reset. Write it down.

Supporting it, if you want to

Cogwars is free, and Boost passes are what keep the servers running — one-off, and never a subscription.

✓Your factory banks a longer stretch of the time you are away, instead of filling up and stopping.
✓The quantum tunnels open: production runs faster and every launch flies sooner.

Bought inside the game, never on the way in — and it buys time, not reach. A pass never changes who you can hit or who can hit you; that is hulls and research alone.

Start a new factory

A name, a password, and you are standing on a plot. What each of those four steps actually commits you to:

  1. Name the factoryTwo to nineteen characters — letters, numbers, spaces, _ or -. It is your account name and what the rest of the galaxy sees on the map, so pick one you would not mind being raided under.
  2. Set a passwordEight characters or more. There is no email on the account and no reset, so write it down: a lost password is a lost factory.
  3. You land on a plotYou start with credits, a depot at the centre of the plot and turbines already wired to it. There is ore on the ground within reach of the depot, and that is where the first extractor goes.
  4. Follow the ladderSigning up opens Getting started, which is the first factory in the order it wants building. Tap a step and the game takes you to it. Past the end of the ladder the plot is yours to shape, and the rest of the book is the reference for it.

Cogwars is still in testing.

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