What it is
Valarom is a real-time strategy game for the browser, and a remake of Risk Revolution, a Warcraft III custom map from the mid-2000s that people hosted on Battle.net around the clock. You start with a share of Europe, earn gold every round for the territories you fully hold, train infantry, grenadiers, tanks, berserkers and healers, and try to take everyone else’s bases. You win by eliminating every other player or by holding 85% of the territories.
The main map is Europe: 145 bases, 39 territories, 8 regions, free-for-all for eight or more players. Smaller maps cover 1v1, 2v2 and 2v2v2.
Why
As a teenager I ran Warcraft III communities and hosted games for more than 100,000 players a year. Risk Revolution was one of the maps we hosted most. Years later I wanted the same chaotic, swarm-of-units feeling, without the old client.
How it’s built
- Authoritative server. A Node server using Colyseus rooms and an ECS (bitECS) that ticks 20 times a second. The client interpolates to 60 fps.
- Swarms are the point. Games peak around 1,500 units, so I could not just cut the unit count. Performance work went into allocation (pools, typed arrays), a lower update rate, and moving work to workers, in that order. The tick budget is 35 ms at p99.
- Bots that plan. The third generation of bots plans in layers, from strategy down to squads. Their decisions are deterministic and seeded, so I can replay matches and tune them in headless simulations that run much faster than real time.
- Monorepo. Server, React + canvas client, and a shared package for maps, ECS components and schemas. Playwright covers the end-to-end flows.
About 1,400 commits went into it.
Where it stands
Valarom is live at valarom.com and playable. It is dormant right now: it works, and I am spending my time on the Danish products. The bot rewrite was merged in June 2026.