Curse of War — Rust Re-implementation · Terminal RTS in Rust (TUI)

A faithful Rust re-implementation of Curse of War 1.3.0 (the classic Linux hex-grid RTS by Alexey Nikolaev, 2013), rebuilt as a modern terminal / TUI strategy game with Chinese UI by default.

Curse of War is a fast-paced real-time strategy game played on a hex grid — you don't command individual units, you plan at a high level: build infrastructure, secure gold mines, move armies. This Rust port keeps every rule, every command-line flag, and every terrain glyph, but ships as a single, dependency-light terminal application that runs anywhere a real terminal opens: Linux, macOS, Windows, and over SSH.

There are several Curse of War ports in the wild. This one is differentiated by three choices — see README.cn.md § 与原版的差异 and README.en.md § Differences from the original for the full list:

• Modern terminal-only build. Built on ratatui + crossterm — no X11, no SDL, no ncurses quirks. Works in tmux, over SSH, in CI, on a Raspberry Pi, on a server without a display.
• Chinese UI by default. Every string is localised; switch back to English any time via --lang en, $COW_LANG, or $LANG. Useful as a study artifact for terminal i18n.
• Two-crate Rust workspace. Game logic lives in cow-core (no UI / IO dependencies) and the terminal front-end in cow-tui. The split makes the rule engine reusable for bots, headless simulations, or future ports to other front-ends.

git clone https://github.com/lunrenyi/curseofwar-rs
cd curseofwar-rs
cargo run --release -p cow-tui                 # default: Chinese UI, default map
cargo run --release -p cow-tui -- --lang en    # English UI
cargo run --release -p cow-tui -- -W 18 -H 18 -R 7   # small reproducible map

You need a Rust toolchain 1.75 or newer (rustup default stable is enough).

Victory: wipe out every other country's population. Defeat: your population reaches 0.

Faithfully mirrors the original game's argument set:

-W width   -H height   -S shape (rhombus|rect|hex)
-l locations  -q quality  -i inequality (0-4)
-r  -d difficulty (ee|e|n|h|hh)  -s speed (p|sss|ss|s|n|f|ff|fff)
-R seed  -T timeline  -v  -h
-E/-e/-C/-c   multiplayer (parsed; not implemented in this build)
--lang zh|en   language (default Chinese; also honour $COW_LANG and $LANG)

• 中文文档 — 玩法、键位、命令行参数、与原版的差异
• English — Gameplay, key bindings, command-line options, differences from the original

curseofwar-rs/
├── README.md            this file (entry point, keyword-rich landing page)
├── README.cn.md         Chinese documentation (玩法、键位)
├── README.en.md         English documentation (gameplay, key bindings)
├── LICENSE              GPLv3-or-later full text
├── Cargo.toml           Cargo workspace manifest
└── crates/
    ├── cow-core/        game-logic library (no UI/IO deps)
    └── cow-tui/         terminal front-end (ratatui + crossterm)

Derived from Curse of War by Alexey Nikolaev (2013), distributed under the GPLv3. Every source file retains the original copyright and the derived-work disclaimer. See LICENSE for the full text.

Curse of War -- Real Time Strategy Game for Linux.
Copyright (C) 2013 Alexey Nikolaev.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

• Original C implementation — https://github.com/a-nikolaev/curseofwar
• Other Rust ports of Curse of War — search GitHub for curseofwar rust
• Author profile and other projects — @lunrenyi