War is something the people do, and something you can now enter. The core description says they betray each other and go to war. Beta 2.2 made the fighting concrete. Beta 2.6 lets you fight in it yourself.
Land and sea, by age
Beta 2.2 said armies meet in the field and fleets fight with the weapons of their age. A nation that has not discovered gunpowder should not be expected to field gunpowder weapons. A nation without a coast, or without the age and culture for ships, should not be expected to match a seafaring neighbor. The game does not publish unit names, ship classes or a counter triangle.
What to watch in a war you are not fighting personally:
- Read the sharper borders from Beta 2.2 so you know which towns are in the path.
- Check the age of each side by their buildings, ships and weapons.
- Mountains you raised earlier can block an army. A flood can remove the valley they are marching through. Those are interventions, not orders you give the army.
- A fleet matters only where there is water and a nation able to build ships for its age.
Ignore fleet recipes that assign skirmishers, ships of the line and bomb vessels in a fixed ratio. That chart is not in the official description.
The rival god, colonies and mechs
Beta 2.2 listed three late-world facts together: colonies across the solar system, invasions from a rival god, and giant mechs. History was said to keep going past the Space Age. The text does not say the rival arrives on a timer, which colony is attacked first, or how strong a mech is.
Practical reading, not a script:
- A nation that reaches the Space Age can found colonies. See Solar colonies.
- Those colonies sit inside the same note as rival-god invasions. See Rival god and Rival god invasion.
- Giant mechs are part of that same Beta 2.2 sentence. Beta 2.6 separately says you can fight in mechs yourself. This wiki keeps those as related but not proven to be the same machine. See Mechs.
There is no published counter of "use lightning on the mech" as a required tactic. Lightning remains a targeted power. Whether it affects a mech is not stated.
Fighting the war yourself
Beta 2.6 says huge wars can be fought by you, on foot or in tanks and mechs. That is new next to the older line that armies and fleets fight on their own. You can still let them fight. You can also enter.
The description does not say how you enlist, where the tank or mech is spawned, or whether you command the army while you are inside one vehicle. Use the in-game Guide for that control. Tanks are only named in the 2.6 note. See Tanks.
Done when
You can tell a watched land or sea battle from a war you enter on foot, in a tank or in a mech, and you are not using another game's ship-counter chart.