What is Footmen Wars?

Footmen Wars, often shortened to footies, is a kind of custom game from Warcraft III. Every player has a base that spawns soldiers on a timer, you lead those soldiers into battle, and you are out when your base falls.¹

The two rules every footies game shares

StrategyWiki sums up the genre with two must-haves. First, a steady stream of units spawns at each player's base, and "these units are controlled by the player". Second, every player has a base, and "a player is defeated when his/her base is destroyed."¹

Most versions add more on top: four teams of three (some play two teams of six), heroes, item shops, and a base you upgrade through tiers.¹ The best known of them is Footmen Frenzy, which grew out of the early Footmen Wars maps. Its story, and the people who made it, are on our Footmen Frenzy history page.

How a classic match plays

Four corners and a middle

A full game is four teams of three.² Each team holds a corner of a square map, and the neutral ground in the center connects them all, so that is where most fights happen.³

Your army spawns, and waits for you

Units appear at your barracks every few seconds.³ They do not march off on their own. The old NoHunters guide warns that "a common mistake" is to let them "pile up in their base."⁴ Good players head home every 15 seconds or so and send the new batch into the fight.⁵

Gold comes from kills

There are no mines and no peasants. "You earn gold not from harvesting as in ladder, but by killing units and heroes."⁵ So fighting is the economy, and a team that sits back falls behind.

One wallet, three ways to spend it

You can tier up your barracks for stronger units, power up your hero, or buy extras like caster units from your team's shop, which players often call essential.^5,2 The 2009 player guide calls going all in on one path "usually a recipe for disaster".⁵

Teams pool their gold

Allies can send each other gold, and teams often pool it so one player can reach a high tier fast. The NoHunters guide suggests a split: "one player upgrade tiers immediately, one player get an Area of Effect hero like the Archmage, and one player get a hero killer."³

Last team standing

"As soon as a player's barracks is destroyed, he loses all his units and spawning privileges." The game ends "when only one team is left."³

Why people loved it

It is easy to start. One guide says that "even most skilled players spend most of the game just using attack move".⁵ But it runs deeper than it looks: "At first glance it appears to be shallow," the Compendium says, but "there's tons of complexity just below the surface."³ And a bad fight is rarely the end. "Losing a battle isn't losing the war."⁵

The genre is still played. The Reforged version of Footmen Frenzy is an official featured map with over 70 heroes.⁶ If you want to play it today, our guide to where to play footmen games lists every option.

How Footmen Wars Online plays

Ours keeps the two rules and the four corners, and changes the rest. These are the current build's numbers, and we are still tuning them.

You pick one of 8 heroes from history to lead your army.
Your barracks spawns a footman every 8 seconds. Tap the ground to rally them, tap a base to attack it, or tap the tower to hold the center.
Tier up from 2:30 and pick one of eight armies, from Knights and Samurai to Aztecs and Egyptians. Each tier adds a spawn slot, and you choose what each slot makes, so you can answer what the enemy fields.
Bases are safe for the first 5:00, and every barracks shoots back.
From 18:00 the table closes in, so a match ends instead of running for an hour. In our bot tests, matches end in 12 to 22 minutes.
Bots take every empty seat. Make a room and send friends the link: up to four of you play, one in each corner, and bots fill the rest.

Everything in it is our own: the armies, the art, the names and the rules. Nothing is taken from Warcraft or from the original maps.

The same tabletop battlefield four times: a misty spring morning, a sunny summer day, an autumn sunset and a snowy winter night, with toy soldiers from four armies on a stone bridge — Concept art: one table, four seasons.

Sources

Your barracks is ready

Early access: free to play in your browser while we keep building it. Bots fill every empty seat.

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