Warzone 2100 – the unique case of the open source strategy game

Warzone 2100

Warzone 2100 is a strategy game released in 1999 on PC and PS1.

When this game came out I was a child.

I had a PS1 games magazine where Warzone 2100 was described as something giving a vibe of a StarCraft killer that appears to be just another strategy game in the process.

And partially I agree with this statement. On the other hand I barely have the same amount of hours in StarCraft in comparison to Warzone 2100. It became one of my favorite strategy games.

Unique features of the strategy game

Warzone 2100 has huge research tree with more than 400 technologies that will take you hours to develop in multiplayer and enough for constant research through the main scenario mode. That’s what makes the multiplayer unique – you constantly fight for resources to research faster, than your opponent. Not to just build a big army.

Because a smaller army of rocket launcher will destroy your bigger and even more expensive army of machine-guns. But they will not be able to do much against your army of cyborgs. Combination of units is an important factor.

You construct your tanks from the main 3 components: turret, body and moving platform. You can make and produce as many combinations of them as you like. Different parts have different tactical advantages.

With time you get access to cyborgs and air forces. Cyborgs are vulnerable to a different type of damage. For example all of your tanks are vulnerable to rockets but cyborgs are not.

Air units have limited amount of ammo but very effective in taking out single targets like factories. As well as doing massive splash damage with bombs over an area. But they are very vulnerable to anti air weapons if your enemy builds them.

In addition to tanks Warzone 2100 equips you with a variety of defense buildings. It’s not only bunkers and static turrets but also a lot of different types of towers. Radars increase visible range. Counter battery tower makes your artillery to respond to artillery fire outside of the radar range. Other can make your air forces automatically strike incoming targets. On the later levels you even can make enemy units change sides similar to monks in Age of Empires.

Another unique feature of Warzone 2100 is your base and how the game switches locations. You keep your base in the entirety of a campaign. Scenario of the game is divided on 3 campaigns in different areas. Instead of starting all over again your units are being delivered to other locations or missions happen at the area of your main base. On average one campaign has around 12 missions with varying difficulty and lengths.

Warzone 2100 has a perfect formula of endless progression and it’s the game where story plays secondary role, because researching new technologies is pure dopamine. This is both the blessing and the curse. Instead of epic action of StarCraft or WarCraft you get deeper gameplay in the scenario mode and that’s not something that originally sold the game well.

Memories

When I was young I didn’t understand that some technologies are improvements for existing equipment like better firepower and velocity so I just skipped researching them spending my energy only on new parts. I thought, they are just for endless research with no end purpose. Even with this approach I made it to last levels with rocket silos.

In 2004 only 5 years after the main release game went open source under GNU GPL 2.0 license. It’s really sad to see such generous events happen so rarely. This gave Warzone 2100 cult following. More often companies just lose sources and abandon their own games. Some CEOs say they want players to buy new games instead of playing the old ones.

Warzone 2100 nowadays

You can download the modern version of Warzone 2100 on the official website of the project. They publish stats that state that the game has been downloaded over 5 million times.

Warzone 2100 is not only unique in becoming an open source project, but also with the fact it went free with all the assets. For example Doom opened the sources only for the engine, but not the media. You still can’t play the full version of Doom for free without breaking the license agreement. Legally you can play only Doom engine based games that don’t use the original assets.

As you can guess 2004 started the endless journey of enthusiasts working on the game to this day.

First the game went through the full engine rehaul. It got normal rendering system that works under modern OSs.

Better network capabilities. You can find online matches even to this day.

The only problem you will encounter is the level of your opponents cause you can rarely see a newbie in Warzone’s online multiplayer community.

And in 2025 developers of resurrection project granted us a huge balance update that made hard mode really hard. With only the most skilled players able to beat it. I personally can complete only the first campaign.

Original version’s hard mode wasn’t that difficult to play on PC. Mostly thanks to Enemy’s AI giving you too many opportunities and repeating the same actions that you can easily read and use against it.

Game also got MacOS and Linux support.

Local multiplayer got new AI bots. They are much stronger than the original AI. I can beat them only sometimes. Scavengers got helicopters.

Modern version added more multiplayer skirmish maps and settings for multiplayer.

I personally would call Warzone 2100 the best open source strategy game on PC to this day.