Europe · 1914–1918

World War I: The History Behind the Game

A single assassination triggered a war that no single power actually wanted, but that a decade of alliances made almost impossible to stop. Era of Warlords covers all four years of it, from the initial mobilization to the collapse of the old imperial order.

A tangle of alliances

By 1914, Europe's great powers were bound into two rigid alliance blocs — the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) — armed with mobilization plans built for speed rather than restraint. When a Bosnian Serb nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914, a month of ultimatums cascaded into general war by early August, with Germany's Schlieffen Plan sending its armies through Belgium toward France almost immediately.

The expected war of movement stalled within weeks. By the end of 1914, opposing armies had dug in along a front stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, and the industrialized killing power of machine guns and artillery made that line almost impossible to break for the next three years.

Attrition, revolution, collapse

1916 became a byword for attrition: Verdun and the Somme together produced well over a million casualties for barely any change in the front line. The strain told on the least stable regimes first — in 1917, revolution toppled the Russian Tsar and, after a second revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, took Russia out of the war entirely, freeing German troops for one last gamble in the west.

That gamble, the 1918 Spring Offensive, briefly broke the stalemate but exhausted Germany's remaining reserves. Allied counterattacks in the "Hundred Days" that followed pushed German forces back for good, and by November 1918 the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires had all collapsed, redrawing the map of Europe and the Middle East.

88 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.