Ruins of Chaos is a text-based role-playing game. The role you play is interactive war. Your skill and determination are put up against that of thousands of other players, or maybe soon even millions!

You build an army in a series of web pages that work in just about every browser. The game bases your rank on how well-balanced an army you can build, but there is much more fun to be had than just numbers. The game is a society, and it extends out much farther than just what you can see on this website. People bring their friends along to play with them and compete with others. Of course, you too can get better by inviting more of your friends. Send out your Recruiting Link to everyone you know, and get them to visit it and join the game. You'll get more soldiers, you'll have more influence, and maybe you'll climb up to the top of the ladder.

Play from your web browser or your phone. Issue commands to your army by filling out some boxes on each page and proceeding with the number verification.

The main commands you will likely use:

• Recruiter: trade link clicks with other players to gain more soldiers into your army. Soldiers produce income, which is a good way to get better.
• Armory: buy weapons and siege/fortification upgrades here. Weapons are what your soldiers need in order to be effective in battle.
• Training: train soldiers to specialize your military effectiveness, upgrade your covert skill, or build up your automatic unit production so that you gain more soldiers without any extra effort. Training soldiers to attack also protects them from dying when you get attacked.
• Mercenaries: protect your recruited soldiers from dying by hiring mercenaries, who will then become your front line of offense and defense.
• Battlefield: scout the land to search for gold to pillage. From the Battlefield:
  • Attack: travel to another player's base and attempt to besiege their defenses and steal their gold.
  • Recon: send a covert operative to sneak through somebody's base and find out their stats, so that you will know if you can beat them.
  • Sabotage: destroy a small amount of their weaponry by executing this covert mission. If a player is stepping over your boundaries and all other avenues of communication have failed, sabotage is one way to get your point across. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense!
• Alliances: seek out help from a group of players that suits you, or forge your own alliance, get your friends to join, and lead them all to greatness.

This is your bread and butter. You find this gem in your Command Center, near the bottom of the page. Every time someone clicks on this link, you will get one soldier. If that person signs up to the game after clicking on the link, he/she will be your officer.

Officers earn you more soldiers - for every two clicks an officer receives on his/her link, you will receive one soldier.

Each person who uses the link will be able to give you a soldier once every 24 hours. Get them to join the game, and they can build their own army, while you get a bonus for referring someone new!

You can use this system to trade recruiting clicks with other players already in the game. It's like the penny tray at the convenience store. For every click you do, you will get one back from someone else using the recruiter. Each click is like using the recruiting link above, except it is a click exchange between players who are already in the game, so it is not limited to once per 24 hours.

The officer bonus system works just as stated above. So, get more officers, and get yourself and all your officers to use the recruiter for more soldiers!

You get a soldier, and your commander gets half a soldier (stowed away in a hidden vault until he/she makes a whole soldier).

Since recruit click bonus from your officers is such an influential part of the game, you might be wondering how it works. So, here goes the quick and dirty diagram (yay for text + CSS!) - look from the bottom up

Level	Soldiers
Uber-Awesome Elite Supreme Ruler	4	<-- and we're done
Supreme Commander	8	<-- aaaaalmost there
Super Commander	16	<-- And so forth, 16 clicks
Commander	32	<-- And so on, 32 clicks = 32 soldiers
Officer	64	<-- 64 clicks trickled up = 64 more soldiers
Sub-Officer	128	<-- 128 clicks trickled up to the commander = 128 soldiers
Sub-sub	256	<-- Started here, with 256 clicks on this player's link to earn them 256 soldiers

The clicks can come from either the recruit link or the recruiter. A click on either one will result in one soldier, and will trickle up the line in the same fashion.

Note: The unit production acquired in the Training page does not trickle up to the commander.

There are four races in Ruins of Chaos:

As you can see, each race in the game has a specific bonus. You pick your race when you sign up, and can reset your account at any time to start over and choose a different race. You can't build an army of Orcs and then just expect them to turn into Humans, right?

The different bonuses each cater to specific gameplay strategies.

• Ranker
  • Prefers trying to get the best rank
  • Spends gold more often than most, lest they lose it!
  • Usually the most well-balanced armies
  • Preferred race: Humans. Why? The income bonus can be applied to everything in the game. Gold is essential for all of your army's upgrades, training, and armaments.
• Banker
  • Prefers keeping gold above all else
  • Spends gold several times a day
  • Usually hides in the rankings, typically with a highly defensive build
  • Preferred race: Dwarves. (ftw) Why? The high defense bonus allows these players to more easily protect their income, or risk fewer soldiers in defending due to their effectiveness.
• Spy
  • Prefers being able to find more gold and sabotage more effectively
  • Mixes between seldom and frequent spending, depending on how long the game has been running
  • Usually hides in the rankings, typically with high covert stats
  • Preferred race: Elves. Why? Covert bonus applies to both Spy and Sentry, allowing them to sneak around more effectively, and at the same time protecting them more from covert operations.
• Slayer
  • Prefers taking all gold they can
  • Spends their own gold a few times a day; spends other people's gold as often as they damn well please!
  • Can hide in the rankings or balance well with their pillages
  • Preferred race: Orcs. Why? Attack is the easiest path of the game to complete, and having a very strong Strike Action allows you to decide how much gold you make by who you attack to steal gold from. The attack bonus makes this path much easier and more powerful for an Orc.

Page compression is a way for your browser to download a smaller version of the pages here so that it loads faster. As you might know from saving a large document of words into a .ZIP file, it can compress a very large file into a very small size. Same thing works with the Internet. When your browser tells the server it can accept compressed content, the server sends content compressed by GZIP. This can make a very large page compress by anywhere from 50-90%.

When your browser isn't accepting compressed content, it takes longer to download the page, and uses more data transfer (bandwidth). All modern browsers support getting compressed content, but some things may filter out the browser's notification to the server that it can accept compressed content. Ad Muncher, for instance, removes the browser's notification that it can accept compressed content. Because of the way Ad Muncher's filtering works, it can't deal with compressed content. So, having Ad Muncher running on your computer can cause the compression warning to appear. In this particular case, you will need to exit Ad Muncher entirely in order to get it to stop filtering your browser's connections.

Other things that may prevent the ability to compress content are web proxies that don't support it, or older browsers where it wasn't implemented yet.

The primary things that this would slow down are rapidly loading several pages one after the other, or using the in-game recruiter (which basically does that in the background for you). For the best in-game recruiter experience, we recommend the Safari web browser for all Windows or Mac users, as it is currently the fastest Javascript processor of all modern browsers we've tested, and the game relies heavily on fast Javascript processing in order for the in-game recruiter to work smoothly.

DISCLAIMER

1. By playing the game from this moment forward, you agree to these rules and any rules that get changed or posted in the future
2. We reserve the right to change these rules at any time, with or without notice, and to make such changes to rules retroactive
3. We reserve the right to make exceptions to rules at our own discretion
4. We reserve the right to fire the ban cannons for any or no reason whatsoever, if we feel it is deserved
5. While we will make every effort to ensure the rules are fair and enforced promptly, we are not responsible for any damage arising from the violation of any terms and conditions, the inability to use the site or a specific feature on the site, or the delay of or lack of enforcement of a particular condition in any particular case
6. You must be at least 13 years old to play. We can accept no responsibilty for underage users creating an account.

Allowed

1. Playing the game with your friends, family, co-workers, et al, in the same building
2. Giving your recruit link out to anybody and everybody you know, as often as you want (it won't change when the game resets)
3. Gaining a fair advantage by expending the most effort, being awesome at the game, and/or having the best officers under you
4. Recruiting people from all around the internet to play and become your officer
5. Passing an account ONLY ONCE to somebody else if you cannot continue for the rest of the age
6. Building or using a tool to assist in playing by automating tedious parts of the game, as long as the game's advertisements are displayed for the user to view at least once before, during, or after each session of using the tool. For example, click tools must use either 1) the full game pages at recruit.php or recruiter.php, or 2) the following page at any time at least once: http://www.ruinsofchaos.com/break.php?showclickcount=1000 (changing the 1000 out for any desired number, e.g. NINE THOUSAAAND)

Not Allowed

1. Playing the game for any of your friends, family, co-workers, et al, no matter what the circumstances.
2. Playing more than one account.
3. Registering more than one account.
4. Two or more people playing the same account.
5. Creating an account with the sole purpose of financial gain, i.e. creating an account to sell click credits.
6. If you have family members on the same IP, you cannot recieve sell-offs or click credits from another account played on the same IP internet conncection.
7. Passing your login information onto somebody else.
8. Passing an account after it has already been exchanged once, passing an account requires approval from RoC administrators (moderators).
9. Interacting with an account which you have previously owned, this includes selling off.
10. Bypassing or breaking the means set up to keep the game fair (CAPTCHAs, attacking limits, etc), GreaseMonkey scripts are allowed as long as they does not gain an unfair advantage.
11. Attempting to obtain programs which violate game rules, i.e. autoclickers.
12. Exploiting the game in any way to gain an unfair advantage.
13. Deceiving people through tools or misleading information to gain an unfair advantage.
14. Sending harassing, obscene, or illegal material through the game's messaging system, chat, or on the forums.
15. Intentionally refreshing page's or performing expansive queries to slow down or otherwise harm the Ruins of Chaos website or server.

Copyrights

1. Ruins of Chaos is 100% original source code, written from scratch by Dennis Field and Timothy Potter. The source code and images for Ruins of Chaos are copyright © 2008 by Dennis Field and Timothy Potter. Unauthorized commercial use is forbidden. All rights not explicitly stated are hereby reserved.