Why Petalwar exists

We missed Supreme Commander. So we made our own.

Petalwar is a real-time strategy game for everyone who grew up on Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance and still reaches for them: the same big-picture command, simpler to learn, and made to run natively on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The game we kept going back to

Supreme Commander and its standalone expansion, Forged Alliance, came out in 2007 and never really left. No other strategy game made a war feel that large and that readable at the same time: zoom out and the whole battlefield becomes icons you can command at once, zoom in and a single factory is working through its queue. Engineers help each other build, orders stack up with Shift, and a base is worth more when its buildings stand side by side.

Almost twenty years later, the Forged Alliance Forever community still keeps the game alive, with its own client, maps, ladder and rating. We still play it. And every time, we wished for the same few things.

What we missed

• A native Mac game. Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance are Windows games. On a Mac they mean Wine, CrossOver or a virtual machine, and on Linux a compatibility layer.
• A gentler first hour. Forged Alliance rewards years of practice, which is also what makes it hard to bring a friend along. A new player faces a long list of units per tech tier before the first fight feels fair.
• A match you can read at a glance. We wanted everyone, from the first minute, to see what they are defending and what they have to break.

Our own version, simpler

So we built Petalwar. What we kept from Supreme Commander is what we love about it:

• the strategic zoom, from a single tank to the whole valley in one scroll;
• engineers that build, assist and repair, and orders queued with Shift;
• attack-move on Q, control groups on Ctrl+1–9, factories on repeat;
• adjacency: storages and generators that make their neighbours better;
• three tech tiers, earned by upgrading your factories;
• an AI that plays by the same rules you do, and waits for your first order.

And what we changed to make it simpler:

• One objective for everyone. Every base grows around a Heartbloom, and five petals ward it. While any petal stands, the Heartbloom cannot be harmed. Break the petals, then bring the bloom down.
• Two resources, matter and energy, and a small army per faction: six tanks each, every one with a clear job.
• Three factions that play differently: Sunhearth holds the line with armour and heavy guns, Mossglade is fast and never where you expect, and Moonveil fights with shields and light.
• Play together without a server of your own. Host a match, share its invite code, and up to eight commanders meet in the valley, online or on your local network.

Even the highscores borrow from Forged Alliance Forever: skill ratings use TrueSkill with the settings FAF uses, and every counted match also earns experience towards 56 ranks.

Native on Mac, Windows and Linux

Petalwar is built in Unreal Engine 5 to run natively, with no emulation or compatibility layer in between: on a Mac it is a Mac app, and on a PC a PC game. The first builds are for Apple silicon Macs, and the Windows and Linux builds follow from the same project. The download section shows each one the moment it is published.

Sketched and built with Codex Astra

Every faction, building and vehicle in Petalwar started as a sketch. We used Codex Astra to generate the concept sketches, from the Hearthland valley and the three faction headquarters to every tank and the menus, and then to build the game's assets from them: the sketches became 3D models with Tripo, which Codex Astra fitted, painted in each faction's colours and brought into Unreal. The illustrations on this website come from the same sketches, and the music was made with Suno. The prompts and the originals are kept with the source, so every piece can be traced back to the sketch it came from.

The screenshots in the gallery are real captures from the game.

Who makes it

Petalwar is made by Deverence Group B.V. in the Netherlands, the studio behind CozyCity and Brismania. It is still in development, and it is shaped by the people who play it: write to devs@deverence.com with what you would like to see.

Read the commander's guideMeet the factions

Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance are trademarks of their respective owners. Petalwar is an independent game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the makers of Supreme Commander or the Forged Alliance Forever project.