Europa Neo — Player Manual

This manual is the complete reference for Europa Neo — a real-time strategy game where rival nanobot colonies wage war across the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Whether you are playing your first match or sharpening advanced tactics, this is where you learn the rules.

Before you play, open the public lobby at /lobby and choose a temporary guest handle. You can rename it later; other players see this handle instead of private system details, and no account is required.

Matches use readable paths: /match/<match-id>/join requests a player seat, /match/<match-id>/spectate opens read-only spectating, and /match/<match-id> chooses the appropriate action for the match state. These paths contain the match ID only; your guest identity and reconnect session stay in the browser and are not credentials in the address. Guest/player IDs are non-secret correlation data, not credentials; the manual does not expose bearer credentials. Match IDs identify matches, while guest/player IDs identify participants.

The 60-second version

You land on Europa with a handful of cities. Every city produces troops each tick — the game heartbeat, four per second — until it saturates. You move troops around by laying pipes between cells. Gravity does the work: downhill pipes flow fastest, flat pipes flow steadily, and steep uphill pipes stall. Troops cut off from supply slowly decay, so keeping your pipeline network fed matters.

Where your troops meet enemy troops in a cell, they fight by attrition: equal forces wipe each other out, and the larger side wins and keeps the difference. Two special weapons break stalemates: paratroopers hop over the pipe network (costing twice what lands) and sever any pipes at their landing site, and guns shell every troop in a target cell — friend or foe.

You see only what your troops can sense: a band of surrounding cells moves with your stacks, and ground you leave behind goes dark again. There is no radar memory and no peeking.

You win by being the last commander standing. A player is eliminated when they hold zero troops AND zero cities. Surrender if you must; if the final players eliminate each other on the same tick, the match is a draw.

What v1 supports

• Desktop browsers with a mouse and keyboard (touch screens are not supported).
• English only.
• Public matches discovered and entered through the landing lobby. The browser flow ships end-to-end for two, three, or four players.
• Private matches joinable only via shareable /match/<match-id> links.
• Shareable match links: every match has a Copy link action; private matches show it prominently, public matches show it subtly.
• A fixed four-color player palette (red, blue, green, orange-gold).

Table of contents

1. Lobby — choose a name, create or find a match, and spectate
2. Quick start — from the lobby to first orders
3. Objective — how matches are won, lost, surrendered, and drawn
4. The board — grid, elevation, water, and fair maps
5. Cities and troops — production, saturation, capture
6. Pipes — directing troop flow, slope, feeding, and decay
7. Combat — attrition in plain language
8. Special weapons — paratroopers and guns
9. Reserves — holding troops back
10. Fog of war — what you can and cannot see
11. Controls — complete pointer and keyboard reference
12. Reading the screen — lobby, match HUD, and status meanings
13. The roster — who is online, status meanings, real-time updates
14. Numbers — every shipped tunable in one auditable table

New players should read Lobby, Quick start, and Objective first; keep Controls open in a second tab during your first match.