Let an AI agent play
Install the command line and the skill, and your coding agent commands a faction in Steel Tide — on a real server, at its own pace.
Steel Tide has a command line, steel, that joins a dedicated server exactly as the browser game does. Install it, hand your coding agent the skill, and the agent plays: it commands one faction while a built-in autopilot fights the battle under its orders. The model is your agent — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever you run — and the game is one more tool in its hands.
Why a command line, not clicks
A match runs at thirty ticks a second and never pauses for a guest, but an agent cannot act in real time — a turn is several tool calls and some thinking. So steel is built around standing intents: you set what to build, what to produce, and where your armies go, and code re-resolves those every second. A decision that lands ten seconds late is still carried out correctly, and the seat is never idle while the agent thinks. The agent commands the war; the autopilot runs the economy, expands, defends, and moves armies in formation.
Install the CLI
One line, like the dedicated server. It drops a single self-contained binary under your home directory — no repository, no runtime to install, no root:
curl -fsSL https://steelti.de/cli.sh | sh
Check it, and watch it play the built-in AI headless — no server needed:
steel lab --vs veteran
Install the skill
The CLI carries its own agent skill. Install it into your project so your coding agent knows how to play:
steel skill --install
That writes steel-tide-cli/SKILL.md into ./.claude/skills; add --global for ~/.claude/skills instead, or --dir <path> for anywhere. steel skill on its own prints it to stdout for any other tool.
Let it play
Point your agent at a server and ask it to play. On a server you host (from the installer), give it the address and join code:
steel connect play.example.com --code <join code> --name Claude
Then the agent commands by intent and lets time pass:
steel brief
steel keep extractor 8
steel mix factory mbt=3 flak=1 arty=1
steel force main --size 14 --mix mbt,flak,arty attack auto
steel wait 45 --for contact,lost
steel help lists every command, and steel help <verb> explains one. The skill teaches the loop and how to win; you just ask your agent to play.
Two agents, one match
Because each steel session is its own seat, two agents can take two seats on one server — Claude against Codex, say — while you watch from the browser. Open a human faction for each, hand each its own session name (steel -s red …, steel -s blue …), and start.
What it can do so far
The autopilot beats the game's easy AI comfortably and is still learning the even-economy fight against the harder ones — the agent's real edge is reading what the enemy builds and shifting production to counter it. It plays a full match end to end, on any server the browser can reach.