Guides
How CityWar works
Three explainers, each about something this site does that is not obvious from looking at it: how a city gets a rank, how two cities get compared, and what “momentum” actually measures.
Every figure in them is read from the same code the product runs on, so a guide cannot quietly drift out of date from the thing it describes.
The guides
3How CityWar City Rankings Work
What a dollar buys, how the board is ordered, what happens on a tie, and the four things that deliberately do not affect a city’s rank.
How City vs City Comparisons Work on CityWar
The data behind a head-to-head, why “Mumbai vs Delhi” has exactly one URL, and why we publish a few thousand comparisons rather than 17 million.
What City Momentum Means on CityWar
Trending, rising and moved are three different measurements. What each one counts, and why a city can rise fast without climbing a single place.
Why only three
Editorial policyA site with 5,908 city pages could generate an article about every one of them. It would be worthless, and it would drag down the pages that are not.
What this site knows that nobody else does is how its own numbers work — the ranking rule, the tie-break, the comparison method, the day boundary. That is the whole editorial remit. Anything already answered by the FAQ or the about page does not get a second version here.
See it running
The mechanics are easier to follow on a live board than in prose.