25 questions
Questions, answered
How the leaderboard is calculated, what a dollar buys, what a business spot costs and what happens when somebody outbids you. Every number on this page comes from the same code the checkout runs on.
If something here is not clear enough, that is worth telling us — a payment page that has to be interpreted is a payment page that is wrong.
The board
6 questionsWhat does $1 actually do?
- It adds one point to the city you picked, as soon as the payment clears. The city moves up the leaderboard by however much that buys, and the display name and shoutout you typed — both optional — are published on that city’s page and in the live feed. That is the entire product: a position on a public board and a line of text next to it.
Does the money go to the city?
- No. Nothing reaches a city government, a municipality, a tourism board, a resident or a charity. CityWar is not affiliated with any city it lists, and a contribution is a paid entertainment and advertising product, not a donation.
How is a city’s rank calculated?
- Cities are ordered by total score, highest first, and one US dollar contributed is one point. When two cities are level the one that was backed first holds the higher rank, so an equal top-up never demotes the city that got there first. Nothing else is in the calculation — no population weighting, no votes, no editorial judgement.
My city has no rank on its page. Why not?
- Because nobody has backed it yet. A city with a score of zero is unclaimed: it has a page, it is in the sitemap and a business can buy a listing on it, but it is not on the leaderboard and the site will not print a position for it. The first $1 is what puts it on the board.
Does a bigger city rank higher automatically?
- No. Population decides only whether a city is in the catalogue at all. It has no effect on score or rank — a town of 100,000 with $60 behind it outranks a megacity with $50.
Is there a maximum contribution?
- Yes, $5,000 per payment. It is a guard against a mistyped amount rather than a policy about generosity, and it applies to spot bids too.
Seasons
2 questionsHow long is a season?
- 30 days. Season 01: Global Clash is the first one and it closes on September 25, 2026.
What happens when a season ends?
- The city holding #1 at that instant is recorded in the Hall of Fame permanently. Nothing is refunded, no page is taken down, and business spots and float ads keep running on their own clocks. Whether the next season starts every city from zero has not been decided; the rule will be published here before Season 02 opens.
Business spots
6 questionsWhat is a business spot?
- A ranked listing on one city’s page for the season: your business name, one line of copy and a link to your site. Every city sells 5 of them, ordered by total spend, ties broken by who bid first.
What does a spot cost?
- A first bid starts at $25. If all 5 spots in that city are already held, the floor is $1 more than the total of the weakest one — you have to beat it, not match it. Topping up a listing you already hold starts at $5.
What happens if someone outbids me?
- Your listing stays published and moves into the challenger queue underneath the live spots. Bids stack rather than reset, so topping up climbs from your existing total rather than starting again from zero. Being outbid is not a refundable event — it is the product working as designed.
Am I guaranteed the top spot, or any traffic?
- No. A spot ranks by spend and anyone can outbid it an hour after you buy it. CityWar makes no promise about traffic, clicks, impressions, customers or how long you will hold a position.
Do paid links pass SEO value?
- No. Every paid link — spots and floats — is published with rel="nofollow sponsored ugc noopener noreferrer" and opens in a new tab. Buy a placement for the audience, not for link equity.
What kind of link is rejected?
- Link shorteners, IP addresses, URLs with credentials in them and anything that is not an ordinary http or https address are rejected at checkout, before any money moves. A listing that misrepresents where it leads is removed without a refund.
Float ads
3 questionsWhat is a float ad?
- A dismissible card that hovers over the page for a fixed run, either on one city page or across the whole site. When more than one float is live for a page the slot rotates between them, weighted by spend, so a large buy shows up more often without owning the slot outright.
What do floats cost?
- City Float / 24 hours at $19, City Float / 7 days at $79, Global Float / 24 hours at $99, Global Float / 7 days at $349, Global Float / 30 days at $999.
Does a float move the leaderboard?
- A city float credits that city’s score with the full price of the package — buying attention in a city is backing it. A site-wide float belongs to no city and credits none.
The cities
4 questionsWhich cities are on the site?
- 5,908 of them, across 244 countries: every city in the world with more than 100,000 residents, plus all 241 national capitals however small. Every one has had a page since launch, backed or not.
Where do the populations and place names come from?
- GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0. Populations, regions, coordinates, timezones and capital status are theirs and are not edited here.
How do I get a city added, or a wrong detail fixed?
- The catalogue is generated from GeoNames, so a missing city or a wrong population is fixed upstream at geonames.org and arrives here on the next rebuild. If a city is over 100,000 people, is correct at GeoNames and is still missing here, that is our bug — tell us and we will look.
Two cities share a name. Which one is which?
- The bigger one keeps the plain URL and the others are disambiguated by region and country, so /city/london is London in England and /city/london-ontario-ca is London in Ontario. Old and colloquial names redirect to the right page — /city/bombay lands on Mumbai, /city/saigon on Ho Chi Minh City.
Paying
4 questionsDo I need an account?
- No. There is no sign-up and no password anywhere on this site. The display name and shoutout are typed at checkout and are optional; leave them blank and the contribution is published as Anonymous Warrior.
What currency am I charged in?
- Scores are denominated in US dollars; the charge is taken in INR through Razorpay. The conversion uses a market reference rate refreshed through the day, fixed at the moment your order is created so it cannot move while you are paying. The exact INR amount is shown before you confirm. If your card is issued in another currency, your own bank adds its own conversion and fees on top of that.
Can I get a refund?
- Not by default. A contribution is credited to a public leaderboard the moment the payment clears, which is a change other people can see and act on, and it cannot be quietly reversed. Duplicate charges and payments that were taken but never credited are a different matter and are put right — the refund policy sets out exactly how.
Can I take my shoutout down?
- Yes. Ask and the message and display name come off the page. The points stay with the city: they were counted the moment they were paid and other cities’ standings have been built on top of them since.
Still stuck
The longer versions live in the terms, the refund policy and the privacy policy. For what the product is and why it exists, read about CityWar.
Buying for a business? The prices, the live spot boards and the float packages are all on the advertise page.
Anything else — a billing problem, a shoutout to take down, a city you think is missing — write to morningstar200069@gmail.com, quoting the Razorpay payment id from your receipt if it is about a payment.