Military and Combat

Unit types, strength, posture, standing orders and travel by era — how forces move when you order them and the engine carries it out.

Armies in Open Historia are formations on the map with a type, a strength, a posture and an owner. You do not move them by hand. You state what you want, the turn decides what happens, and the engine carries the movement out over however many turns it takes.

The way to use your army

Write it as an order. "Reinforce the eastern border with two armoured divisions", "Launch an offensive toward Kharkiv", "Withdraw the fleet to home ports". The time skip resolves it, and after the skip the game moves units to match what the events say — armies advance, retreat and take losses where the events say they did. (The skip's own events carry those moves; nothing is asked afterwards.)

The model owns movement; you own intent. A place an order or event names — "toward Kyiv", "the Suwałki gap" — is read as an objective and found on the actual map, and new units and structures are placed by name and kept off one another.

Clicking a unit on the map gives you an intelligence card — what the formation is, whose it is, roughly how strong, what it is made of, and what it appears to be doing. It is a briefing, not a command panel.

Hands-on control does exist — the Force Manager, under Military in the cheats panel — for deploying, inspecting, editing and repairing forces directly. That placement is deliberate: editing your order of battle by hand is a game-master tool, not the normal loop.

On beta, land wars are fought on battlefields. Where two sides at war hold land that touches, a battlefield opens and the game fights the land war itself, with hundreds of troops a side, before the time skip's story is written. Your infantry, armour and artillery formations near the line join it as troops and come back as formations when it closes; fleets, air wings and garrisons stay formations. You command your troops in the War Room, and your fleets there or by order: see war at sea.

Unit types

A scenario can restrict which types exist — there is no air force in 1200 AD — so the deploy options you see depend on the world you are playing.

Strength and composition

Strength is a percentage of the formation's established strength, 0–100: 78 means about three quarters of what that formation should have. A new unit starts at 100. A separate composition says what it actually is — "1 aircraft carrier, 2 frigates".

Strength only changes where the events narrate casualties or reinforcement (on beta, also where a battlefield or a sea battle wears a formation down). A unit that reaches zero is destroyed and removed. Saves from before the percentage scale are converted on load — anything over 100 is divided by ten.

Posture

What a formation is doing, as distinct from whether it is alive. Posture is what makes the map readable at a glance: massing on a border and on exercise on the same border are the same counter and a completely different message.

Standing orders

A move that is further than the unit could cover in the time skipped becomes a standing order, and the engine advances it every turn at the unit's pace until it arrives — within about 60 km of its destination. A patrol works its station, drifting to a new point each turn (the same point every time you replay that turn, never at random). The map draws a heading line to a destination and a ring around a patrol station, and counters glide between positions.

Travel is paced by what it is. A move is a redeployment unless the formation's posture is assaulting, and a redeployment goes by rail, road and ship; an advance against an enemy is much slower. Kilometres a day, by era:

A garrison does not travel. A redeployment that crosses water is paced by how much of its way lies over the sea, so a division ordered from Texas to Korea in 2016 arrives in about three weeks. Before the railways a march across a continent is still a campaign, not a turn. There is no separate cap on how far one order may send a unit: the pace is the limit, and a long move simply takes the turns it needs.

Other countries' forces

AI countries' formations respond to the military events a turn wrote: the engine reuses an existing formation before raising a new one, moves each at its type's pace, and only changes strength where the events say so. The map holds at most 12 formations per AI country and 80 in total; your own forces count against neither. On the stable build their formations are moved by turns, not between them.

On beta, the world stirs between turns. With Background AI and the Idle diplomacy feature on, the pulse that lets other countries write to you while the game sits open may also move or re-posture up to two of other countries' formations at a time: never one of yours, and never a garrison on the move. A movement near your sphere that your services would plausibly see is reported as a sighting.

Combat itself is narrated by the time skip and bound to the war ledger: a battle needs an active war with named sides, so fighting cannot quietly appear out of nowhere.

On beta, what the events raise reaches the map. A ship commissioned or a squadron formed in an event becomes a unit; a deployment or garrison the skip resolves joins the order of battle; a unit's move is listed once, not twice; and a renamed country's counters carry its flag.

Men, money and military power

Beta channel only.

On beta an army is drawn from a country's people and paid for by its economy, and how much it is worth in a war is a figure of its own.

Manpower. A formation on a battlefield stands for so many men: 2,000 before 1500, 5,000 to 1849, 12,000 to 1944 and 10,000 after, unless the scenario or the country says otherwise. By default 12% of a country's people are fit to serve. Every formation raised, drafted or sent to make good a loss is drawn from that pool and leaves the country's population; those who come home when a battlefield closes or a country leaves a war are given back. Those who do not come home are what a war costs in people. A country with no men left to call up cannot raise more.

Funding. A share of a country's GDP goes to its forces, more with a budget in surplus and less with a deficit or a heavy debt, and what its forces have to spend weighs in how strong it is. Blockades and reparations cut into it.

Military power. Each country has military figures, shown as bars on the ⚔ Military card of its stat sheet: Troop quality, Technology, Spending, Manpower share, War weariness, War resources (where the scenario counts them) and its Land, Naval and Air arms. Its Military power, the figure at the top of the card and the one the Stats pane's 🏆 Ranking tab uses to rank military power, is the men it can put under arms times what each of them is worth by those figures (spending, quality, technology and its arms), and never how much land it holds. How far being better armed outweighs being more is the scenario's to say: its Importance of technology, in the scenario editor's Features tab under Wars. Left empty it is 4.5, configured for the modern world, where a smaller, far better armed force outweighs a larger one; at 1 the men and their arms count alike, as in a world where everyone fights with much the same weapons; at 0 only the men count. The figures are rated by the AI against every other country, twenty countries to a request: a scenario designer can rate every country at once in the scenario editor's Fronts tab (Rate every country), and a country nobody rated is rated the first time the game needs it. Time skips then move your figures with what you do: training, new weapons, a bigger defence budget and a larger army raise them over the years, and losses and cuts lower them. See national statistics.

Structures do not move borders

Bases, ports, airfields and other built markers have an owner — whoever runs the facility — which is not the same as who owns the ground beneath it. Building a base in an ally's country does not annex it. See cities and structures.

Next

• Territory — what winning actually transfers.
• Giving orders — phrasing military instructions.
• The War Room — commanding troops on a battlefield, on beta.
• War at sea — fleets, sea battles and blockades, on beta.
• Cheats — where the Force Manager lives.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-10-25 · main 6e6239c4 · beta d7e8fa85. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.