Starting a Game

Scenarios, choosing a country, inventing your own faction or leading a group, and what the six difficulty levels actually change.

A new game needs three things: a scenario to play on, a country to play as, and a difficulty.

The Scenarios tab. Modern Day is the only built-in one; everything else comes from the Community Hub.

Scenarios

A scenario is a world — its map, its borders, who owns what, the starting date, which troop types exist, and any house rules the author wrote. A game is one playthrough of a scenario. One scenario can seed as many games as you like, and playing one never changes it.

Modern Day is the only scenario built into the game. Everything else lives on the Community Hub, including the official presets:

Open the Community tab in the main menu, find one, and hit Import & Play. It downloads into your library and behaves exactly like a built-in scenario from then on.

Modern Day is played on the real world's provinces — 3,662 regions, 202 countries with their own colours and common English names, about 2,500 cities — starting on 1 January 2016, with the United States as the default country. Campaigns begun on the earlier hand-drawn map are not lost: they move to a copy called Modern Day (classic map) and carry on there, on the map they were started on.

If a scenario you imported gets updated by its author, an Update button appears on its card. Updating is safe — games already in progress keep working on the version they started on.

Choosing a country

Selecting New Game on a scenario opens the picker, drawn on that scenario's own map. It has two tabs, Pick a country and Create a faction (on beta, Pick a country and Play as a group).

Pick a country

Pick a country, or switch to Create a faction to invent one.

A map and a searchable list of every country in the scenario. Click one on the map or pick it from the list — or press Scenario default to play whoever the scenario's author chose.

The list is built from the scenario's actual roster, which includes countries that hold no land — governments in exile, movements, organisations. Playing one of those is a very different game: you have no territory to defend and no territory to lose.

On beta the picker is larger: the map beside a list of the countries you can play, each with its flag where one is known and its colour on the map, both in the scenario's own colours. Pointing at a row lights its country on the map.

Create a faction

This is where you invent a country that does not exist. You give it:

• A name — this is its identity everywhere in the game, so choose it properly.
• A colour — how it paints on the map.
• A flag — optional; pick from the library or leave it blank.
• Lore — who this power is: its history, cause and ambitions. The world reads this. It is worth writing something real, because it steers the story the AI tells and how every other country treats you.
• Starting territory — Claim regions on the map, or Start landless.

The regions you take are carved out of whoever held them, and that country will notice.

Play as a group

Beta channel only.

On beta the picker's second tab is Play as a group, and Create a faction is part of it. A group is something that is not a country — a cartel, a militia, a movement, an outbreak. It owns no land: it controls an area, and the regions in it stay their countries'.

• This scenario's groups lists the groups the scenario already has, each with how many regions it controls. Pick one to lead it.
• Or make a new group with the same form as a faction: a name, a colour, a flag, a Description — what the group is and wants, which the AI reads — and a Starting area: Choose its area on the map, or No area yet, to take one as the story goes.

The AI then treats you as the group's leader, not a state's. The group cannot sign for a country, be annexed like one or govern one, and the governments and people where it operates deal with it as what it is — they may hunt it, bargain with it, use it or ignore it. Ground it gains or loses is its area growing or shrinking, and the world can push it back but never dissolve or rename it. In a scenario with its Groups feature switched off there is no list, and the same form invents a new power instead, as Create a faction does.

Difficulty

Six levels. Medium is the honest one.

Six levels. Difficulty does not give the AI secret information or extra resources, and at no level is the world biased against you — it changes how much benefit of the doubt your plans get, how competent your rivals are, how hard consequences press, and how firm other governments are at the table. It has its own instructions for the time skip, for diplomacy and for interactive events.

At the easy end, when several outcomes are equally plausible the less punishing one is preferred — but no level grants a success the world state makes impossible. At the hard end, weak assumptions are punished and errors can compound naturally — but even Impossible is "full causal consequences", never a scripted conspiracy against you.

Medium — "the simulator neither helps nor targets the player" — is the honest one and the right default. The difference between Medium and Hard is mostly whether a vague order gets a charitable reading — on Hard, "improve the economy" will get you an event about a policy that did not work.

On beta, difficulty decides how things tend to go for you. The levels no longer only change how strictly your plans are read. The grid says so, from Very Easy, "Almost everything goes your way", through Medium, where things happen realistically, to Impossible, "Almost everything goes against you", with the levels between as steps on that ladder. What it still never does: grant what the world makes impossible, give a reverse with no cause the story states, or ignore an order — the attempt is always made and always gets an outcome. On the battlefields it is part of the fighting itself: the armies fighting you fight at 85% of their strength on Very Easy and 175% on Impossible, advance at 90% and 140% of their pace, and draw 70% and 300% of the usual reserves, while Medium is equal terms. It also sets who commands them: a plainer commander on Very Easy and Easy, and on Hard and above one that also weighs how you are likely to answer.

Difficulty is set when you start and stored with the game, but you can change it mid-campaign from the cheats panel.

Opening a campaign

Starting or resuming a game shows its scenario's cover, then a loading screen — the logo turning over a dark ground — while the map works out every country's surface. A pause here is normal rather than a hang; the map is revealed once it is drawn.

On a new game's first turn, a scenario with a World Before Round One briefing also writes its own backstory — the recent history that led to the situation you have inherited.

On beta nothing loads until you press Play. The game starts on the main menu, and a campaign opens only when you press Play on its card. The first time the game opens after an update, a steel vault door stands in front of the menu with the Open Historia mark as its wheel: click it and the door opens, onto a notice of what the update brings when there is one. Show the vault door every time, in Settings → General → Display, shows it at every start, and with Reduce motion on it simply fades away.

What gets created

Starting a game copies the scenario's world into a new playthrough and gives it its own set of documents — world state, game state, events, actions and chat history. From that point the game is independent: editing the scenario later does not touch it.

Games appear in the Games tab of the main menu, under Last Played and Most Played, with your country, date, round, and pending actions and events on the card. Play opens one (the game you have open reads Current), Archive puts it away, and the card's ⋮ holds Edit, Clone and Export. See saves and rollback.

On beta the Games tab has Continue Playing and All Games. Continue Playing is your latest few; All Games is every campaign once, with a search, Active, All and Archived, and a sort by recently played, most turns, most played or name. An archived game's card has Delete, and a deleted game waits on the Recently deleted shelf below, where it can be restored. See archiving and deleting.

Starting well

• Take a country you know something about. You will write better orders for a situation you can already picture.
• Modern Day first. It is the most polished and the most legible.
• Medium first. Very Hard is not more interesting on turn one, just less forgiving.
• Write the faction lore if you invent a country. A faction with no lore is a blank to the world, and it will be treated like one.

Next

• Your first campaign — a walkthrough of the first hour.
• The interface — what everything on screen is.
• Countries and identity — names, tags, flags and reputation in depth.

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.