Projects and Operations

Long-running efforts that span turns: research programmes, construction, covert operations and campaigns.

Some things a country does cannot happen in one turn. A nuclear programme, a canal, a rearmament plan, a decade-long insurgency, a covert operation to destabilise a neighbour — these are efforts, not actions, and they get their own board.

Open it with the Projects & Operations button in the toolbar, alongside Chat and Actions. A new campaign's board is empty — "Nothing on the board yet" — until events and your advisor start writing to it; 🧭 Ask your advisor to populate this gets it to file the efforts you already have under way.

This is also where research and technology live. There is no tech tree; there is a research programme with milestones that either progresses or stalls.

*A board on a campaign that has been running a while. Note the counts — Mine (4), Foreign (2) — the tag chips, the priority control on each card, and that an ongoing effort carries no target date and so can never run late.*

Projects and operations

Two kinds:

• Projects — construction, research, industrial and political programmes. Building something, generally.
• Operations — military and covert undertakings. Doing something to someone, generally.

Each carries a status:

The first four are open and appear on the default board. The last three are closed and live behind a separate view.

Your agents are on the board too: each one in place is a covert operation of its own, Agent in Germany, opened the moment it is deployed, cancelled when you recall it and failed when it is caught.

Secrecy

A covert operation you can see on your own board is not visible to the country it targets — unless their intelligence service finds it.

Milestones

A project carries up to 8 milestones, each dated and either pending, done or missed. The next pending one is what the board shows you as the thing to watch.

Milestones can repeat — weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual or biennial. Marking a repeating milestone done advances it to its next date on its own calendar, so an annual exercise on 1 June stays on 1 June rather than drifting, and the card counts how many times it has been done. A missed occurrence is deliberately not rolled forward: it stays pending and the card flags it, Milestone slipped, because a drill you skipped is a fact about your country, not a scheduling inconvenience.

On beta a date that passes with nothing said is a slip. A milestone whose date the time skip reaches without an outcome is marked slipped: late, but not missed, and the next skip is asked to say what became of it — reached, slipped again or missed.

A project marked ongoing is a standing effort with no planned end. It has no target date and can never be overdue.

On each card

Besides its status, progress and next milestone, a card warns you of what the calendar says: ⚠ Overdue once its target date has passed, ⏳ Due in so many days when a milestone falls inside the next month, Milestone slipped when one's date went by while it was still pending, and No recent progress — on another power's entry, No fresh intelligence — when it has stalled or nothing has been reported of it for three rounds. Under that:

• 🧭 Ask advisor on your own work, or What do we know? on someone else's, has the advisor brief you on it.
• ⚖ Our options, on another power's running effort, asks the advisor what you could do about it.
• 📍 Show on map takes the camera to where it is happening, when the board knows.
• Activity lists the events behind it, with their dates.

What you actually control

Two things, and this is deliberate:

Priority. ▲ high, ● normal or ▼ low, on each of your own cards. High means the advisor briefs it first and the simulation is told to keep it moving. Low means it is allowed to drift.

Abandoning it. Abandon, then Confirm abandon?, which routes through cancellation — the project stays on the board under Closed, with the progress it actually reached.

Neither is offered on another power's entry: you can watch it and act against it, but its priority and its cancellation are not yours to set.

You do not author a project's content. Projects are written by the world — by events, by your intelligence service, and by the advisor — in response to what your country is doing. You steer them; you do not type them into existence.

After each time skip the board is brought into step with what happened — progress, stalls and new long-term efforts — reading every event of the turn, including ones taken off the timeline as filler. The skip's own events carry the board's changes, so this costs no request and has no switch. If that update fails, the turn is held rather than lost — see troubleshooting. The time skip itself is shown the board, so an effort you push is narrated as what it actually is.

On beta a project's activity lists only the events that moved it, rather than every event that mentioned it in passing.

Closing keeps the record. Completing marks pending milestones done and forces progress to 100%; failing or cancelling marks them missed and preserves the real progress reached. Only an explicit delete erases a project entirely.

Completion has consequences

A project can carry changes that release only on successful completion — never on cancellation, never on failure. This is how a five-year programme to build up your intelligence service actually raises your rating: not gradually, but when it finishes.

It is also why abandoning a project at 90% gets you nothing except the record that you tried.

Foreign projects, and whether to believe them

The board shows projects belonging to other countries too, when your intelligence tells you about them. Those carry a verification state:

The loop this creates is the best thing on the board. A turned agent feeds you planted material. A foreign project opens on your board from it. Later, that source is found to be compromised, and the entry is stamped Doubtful and stalls — the engine can raise the doubt but it cannot settle it. On the stable build the stamp comes as soon as the source is turned or your analysts suspect it.

On beta a turned agent's reports stay trusted until your own service catches on. The stamp comes only when your analysts suspect the source, or the agent is caught after having been turned: the board never knows more than your service does.

The only way to resolve it is to get a fresh agent into that country and look again. Until you do, you are planning against something that may not exist.

Limits

The board warns you when you are within ten of the project limit. Past it, finished work is evicted first, oldest by last update — your active programmes are never dropped to make room.

Filtering

The board filters by owner — All, Mine (where it opens) or Foreign, once there is anything foreign on it — by free text, and by tag chips, and sorts by Recently updated, Priority, Next milestone, Progress, Name or Status. Closed switches to the finished entries, and ← Running back. On a long campaign with a busy intelligence service you will need them.

On beta the tags sit behind one Tags button: a menu you tick them in, with a box to find one once there are many and Clear selection, so a long campaign's tags no longer push the projects off the panel. An entry shows if it carries any of the ticked tags.

🧭 Ask the advisor to review or extend the board, at the foot of the list, has the advisor fill gaps a long campaign has left.

Next

• Espionage — where the foreign entries and the doubt come from.
• Giving orders — how efforts get started.
• Relations, treaties and war — the ledgers the board sits beside.

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.