Time and Turns

Nothing happens until you skip time. Jump lengths, what a skip costs, Intervene, and undoing a turn that went badly.

Open Historia has no tick. There is no clock running in the background, nothing accumulates while you think, and no timer forces your hand. The world advances only when you press the button, and only as far as you tell it to.

Open the time panel with » on the date pill, top right.

Fixed jumps

Each preset shows the date you will land on; the custom row and today's AI request count sit underneath.

Each one shows the date you will land on, so you can see what you are committing to — and it is the date the jump actually reaches, worked out by the same rule the jump uses.

Note that a "month" is a flat 30 days and a "year" is 365 — the game does not track calendar month lengths for jump sizing. So from 1 January, 1 month lands on 31 January, not 1 February, and the button says so.

Custom jumps

Type an amount and pick a unit: hours, days, weeks, months or years. The conversions are the same flat ones — an hour is 1/24 of a day, a week is 7, a month is 30, a year is 365.

The row shows Lands on with the resulting date before you press Go, the same way the presets do. A part-day amount is rounded to whole days, so a 12-hour skip moves the date to tomorrow.

Useful when you want to land on a specific date, or when a fixed preset is slightly wrong for what is happening.

Auto-jump

Instead of choosing a distance, let the model choose it. Auto-jump looks at the state of the world and skips to the next moment it thinks you would want to be present for — which might be three days if a crisis is breaking, or eight months if nothing is happening.

Good for quiet stretches. Less good when you have something specific in motion that you want to watch closely.

How far should I skip?

The world has to fit everything that happens into one turn's worth of events, and a longer skip gets more of them, but not in proportion:

So a year gets barely more events than six months, and twelve months are compressed into about three dozen; skip a week and you get the texture. Queue more orders than the lower figure and it rises so that each order has an event to land in, and a scenario's author can make its periods busier or quieter.

• Something is actively unfolding — a war opening, an ultimatum running out, a coup — 6 hours to 3 days.
• Normal play — 1 week to 1 month. This is where most campaigns live.
• Building toward something — 3 to 6 months.
• Nothing needs you — 1 year, or auto-jump.

A common early mistake is skipping a year on turn one and wondering why the campaign feels thin. Start with months.

What a skip costs

Under the presets the panel shows today's count — "0 of 500 AI requests used today · a skip uses 1 request". A skip is one request, with Save AI requests on or off: each event carries what it changed — land, units, structures, the Projects board — and your agents' reports come back in the same answer. When the history document is due a fold, that rides in the same answer too. With Save AI requests off and AI lookup functions on, the model may look things up first, and the panel then says "at most 3"; with long skips in segments on, each extra segment adds one. See settings.

While it runs

A time skip takes a while — the model is simulating the world. The time panel says what it is doing as it goes ("Writing 1 month of events…", "Placing the armies and the fronts…"), and there is a Cancel button. Cancelling aborts the request cleanly and leaves the world exactly as it was.

The Events panel opens as soon as the skip starts and fills as the model writes, so you can start reading before it finishes — on Gemini too, except in a skip that may look things up, which arrives all at once. Turn this off with Show time skip events as they are written in Settings → AI.

On beta a land war is fought before its story is written. Where your country or anyone else's is at war on a battlefield, the skip first fights the period's days under the orders that stand ("Fighting the war…"), at no request, and the events are then written knowing how it went. If you queued an order for your troops, the model can have the period fought again with it before it writes, which is one request more; a skip in which no order commands troops stays one request. Cancel all AI requests, in Settings → AI → AI requests, stops a skip as its own Cancel does.

If jumps routinely hang, turn on Limit AI generation in Settings → AI. It gives up on a stalled generation and falls back to a canned event rather than waiting indefinitely. It watches for silence rather than total elapsed time, so a slow-but-working model is not cut off mid-answer.

Long skips in segments

Settings → AI → "Generate long time skips in segments", off by default.

Off, the whole skip is generated in one request. On, a skip of 120 days or more is generated as several requests of about three months each, merged into one round — a year is four. The result still arrives as a single turn with one set of events; you are not asked anything in between.

The trade:

Turn it on if long skips keep failing or timing out, which is the usual symptom on a hosted provider that drops long requests. Leave it off otherwise: it costs more tokens, and a year generated in one pass hangs together better than one generated in pieces.

It only affects long skips — a week or a month is a single request either way — and never auto-jump, which has no span to divide up front. Each segment adds one request to the skip's cap.

Each segment is validated against the world as the previous segments left it, so the pieces cannot contradict each other — a war started in the first segment is real by the second. If one segment fails, the turn is held rather than lost: Retry the segment re-runs only that segment, and Discard the turn drops it. See troubleshooting.

On beta two more things hold a turn. If a check the game has to ask for after a skip's events does not come back — rare now that the events carry their own consequences, but a provider that will not answer a skip in one piece is asked for the unit moves, territory and structures in a request of their own — nothing is saved yet and the turn waits: Retry the checks, Continue without them, or Discard the turn. And with Stop when my events fail on (Settings → AI, off by default), a skip in which an event about your country was refused, or an order of yours got no outcome, stops before anything is saved and lists what failed: Retry the failed events (one more request, for the same dates), Retry the whole skip, or Keep it and move on. With it off, a refused event is left out and an unanswered order carries over to the next skip as overdue.

Intervene

Events are revealed one at a time, and three events in you may see the thing you would have acted on — an ultimatum, a border crossing — while the events after it assume you did nothing. ✋ Intervene here, under Next event and Skip to end in the Events panel, stops the round at the event you are looking at. It asks once, then:

• the events you have seen are kept;
• the rest are discarded — they never happen;
• the date becomes the last kept event's;
• the next skip is told where you stopped, so it does not write the discarded events again.

It costs no request, and the shortened turn can still be undone. It is offered only while events remain unrevealed.

Interactive events

Now and then a skip offers one of its own weightier events about you to play out — a one in three chance when it has such an event, and never within three turns of the last offer: its card carries a yellow ⚡ strip, and the time panel mentions the offer until the next skip replaces it. See interactive events.

On beta offers come about one skip in five: one in four when a skip has such an event, and never on the skip right after the last offer.

Time stands still while one is in progress. The skip controls are replaced by a note that leads back to the scene; end it or set it aside to carry on.

Undo

↩ Undo last turn is in the time panel, and it tells you how many turns can be undone.

Undo restores the world, the game state, the events, your action queue, the chat history and the colours to exactly how they were before that jump. The game keeps up to 12 turns of snapshots, so you can step back repeatedly.

Use it freely. A time skip is partly a roll of the dice, and rewinding a turn that produced something absurd is how the game is meant to be played, not a workaround.

For jumping back further than the recent stack, the cheats panel has a roll back turn tool that restores the start of any earlier turn — discarding everything after it.

Rounds and dates

Every jump increments the round counter, which starts at 1. The round is what the game uses internally to seed deterministic outcomes such as espionage rolls and combat, which is why the same save always replays the same way.

The date is stored as plain text, so scenarios can use non-Gregorian dates such as "Third Age 3019" without the clock breaking. Loosely formatted dates get repaired rather than rejected.

BC dates are real dates. A year before AD 1 is written with a leading minus and counts backwards with no year zero: -0218-03-01 is 1 March 218 BC. Jumps, the timeline, the war and treaty records and the stat history all do proper arithmetic across the boundary, and the date is shown as "3/1/218 BC". Prose dates still pass through untouched.

Player focus

Beta channel only.

How much of each skip is about your country is a choice, made per game in Settings → AI → Player focus — for this game. A scenario sets where new games start; the default is Balanced.

It never invents events for you: in a quiet stretch the world fills the skip as usual, and what you have going on — orders, milestones due, wars, open threads — is what the share is measured against.

The first turn is special

On round 1, a scenario that has a World Before Round One briefing generates its own backstory before play begins — the recent history that led to the situation you have inherited. It happens once, and it gives the world something to refer back to. See events and history.

Next

• Events and history — reading what a jump produced.
• Giving orders — what to queue before you jump.
• Saves and rollback — how snapshots and autosave actually work.

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.