field manual · in-development document

What is being built

rev. 2026-10 — every claim below maps to something the build does today, or is marked planned.

01 The game

Open Ground is a real-time tactics game. Modern day, isometric, in the lineage of Close Combat, Combat Mission, Sudden Strike 2 and Men of War — but built around one idea: every soldier on the field is individually simulated.

It is RTT, not RTS. No base building, no resource harvesting, no tech tree. You get your men, the terrain, and the plan. Single-player only, and honest about it — authored missions, campaigns and configurable skirmishes are the game.

02 Command model

Orders are intents, not clicks-per-action. You tell a squad where to be, how to get there and under what conditions; the men work out the cover, the bounding and the rest.

• Squads command as one — select a squad, give an order; it splits into fireteams that look after each other on their own (bounding, covering, dragging bodies out of the open).
• Any man is one click away — grab an individual soldier for a hero moment without breaking the squad model.
• Routes and facing — lay a multi-waypoint route, set the final facing; markers show the plan on the field.
• Stances and pace — standing/crouch/prone posture, move pace, per-squad behaviour (rules of engagement, hold position, formation).
• Wait-for-go — stage several squads on their objectives, then release them all on one GO for a coordinated assault.
• Plan modes — BEHAVIOUR sets standing preferences (ROE, hold, stance, pace, formation) independent of any order; COMMAND is the orders themselves; PLAN and COORDINATE stage what happens next.
• Pause + time controls — spacebar pauses; 0.1x / 0.5x / 1x / 2x / 4x. Watch it like a film or take your time per order.

03 The simulation

The core is a deterministic C++ simulation. Every man, every tick:

• Perception & line of sight — real vision cones, obstacles, stance and light all matter. Show a man's cone with Alt+click.
• Suppression & morale — fire pins men down; squads break contact; the truly hopeless surrender.
• Ammo per man — magazines are counted; runners hand ammo to the dry; low ammo changes how a man fights.
• Wounds & aid — hits wound before they kill; buddies drag and carry casualties; medevac to friendly vehicles; the winning side patches up prisoners.
• Weapons & kit — rifles, MGs, AT grenades, breaching charges, smoke, flares, weapon jams under bad conditions.
• Civilians — they cross the field, get in the way, and the scenario can hinge on keeping them alive.

Vehicles & devices

• Wheeled & tracked armour — APCs, tanks, trucks, technicals, bikes. Real steering, turrets, hatches, per-part damage and fires, ragdoll crashes.
• Mud is real — vehicles bog down by weight and ground; a tank can take a truck in tow and haul it out.
• Transport & bodies — infantry mount and dismount, vehicles freight cargo, and your dead can be laid aboard for the ride home.
• FPV drones — launched, flown and crashed into things by the sim; operators, link lines and EW posts on the field.
• Helicopters & boats — airframes with working rotors; boats on standing water, and men who swim when they have to.
• Fire support — mortars and naval guns on call when the mission grants them.
• Night & weather — night ops with the commander's night vision, rain, wind, ambient beds that fit the ground.

04 The field remembers

• Bodies, wrecks, craters, blood, footprints and tracks persist for the whole battle — and wrecks work as cover.
• Destruction — buildings fall in chunked blocks; the rubble rests where it lands and becomes part of the terrain.
• Gore is a dial — ragdolls and worse are in the sim; the setting lets you dial it down.

05 Under the hood

06 Content

• The Valley Campaign — seven linked authored missions over one valley: recon the hill, take the farm, escort the convoy, get the prisoner back before dawn. Squads persist.
• Skirmishes — configurable battles (the 4v4 in video 2 is one).
• Factions — fictional modern-day sides: regulars vs militia, with regional patrol kits (desert, winter, tropical, alpine) already in the art.
• Mission cues — comic-page cutscenes, radio voiceovers and named-character dialogue frame the missions.
• Scenario editor — being built in the game itself; scenes already previewable. Community packs land as DLC folders.

07 In the lab — spikes

Test missions exist to prove a mechanic before it becomes a shipped feature. These are playable prototypes, not promises — each one is a real scenario running on the real sim today, but it hasn't graduated to shipped missions yet.

Naval insertion — the zodiac raid

A Sahel-style Atlantic coast, rainy morning: a French commando team (green berets, suppressed rifles, NVGs) sits 170 m offshore in a zodiac. Order them to the shore — the boat sails in, they go over the side and swim the surf while the boat withdraws out to sea. Across dunes and forest lies a radio compound: plant charges on the mast and the ammo depot, EXECUTE the demolition, call the boat back and EVAC at sea.

• what it proves — water as real terrain, boats as coxswained transport you direct like any vehicle, men who swim, stealth insertion, demolitions on objectives, extract-on-call
• what it could become — coastal raids, river crossings, amphibious assaults, pilot-rescue missions behind the waterline

Combined-arms breach — breakthrough

Eastern Europe, dawn drizzle: a generated front line stands between you and the rear — mine signs, concertina wire, dragon's teeth and hedgehogs, an anti-tank ditch, a trench with strongpoints, and a gate on the road with a minefield under it. Engineers clear lanes through the mines, riflemen cut the wire, the tank and APC take the strongpoints while mortars walk the battery behind. Take the gate, blow the ammunition dump, get through — and hold the counter-attack that comes the moment the gate falls. Twenty-five minutes; keeping the tank alive is optional but honorable.

• what it proves — mines and engineer clearance, wire cutting, anti-vehicle obstacles that genuinely stop armour, trench strongpoints, combined arms (infantry + tank + APC + mortar support) working one breach, timed objectives, a triggered counter-attack, and a whole front line generated by the map tools
• what it could become — fortified-line assaults, Siegfried/Maginot-style breaching missions, combined-arms ops as a mission template, generated front-line packs

Mud as a mechanic — rasputitsa

Eastern Europe, 1950, the spring thaw: a tank and a troop truck must cross a mud belt that spans the whole map — the road is washed out under it. The tank lays ruts, the truck follows into them and bogs down, and the tank's cable has to tow it out while an enemy mortar on the ridge shells the crossing. Men on foot are slow but quiet; the village on the far side is garrisoned, and there are civilians in it. Thirty minutes.

• what it proves — mud as terrain you fight, not a texture: vehicles lay real ruts others follow, weight against ground decides who bogs, cable towing as recovery, an infantry/armour tempo trade-off, indirect fire on a timed crossing, and season (rasputitsa) as a mission-defining condition
• what it could become — seasonal ops (mud season, deep winter), convoy missions where the environment is the enemy, logistics-under-pressure scenarios
• already on camera — this is the mission in video 2: the tank sinks, takes the truck in tow, and the assault on the village goes sideways before it goes right

08 Honest not-yet list

Things other games in the genre have that Open Ground does not claim today:

• Multiplayer — single-player by design; no versus, no co-op.
• Base building / economy / supply lines — it's tactics, not management.
• Tunnels, trenches you dig — not in the sim.
• Steam page / wishlist — waiting on the $100 Steam Direct fee (that's literally the Ko-fi goal).
• Workshop — comes with Steam; JSON packs already work today.
• Conquest campaign map — planned, not built.

09 Roadmap

Follow the build on YouTube, argue about it on Discord, read the devlog on the blog.