Your First Campaign

A guided first hour — from the main menu to your first war, told step by step.

This walks through the first hour of a campaign as Poland in the Modern Day scenario, on Medium. Poland is a good first country: it has real neighbours with real opinions about it, it is not so powerful that nothing threatens it, and not so weak that everything does.

Follow along with your own country if you prefer — the shape is the same.

Before you start

Make sure you have connected an AI provider. Without one, the world will not respond and this walkthrough will not work.

1. Start the game

From the main menu, Scenarios → Modern Day → New Game.

The country picker opens with a map and a searchable list. Find Poland and select it. Leave Create a faction alone for now — that is for inventing a country that does not exist.

Pick ⚖️ Medium, and the game starts.

The map loads centred on your country, with your flag in the corner and the date pill top right. If you have not set up a model yet, the Set up your AI provider prompt appears now — paste your key there and press Save and play.

2. Find out where you stand

Open the advisor — the button in the bottom-right corner. Ask it:

What are the three biggest risks to Poland right now?

It reads the actual world state and answers about it, sometimes with a chart. This is the fastest way to understand a position you have just inherited.

Now open the Stats tab in the same drawer. You get your relations and agreements, your economy, your stability, your strategic indices and your intelligence rating. Note the intelligence number — it decides how well your spies work and how well you can read other people's, and 40 is ordinary.

Finally, click Germany on the map. A card opens naming the country and the region you clicked; press ⓘ for Germany's panel — flag, details, related events, and an Advisor Report on request. Read it. Do the same for Russia and Ukraine.

3. Talk to someone

Click Germany on the map, then 💬 on its card to open a chat.

Say something with an actual ask in it:

Chancellor, Poland wants firmer guarantees on the eastern flank. What would Berlin want in return for backing a permanent NATO presence on our territory?

You will get a reply in the German leader's voice, shaped by the current state of the world and by how Germany sees you. Keep going for a few messages. Notice that they remember what you said earlier in the thread.

Diplomacy here is not a menu of treaty buttons. If you want an alliance, you have to talk someone into one.

4. Write your orders

Open the actions panel (✦ in the bottom toolbar). First, set a standing goal at the top — the direction behind your orders, such as "Keep Poland out of any war while tying Germany and the United States to our eastern flank." Your advisor and the simulation steer by it; no other country ever sees it.

Then queue two or three orders. For a first turn as Poland, something like:

• Open formal negotiations with Germany on a permanent allied presence in eastern Poland.
• Begin a two-year programme to expand domestic ammunition production.
• Quietly increase intelligence collection on Russian force movements near Kaliningrad.

Three orders is plenty. Each one should be a thing a government could actually decide to do this month.

If you are not sure how to phrase one, type a rough version and press the ✦ sparkle in the input to have it rewritten into a proper order. Get AI suggestions proposes orders based on your situation, and Help brainstorm actions opens the advisor to plan a set of orders with you.

5. Skip a month

Open the time panel (» on the date pill) and choose 1 month.

This takes a little while — the model is simulating the world, and the time panel says what it is doing. You can cancel if it hangs. On a free key, the panel also shows how many of the day's requests you have used; a skip costs one to three.

6. Read what happened

The Events panel opens and fills as the model writes. Step through the events with Next event. Watch the map: borders, units and markers change as each event lands, and the camera moves to whatever the event is about. If an event is something you would have reacted to, ✋ Intervene here stops the round there, and the rest never happens.

Look for:

• Whether your orders were picked up — an event should reference the negotiation you opened.
• What other countries did on their own. They are not waiting for you.
• Anything that has clearly started rather than finished. A crisis that opens this turn is the thing to pay attention to next turn.

7. Do it again, but respond

Now the campaign is actually running. Second turn:

• Go back to the advisor and ask what changed.
• Reply to any leader who wrote to you — countries will open chats with you unprompted.
• Write orders that respond to the events rather than repeating your last three.

Take another month. Then another. Somewhere in the first handful of turns something will go wrong in a way you did not plan for, and that is when the game starts being interesting.

Common first-hour mistakes

Skipping a whole year on turn one. You will get a compressed summary of twelve months and lose all the texture. Start with months.

Writing one vague order. "Improve the economy" produces a vague event. Name the policy.

Ignoring the chats. Countries write to you. If you never answer, you are playing a much smaller game than the one on offer.

Never using Undo. A turn that goes absurdly is a turn worth rewinding. It is in the time panel and it is there to be used.

Trying to control your army directly. Forces move because you order it and the world carries it out; the engine keeps them moving turn after turn. Hands-on deployment exists, but it is the Force Manager in the cheats panel. See military and combat.

Where to go next

• Diplomacy — how leaders, memory and group threads work.
• Espionage — once you have a stable position, start reading other people's.
• Starting a game — scenarios, inventing your own faction, and what difficulty changes.
• Settings — worth a pass once you know what you are looking at.

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 2026-09-24 · main e62a1c55 · beta 2f48a6c2. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.