Military and Combat

Unit types, strength, posture, standing orders and era limits — how forces move when you order them and the engine carries it out.

Armies in Open Historia are formations on the map with a type, a strength, a posture and an owner. You do not move them by hand. You state what you want, the turn decides what happens, and the engine carries the movement out over however many turns it takes.

The way to use your army

Write it as an order. "Reinforce the eastern border with two armoured divisions", "Launch an offensive toward Kharkiv", "Withdraw the fleet to home ports". The time skip resolves it, and after the skip the game moves units to match what the events say — armies advance, retreat and take losses where the events say they did. (With Save AI requests on, that is part of the one after-skip check; it can be turned off in Settings → AI.)

The model owns movement; you own intent. A place an order or event names — "toward Kyiv", "the Suwałki gap" — is read as an objective and found on the actual map, and new units and structures are placed by name and kept off one another.

Clicking a unit on the map gives you an intelligence card — what the formation is, whose it is, roughly how strong, what it is made of, and what it appears to be doing. It is a briefing, not a command panel.

Hands-on control does exist — the Force Manager, under Military in the cheats panel — for deploying, inspecting, editing and repairing forces directly. That placement is deliberate: editing your order of battle by hand is a game-master tool, not the normal loop.

Unit types

A scenario can restrict which types exist — there is no air force in 1200 AD — so the deploy options you see depend on the world you are playing.

Strength and composition

Strength is a percentage of the formation's established strength, 0–100: 78 means about three quarters of what that formation should have. A new unit starts at 100. A separate composition says what it actually is — "1 aircraft carrier, 2 frigates".

Strength only changes where the events narrate casualties or reinforcement. A unit that reaches zero is destroyed and removed. Saves from before the percentage scale are converted on load — anything over 100 is divided by ten.

Posture

What a formation is doing, as distinct from whether it is alive. Posture is what makes the map readable at a glance: massing on a border and on exercise on the same border are the same counter and a completely different message.

Standing orders

A move that is further than the unit could cover in the time skipped becomes a standing order, and the engine advances it every turn at the unit's pace until it arrives — within about 60 km of its destination. A patrol works its station, drifting to a new point each turn (the same point every time you replay that turn, never at random). The map draws a heading line to a destination and a ring around a patrol station, and counters glide between positions.

Sustained travel runs at a post-1945 baseline, scaled by era:

So infantry in 1200 AD cover about 14 km a day. A march across a continent is a campaign, not a turn.

A single order is also held to a movement leash — how far one order may relocate a unit before it has to become a multi-turn campaign instead of a teleport:

multiplied by ×0.5 before 1500, ×0.7 to 1849, ×1.0 to 1944 and ×1.15 after.

Other countries' forces

AI countries' formations respond to the military events a turn wrote: the engine reuses an existing formation before raising a new one, holds each type to its era's leash, and only changes strength where the events say so. The map holds at most 12 formations per AI country and 80 in total; your own forces count against neither. With Background AI on, forces may also reposition between turns.

Combat itself is narrated by the time skip and bound to the war ledger: a battle needs an active war with named sides, so fighting cannot quietly appear out of nowhere.

On beta, what the events raise reaches the map. A ship commissioned or a squadron formed in an event becomes a unit; a deployment or garrison the skip resolves joins the order of battle; a unit's move is listed once, not twice; and a renamed country's counters carry its flag.

Structures do not move borders

Bases, ports, airfields and other built markers have an owner — whoever runs the facility — which is not the same as who owns the ground beneath it. Building a base in an ally's country does not annex it. See cities and structures.

Next

• Territory — what winning actually transfers.
• Giving orders — phrasing military instructions.
• Cheats — where the Force Manager lives.

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.