IN THE MOUNTAINS

A deep tactical-strategic simulation of counterinsurgency at the platoon/company level, in a procedurally generated valley of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, c. 2011.

You are the commander of a remote combat outpost. The men, the equipment, the patrols, the shuras with the elders, the calls for fire, the wounded — they are yours. The valley is steep, the enemy fights on his own ground and his own timeline, and the population is the prize. This manual is your reference. Read it, or learn the hard way; the valley teaches both.

1. The Situation

It is 2011. Your company has inherited a combat outpost (COP) on a knob of high ground above a river valley. North, the valley climbs into "Indian country" — switchback trails, draws choked with holly and cedar, ridgelines at nearly 3,000 meters. A handful of villages cling to benches above the river, growing corn and timber and, when the season is right, fighting.

Your enemy — call them ACM (Anti-Coalition Militia), the Taliban, HIG, outsiders, local boys with a grievance and an AK — does not mass and charge. He ambushes from defilade, fires a few magazines, and melts up the draws before your mortars can range him. He is patient. He is home. The terrain is his ally and your enemy in equal measure.

Your weapons are superior; your firepower is overwhelming. And almost none of that matters if you cannot win the people. Every civilian you kill makes ten fighters. Every promise you break is remembered for a generation. You can win every firefight and lose the valley.

2. One Continuous Clock

There are no turns and no phases. A single real-time clock runs the entire valley at once — the sun and a true day/night cycle, the weather, your soldiers' fatigue and rest, the enemy's tempo, the slow grind of construction, and combat. It is one screen and one timeline.

3. The Game Loop

1. Order — pick a squad and a mission, set its standing SOP (how it moves, what drill it runs on contact, and its rules of engagement), draw a route, step off. The squad musters, kits up, then moves through the terrain on its own.
2. Skip — when nothing needs you, press ⏩ to fast-forward to the next event — contact, an objective reached, a project milestone, a decision at the gate.
3. Fight — when rounds crack, the clock slows. The squad fights itself to its SOP — taking cover, returning fire, bounding or breaking contact; you read the net, approve or deny its calls for fire, and call MEDEVAC for the wounded. The patrol resumes on the lull.
4. Build — run shuras, fund projects (and keep them secure), resupply, and answer the decisions that pause the clock.
5. Endure — for an entire deployment, on one clock. The valley keeps score.

4. The Command View

The command bar across the top shows the COP, the running clock (Day · HH:MM) and tour length, the light level (which governs night-vision advantage), the weather (which governs air support), your five campaign metrics, and the time controls (pause, 1×–16×, and ⏩ skip-to-event). The center is the live topographic map. The left column holds your active elements, directives, intel, and the log; the right column holds the patrol planner / village engagement and logistics; the bottom carries fire support and the prompts the squads raise — a call for fire to approve or deny, a MEDEVAC request, a decision at the gate.

Your men rest and recover at the wire and tire in the field; supplies burn continuously; intel arrives; the enemy moves. The night belongs to him.

Zoom in and your COP resolves into a real fortified outpost: a ring of HESCO wall with one entry-control point (the gate), and inside it the TOC, barracks, aid station, armory, chow hall, a motor pool and a helicopter LZ, with crew-served fighting positions and towers on the wall. Off-duty soldiers live there — a guard rotates through the wall positions, the gun crews stay on their guns, and the rest cycle between the chow hall (at meal hours), the barracks (after dark) and the yard. When the wire takes fire the whole COP stands to and mans the positions.

5. Personnel

Your platoon is roughly 35 soldiers in a headquarters element, three rifle squads, and a weapons squad. A rifle squad is built the way a real one is — a squad leader over two four-man fire teams, each a team leader, an automatic rifleman (SAW), a grenadier and a rifleman. That structure is what lets a squad move and fight as a coordinated unit rather than a clump (see Planning Patrols). Each soldier is an individual with a name, a hometown, a rank, a job, and a set of attributes that actually drive the simulation:

• Marksmanship tightens shot dispersion.
• Composure resists suppression and panic.
• Leadership steadies nearby soldiers under fire.
• Medical determines how fast a casualty is stabilized.
• Fitness resists fatigue on the brutal slopes.
• Experience improves perception and steadiness.

Readiness is shown by a colored dot: green = ready, amber = resting, red = wounded. Wounded soldiers recover over days; the killed do not come back. Their loss costs you morale across the platoon and confidence at battalion. Bring a medic (DOC) on every patrol.

6. Logistics

Everything is finite and everything is heavy. The Logistics panel tracks ammunition by caliber (5.56, 7.62, .50), 40mm and mortar rounds, grenades and smoke, trauma kits, water, food, fuel, and batteries. Firefights and fire missions burn through stocks fast. Resupply comes by ground convoy (risk of IED/ambush) or by air (weather permitting) — usually offered as an event.

7. Planning Patrols

Patrol planning lives in the right-hand panel and on the map:

1. Mission — choose the type. Each shapes the encounter and the rewards:
   • Presence show the flag; visiting villages raises attitudes.
   • Recon gather atmospherics and intel on an area.
   • Ambush you set up first and initiate on your terms.
   • KLE reach a village to meet its elder.
   • Census log military-age males; build the human terrain.
   • Cordon & Search presence with teeth.
   • Overwatch / OP sit on high ground and watch a route.
2. Pick the squad — choose a fixed squad from the Task Organization list (hq, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or Weapons), or just click any of its men on the map. You command squads, not individuals — you never compose one. Optionally Send Officers to attach the HQ element (the platoon leader, medic, RTO, and JTAC) to the patrol.
3. Set the SOP — three standing settings that you lock in before step-off. They are the squad leader's orders, and once the squad is in contact they cannot be changed:
   • Movement how they move — Stealth (slow, low, hugs cover, hard to spot), Patrol, or Fast (quick, loud, exposed). This also shapes the formation.
   • On Contact the battle drill the squad runs when it makes contact — Hold & Return Fire, Suppress & Call Fires, Assault, or Break Contact.
   • ROE the civilian-fire rules — Weapons Hold, Tight, or Free.
   The mission type seeds sensible defaults for all three; adjust them to your intent.
4. Route — hit Draw Route (or press R) and click the map to drop waypoints. The squad paths through the terrain (following trails and washes, avoiding cliffs).
5. Step Off — the squad leader musters in the yard, the element kits up, then files out the gate and navigates the route in formation. It all happens in real time; watch it on the map and in the Active Elements panel. To change a deployed squad's path, select it, draw a new route, and Re-route.

Contact is not a dice roll along the route — it emerges when your soldiers and the enemy actually see each other. The enemy director stages ambushes astride your patrols, infiltrations through the draws, harassment, and the occasional complex attack on the COP, scaled by the valley's heat.

8. The People (Counterinsurgency)

Click a village. Each has an elder, a population, an attitude toward you, a cooperation level (how much intel they'll share), a hidden sympathy for the insurgents, and something it wants.

• Shura (KLE) — run a patrol to a village as a KLE mission to sit with the elder. Attitude, cooperation, and intel accrue over the time the squad spends there. A shura can also produce an elder's ask — a project, a security presence, restraint, a prisoner — with a deadline. Keep the promise and the village remembers it; let it lapse and a broken promise stings worse than the kept one would have helped.
• CERP Projects — fund a well, school, clinic, road, or footbridge. This is not instant: materials must be trucked in, a local contractor and labor brought on, and an element must Secure the Build Site for days of work (the secure-build order parks a squad on the village and holds an overwatch until the job is done). Leave it unsecured and the insurgents intimidate the crew — the job stalls and can be sabotaged. Build what they want: the project a village asked for moves it far more than one nobody needed.
• CERP budget — not a countdown. Battalion disburses a periodic stipend (more if it trusts you), and a delivered project is partly reimbursed, so CERP is a budget to manage across the tour.
• Directives — Battalion tasks you on deadlines (presence, shuras, a census, interdicting the enemy, delivering a project, holding hostile ground, protecting the population). Deliver and confidence rises; miss a deadline and it falls. A civilian casualty fails protect-the-population instantly.
• Solatia — after you cause harm, payment and apology can repair a relationship. Offered through events.
• Resupply — request a ground convoy (full, but it can be ambushed on the road) or air (partial, weather-dependent) from the Logistics panel; it also brings the construction materials your projects need.

9. Intelligence

The Intel Feed aggregates reporting, each tagged with a source and a reliability percentage:

• SIGINT intercepted "ICOM chatter" — the enemy's radios. Often cryptic, sometimes a warning.
• HUMINT tips from cooperative villagers and paid sources. Quality tracks the village's cooperation — and sometimes settles a private score.
• DRONE ISR sightings, especially of night movement.
• PATROL what your own boots saw.

Intel marks hotspots on the map and raises contact probability nearby. It is frequently wrong. Corroborate across sources before you act on it.

10. Combat

Combat is not a separate screen — it happens on the same map, in the same continuous clock, the moment your soldiers and the enemy see each other. The clock automatically clamps to a readable speed (≤4×) and the ⏩ skip is disabled while you're in contact. You do not fight the men. The squad fights itself, autonomously, to the SOP you set before step-off — the squad leader designates a base of fire and a maneuver team and runs the drill (bound onto the objective on Assault, pin and call for fire on Suppress, hold from cover on Hold, or leapfrog back to a rally on Break); each man takes cover, returns fire under the ROE, reloads, and renders buddy aid on his own. A squad that becomes combat-ineffective always breaks contact automatically.

Your levers in the fight are the radio, not the trigger: approve or deny the squad's calls for fire, call MEDEVAC for a casualty the squad surfaces, and live with the SOP and route you set beforehand. The hardest part of command is watching. When the fighting stops, a patrol picks its task back up and continues.

11. Controls

You command squads, not soldiers. Select a squad (a Task Org chip or any of its men), set its mission and SOP (Movement / On-Contact / ROE) and, if you like, Send Officers; press R to draw a route and Step Off. Re-route a deployed squad with the same gesture. In contact the squad fights itself — your inputs are to approve or deny a call for fire, call MEDEVAC, and, for fire support you initiate, select the asset and click the impact point.

12. Terrain, Line of Sight & Concealment

The valley is procedurally generated from your seed and resolved to a 5-metre grid — a ~2.5 km AO with 21 distinct landcover classes. A meandering river floor rises to ridgelines, cut by spurs and draws, with marsh and dry washes (sunken, concealed approaches), irrigated cropland, terraced fields and their stone terrace walls, orchards, scrub, forest, scree, boulder fields, cliffs, walled compounds and compound walls, cemeteries, roads, trails, and footbridges. Terrain is not scenery — it is the dominant actor.

• Elevation drives line of sight. A man behind a crest is in dead ground (defilade); only what pokes above the horizon line can be seen or hit. Partial exposure — "heads and shoulders over the ridge" — is computed smoothly, not as a binary.
• Concealment (forest, orchard, scrub, dry washes, smoke) blocks sight without stopping bullets. A squad on Stealth movement hugs it and is very hard to spot.
• Cover (compound walls, boulders, terrace walls, rock) stops rounds — mud qalat walls are the best cover in the valley. Going prone or crouching adds cover and shrinks your silhouette.
• Movement cost punishes steep slopes, scree, brush, and the river; roads and trails are fastest. Cliffs and compound walls are impassable on foot. The climb itself is an enemy: fatigue degrades everything.

13. Ballistics — Every Round Simulated

There is no abstract "to-hit roll." Each shot spawns a real projectile with the weapon's muzzle velocity and time of flight. The aimpoint is the target perturbed by a dispersion drawn from the weapon's mechanical accuracy combined with the shooter's marksmanship, stance, fatigue, movement, suppression, and how settled the shot is. The round flies; on arrival it strikes the target only if it lands within the target's effective silhouette — which shrinks with cover and defilade — and cover may still stop an otherwise-good round depending on the weapon's penetration.

Consequences fall out of the model rather than being scripted: rifles are deadly inside their effective range and waste rounds beyond it; machine guns hit through volume and suppress whole positions; the .50 and DShK defeat most cover; snipers and DMRs reach far but fire slowly. Rounds passing close overhead suppress without hitting — the "crack" that pins men down.

14. Morale, Suppression & Wounds

Each combatant carries composure (morale in the moment) and accrues suppression from incoming fire. Suppressed soldiers shoot wildly, hesitate, and seek cover; broken soldiers cower or rout. Leaders project composure to those around them — lose a leader and his squad wavers. Cohesion (friends nearby) and cover restore composure; isolation, casualties, and fatigue drain it.

Hits roll a body region and a severity, mitigated by body armor (your soldiers wear plates and helmets; the enemy does not). Outcomes range from a graze to a mortal wound. Wounded soldiers bleed; buddy aid slows it, a medic stops it, and MEDEVAC takes them off the field — converting a probable KIA into a WIA who may return to duty.

15. Fire Support

Fires are AI-requested and commander-approved. When a squad is suppressing or pinned, its JTAC or leader raises a call for fire over the net — a prompt naming the squad, the reason, and a proposed grid. You approve it (the rounds fly) or deny it. You can also initiate a mission yourself from the Fire Support panel: select an asset and click the impact point.

• Mortars (60/81mm) — your organic indirect fire from the COP, if the target is in range and rounds remain. There is a delay while the mission is plotted and fired; rounds land with realistic dispersion.
• CAS / CCA — close air support (a gun run) or a Hellfire, available only when the weather allows aircraft. Devastating, slow to arrive, and limited.
• MEDEVAC — when a man goes down the squad surfaces the casualty (a 9-line); you call the bird to take them off the field.

16. Weapon Systems Reference

Selected systems and their game stats (effective range, dispersion in MOA, and notes). Higher MOA means looser fire; penetration is how much hard cover the round ignores.

United States

Insurgent

17. Knowing the Enemy

The insurgent AI fights like the real thing did. He prefers the high ground and defilade, holds his fire until the patrol is in the kill zone, and masses RPG and PKM fire at the moment of initiation. Then he shoots and scoots — fires for a spell and displaces to a new firing position before your mortars range him. He breaks contact when he's hurt, when he's isolated, or when aircraft arrive, slipping up the draws and off the map. He fights hardest near his own villages. He melds into the population. His skill and numbers scale with the "heat" of the valley, which you raise by causing civilian harm and lose by killing fighters and winning villages.

18. Scoring the Tour

There is no simple win. Your deployment is graded across five metrics:

• Valley Stability — the overall trend, blended from attitudes, enemy strength, and your presence.
• Village Attitudes — the mean disposition of the population toward you.
• Enemy Strength — the estimated insurgent pool; attrition lowers it, your mistakes feed it.
• Combat Power — your readiness in men and materiel.
• Higher Confidence — battalion's faith in you. Hit zero and you're relieved of command.

At the end of the tour you receive a letter grade and an honest assessment — and a list of your killed, by name and home state. The rarest grade of all is the one where everyone goes home.

19. Glossary