Tutorial — Your First Deployment

A guided walkthrough of your first hours in the valley. Read it through once, or keep it open beside the game. There is also a step-by-step coach inside the game — press Guided Tutorial on the menu.

Two ways to learn
In-game coach: from the title screen, click Guided Tutorial for contextual tips overlaid on the real interface. This page: a narrative walkthrough you can read at your own pace. Both cover the same ground.

0. Before You Start

From the title screen you can set a valley seed (any text — it generates a unique valley) and a tour length. Leave the seed blank for a random valley, choose a shorter tour (60 days) for your first run, and press Deploy. You can read this manual at any time from the menu.

1. Arrival at the COP

You're looking at the Command view. The large panel is the topographic map of your valley: shaded relief, brown contour lines every 40 meters, the blue flag marking your combat outpost (it'll be named something like COP Vimoto), and a handful of villages with house icons, colored by their attitude toward you — green friendly, amber neutral, red hostile.

Try it: drag the map to pan, scroll to zoom. Hover anywhere to read the grid, the elevation, and the terrain type in the corner. Notice how the valley floor (the river, the fields) is hemmed in by steep ridgelines and cut by draws. That terrain will decide your fights.

Zoom into your COP. It's a real fortified outpost: a ring of HESCO wall with a single ECP gate, and inside it the TOC, barracks, aid station, armory, chow hall, a motor pool and a helicopter LZ. Your soldiers live here — a guard rotates through the fighting positions and towers on the wall, the gun crews sit on their guns, and the rest cycle between the chow hall, the barracks and the yard as the clock runs. Patrols muster in the yard and file out through the gate; that's the only way through the wire.

2. Read the Board

Spend a moment with the command bar at the top. The clock reads Day 1 · 06:00 and runs continuously; next to it are the light level and the weather — note whether AIR reads ON or NO-GO, because that decides if you can call aircraft. The five bars are your campaign health. Early on, Enemy strength is high and Stability is middling. Your job over the tour is to bend those curves. To the right are the time controls.

On the left: your Active Elements, Directives from battalion (your first two will be to establish a presence and to meet the elders), the Intel Feed, and the Command Log. On the right: the patrol planner / village panel and, below it, your Logistics.

3. The Clock & the Skip

This is the heart of it: time always moves. The game opens paused. Press Space or a speed button (1–5 = 1×…16×) to let it run. There is no "advance" button — soldiers rest, supplies burn, intel arrives, and the enemy maneuvers in real time.

Most of a deployment is waiting. That's what the ⏩ skip-to-event button (T) is for: it fast-forwards through the quiet hours and stops the instant something matters — contact, a patrol reaching its objective, a project finishing, a decision at the gate, first light. Lean on it. When rounds crack, the clock automatically drops to a readable speed.

The night belongs to him
Enemy activity — including attacks on your COP — is far likelier at night and when the valley is "hot." Pushing a patrol out after dark is a calculated risk.

4. Your First Patrol

You command squads, not men. You never pick individual soldiers or compose a squad — you choose a fixed squad and tell it where to go and how to fight. In the right-hand Patrol Planner:

  1. Leave the mission set to Presence Patrol. The mission type seeds sensible defaults for the squad's standing orders (below).
  2. Under Task Organization, click a squad (e.g. 1st Squad) to pick it — or click any of its men on the map. The squads are fixed: HQ, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Weapons. Optionally tick Send officers to attach the HQ element — the platoon leader, the medic, the RTO, and the JTAC. Never patrol without a medic.
  3. Set the Squad SOP — three standing settings the leader will run by, locked once the squad is in contact:
    • Movement — how they move. Stealth is slow, low, and threads cover (hard to spot, slow); Patrol is the workhorse pace; Fast takes the road and makes time but is loud and exposed.
    • On Contact — the battle drill the leader runs when the shooting starts: Hold & Return Fire, Suppress & Call Fires, Assault, or Break Contact.
    • ROE — the civilian-fire rules: Weapons Hold, Tight, or Free.
  4. Hit Draw Route (or press R), then click the map to lay waypoints out toward the nearest village. The squad will path through the terrain. Keep the first one short.
  5. Press Step Off.

The squad leader musters in the yard and kits the squad up for a few minutes, then files out the gate and moves in formation: a squad leader and two fire teams in a doctrinal shape — a file in close country, a wedge in the open, spread out when contact is likely — with a man on point reading the ground and the rest pulling security to the flanks and rear. Watch it on the map and in Active Elements, where you can recall it. To send a deployed squad somewhere new, pick it and draw a fresh route — Re-route. On the objective the teams set into a 360° security halt. Press 4 or ⏩ to let time run while it patrols. Sooner or later, the valley will fight.

5. Talk to a Village

Click a village on the map. A panel shows its elder, its attitude, cooperation, hidden sympathy for the insurgents, and what it wants. Two tools win hearts:

This is not a side activity. Over a tour, the shuras and the wells move your metrics as much as any firefight — and a cooperative village feeds you the intel that keeps your soldiers alive.

6. Contact!

There's no separate combat screen and no briefing. When your soldiers and the enemy see each other, a TROOPS IN CONTACT banner appears, the clock drops to combat speed, and the fight plays out right there on the map. Hit Space to pause and think. Every round is simulated against the terrain you've been walking.

7. Fighting the Fight

You do not fight the firefight by hand. Combat is autonomous. The squad leader runs the battle drill you set in the SOP, and each soldier reacts on his own — taking cover, returning fire within the ROE, and dragging the wounded to safety. The hardest part of command is watching. Your job in contact is to read the net and pull the two levers that are yours.

  1. Watch the drill run. On contact everyone gets off the X and into cover, then the leader executes the On Contact drill you chose: he designates a base-of-fire team and a maneuver team and bounds onto the objective (Assault), pins and calls for fire (Suppress), holds from cover (Hold), or leapfrogs back to a rally (Break). A squad that becomes combat-ineffective always breaks contact on its own — that is not a dial you control.
  2. Approve or deny fires. When the squad is suppressing or pinned, the JTAC or leader raises a call for fire. A prompt names the squad, the reason, and a proposed grid; you Approve (rounds fly) or Deny. Watch the DANGER CLOSE warning — and watch for civilians near the impact.
  3. Call MEDEVAC. The medic moves to casualties automatically. When the AI surfaces a wounded man, you can call the 9-line to bring the bird in and take him off the field — turning a likely KIA into a WIA.
  4. Restraint pays. Under Tight ROE a soldier will hold his shot rather than risk a civilian in the kill zone. That restraint nudges the village's attitude up — a real reward in this war. A dead civilian tanks it.

Pause (Space) any time to read the situation; unpause and let it play. Use 2/3 to speed through lulls. Everything else you set beforehand — the route and the SOP. In contact, those are locked.

8. Breaking Contact

You don't have to kill every fighter. The enemy will displace up the draws when he's hurt; once the shooting stops, the TIC banner clears, the clock frees back up, and your squad picks its task back up and continues toward its objective or home. If you've had enough — the position is bad, you're low on ammo, you have wounded — hit recall on the squad in Active Elements to bring it back inside the wire. (If you want a squad to disengage by default, set its On Contact SOP to Break Contact before step-off; a combat-ineffective squad breaks on its own regardless.) Casualties, ammo, and the outcome all flow into the Command Log as they happen.

9. The Long Game

The costs are real: wounded soldiers are out for days, the killed are gone for good, and your supplies are lighter. Keep patrolling, keep talking to villages, keep a project secured to completion, watch your directives' deadlines, and resupply before you run dry. Use ⏩ to skip the dead hours and play the moments that matter. The tour ends with a grade — and a roll of your dead. Play to bring them home.

10. Hard-Won Tips

Good luck, commander. · Field Manual · Return to game