How the war
is fought.
One turn at a time.

1. Overview

Hostile Act is a hybrid grand strategy and turn-based tactics game. You command one of four powers (the US, the EU, Russia or China) across land, air and sea. Each mission alternates your turn → the AI's turn until the win or loss condition is met. Finish a mission and you are graded S to F, then returned to a world map where you must wage geopolitical warfare against nation states using spycraft, researc, and your economic power.

The game ships with 157 units (88 land, 40 air, 29 sea), 60 weapons, 28 structures, 25 terrain types and 14 commander specials. Everything is browsable in the Compendium.

2. Screens and flow

• Title screen. The first launch plays a one-time intro sequence (tracked globally, not per save slot). Then choose New Game (pick a save slot 1–4, then a faction campaign) or Load Game (pick an existing slot and the campaign is restored).
• Save slots (4). Each slot stores one campaign. Slots are independent, so you can run one power's campaign in Slot 1 and another's in Slot 2 at the same time. Save and load work from the title screen and the pause menu.
• World Map. The campaign-progression scene shows the mission nodes for each campaign and the routes between them. The briefing panel has four tabs: Mission (objectives and setting), Commander (pick your commander and equip skills), Heroes (choose heroes from your roster under a point budget) and Intel (clues and story fragments you have gathered). All four power campaigns can be played in any order; the finale and the bonus campaign unlock once their prerequisites are met.
• Briefing and debrief. A dialog-driven briefing plays before each mission and a debrief after it. Both are generated per mission by a language model that is given the character, the faction's background and what has happened in earlier missions (see News generator).
• Battle HUD. Built to scale with large unit counts. It shows whose turn it is, the selected unit's stats and weapon choice, deploy and overwatch toggles, the command-cell count and available specials, and a stack badge when more than one unit shares a tile (for example "×3" on a garrisoned city).
• Battle cutscenes. Procedurally generated 3D scenes built from the mission's weather, the time of day and the terrain tile where the moment happens. Nothing is pre-rendered per mission.
• Hero dialog popups. Hero units trigger dialog popups in the HUD during battle, separate from the briefing and debrief.
• Pause menu. Press Escape. In battle: Resume, Save Turn Progress, Restart Mission, Return to Map, Exit Game. On the World Map: Resume, Save Game, Load a Different Game, Return to Main Menu, Exit Game. Destructive actions (Restart, Return to Map) ask you to confirm.

3. The turn

1. Your turn. Move and act with every unit you choose to.
2. The AI's turn. The enemy responds.
3. Repeat until a win or loss condition triggers.

Units have fuel. Running out strands non-infantry units. Supply units (APCs, supply trucks, resupply ships) and buildings that repair refill fuel and ammunition.

4. Movement and terrain

Every unit has a move type that decides what each terrain costs it to cross.

Terrain (mountains, forests, cities, swamps, roads) affects both movement cost and defence bonus. Higher ground and cover reduce incoming damage. Per-tile costs for every move type are in the Compendium's terrain tab.

5. Combat

Primary and secondary weapons

Every combat unit can carry a primary and a secondary weapon; either may be absent (unarmed civilians carry neither). Weapons are shared definitions reused across units: the same 30mm autocannon appears on both the Wheeled IFV and the IFV. You choose which weapon to fire on each attack. A unit like the Anti-Air (Vulcan primary, machine gun secondary) can flex between roles, and an AAA unit can swap HE (anti-air) for AP (anti-ground) rounds.

Range and ammunition

Weapon stats read as Name (Range) [Ammo]. For example, Artillery's primary is Cannon (2–3) [9]: it fires only at range 2–3 (indirect, so it cannot hit adjacent tiles) and has 9 shots before resupply. A range of 1 means direct, adjacent fire only. Damage depends on the weapon class against the target's armour class; the full table is the damage matrix.

Direct and indirect fire

Direct-fire units (tanks, infantry) fight at range 1 and can be fired back on. Indirect units (artillery, rockets, missile launchers, battleships) hit from range without retaliation. The trade-off is that they cannot defend themselves in melee.

Deploy and overwatch

Some units (AT Gun and artillery-class units) can deploy to fire with a bonus, trading mobility for punch, and set overwatch to fire automatically on enemies that move into range during the enemy turn. This is the core of an ambush.

6. Fog of war and detection

• Each unit has a vision stat. Tiles outside every friendly unit's vision are hidden.
• EW Jammers and Mobile Radar do more than see. EW Jammers actively mask nearby friendly units from enemy detection (unless the enemy is directly adjacent). This applies symmetrically to the player and the AI.
• Submarines can dive to hide from any unit that is not adjacent. Only sonar-equipped units (destroyers, ASW helicopters, sonobuoys) can detect a submerged sub.
• GPS Jam, a commander special, thickens the fog further for the affected side.

7. Buildings and economy

Capturing buildings is how you expand production and income. Losing your HQ ends the mission. Special buildings (Missile Silo, Coms Tower, TV Station, Data Center, Radar Station) do not produce units, but they unlock or deny strategic effects. They are the objectives the AI prioritises over territory. The remaining structures (power plants, gas stations, FARPs, spaceport and so on) are listed in the structures tab.

8. Hazard tiles

Only NBC Infantry can safely operate inside radioactive or chemical zones.

9. Civilians and scoring

Civilian units do not fight back. Civilian deaths during a mission cost your rank and reduce end-of-mission funds, and enough of them fail the mission outright. Missions are graded S to F on performance, with civilian casualties weighted into the grade. Some commander specials and enemy actions (like a captured TV Station sending civilians into panic) can herd civilians into your path as a deliberate hazard.

10. Commander specials

Specials run on a command-cell economy. Dealing damage charges your cells, your commander's rank sets how many cells your team has, and each cell extends a special's active duration by one turn. Capturing certain special tiles (such as Data Centers) charges cells faster. Some specials also deploy units you could not otherwise purchase in that mission. I planned on expanding this section with more detailed examples of how each special interacts with the command-cell economy and the overall strategy of the game. This will help players understand the optimal use of specials in different tactical situations. The goal is to target around 50 commander specials across the game.

11. Heroes and ranking

Each faction's main commander is a default hero unit. It persists between missions, deploys near your HQ, Base or Naval Base, carries a hero flag, has extra HP, triggers dialog popups and grants an aura that randomly buffs adjacent friendly units.

Named supporting characters and ordinary infantry can rank up from 1 to 5 through combat and become a hero at rank 6, gaining randomly rolled stat bonuses. Heroes you earn persist across missions, just like the main commander.

12. The four powers

Power	Colour	Doctrine	Best at
United States	Blue	Networked, air-, space- and data-dominant, expeditionary	Air and data dominance, kill-chain tactics
European Union	Green	Coalition, cautious, casualty-averse, legally minded	Civilian-casualty management, infrastructure defence
Russia	White	Attritional, EW-heavy, comfortable with deception	Fog of war, EW masking, ambush
China	Red	Systems-of-systems, naval and space-centric	Naval operations (sub, sonar, carrier, ship capture), information control

The four powers share one roster, reskinned per faction. Doctrine comes from mission design and AI behaviour, not from unique rosters. Meet the commanders on the Factions page.

13. Campaign structure

Each power has its own 13-mission campaign (Empty Quiver, Dead Hand of Europe, Maskirovka and Tianji), playable in any order. The story runs across five acts: I Ghost Signal (missions 1–4), II Black Ledger (5–8), III Dead Reckoning (9–11), IV No Human Authority (12–13) and V The Ark. All four powers converge on the shared 4-mission finale, The Ark, at Svalbard. Finish the war and a bonus campaign, Optimizer, unlocks with inverted rules: expendable units, infrastructure-capture win conditions and no hero system. It is played from ACTUARY's side. The full mission list is on the Campaigns page.

14. Units and buildings

Complete stats for every unit, weapon, structure and terrain type, searchable and sortable, live in the Compendium.

15. Unit actions and the contextual menu

When you select a unit and choose a destination, the action menu shows everything that unit can do from that tile, depending on its flags, its position and the terrain it stands on.

• Attack. Choose a target and a weapon (press Q to switch between primary and secondary when both can engage). A damage preview shows expected and maximum damage plus the counter-attack.
• Capture. Infantry-class units capture enemy and neutral properties.
• Recover. An ARCV recovers wrecks for salvage.
• Unload / Paradrop. Transports unload cargo to adjacent tiles; paradrop-host aircraft can drop paratroopers.
• Forward Flight. Tiltrotors toggle forward flight for extra movement, but cannot hover-attack while in it.
• Fire Flare. The Flare Vehicle illuminates a radius of fog, revealing stealthed units.
• Dip Sonar / Active Sonar. ASW units ping for submerged submarines.
• Dive / Surface. Submarines toggle their dive state.
• Jammer On / Off. EW Jammers toggle their masking bubble.
• Deploy / Pack Up (or Land / Take Off for aircraft). Toggles the deployed state for the accuracy bonus and overwatch eligibility.
• Overwatch. Arms the unit to fire on the first enemy that enters range during the enemy turn.
• Board. Frogmen and Special Forces board an enemy ship to capture it.
• Power Toggle. Generators and power-producing units can be switched on and off.
• Altitude Toggle. Aircraft with altitude capability climb to high altitude (harder to hit but unable to attack ground) or descend.
• Engineer actions. The ABV and FARP Builder get context actions: lay mines, build fortifications, clear rubble, build a FARP.
• Build Aircraft. Carriers and sub-carriers open an in-field aircraft production menu.
• Wait. Ends the unit's turn in place.

Clicking an empty owned production building opens the production menu, tabbed by domain (All / Land / Air / Sea) and filtered by what that building is allowed to build. Clicking an owned Missile Silo opens the silo menu (see Missile silos).

16. Power grid

Buildings need power. Each team's grid sums the output of its owned generators, oil production and any units with a power output, against the draw of its factories, Data Centers and other high-draw buildings.

• Surplus. Everything works normally.
• Brownout. Draw exceeds output. Income is scaled down proportionally (floor: 25%) and production is blocked entirely until the grid recovers.
• Generator units can be toggled on and off from the action menu; a switched-off generator contributes nothing.

17. Building damage and destruction

Buildings carry their own HP pool, separate from any garrison. Attacks reduce building HP; at zero the building converts to rubble. Some buildings specify what rubble they leave: a Nuclear Plant's destruction creates radioactive rubble. Rubble can be cleared by the ABV.

18. Gas stations

A Gas Station tile refuels units from a finite fuel pool (no HP or ammunition). Once the pool is empty, the station gives nothing until a supply unit refills it.

19. Utility charges

Mine-laying and FARP-building draw from a shared per-unit charge pool of 2. Once spent, the unit needs resupply to get them back, the same resupply path as fuel and ammunition.

20. Missile silos

A captured Missile Silo fires one shot per mission, chosen from the silo menu.

• Conventional. Always available.
• Chemical. Gated behind the Chemical Strike Authorization clue, earned through the campaign narrative.
• Nuclear. Gated behind the Nuclear Football clue.

21. Commander skills and loadout

Before launching a mission from the World Map, the Commander tab lets you pick which commander leads your force and equip skills from the skill library.

• Each commander has innate bonuses (attack %, defence %, vision, movement, income %, charge rate).
• Skills are reusable bundles of the same bonus types, optionally granting access to a specific command special. Skills stack with the commander's innate bonuses and with each other.
• A skill that unlocks a special (for example "grants access to Nuclear Strike") lets the commander use it even if their rank would not normally allow it.

22. Narrative triggers and dialog

Dialog fires on state changes, never on a plain turn timer alone. A turn number is only ever an extra gate on a real game-state condition.

• Trigger conditions: mission start, the first time a unit type is seen, a property captured or lost, civilian deaths reaching a threshold, a unit destroyed or damaged below a threshold, a specific special used by the enemy or the player, objective progress, mission won or lost, or a custom scripted key.
• Each trigger names a speaker and a beat (what the moment must accomplish narratively), and may reveal a clue fragment that advances the central mystery.
• Dialog appears as portrait plates with typed-out text. Click or press Space to advance.

23. Infrastructure flipping

The big twist, mechanically: mid-mission, captured infrastructure can turn hostile. A flipped building stays on your map and your units can still stand on it, but anything produced there afterwards belongs to the enemy. This is distinct from losing the building outright. You hold it; you just cannot trust it.

24. Civilian herding via TV stations

When the enemy holds a TV Station, civilians inside the broadcast radius panic and flee away from the transmitter. Because the defenders sit between the transmitter and the rest of the city, the civilians arrive exactly in the defenders' lanes. Some civilians freeze instead of running (25% chance). Retaking the TV Station stops the broadcast.

25. News generator (local language model)

Mission debriefs and in-game news articles are generated locally on your machine by a small language model (Phi-3, DeepSeek or Qwen3 via ONNX Runtime). These are OPTIONAL and do not require an internet connection. There is no API key and no network call. The game will work without any AI assistance but the story generation will be less rich.

26. Turn banner and mission log

At the start of each turn a turn banner shows the commander, faction and turn number while the camera pans to that team's HQ. It is non-blocking, so a fast player is never held up by the announcement. A scrollable mission log in the corner tracks combat, captures and events, colour-coded by faction. The log panel is draggable and collapsible.

27. Mid-mission save and resume

You can save turn progress mid-mission from the pause menu. The save captures every unit's position, HP, fuel, ammunition, cargo, dive and jamming state, property ownership, turn number and team stats, a full snapshot that restores exactly where you left off.

28. Extended mechanics

Fifteen flag-driven behaviours extend the basic rules. Each is data-driven (a tag in the unit data), so any unit can gain or lose these abilities without code changes.

Decoy

Unit: Spy Balloon. Spends 1 ammo to place a decoy structure on an adjacent empty tile. The enemy's fog of war shows the decoy as a random friendly unit type. It dies in a single hit, but the enemy has wasted an attack on a fake.

Spoof radar (phantom blip)

Units: EW Jammer, Stealth Tank, EW Attack. Places a phantom blip on any empty tile within range. It appears as a hostile contact on the enemy's fog layer for 2 turns, then fades. The enemy cannot tell it from a real unit until something moves adjacent to investigate, by which time they have committed forces. This is different from jamming (which hides real units) and from decoys (which are physical units on the board).

Loitering munition

Units: Neotank, Missile Tank. Spends 1 ammo to spawn a short-life FPV drone at a tile within range, bypassing production entirely. The drone can move and attack the same turn. It is free combat power limited only by the launcher's ammo, and it expires after a few turns if unused.

CBRN detection

Unit: CBRN Recon. Passive: every tile in the unit's vision shows its hazard status (radioactive, chemical, burning or clear) on the fog layer and hover panel before you step on it. Without this, hazards are invisible until a unit walks in and takes damage. The CBRN Recon is itself NBC-immune.

Tunnel

Unit: Tunnel Borer. Requires deploy first. Once deployed, it bores toward a target tile within 3 range: 1 turn on normal terrain, +1 through mountains, +1 through swamps, and never through water. On completion a bidirectional link appears between the borer's tile and the target, and any infantry-class unit can traverse it as a 1-cost move. The tunnel collapses if the borer is destroyed.

Intercept (point defence)

Units: Laser Defender, Airborne Laser. Passive: when an indirect-fire or strike attack targets a friendly unit within 2 tiles, the interceptor negates the hit. (The Airborne Laser shoots down one incoming missile or shell per turn aimed at a nearby friendly, and flies, so it can cover a moving fleet.) The attacker's ammo is consumed but no damage lands. One interception per interceptor per turn, and it must be deployed. This is a hard kill against artillery, rockets, missiles and strike-type specials, distinct from the Drone Net, which only reduces drone damage.

Wingman

Unit: CCA Wingman. Auto-pairs to the nearest manned fighter within 3 tiles on spawn, and the parent fighter sees through the wingman. If the parent is destroyed, the wingman is destroyed with it. If it drifts beyond 3 tiles the link breaks (UNLINKED on the hover panel) and the shared vision is lost until it returns.

No fuel burn

Unit: Spy Balloon. Consumes zero fuel per turn and can fly indefinitely without landing or refuelling.

Air block

Unit: Spy Balloon. Enemy aircraft cannot fly through this unit's tile; friendly aircraft pass freely. Combined with its low cost and no fuel burn, it makes a persistent no-fly zone that forces enemy air to route around it.

AEGIS fire control

Unit: Battlecruiser. Passive: any friendly unit within 3 tiles can engage air targets through the Battlecruiser's fire-control link, using its long-range SAM for the damage roll. A tank, an APC or a supply truck can all shoot at aircraft under the umbrella.

Volley fire

Units: Dreadnought, Heavy Mortar Carrier. Instead of attacking one target, the unit fires one shot per target across up to 6 targets in range, each resolved as a separate combat and costing 1 ammo each. A Dreadnought's Rail Gun (range 1–3, 12 rounds) can hit up to six ships in a single turn, but it burns the magazine doing it and is defenceless until resupplied.

Fixed turrets

Units: Remote MG Turret, Missile Turret, Missile + MG Turret, Radar / EW Jammer Turret. Emplacements that cannot move and arm overwatch automatically. The machine-gun turret is cheap infantry insurance, the missile turret covers armour and aircraft, the combo turret does both, and the Radar / EW Jammer Turret sees 6 tiles and jams enemy sensors within 3.

Flashbang

Units: Infantry, Medic, Red Raven Operator. A thrown stun grenade (3 per unit, range 1–2) that does no damage. Thrown into a building, it makes the civilians inside flee into the open next turn, so you can flush a structure without a firefight.

Cluster fire

Weapons: Cluster Artillery (Missile Launcher, Megacannon) and Cluster Bomb (Bomber). Submunitions: the damage is divided between the target tile, which takes 40%, and its four neighbours. Great against massed infantry and clustered units; wasteful against one tough target. A single-tile heavy shell (204mm) is the opposite choice.

Carryall (sling load)

Unit: Carryall. A tilt-rotor that slings one wheeled, tracked, hover or amphibious vehicle underneath it and drops it across terrain a column cannot cross. If it is shot down, the cargo is lost with it.

Newer units