The sim writes the story — an unedited 11-minute session of a milsim RTT
Last week the first Open Ground video went up — 2 minutes of a village assault, cut tight. This week is the opposite: 11 minutes, unedited, menus and all. Because the point isn't polish — it's that nobody scripted a second of it.
What the session produced, in order:
A convoy escort through the mud
The escorting tank sinks. The radio calls in — "We're out. Moving." — and the tank takes the truck in tow to drag it through. Vehicles getting stuck, crews asking for help, a tow line solving it: sim mechanics, not a cutscene.
An FPV drone ambush
One operator, one strike drone, a two-man militia patrol that never sees it coming — then the feed dies on impact and the operator is marked ELOSS.
A village assault that fails
My squads push the compound, the militia's mortars answer, and the debrief literally says "we pulled out before the mortars found us — we can hit it again, wiser."
The same assault, run again
This time it works: smoke screens, bounding fireteams, four enemies taken prisoner and patched up on the spot.
Why determinism is the whole point
None of that was authored. The simulation is deterministic — same seed, same battle — and every soldier is an individual: line of sight, suppression, morale, ammo, wounds. The event log on screen narrates what the sim actually decided, which is why I leave it in frame.
As a developer it means a bug report is a seed, not a video — I can replay a battle exactly, bisect it, verify the fix. As a player it means what you watched is genuinely the game: replayable, not a trailer.
What the game is
Open Ground is a real-time tactics game in the lineage of Close Combat, Combat Mission, Men of War, Call to Arms and Sudden Strike 2. Squads command as one; any single man is one click away. Spacebar pauses, time runs 0.1x–4x. No base building, no multiplayer — single-player depth, and mod-friendly JSON scenario packs from day one.
Right now the studio is crowdfunding exactly one thing: the $100 Steam Direct fee so the Early Access wishlist page can go up.