Brigades

A brigade is the basic land formation of Atomic Dawn: a body of around five thousand soldiers with their equipment, standing in a province of the The Map and moving across it province by province. Brigades are the only thing that can take or hold ground. Air wings and fleets fight their own war around them (see Air and Naval Warfare), but a province changes hands only when brigades fight for it and march in.

Each brigade tracks its own strength in men and arms, its morale (its readiness to fight), its combat experience, and its entrenchment, which builds up while it stays put.

Brigade types

The 1946 scenario has five land types. Every brigade has a full strength of 5,000 soldiers, which is also its manpower cost.

A brigade's arms cost also sets the price of each soldier it loses or gains back: replacing casualties in an armoured brigade costs three times as much equipment as in an infantry one. Military power per soldier ranges from one for militia to ten for armour.

Aircraft and ships are not brigades. They train into air wings and fleets that operate from bases; see Air and Naval Warfare.

Raising an army

New brigades are ordered through the national training queue. Training draws on the Manpower pool and the arms stockpile over the training period, and the finished brigade deploys to a province the country owns or controls that is connected to its homeland. Alternatively a brigade can be trained into the unit stockpile: its full cost is paid up front, and it waits off the map until it is needed, then deploys instantly to any friendly land province at no further cost. That makes the stockpile the quickest way to reinforce a front that suddenly turns hot.

Training is slowed by War Exhaustion (up to ten times longer at full exhaustion) and by Corruption, and sped up by Brigade Training Speed.

Political Factions train brigades too, from their own arms and manpower. These stay off the map while the faction is peaceful, strengthening its coup attempts, and become real brigades if it rises up. Foreign Military Advisors can speed this up.

Movement

Select a stack on the map to open its brigade view, include or exclude individual brigades, and right-click a destination province to march there. Shift-right-click adds intermediate stops to build a longer route.

• Marching moves through neighbouring land provinces. Most types take five days per province; terrain such as mountains, marshes and river crossings slows them, and good Infrastructure speeds them up (a leg between two fully connected provinces takes two thirds of the time). Enemy air interdiction slows every leg starting in its region.
• Redirecting: an order can be changed while the brigade is less than halfway along its current leg. The arrow shows gold while it can still be redirected and turns silver once it is locked in. Right-clicking the stack's own province cancels everything still redirectable.
• Strategic redeployment moves selected idle brigades over rail and road directly to a distant province with military access, much faster than marching, but they arrive temporarily unready, and the order cannot be cancelled once given. Full railroads and roads at both ends make it twice as fast as between unconnected provinces.
• Crossing the sea is possible where the country has amphibious lift on station; see Air and Naval Warfare.

Battles

A battle starts the moment a brigade commits to entering a province held by hostile forces. The battle is fought over that single province: attacks from every neighbouring province join it, each shown with a red arrow. Attackers stay on their own side of the border and defenders stay in the province until one side gives way, so opposing armies cannot slip past each other without fighting.

• Every battle lasts at least ten days, however lopsided.
• Losses fall on both manpower and arms, and both sides' damage is shaped by their Casualties Inflicted and Casualties Taken modifiers, by offensive and defensive variants, and by the terrain of the defended province (mountains, for example, blunt the attacker).
• Entrenchment builds up over about ten days of standing still and at its fullest halves the casualties a brigade takes. It resets after combat.
• Air support, shore bombardment and air superiority add to a side's strength; attacking across the sea carries a heavy amphibious-assault penalty.
• Battles cause Devastation and civilian deaths in the contested province, and soldiers killed are removed from the population at the next monthly update.

If the defence holds, the attackers stay where they were. If it breaks, the defenders begin an uninterruptible retreat (a gray arrow) to the nearest friendly or empty province, travelling only through provinces free of enemy troops. A brigade with every neighbour held by the enemy is encircled and destroyed outright. The victors do not appear instantly: they still march in, taking as long as an unopposed move would.

Morale

Morale decides how much punishment a brigade will take before it breaks. The national Morale modifier sets the tolerance: at the normal 100%, a brigade will endure losses of 15% of its strength in a battle; at 50% only 7.5%; at 200%, 30%.

Each brigade's own morale drains with casualties and with every day of fighting (by a further 5% a day even when losses are light). A side whose average morale falls to 20% routs, and a retreating brigade keeps at most 35%. Morale Damage raises the morale enemies lose fighting a country's brigades; Morale Damage Taken raises its own losses. Aggressive doctrines are the main source of the first, while politicized command such as party-loyalist officers or military government increases the second.

An idle brigade on its own country's soil recovers from empty to full morale in thirty days, but only up to the cap set by the Readiness policy: an army kept on peacetime readiness never gets past a quarter of its fighting trim, which is why AI countries at war move quickly to partial or full mobilization. Corruption lowers both how much a brigade endures and how far it recovers, and in wartime a corrupt army also deserts.

Reinforcement

Damaged brigades automatically draw replacement soldiers and equipment from the national pools, at a base rate of 100 soldiers a day, faster with Brigade Reinforcement Speed. The pace halves where there is no infrastructure, and reinforcement and morale recovery only happen while the brigade is in supply: on its own soil, or on friendly-held land connected to it over land or across seas the enemy does not control. See Supply.

Garrisons and occupation

Brigades earn their keep even when they are not fighting:

• Keeping the peace. Troops stationed in a province reduce local Unrest according to their numbers, more effectively the more the military supports the government.
• Forceful pacification. In an acute crisis, stationed troops can put down unrest by force. This needs at least half the military behind the government and costs political capital; it cuts unrest sharply but brings devastation, some civilian deaths and angrier opposition movements.
• Occupation. In wartime, brigades standing unopposed in an enemy province take control of it after 15 days. See Occupation.

How the AI fights

AI countries plan their whole front every day. They judge strength as a commander would, by men discounted for morale. Their priorities are to keep every front province garrisoned, to exploit openings by walking into empty enemy provinces or massing against defended ones they outnumber by a fifth, and to concentrate spare brigades where a breakthrough can build. A war leader commits everything; a country fighting alongside it sends only what its commitment allows (see Warfare).

On the map

Each owner's brigades in a province stand together as one formation of miniatures, with a nameplate showing the owner's flag and combined strength. Formations stand in rows with infantry and militia in front, turn to face the most threatening neighbour, and stand at their province's side of the border when facing one. Up to about eight brigades each have their own miniature; beyond that each miniature stands for several.