Warfare

Warfare in Atomic Dawn is decided by what an army can actually do, not by how many soldiers it has on paper. Two countries with the same number of men under arms will not fight to a draw if one has better equipment, a sounder doctrine and troops kept at a higher state of readiness. How much of that strength a country is willing to put into a particular war is itself a choice, and that choice is limited by how much support the war has at home.

The ground war is fought by Brigades moving across the provinces of the The Map. Around and above it, air wings and fleets fly and sail missions that change the battles below (see Air and Naval Warfare). Behind the front, Supply, Manpower and the arms stockpile decide how long an army can keep fighting, and War Exhaustion decides how long the country behind it will let it.

Military strength

Each country keeps two pools that feed its armed forces:

Arms: an uncapped stockpile of equipment. It is bought from the GDP of the country's unoccupied provinces through its military spending, and multiplied by Arms Production, which defence-industry Policies, industrial and military research, International Organizations and other national effects supply. A richer country that spends more and produces more efficiently accumulates more equipment over time.
Manpower: the untrained recruits a country can draw on, a share of its population living outside enemy occupation (see Manpower).

Neither pool fights on its own. Only brigades deployed on the map contribute conventional military power; trained brigades held in reserve sit in the unit stockpile until they are deployed. Each brigade type contributes a set amount of military power per soldier: an armoured soldier counts for more than ten times a militiaman.

Doctrine and readiness shape how that power performs. The Military Doctrine policy changes battlefield damage and losses, while the Readiness policy caps how far deployed brigades can recover their morale: a demobilized country's units recover none at all, and only full mobilization lets them return to full fighting trim. Corruption eats into everything that builds and sustains an army, from training time to desertion in wartime.

Commitment and war support

In every war each participant has a commitment level: the share of its military power it is actually putting into this war. A country fighting several wars, or a great power backing a distant ally, does not throw everything at every front.

A country that is attacked fights at full commitment from the first day.
The attacker starts at half commitment.
Allies of the defender start at half; countries that join an existing war start lower, at 35%, and work up towards half.

Commitment changes gradually. Raising it takes time (a full rise from nothing takes about three months), while cutting it back is three times as fast. Each adjustment costs political capital, and the cost is halved for a side that is currently weaker than its enemy, so the outmatched side can always afford to escalate.

How far commitment can rise is capped by war support. Defenders begin with full war support; attackers, joiners and the defender's allies begin at half. If every country on one side of a war loses its war support entirely, that side's war collapses and the war ends.

For AI countries, commitment also limits how many brigades they send abroad: troops on an ally's soil or on enemy ground count against it, and when commitment falls the AI recalls the excess to its capital rather than leaving them stranded overseas.

The front line

There is no abstract resolution of territory. A province changes hands only when brigades take it, and the only way to inflict casualties is to fight with brigades, aircraft or fleets. A war between two countries that cannot reach each other simply sits still: no casualties, no change of ground, until someone deploys forces that can.

A battle begins the moment a brigade commits to moving into a hostile neighbour, and every attack on that province from its neighbours joins the same battle. Battles last at least ten days, inflict losses on both manpower and arms, and leave Devastation on the contested province. The loser retreats; a force with nowhere to retreat to is destroyed. Winning troops then march in and occupy the province, cutting its owner off from its taxes, arms and manpower. See Brigades for the full battle rules.

Only enemy ground can be occupied. Ground taken by a country's allies passes to the country leading their side when the war ends, not to the allies themselves.

Strategic importance

Each land province has a Strategic Importance weight that tells an AI country where to station its defensive garrison. Part of it is a computed Geopolitical Situation: how much hostile military power faces the province across a border, plus weight for the capital and the largest city. The rest is Strategic Importance from modifiers. Garrison towns carry a permanent modifier for their military infrastructure, and the Geopolitical Flashpoint modifier marks hotspots, such as divided Berlin, whose loss could spark a wider Cold War confrontation. Scripted Events can add importance to whole Regions. The province's tooltip breaks down every contribution.

Strategic Importance is also what places each country's forces at the start of the campaign: the starting order of battle comes from scenario data and is deployed using ownership, alliances, military access and these priorities.

How wars end

A war can end in several ways:

At the table. Ceasefires and peace are clauses of an ordinary treaty negotiation. A ceasefire freezes the front and hands each side the ground it holds; a peace formally ends the war and returns occupied land unless the treaty cedes it.
Stalemate. If 24 months pass without the front line moving, the war ends automatically in a ceasefire, and any land still occupied becomes the property of whoever holds it. A ceasefire agreed by treaty pauses this clock.
Collapse. A side whose countries have all lost their war support, or all lost their land, is out of the war.

Rebellions are an exception to the stalemate rule: an uprising whose rebels still hold land fights on however still the front, and ends only by annexation or a settlement. See Wars.

Leverage

What happens on the battlefield is converted into bargaining power. Leverage measures how far one country can force concessions from another, and in wartime it is fed by occupation (a completely occupied enemy concedes the maximum), the military balance, the enemy's War Exhaustion and any blockade of its ports. Leverage makes demands easier to press in peace negotiations, but cannot force a country past terms it considers non-negotiable.

Wars of the era

The 1946 scenario opens with the world's armies demobilizing and every former combatant carrying war exhaustion from the Second World War. The conflicts that follow largely come out of Flashpoints and Crises, faction uprisings and scripted history: the Chinese Civil War resumes in June 1946, the Greek Civil War and the First Indochina War break out as risings, and the Korean War follows the Communist victory in China. For the United States, Korea is also a dedicated time-limited National Focus episode with branching choices about how far to push. See Wars for how these conflicts unfold.

In this section

Wars: declaring, joining and ending wars, casus belli, guarantees, peace.
Brigades: the land army, movement, battles and morale.
Air and Naval Warfare: air wings, fleets, air superiority and sea control.
Supply: supply limits, attrition and staying in supply.
Theaters: the continent-scale areas used to organize the military view.
War Exhaustion: the accumulated cost of fighting.
Occupation: holding enemy ground and what it denies the owner.
Military Advisors: foreign help for an arming faction.