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Wargamers! For our last few diaries, we’ve focused heavily on the core gameplay. Today, we pull back the curtain on our completely original, dynamic campaign mode.
Instead of a "one-and-done" scripted, cinematic story (which was tempting!), we’re building a highly replayable, strategic sandbox inspired by best-in-class, procedurally generated campaigns. Here, preserving your troops and choosing your next operation strategically matters just as much as your tactical execution.
Every campaign run starts by picking your Faction and Difficulty. Our engine takes those choices and dynamically generates a theater of war made of connected regions across late-war Western Europe. Higher difficulty increases the total number of battles you must fight, the size of the enemy armies you'll face, and reduces the quantity of player rewards.
Your battles will take you from a starting region (e.g., Normandy) to your ultimate campaign goal (e.g., The Siegfried Line). Adjacent regions offer different missions, leaving the tactical path entirely up to you. Each mission will offer a unique reward, drawn from a specific pool:
Points: Increase your maximum army size.
Supply: Allows you to actually recruit units.
Unlocks: Let you unlock advanced units.
Every mission increases the stakes, making all remaining defending armies stronger. Will you rush straight to the final objective to face a weaker enemy, or play it slowly to smash through the lines with an overwhelming force of your own?
Your army carries its scars from battle to battle. You will spend your Supply to recruit regular units and organize them into platoons following our implementation of the Bolt Action 3rd edition rules. However, managing a persistent company introduces a completely different layer of strategy:
Customizable Deployments: You can bring a different army into every single mission. Because all your platoons form out of your central reserves, you can dynamically shuffle your active platoons in and out to perfectly suit the next mission.
Unit XP: Surviving units dynamically gain experience on the battlefield, leveling up from regular troops to hardened Veterans, and eventually reaching the campaign-exclusive Elite rank.
Power of Experience: Unlike multiplayer matchmaking, experienced units in the campaign do not cost additional army points. They are a pure power spike — but beware, later campaign missions are balanced with this in mind.
Permadeath: Your company is fully persistent. If a unit gets wiped out on the field, they are gone forever, along with their accumulated experience and upgrades!
To keep platoon micromanagement to a minimum, our Army Builder tool will allow you to quickly select platoon templates and edit them. It can even quickly “optimize” your platoons to maximize your point efficiency.
With a dynamically generated campaign map, no two runs are ever the same. Your choices of factions, missions, and units determine your unique story, inspired by history, but never a slave to it. Before every battle, a narrative mission briefing sets the tactical stakes for the region.
To keep the gameplay fresh, the campaign engine populates your map with two distinct mission types:
Historical Battles: Heavily scripted operations with predefined enemy defensive positions. You’ll be dropped directly into iconic moments like the brutal infantry attrition of the Hürtgen Forest, high-stakes armored breakthroughs in the Falaise Pocket, or desperate crossroads defense during the Battle of the Bulge.
Fictional Battles: Original tactical puzzles pulled from a massive pool of hand-crafted maps. Free from historical constraints, these layouts are designed strictly around our core bolt-action rules, challenging you to master line-of-sight, cover, suppression, and flanking against an intelligent opponent.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our deep dive into the game’s campaign mode. We know you’ll have many questions and suggestions, so leave them in the comments or catch us on Discord!
For our next Diary, we’re doing something a bit different. We’ll go deeper into our enemy AI design: To show how the enemy thinks, evaluates different options, and plays like a real wargamer. Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two!
Community Question: Do you prefer more narratively driven campaigns with historically driven events, or do you prefer a dynamic, replayable campaign sandbox which keeps you on your toes?
Let us know your answers in the comments or on our Discord server and don’t forget to wishlist Bolt Action: https://www6.slitherine.com/game/bolt-action
