Warnament news: alternative history DLC
Hi friends!
It hasn’t been long since our last message, but here we are again — this time with news about Warnament.
You can check out the game here:
Some of you have been with us long enough to remember this one. Warnament is one of our smaller projects — a grand strategy with a low barrier to entry. You can jump in, pick almost any participant of World War I or World War II, and attempt the classic strategy-player pastime: casually rewriting history.
And the community around the game has grown into something quite wonderful.
Over on it’s —
— players regularly create their own maps and scenarios. There are campaigns about the Napoleonic Wars, various alternate-history conflicts, and even scenarios set in Westeros. If there is a war somewhere in history (or in fiction), chances are someone in the community has already tried to turn it into a scenario.
Big news: a new DLC
Now to the main event.
A large DLC has just been released for Warnament — something players have been asking about for quite a while, and something we’ve been promising for quite a while too.
So… what’s inside?
Scenario 1: Consequences
The first new scenario is Consequences.
The year is 1926, but not quite the one we know. In this alternate timeline, global warming has already begun to spiral out of control. Temperatures rise high enough to devastate provinces and reduce populations.
Your mission is simple in theory and slightly terrifying in practice:
Move north.
Reach colder regions.
Research a new technology branch.
And eventually find a way to stop the warming.
There’s a twist, of course.
Every time you start the scenario, the cause of the warming is generated randomly. It could be greenhouse gases, unusual activity in the Earth’s core, or increased solar radiation.
Which means you can’t simply memorize the optimal build order. You actually need to pay attention to events and research clues to figure out what’s going on.
One particularly fun example:
If the warming turns out to be caused by solar activity, the “solution” involves… triggering a nuclear winter.
Yes. When players first read that objective, it tends to sound completely unhinged.
But after thinking about the situation for a moment, it somehow starts sounding almost reasonable.
Scenario 2: Lost
The second scenario is called Lost.
Here, you play as the crew of an expedition that has crash-landed on an unknown planet.
There are some complications… You cannot recruit armies. You cannot build military industry. You only have a small group of surviving crew members, and your job is to defend them from the aggressive local inhabitants while trying to figure out how to escape the planet.
The scenario also introduces a brand-new map — LP-16, the planet where all of this is happening.
A small detail we personally like:
The hostile locals are technically not one country. They are actually many small fragmented factions that don’t cooperate with each other.
However, in the game they all share the same name and color.
Why?
Because from the perspective of the stranded crew, they’re just a lot of unknown hostile creatures. The expedition has no idea who they are or how their societies work — so to the player they all look roughly the same.
A few stories from development
Of course, making these scenarios produced some entertaining bugs along the way…
But before we share a couple of our favorite development stories from this DLC, we have a small request: if you have friends who love grand strategy games, please share this news with them. We wouldn’t have been able to release this game without the support of our amazing and welcoming community—thank you for being with us.
Alright, story number one
The speed of temperature increase in Consequences had to be adjusted several times. In the very first version, countries in the far north could sometimes finish the entire game without really experiencing the warming at all.
Which felt… slightly against the point of the scenario.
Another design challenge was making sure every country still had a chance to win. Even a hot country like Egypt at the start of the game needed some theoretical path to survival — whether by building a giant cooling device or migrating north in time.
The Mega-Refrigerator Incident
One particularly funny bug happened in the scenario selection menu.
If you selected Consequences and then switched to a normal historical scenario, the game sometimes forgot to remove the special technologies.
Which meant that in completely normal historical campaigns players could suddenly research things like:
the Mega-Refrigerator
and several other technologies that definitely don’t belong in standard WWI or WWII timelines
Mutiny meets alien diplomacy
There was also a strange interaction between old mechanics and the new Lost scenario.
In the base game, if two countries are at war — say France and Germany — and a rebellion happens inside one of them, the rebel regions don’t automatically continue the war. Historically that makes sense; rebellions often change political alignments.
But when we launched the alien-planet survival scenario, something unexpected happened.
Occasionally rebelling members of the expedition would immediately become friendly with the hostile alien fauna surrounding them.
Which produced some… extremely strange diplomatic outcomes. Needless to say, that mechanic didn’t survive very long in this scenario.
That’s all the news for now. As always — stay tuned, and we’ll see you in the next update.
And before we go — a big thank you for supporting us.
How to get more involved?
Want some more Warnament? We got you! Here’s what you can do:
Suggest your ideas for the game on our Discord server
Create a map in the free standalone map editor app
Create your own multiplayer server
Create a guide for the game
Help us translate the game into your native language
Play Warnament beta for free on Android
Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and watch weekly videos about the development process
Follow Warnament on Twitter
Leave a comment under a video of your favorite content maker, to let them know about the game