The 2020s ended badly. Grid failures, a drought decade, two currency collapses, and the first autonomous-weapon incidents, drone swarms nobody admitted to launching, pushed the big blocs to the edge of a war none of them could pay for. In 2031 the three alliances signed the Kessler Accord: no nation may deploy armed forces, manned or autonomous, outside its own borders, and standing armies are capped. Enforced by satellite, and by the fact that everyone was broke.
The Accord has one hole, and everyone knew it when they signed. It binds nations. It says nothing about corporations. Within a year the three largest private military corporations were fighting each other in places nobody looks, under contract to the same governments that outlawed war.
Publicly the PMCs run disaster relief, grid security and "peacekeeping". Privately they raid each other's fabs, steal each other's cores, and burn each other's server halls. Every match in OpenMAG is one of those raids.
Same three archetypes as MAG, high-tech, brutal, and traditional, because they read instantly on sight and give three different ways to fight.
Recruits: Western and Central Europe, Japan, Korea, Singapore.
Origin: a defence-AI firm that bought a security company the week the Accord made armies illegal. Runs on compute: every squad has a model in its ear.
Look: matte grey-white, slim armor, visored helmets, blue status lights. Alpine and clean-room palettes.
Guns: low recoil, high rate of fire, high accuracy, light rounds. Caseless, suppressed, optics on everything.
Drones: small, many, quiet.
Doctrine: see first, shoot first. Weak when the sensors go down.
Recruits: Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, parts of Africa and the Middle East. Anyone the other two won't take.
Origin: what was left of three national armies after the Accord caps, re-flagged as a corporation overnight. Compute-poor, steel-rich.
Look: rust-brown and olive, welded plate, rebreathers, exposed cabling, painted slogans. Steppe, refinery, scrap-yard.
Guns: heavy calibers, high damage, hard recoil, slow fire. The widest roster: anything that still works.
Drones: big, loud, few, armored. Flying tanks.
Doctrine: close the distance, kill the sensors, make it a brawl.
Recruits: US, Canada, UK, Australia, Mexico, Brazil. Ex-regular military, by the book.
Origin: the Pentagon's own contractor, spun out when the Accord passed. Most of its officers were in uniform the year before. The only PMC that still fights like an army.
Look: multicam tan and green, modern plate carriers, clean but worn. Boreal forest, tundra, rail yard, quarry.
Guns: the middle of everything. Reliable, balanced, forgiving.
Drones: standard-issue, one per platoon, always there.
Doctrine: combined arms, forward spawns, logistics. Strongest with vehicles.
Every system in the game has a reason in the world. The objectives are what a raid on a server hall would really be; the leaders' powers are the drones the contract paid for.
| In the game | In the world |
|---|---|
| Contracts (the war) | Governments post a contract: secure this fab, deny this data center. PMCs fight for it in secret. The winner holds it until the next contract cycle. |
| Burn-off → cooling → pumps (Domination) | Coolant loops → power feeds → server halls. Cut the coolant so the hall overheats, take the power, then hold the halls while they burn. |
| Prototype theft (Acquisition) | Stealing an autonomous combat vehicle, or its control core, from the enemy's drone works. |
| Uplinks A and B, then C (Sabotage) | Two relay towers, then the training cluster: the building where the enemy's models learn. |
| Counter-drone battery / launcher / sensor mast | The counter-drone battery kills air insertion and enemy strikes. The loitering-munition launcher is the artillery. The sensor mast is the sweep. All destroyable, all repairable. |
| Leader abilities | Drone support by rank: squad leader loitering munition, platoon leader recon swarm and precision strike, officer in charge the company's heavy drone wing. Drones are called, never flown by hand, so the sky stays readable. |
| Home camo | Each PMC's gear matches its own home biomes. Defending at home is a visual advantage. |
| Veteran mode | A soldier who hits the cap "re-ups" with a new PMC. The Grey War pays whoever shows up. |
| Seasons | The Accord is reviewed every year; every three months the blocs re-issue contracts. Standings reset, the map of who-holds-what redraws, and the story advances: a fab goes dark, a new data center comes online, a new map. |
Nine home maps, three per PMC, one per tier. Each four-sector map also ships as a two-sector and a one-sector variant, so nine builds give twenty-seven playable configurations, plus four neutral maps for Interdiction and Escalation.
| PMC | Skirmish · 1 sector · 64 | Battle · 2 sectors · 128 | War · 4 sectors · 256 |
|---|---|---|---|
| HALCYON | Rhône Relay — alpine relay towers above a dam | Vestfold Fab — Norwegian fjord chip fab, stolen wafer carriers | Gotthard Deep — tunnel data center under the Alps, four portals in |
| VRG | Aral Uplink — dry-seabed relay station | Tagil Works — Ural tank plant turned drone factory | Tengiz Station — Caspian power complex and lithium field |
| MERIDIAN | Kennecott Relay — abandoned Alaskan mine town, rail yard | Whitehorse Field — Yukon drone airfield | Prudhoe Fab — arctic chip fab on the pipeline terminal |
| Neutral | Sahel Array (desert solar and server farm) · Isla Volcán (geothermal island) · Baltic Barge (floating data center) · Mekong Cross (hydro cascade) | ||