BURNED HORIZONS

The radio crackles. Contact, two hundred meters, tree line. Your team hits the dirt before you finish the thought.  This isn't the first firefight your squad's walked into, and it won't be the last one that leaves a mark.

Burned Horizons™ is a turn-based tactical sandbox set in the early 2000s, where nothing resets and every decision follows your operators home. You don't run missions, you run squads: hired, supplied, and rotated across entire theaters of war. What happens in one AO doesn't stay there.

▬▬▬▬▬▬

"It's not just about winning the battle; it's about surviving the war, with all the scars that entails." - Gungho Cowboy, Popular Airsoft

▬▬▬▬▬▬

// HIGHLIGHTS

SCARS & Flashpoints

Combat leaves more than wounds. Flashpoints build quietly over time, small marks that accumulate until they harden into SCARS, lasting psychological effects that sharpen an operator's reflexes or break their trust, steady a trigger hand or shake it apart.

• Some strike instantly, surviving an ambush that wipes your squad

• Others creep in slowly

• Some combine into something worse

No two operators carry the same war.

Trust & Cohesion

Operators don't just fight, they rely on each other. Trust builds and erodes between squadmates based on what they live through together, and a squad that doesn't trust its team lead or each other fights differently than one that does.

Wounding

Wounds are modeled after how the body actually breaks down, not a depleting number that regenerates on its own. Getting your people home means calling in CASEVAC and treating them properly, not waiting out a cooldown.

• A hit to the leg changes how an operator moves

• A hit to the arm changes how they shoot

"That's a permanent souvenir, a little something to remember the holiday by." — Gungho Cowboy, Popular Airsoft

Real Loadouts, Real Weight

Plate carriers, chest rigs, and rucksacks aren't cosmetic; armor placement matters, and what you carry affects what you can do. Weapons are moddable down to real components, sights, slings, and attachments that change how a weapon actually handles. Build a loadout for the mission in front of you, not a fixed kit.

Pathways and Specializations

Operators grow through what they actually do in the field, not a static class you pick once. Experience organically opens new pathways and specializations over time, shaped by the missions they've run and the choices they've made.

Regional Deployment Commands (RDC's)

Your operators fight across sprawling, persistent theaters, not isolated missions.

• RDC-TRIDENT, 2002: Ukraine, at the start of a brutal Russian invasion

• Victories shift front lines

• Failures ripple outward

• Other theaters open as the campaign expands

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)

Burned Horizons defaults to a hard, unforgiving experience, no health regen, no easy outs. But it's your war to run. SOP settings let you tune the experience to how you want to play, from a brutal Iron Man default to something more forgiving, without changing the core of what the game is.

▬▬▬▬▬▬

// FEATURES

• Deep tactical combat: action points, suppression, overwatch, interrupts

• Realistic wounding system, no health bars, no auto-heal

• CASEVAC and reinforcement support called in from the field

• Full armor and loadout system: plate carriers, rigs, rucksacks

• Deep weapon modding: real components, attachments, and slings

• Pathway specializations that grow from what your operators actually do

• Squad trust and cohesion that shifts based on shared experience

• Switch perspectives: top-down, isometric, or third-person

• Fully customizable SOP settings, tune the difficulty and experience to you

• Full modding support: sliders, toggles, and beyond

• Persistent squads and consequences that carry across the campaign

▬▬▬▬▬▬

// EARLY ACCESS: Q3/Q4 2026 — Targeted exit Q3/Q4 2027

Early Access is where the deeper layers take shape:

• Logistics and supply networks, buying, selling, and trading gear

• Wider AI behaviors

• Strategic movement and maneuver

• Advanced operator systems

• Vehicles and mobility

• Deeper wounding and SCARS integration

• Deepening triage and recovery systems

• Full mission and operational campaign system

• Replacing generic placeholder maps with large, custom-built AOs, progressively expanding to fill out the full RDC-TRIDENT theater

• Full persistence framework

• Exploring a real-time planning phase, and potentially a plan-and-execute turn-based mode

• SPARQ command and team management system

• Base building, growing from a patrol base into forward operating infrastructure

• Prisoner capture and recruit training

• Weather and day/night systems, introduced early and deepened over time

• Hunger and survival needs

• Realistic tech progression, equipment follows historical timing where it applies, with room for operators to field-test, capture, or improvise gear ahead of its time, as real special operations units have always done

• An ongoing authenticity pass, gradually replacing placeholder assets with assets that reflect the period accurately

• Continued art passes, replacing placeholder and concept assets with original, final art

• Localization for additional languages

• Initial set of modding tools

BEYOND 1.0

▬▬▬▬▬▬

// BEYOND 1.0

Our roadmap doesn't stop at full release. These are big undertakings in their own right, and anything that isn't as deep as we want it by 1.0 keeps growing from here:

• Multiplayer and self-hosted server support

• New RDCs (theaters of operation), each a new world tying into the one you already know, bringing new factions, gear, and vehicles with them

• Destructible environments, and continued expansion of them even once introduced

• Continued deepening of every system, art, weather, fog of war, base building, modding tools, and beyond, wherever EA didn't get us all the way there

HOLD THE LINE. ALWAYS FORWARD.