Player Guide

Treaty Ground: Corridor 2032 is a real-time tank wargame. You command a section of tanks on a fifty-kilometre demilitarised corridor — no bases, no economy, no reinforcements. You get the tanks you start with, and how you use them is the whole game. This guide covers what you need to command well; the game’s own Field Guide (on the title screen) has every vehicle’s numbers, and the in-game help panel (/) answers questions mid-mission.

01Plan, then GO — and keep commanding

Every mission starts in setup. Nothing moves, so take as long as you like:

• Place your force — drag your tanks anywhere inside the dashed DEPLOY zone.
• Draw the opening plan — select tanks, drag out their routes, and pin orders onto the waypoints.

Press GO (Space or G) and every tank moves out at once. From then on the mission runs to its end: there is no pause and no rewind.

That is not a limit on commanding. Every planning gesture keeps working while the battle runs — draw, drag, delete and re-order waypoints, and each change takes effect immediately, from where the tank actually is. Commanding a live fight, not a frozen one, is the game. Restart takes you back to setup with a fresh field.

02Giving orders

Click a tank to select it, then drag from it onto the ground to draw a route: press, pull away, release — the release drops the waypoint. A plain click on empty ground drops nothing.

You don’t have to memorise this: the hint strip in the unit pane always says what the pointer under your hand can do right now.

Orders on a waypoint apply to the leg arriving at it. Right-tap a waypoint and the order menu pins rules of engagement (Engage or Hold fire), a watch arc, a hull facing, hull-down, smoke, tempo (Cautious, Normal or Rush), a wait, a signal, a formation, or a dig order. Pin Hold fire on the waypoint at the far side of open ground and the tank crosses that ground holding fire.

Right-tap the tank itself for whole-vehicle orders: CLEAR throws the route away; HALT stops the tank but keeps its plan, and CONTINUE sends it on again from where it stopped. HALT is for “stop for now”, CLEAR for “this plan is wrong”.

Change fire orders right now with X (weapons free) and V (hold fire): the order applies to every selected tank at once, idle or moving. That is the ambush trigger — approach under Hold fire, wait for the enemy to commit, then select the section and press X.

Signals make tanks act together. Four go-codes, A–D: a waypoint can raise one when a tank reaches it, or hold a tank until one is raised. The classic use: the flanker raises A at its firing position, and the assault waits on A before crossing open ground. Raise a code by hand from the SIGNALS strip, or with Y, U, I, O.

Formations and movement. Select several tanks and draw one route; the rest form up on the leader in a line, wedge or column. The formation menu also sets how the group moves — TRAVEL when contact is unlikely, traveling overwatch when it is possible, and bounding overwatch when it is expected, where one element halts and covers while the other advances.

Orders take time on the radio. A tank ordered on its own steps off after 1.5 seconds; a group ordered with one route steps off after 0.5 seconds. Amending a route a tank is already driving costs nothing.

Control groups work as in any RTS: Ctrl+1–9 to assign, 1–9 to recall. Made a mistake? Ctrl+Z undoes the last eight plan changes, before or after GO.

03Seeing and being seen

Your tanks do not know where the enemy is. Every enemy climbs a ladder — unknown, stale (a hollow marker where it was last seen, with an age), contact (a grey ghost with a “?”: detected but not identified), and identified (the full symbol). You cannot shoot at a stale marker, and firing at a contact means aiming at a ghost: most of those shots miss. The enemy runs the same ladder against you.

• Optics see out to 800 m in daylight and can identify — but smoke, forest and darkness cut them down.
• Thermals see out to 450 m through smoke and darkness, but only ever give you a contact, never an identification.
• Your tanks look forward. New enemies are only spotted in the cone in front of the hull. A watch arc pinned on a waypoint makes a crew spot faster in that sector, and slower outside it.

Being seen is a resource you spend. Moving cautiously makes you harder to see and rushing makes you easier; being hull-down halves it; and firing lights you up on enemy thermals for several seconds. One volley, then reposition — that is the rhythm of the game.

04Armour and gunnery

There are no health bars. Each tank has separate mobility, gun and optics systems, and a hit breaks whichever one it physically struck. A tank that cannot move is still a gun; a tank with no gun can still scout and screen. Only a catastrophic kill takes a tank out of the fight.

Where you hit matters more than anything. Your gun penetrates 240 mm. A turret front is thicker than that — it never goes through — and a hull front only gives way to a near-square hit. Sides and rears go through at almost any angle. That is why flanking wins fights: not a damage bonus, but plates the gun can beat.

Your tanks fire on their own when they can: gun working, rules of engagement set to Engage, loaded, turret on target, and a detected target within 530 m with a clear line of sight. You can see much further than you can shoot. Rounds are real objects on a real arc, and a crest between you and the target stops them. Friendly fire is real too.

Why won’t my tank shoot? Usually one of three things: the enemy is only a stale marker, the tank is set to Hold fire, or its gun has been destroyed — a dead gun still turns the turret to follow targets.

05Terrain

• Water and cliffs are impassable. Steep slopes and forest slow you down.
• Forest blocks sight by depth: a thin treeline is see-through, a deep wood hides everything, and in between you get a contact but no identification.
• Hull-down — only your turret showing over a gentle rise toward the enemy — hides your hull entirely and halves how visible you are. Every round that comes back hits your thickest armour.
• Dig in. A stopped tank can build a berm to fight hull-down from, or a trench or scrape to sink into. It takes time, and the tank does nothing else while it digs — so dig before the enemy arrives, not once they’re on your gun line.
• Smoke blocks optics but not thermals: a target in smoke drops to a contact, it does not disappear.

06Winning

You win by eliminating the enemy’s effective tanks and lose when yours are gone — a tank that has lost both mobility and gun no longer counts. Each campaign mission also sets its own objective: hold ground, get a convoy through, break contact, take a compound, tow a prize home. The end screen says exactly why the match ended, then the numbers — gunnery, losses, distance driven, and the incident report: who fired first.

The campaign is six missions, played in order, each unlocking the next with a win. Its spine is the rules-of-engagement ladder: every mission’s standing orders from regiment loosen one step, from Weapons Tight at Borehole 9 to Free Fire at Survey Block 7. The Gunnery Range is always open for practice.

07Controls

Every key below can be rebound in Settings, except the arrow keys.

08If you remember five things

1. Flank. Fronts are thicker than your gun; sides and rears are not.
2. Shoot, then move. Firing lights you up on thermals.
3. Get hull-down. It hides your hull and puts every return round on your strongest armour.
4. Identify before you shoot. Firing at a ghost mostly misses.
5. A damaged tank is not a dead tank. An immobile tank is still a gun; a gun-down tank is still a scout.