Fog of war
You only know what recon has seen. Unknown ground is blank paper; recon paints it in, and old knowledge fades back to pale washes.
You shoot at what recon tells you, not at what you see. The front is 4 to 15 km from Old Marta, far beyond sight, and on the map table every patch of enemy ground is in one of three states.
Three states
| State | What the map shows | How ground gets there |
|---|---|---|
| Fog | Soft cream fog over a blank grid | Nobody has looked yet |
| Last known | Terrain, trenches, buildings and craters as they were last seen, in faded map-paper tones with a time stamp. No soldiers, no fire, no movement. | Recon looked earlier, or your side held it before |
| Live | Everything: soldiers, smoke, muzzle flashes | It is inside recon coverage right now |
Your own held sectors are always live, because your soldiers report from them. The intel layers on the map table show all three at once, with the age of every last-known patch.
What it looks like
Unknown ground is blank, unpainted paper with a faint pencil survey grid. Known ground is painted. When recon looks somewhere new, the colour feathers in at the edge like wet watercolour, and old knowledge fades back to pale washes. It should feel like the edge of your map, not like weather.
That is how you tell it from the other fog. The mist that fills trenches and low ground at dawn and thins in the wind is mood. It has nothing to do with what you know. Fog of war is the paper.
Firing into fog
Targets come from recon pins, radio reports and triangulation ellipses. You may fire into pure fog, but it is a blind shot. Only the impact report tells you what you hit: if a spotter, balloon or plane can see the spot, about 150 m around the impact turns live for 15 seconds. See Recon: spotters, balloons and planes and Finding enemy guns.
The war under the fog
Fog does not mean silence. Your own trenches report enemy barrages by radio, so you know about them even when you cannot see them. A charge you cannot see appears on the map as an arrow. Balloons and planes open live windows, and an impact report can follow every shot you fire. See The living battlefield.
What recon has seen stays on the map long after the paint fades. See The intel map remembers.