3 Days to Kiev
Rebuilding a 2014 war game from the inside to fight the war of 2022.
Wargame: Red Dragon shipped in 2014 with closed file formats and no map editor. Its Mac build, it turned out, still carries 312,000 symbol names, which made it practical to take apart with Ghidra. From there the formats fell one at a time: the data packages, the NDF tables behind every unit (all 2,659 shipped files now round-trip exactly), the terrain, the road graph and the five navigation graphs the AI uses to move.
Nothing gets installed on trust. Every writer has to rebuild a file the game already ships, byte for byte, before it is allowed to make a new one. That discipline paid off when the computer opponent kept surrendering on a freshly built map. The engine silently discards any reinforcement point that sits outside a command zone. With no way to bring units in, the AI concluded it had lost.
The mod is now its own front. Ukraine and Russia field decks of 105 and 102 cards, FPV drones were slowed from 150 to 70 km/h after playtesting, and craters stay on the ground for hours. The centrepiece is Stalnohirsk, a fictional Bakhmut with a rail yard, a salt mining town and a ruined strip between the lines. The title borrows the old boast that Kyiv would fall in three days.