A skirmish match seems to begin when the battlefield appears. The engine has a different answer. Long before the first tank accepts an order, it has already turned dialog controls into a match contract, raw map records into terrain, and terrain into connectivity rules that decide where every ground unit may go. This week we followed that preparation chain from both ends.
March a column of tanks across a bridge in Red Alert 2 and they cross without a second thought. That "without a second thought" is doing a lot of work. Underneath the bridge is water — impassable to a tank — and yet the two banks behave as if they were one continuous stretch of land. This week we reversed the routine that makes that true, and then spent the back half of the session arguing with ourselves about whether we'd broken something along the way.