Getting Started

Read this once. It takes about ten minutes end to end, and at the end you will have a persona for your organisation, run a wargame against it, branched a what-if, and downloaded a report. All the other docs pages are reference material for after you have done this.

#What Strategy Soup is

A diagnostic that produces a persona, and tools that put the persona to work.

1. The Diagnostic asks you 45 questions about how your organisation makes decisions. It turns the answers into apersona: a single markdown file that captures how your organisation decides. Load it over any AI and the AI reasons like your organisation.
2. Simulate takes that persona (or a starter archetype from the library) and uses it as a player in a wargame. You watch the game play out, branch off what-ifs at any point, and download a report.

That is the whole product. Everything else in the docs is detail.

#Step 1: Sign in

1. Go to /signin.
2. Type your email. Click Send sign-in link.
3. Check your inbox (also check spam). Click the link in the email you receive. You are now signed in.

First-time users land at tier='beta'. That means you can use the diagnostic, the public scenarios, and Studio. Higher-tier scenarios (pilot or internal) are not visible until upgraded.

#Step 2: Run a diagnostic (about you)

1. From the top nav, click Diagnostic. You land on a screen that asks who you are answering for.
2. Choose Self (you are answering about your own organisation). Other options (competitor, partner, regulator, hypothetical) are for advanced uses.
3. Click Start questionnaire.
4. Answer all 45 questions. There are three kinds: sliders (place your organisation on a continuum), multi-select (tick observed behaviours), and forced choice (pick one of two paths in a short scenario). Answer as the organisation actually behaves, not as it would like to behave. This is the most important rule.
5. When you submit, you land on a results page. That is your persona.

Allow about ten minutes. You can come back and re-take it any time; you can also save the result to the library so colleagues can use it.

#Step 3: Read your persona

The persona page has three things on it.

1. A persona name and a cluster. The cluster is one of five families (conservative, aggressive, culture, system, independent). It is a shorthand, not a label - the underlying dimension scores carry more signal.
2. A cluster proximity bar. Distance from each of the five cluster centroids. A short bar is information, not a weakness. The shape matters more than the top entry.
3. A persona.A markdown document that summarises what this persona “believes”, principles it operates by, win conditions, red lines, and how it sees other actors. The simulator uses this as a system prompt when it plays the persona at a wargame table.

You can save this persona to your library for later, or skip saving and go straight to Simulate.

#Step 4: Watch a wargame run

1. From the top nav, click Simulate.
2. Pick the first scenario in the list (Atlas Regional - Energy Retail if you are a new user). Click Run.
3. You see the opening view: four player cards on the page with each player’s starting position. This is T+0 (tick zero - before anything has happened).
4. Click Play in the bottom controls bar. Ticks advance automatically every few seconds. The page updates after each tick with a one-line summary of what happened.
5. If you want to slow down, click Pause, then Step to advance one tick at a time.

Atlas Regional has six quarterly ticks. The full run takes about thirty seconds in autoplay.

#Step 5: Try a what-if (fork)

1. Click Rewind a few times to go back to tick 2 or 3.
2. Click Fork. The header now shows two branches (e.g. main vs fork-1).
3. Optional: change something on this new branch. Click Inject to schedule an external event for a future tick, or Overrideto manually change a player’s capital balance (simulate a shock).
4. Click Play again. The forked branch runs forward from where you forked.
5. When done, click Compare to see both branches side by side.

#Step 6: Export the report

1. Click Export on the bottom controls bar. (It becomes available after at least one tick has resolved.)
2. Click Render and download.
3. A zip file downloads to your computer named wargame-<scenario>-<timestamp>.zip.
4. Unzip and open report.html in any browser. You see a styled deliverable with the run summary, both branches, and an audit appendix listing every event.

The bundle also contains a markdown version (report.md) and a self-contained interactive replay (replay.html).

#Where to go next

You now know the whole loop. From here:

• How-tos - recipes for specific jobs (use a starter archetype, edit a scenario, fork on someone else’s persona, share a run).
• Simulate reference - what every button on the operator console does.
• Diagnostic reference - how the 45 questions work, what each register measures.
• Glossary - every term in the product, defined once.