Devlog #001 said balance was a first guess and that combat depth - real defensive counters - was coming. This is the first big pass on both. It goes live tonight, 8pm BST.
The short version: defending matters now, and your Power score finally measures the right thing. Here's what changed and why.
Power now measures toughness, not raw stats
Until now your army Power was a sum of raw numbers. That rewarded big rosters and quietly punished anyone who actually built a survivable army - a unit's defences didn't count for much in the figure you saw.
Power is now worked out from effective HP: how much damage a unit can soak once its mitigation is counted. A tanky, well-protected force reads as stronger than a glass cannon of the same size, because in a real fight it is. Your Power number will move when this lands, and the hit-list bands will reshuffle as everyone re-rates. That's expected, not a bug.
Defending hits back
Devlog #001 admitted there was no real reason to fortify. This is the fix I wanted in most.
Turrets contribute more on defence, and your defences now fight as separate, named lanes instead of collapsing into one block - so a mixed-turret base is properly balanced and a turret type can't be strong against everything at once. Hold a well-built base and an attacker pays for it. That should change how it feels to log in and find a raid on your doorstep.
This is one half of the combat-depth work I flagged last time. The affinity layer (rock-paper-scissors counters) is still on the bench until the base loop reads clean.
Traps that stick
Sanction Charge traps now kill permanently. A unit caught by a trap is gone, the kills are spelled out in the combat report, and the damage is rebalanced so a charged base is a real deterrent rather than a speed bump. If you're hitting a fortified target, scout first.
Combat reports you can trust
A few report fixes that together make the numbers add up:
The verdict heading and casualties are tidied into one clear loss ledger.
Per-round kill counts now reconcile to the battle totals - there was a display mismatch where the rounds didn't sum to the result. Fixed.
Attacker loot is now shown after the fair-fight adjustment, so the figure on the report is what actually comes home, not a headline number that shrinks on arrival.
"Repelled" and "Breached" now read correctly from whichever side you're on.
Research that points somewhere
Research upgrades now grant specific, typed bonuses that feed straight into your raids and defences, so you can deliberately spec toward offence or defence instead of buying flat upgrades. The build queue is levelled for clearer control, and research buttons show the parts cost up front so you're not committing blind.
Notifications that don't spam
Completion alerts now batch together instead of firing one at a time, and there are new pushes for raids and scouts resolving and for your storage filling up - so you can empty it before you're capped and wasting production.
Still a guess, still alpha
The usual honesty: these numbers are a second guess, not a final answer. The point of this pass is to make defending worth doing and make Power mean something - if it now feels swingy in a new way, that's exactly the read I need. Tell me where it's off.
Same ask as always: play the loop across a few days, tell me where you want more, and be honest if a fight feels wrong. The combat rebalance is the thing to kick the tyres on this time.
I'll post the next one when there's something worth telling.
- The Dev
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