For a while now the research tree has been a bit of a promise. You'd sink resources into a line, it would tick over, and... not much would visibly change. The unlocks were mostly names. This release is me making good on that promise: research now actually does something.
The tree finally has teeth
Six research lines now carry real, active effects instead of reading as flavour:
Permanent buffs you stack. +5% per level to resource yield, to build speed, and to how much your walls soak when you're raided. Individually small; over a campaign they compound into a real edge.
A unit you unlock. Research Warden Doctrine and a new unit opens in your training roster - the first time research reaches over and adds something to your army rather than just buffing what you had.
A combat upgrade. Armour-Piercing Rounds gives your Marksmen the piercing keyword, so they cut through armour they used to bounce off.
If you'd been treating research as a box to tick, it's now one of the genuine levers on how strong you get. I also fixed a quieter bug where an unlocked unit wouldn't actually show up in your roster - so when the tree says you've unlocked something, you'll see it.
Where you build matters now
The other half of this one is about the ground. Your Salvage and Ore yield now leans on the biome of the tile your base sits on - up to ±25% either way. Some ground is just richer. You'll see the modifier on your base page and on the map inspector, so you can read a tile before you settle it. Choosing where to plant a base was a positional decision before; now it's an economic one too.
The smaller stuff
The building that pulls your Salvage is now the Salvage Extractor rather than the "Salvage Reclaimer" - same building, clearer name, and it frees "Reclaimer" for the support unit that actually reclaims. And two mining-loop annoyances are gone: scrap harvests that could hang now clear, transports can carry Breach Shard like anything else, and the outpost Refinery no longer stalls at 0:00 when you run Extract more than once. If your mining chain was hitching, it should run clean.
The honest caveats
Every number here is a first pass. The +5%-a-level buffs, the ±25% biome lean, whether Warden Doctrine's unit lands in the right place on the curve - those are all knobs, and I'll be turning them as I watch people play into them. If research now feels too strong, or the biome swing makes some tiles feel mandatory, that's exactly the feedback that shapes the next patch.
Go sink some research and watch it actually change your game. Read the ground before you settle it. And tell me where it breaks.
- The Dev
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