Changelog — Aether Ascent

2026-10-14

The commander measures its losses per body

BALANCE v156 BREAKS OLD SAVES

The commander now keeps its ledger of losses and kills per body: a bad exchange on Mars no longer calls off an assault on the Moon, and a hopeless read on one world is read on that world alone.
An assault that stands at its staging door while its fresh reinforcements die on the march now stands down instead of being sent in; a body already in the fight is left to fight.
The commander remembers where one of its own construction yards died and plants no expansion and deploys no vehicle on that ground while the memory is warm.
A re-door whose massed flip walked nowhere is remembered as one, and the valve holds a while after it, ending the flip-and-stand cycle a taped game showed.
The commander's home door refuses a charge into a howitzer line that grew by half over the last minute, instead of walking into guns that are still arriving.
A freshly built gun is excused from the siege line's count only while it is new; before, every gun of that class was excused for good, and whole lines read as empty.
A pressed colony's standing-army floor no longer counts the troops that flew in as relief, so the colony trains its own guard instead of leaning on pods that will leave. Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged.
Saves from earlier versions will not load: the save format changed with these memories. Finish a game in progress before refreshing, or start fresh.

2026-10-13

The commander counts enemy aircraft

BALANCE v155

The commander now counts enemy aircraft when it picks where its troop pods come down: a cell inside the reach of four or more visible enemy skimmers or gunships is refused. Before, only ground guns counted and whole landings died under a swarm within seconds.
The same count guards where the commander plants an expansion base and where its field army camps forward: a site or a camp under four or more enemy aircraft is moved before the vehicles roll.
Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged. One enemy aircraft alone never moves a landing, a site or a camp - the count must reach four, so a lone scout does not steer the commander.

2026-10-13

The home guard holds under a line

BALANCE v154

When an enemy howitzer line stands off a commander's base, the home guard now holds at the base instead of marching out to reach the nearest gun. Before, the whole home army walked into the line and died under guns that never reached the base; a raid inside the ring is met as before.
The commander's field army no longer gets recalled home while it stands nearer the enemy line than its own base does. The pull home used to turn a standing army into a column with the line walking after it; the stand-off keeps the army instead.
The commander now builds its orbital defense satellite over any world it holds a base on when enemy troop pods are inbound in force, not only the world it is racing for. Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged.

2026-10-11

The commander takes the Moon first

BALANCE v153

While the race for the Moon is open, the commander's first rocket now scouts the Moon instead of whichever world an enemy pod happened to be heading for. Before, its eyes flew to Mars and the Moon was lost unseen.
The fuel plant now follows the launch pad at once instead of waiting its turn behind the whole base, so the commander's first flights leave about two minutes earlier on every Hard opening.
As soon as the Moon is scouted and only a handful of enemy troops stand there, the construction vehicle flies first with its escort behind it, instead of an escort force held in orbit that never landed. The Moon base now stands by minute thirteen on most Hard openings.
A new Moon base keeps its front held and fed while the enemy still stands on it: the pods keep flying instead of the front closing on its first bad read.
The airfield no longer waits for the enemy to leave the commander's sight; the gun ring and the war footing still gate it as before.
The Long Nine now stands on the Moon well before the first howitzer packets land on Earth, and one Hard commander that used to see its home razed late in the game now wins it outright.
The price: a Hard commander busy taking the Moon sometimes founds its Mars colony much later or not at all, and can read its home war as hopeless a while longer meanwhile. Medium and Easy are unchanged.

2026-10-11

The commander brings its stood-off army home with its wave

BALANCE v152

When the commander's army has stood off at the edge of an enemy howitzer line and the wave it belonged to stands down, the army now stands down with it. Before, the units left on hold at the ring stayed there until the line walked onto them: in one long game nearly nine hundred units died that way.
The commander's refusal to charge a howitzer line it cannot thin no longer lifts because a token post of its own guns has been taken against the line. A handful of guns posted against a whole line used to open the door, and the charge that followed died in it.
The door now opens only when the posted guns stand at fifteen percent of the line they face. A post at the commander's own base against a landed line still opens it; a march across the map behind a handful of guns does not.
The commander's Long Nine keeps firing at the howitzer line standing before its own base while that line stands, instead of being swung toward a softer target on another world. In one game one such shell took forty-four of the enemy's guns.
Where a base is already lost the price is unchanged: a base that fell to the guns still falls, a minute earlier. Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged.

2026-10-09

The commander refuses to charge a howitzer line it cannot thin

BALANCE v151

When an enemy lands a howitzer line before its home base, the commander no longer charges it on sight. If one volley would cost a third of its army and none of its own guns are dueling the line, the army holds at home and the door opens again when the line thins.
An army sent against a howitzer line now stops at the line's spread edge, out of the guns' reach, and holds there instead of walking its column into the guns toward the line's centre. The charge that cost nearly nine hundred units in one game now costs almost nothing.
A line counts as being thinned only when the commander's own howitzers have taken a firing post against it, not when it merely owns guns worth as much as the line, so a strike that halves a line no longer opens the door a moment later.
Relief soldiers no longer fly into a colony whose own commander has judged the fight there hopeless under an enemy howitzer line; supply cargo still flies. In one game more than a hundred pods used to die with the colony; now it holds its ground.
The price: a Hard commander that refuses a line nothing can thin keeps its army alive far longer, and can lose its home later to the guns that pile up in front of it. Thinning a standing line is still to come.
The hold and the relief are Hard; the stand-off at the line's edge also applies on Medium.

2026-10-08

The commander reads an enemy siege line honestly

BALANCE v150

When the commander weighs an attack against an enemy siege line it now counts the howitzers once, adds the escort among them, and remembers a line it saw a moment ago rather than only what is in sight this instant. Before, the guns were counted twice and a Hard commander could sit at its army ceiling with the enemy in view for twenty minutes.
On Hard, matches against a howitzer-line opponent now end up to sixteen minutes sooner, and the long parks in front of a line are over in minutes.
The howitzers the commander holds back to answer a siege line keep their post while the line edges in and out of reach, instead of re-forming every few seconds.
A fresh howitzer rolling out of an enemy depot built next to the commander's own base is no longer mistaken for a siege line; forty-eight guns used to march back and forth between two bases chasing each newborn.
Those held guns now commit against the guns that can actually reach their post, and hold where nothing reaches, rather than measuring themselves against every howitzer the commander has ever seen. Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged.

2026-10-07

The commander lands where the guns are not

BALANCE v149

When the commander releases a parked landing and most of the spots it picked minutes earlier now sit under turrets it has since found, the landing comes down on the fresh dry ground instead. Before, nearly every pod of one landing came down under known guns and died within a minute.
The guard posts the commander draws around a newly landed base are no longer placed inside the reach of enemy turrets it knows about or shooters it can see.
The commander's invasion now reads the body it is attacking at what it sees there, once. An enemy siege line was counted twice, which kept a softer target off the table for the rest of the game.
When an invasion front closes for a better door, the better door is now one the commander would actually take. It used to close onto a body it then refused, and aimed at nothing for twenty minutes.
When a front closes with pods still in the air, those pods turn for home instead of landing one at a time on the enemy's army.
A besieged colony's turrets count toward holding the siege only for what they can hit, so a turret out-ranged by howitzers is no longer a shield, and relief now flies while the colony still stands rather than after it has fallen.
The budget for that relief, and for a second front, now reads the army the commander has to spare at home instead of a fixed sum, so an idle home army funds the war where it is.
The landing and targeting rules are Hard and Medium; the relief is Hard only. Easy is unchanged.

2026-10-06

The commander's last stand stands

BALANCE v148

Down to its last base, the commander used to send everything it had in a final stand, call it home the moment it set out, then send it again, every second: the units turned on the spot and never fought. The last stand now goes in and fights until it wins, loses, or is plainly spent.
The siege guns the commander sends to answer an enemy line shelling one of its bases no longer re-pick their target and shuffle their post every second. They keep the gun they chose and hold their post until that gun dies, leaves, or walks away.
In one long game those shuffles ran to more than three thousand re-orders; they are gone. Hard and Medium; Easy is unchanged.

2026-10-05

The commander stops feeding its attacks in one unit at a time

BALANCE v147

When an assault waited at the enemy's door for its army to gather and the wait ran out, the commander sent everyone straight in: the few at the door and every unit still walking there. They arrived one by one and died one by one.
Now the clock sends in only the body already standing at the door, and only when it is a real body rather than a few stragglers. Units still on the road finish their walk and gather for the next push.
If the wait has been a losing one, the commander's units dying at the door for little in return, the assault is called home instead and the commander waits for a better moment.
The place where an assault gathers now stands outside the reach of every enemy turret the commander knows about. It used to gather exactly where those turrets could shell it while it waited.
The units lost while gathering under known turrets fell by more than half, and the assaults that reach the door now go as a body. Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged.

2026-10-05

The commander stops building factories where nothing can walk out

BALANCE v146

The commander no longer places a Barracks, a Vehicle Depot or a Refinery on a plateau that is cut off from the rest of the world. Every unit trained on such a butte was stranded there for the rest of the game.
In one tester game a single Vehicle Depot on a small Mars butte trained more than a hundred vehicles that could never leave it. They stood through the battle for the colony and died to one howitzer volley.
Those stranded vehicles also counted toward the army the commander was waiting to gather at the enemy's door, so its assault stood for three minutes outside an open base. Its vehicles now train where they can join the march.
An older check that keeps factories off cramped ground could be skipped when the commander was also looking for a place for a spaceport or a superweapon. The factory now keeps its own check.
This applies on Easy, Medium and Hard. Solar plants, turrets and other buildings may still use a butte, and the player's own placement is unchanged.

2026-10-02

The commander garrisons its colonies against what can reach them

BALANCE v145

A colony on another world now sizes its garrison to the largest force that can reach it: the enemy it remembers there, the enemy it can see there, and the pods it can see in flight toward it, with the landing's own margin on top.
That garrison bill lifts the colony's training ceiling above the old garrison share and the won-world clamp, so a colony no longer sits at a fraction of its strength while a landing party is already in the air.
Relief from the home world launches on the shortfall before the enemy lands, not after; a colony with pods inbound is treated as a war the home must answer now.
When the shortfall outruns what the colony's factories can build before the landing arrives, a new depot leads the build order instead of waiting behind turrets, walls and solar plants, one depot per yard at most.
A colony's anti-air ring answers enemy aircraft seen over or inbound to that world, not aircraft seen anywhere; against a ground or siege landing the gun turrets and walls go up first and the anti-air follows.
A world the commander is already invading keeps its existing rules; these apply to the colonies it is not fighting on. Hard only; Medium and Easy are unchanged.

2026-10-02

The commander keeps its log between saves

BALANCE v144 BREAKS OLD SAVES

An assault that stands off a base and shoots without landing a kill or razing a wall on that world now lets its clock run down and stands down; a lone gunship's sortie no longer counts as progress.
A force settled at its objective is no longer called back to the door when the rear guard regathers; the fighting line stays where it stands and the newcomers march to join it.
The reason a wave last stood down now rides the save: a game loaded after a costly exit holds its door shut for as long as the running game would have, instead of charging straight back out.
The commander's rocket plans no longer hang on a stale decision from an earlier pass: the flights it meant to make now leave.

2026-10-02

The commander remembers where it saw you

BALANCE v143 BREAKS OLD SAVES

The commander now keeps a separate read of the enemy force on each body, refreshed every time it looks and lowered by every kill it witnesses, instead of one read of the enemy's whole army; the invasion's landing is priced against what stands on the body it is landing on.
An invasion volley is sized to the defence of the landing itself, the enemy's mobile force plus the guns that reach the chosen ground, rather than to the whole explored wall; the pads and the beachhead's holding force read the same number.
A landing it cannot afford is no longer dribbled at: the commander names it unreachable, re-aims where a door exists, and brings the parked army home where none does.
A rich commander no longer waits half an hour after two failed volleys: once the hold has stood a batch's age and the bank covers the next volley, the mass volley flies.

2026-10-01

The commander answers what it sees

BALANCE v142

On Hard the commander's army is no longer held to a fixed multiple of its base strength while it can see what it faces: a fresh read of the enemy's army lifts the ceiling to a share of that read, and the old cap stays only as a guard against a stale or phantom read.
A won home no longer sits at a peacetime garrison while a large enemy army stands in plain view: under a fresh read the garrison rises to the same honest floor whatever the commander's posture.
In one tester game the commander read the player's army almost exactly for the better part of an hour and still built only a handful of units; on the same board it now builds a hundred units within minutes and lands its pods into a fight it wins.
A landed force past raiding-party size is treated as an army: it takes its objective from what it knows of the enemy estate instead of waiting on a once-a-minute raid order, while a small landed squad keeps raiding and its stragglers are ordered the moment they land.
Medium and Easy keep their army caps; the first-wave cap and Easy's learner ceiling stay as the player's softeners.

2026-10-01

The commander fights the line it meets

BALANCE v141

A commander standing off a landed artillery line now advances to its stand-off point ready to fight: units that walked into the guns on a plain move order, firing at nothing, now attack-move, engaging whatever comes within their reach on the way and where they stand.
The stand-off point is read from the line's near edge, the gun nearest the commander's own base, rather than from the middle of the enemy cluster, so the body stands off the guns that can actually reach it.
In one tester game this turned a march that died without firing into a fight that destroyed the whole landed artillery line and kept the estate behind it standing.
The commander's own howitzers keep their stand-off post against the enemy line as before; the change is to the ground body under them.
Applies on every difficulty wherever the stand-off law already lives; a body advancing on an enemy army without artillery is untouched.

2026-10-01

The commander stops grinding

BALANCE v140

A commander in a losing fight no longer counts the fighting as progress: when its assault is trading badly and gaining nothing, it stands the wave down, regroups, and takes a fresh look at the picture before committing again.
The yardstick is the exchange itself: a stand at the enemy's edge that kills at least as much as it loses is still pressing; one that only bleeds is not, however long it holds the ground.
This reads only once the commander already knows it is outmatched; a commander with the upper hand presses as it always has, and an even trade keeps the pressure on.
The stand-down rides the assault's existing no-contact clock — a few minutes on Hard, longer on Medium — so a losing stand ends within minutes rather than lasting the whole match; Easy is untouched.
A long stalemate at the edge, two commanders standing at each other's doors until the clock runs out, now breaks: the one losing the trade comes home, re-reads, and the war moves again.

2026-09-29

The commander keeps its metal

BALANCE v139

The commander no longer sells its stockpiles down to nothing while its bank is full: once it holds a war chest, its trade hubs go quiet and the metal stays for the war.
Silos now follow the stockpile — a commander holding its resources builds the storage to keep them, instead of stopping at a handful.
Its ambition and its doors read its whole wealth, stock included, so a commander sitting on held metal fights as the rich commander it is rather than the poor one its wallet suggests.
Mined-out deposits slowly regrow, a truckload at a time, on every world — a planet worked dry is no longer dead ground for the rest of the game.
Harvesters idling at an exhausted field go back to work on their own when a field they can reach holds a truckload again.
Three small twitches are gone: the forward camp, the landing-war objective and the raze's next target no longer flip back and forth between two reads every think.
The late game steps faster: the colony-site evaluation that reran on every deposit is cached, so a long match with many live fields costs less per tick.

2026-09-25

The army that arrives together

BALANCE v138 BREAKS OLD SAVES

A commander's ground army now advances at the pace of its slowest ground class, so a body reaches the enemy line together instead of one class at a time.
That pace binds only while enemy artillery stands at the objective; a base with nothing left to fight, a turret wall or a line without artillery is razed at full speed.
On a contested front the commander adds production before it walls: the depot its ring was starving for now stands ahead of the next wall segment.
A colony race whose escorts fly and never hold the ground concedes the body instead of pouring pods into it; the invasion program takes the target from there.
A unit lost to a turret's fire is the siege duel's price, not a gift to the enemy's army: the commander no longer stands its assault down at first contact with a wall.

2026-09-25

The colony that becomes a front

BALANCE v137

A landing on one of the commander's colonies now makes that colony a front: it trains to its home ceiling and its relief rides the front budget for as long as the landed army stands.
On a front, a factory whose exit sits under two of the enemy's guns pauses its mints until the guns move or die — and a landed howitzer line counts as guns now, not only turrets, the yard mint included.
A colony fighting a landing no longer punches into a read its own door would refuse; the home base's last-stand punch keeps its right.
A loaded game whose first shells land before the commander's first thought no longer trips a fault in its standoff answer.

2026-09-24

The wall that counts

BALANCE v136

A structure the enemy loses in a commander's sight now counts in its exchange ledger at full value, so an assault cracking a fortress reads its own work instead of a donation.
Under a wall it is cracking, the commander keeps training its siege answer: the ledger pause that held the howitzers back while the turrets fell now lifts as they fall.
The commander's early donation read no longer misfires at a wall it is winning against — the standing false alarm at the half-hour is gone.

2026-09-24

The volley that lands whole

BALANCE v135

A commander massing an invasion in orbit no longer releases it in pieces under the enemy's line: the batch waits until it can land at or over what the landing site demands, then goes down together — one Moon program that trickled three tranches into a wall now drops one volley.
The batch is timed to the enemy's orbital gun: pods hold on their pads while it is charged and launch into the window after it fires, so a parked fleet is no longer swept as it assembles — fifty-two pods lost in one tester's game became ten.
The spaceport count now reads the same bar, so a program sized to fly a line-sized volley inside one charge of the enemy's gun builds the pads it needs rather than the pads a smaller drop would.
When an assault meets the enemy, the commander now judges the fight from its leading edge instead of the middle of its column: a body strung out on the march saw nothing while its front died, and now sees the line the moment the first units reach it.
A colony sitting on metals it cannot use now ships them home when the home world's builds are starved and it has no deposit or smelter of its own — one pod at a time from each colony until the bill is met. A starved home still spends each pod on walls before factories; that order is the next release's question.

2026-09-23

The assault that stood at the door

BALANCE v134

A commander that pulls an assault back to its staging door no longer counts the time it spent standing there as time without contact, so a body that finally leaves the door presses the attack instead of turning for home on the same order.

2026-09-23

The front gets its walls

BALANCE v133

A commander holding a front on a fortified body now ships regolith to it when the walls and turrets it wants there are starved of mass and every regolith deposit on the body sits under the enemy's guns — the ring goes up from the first pod instead of never.
The metals a front's ring is waiting on are held back from the depot's tank pick while that ring can still be built, so a relief cargo builds a gun before it buys a tank that dies at the gate.
On a front body, a factory whose exit sits under two or more of the enemy's known guns mints no combat unit until those guns are gone — depot and barracks alike; the units born there were dying inside a second. The home world is untouched.

2026-09-23

Richer veins, and a front that is a front

BALANCE v132

Every metals deposit now holds a third more than before, on Earth, the Moon and Mars alike — water, regolith and helium-3 are unchanged. One tester's last game turned on the metals running out: the whole system was mined dry by the ninety-minute mark and a half-million-credit treasury could buy nothing but infantry and power plants. New maps only; a saved game keeps the deposits it was started with, and a custom map keeps its author's.
A commander whose colony can no longer truck metals — every deposit on the body under the enemy's guns — now builds its regolith smelter first instead of leaving the want at the back of the queue behind everything else, so the plant stands from the first relief shipment rather than the seventh.
A body where the commander holds a construction yard while its invasion target stands there is treated as a front, not a colony: it garrisons to its home strength at every difficulty instead of a colony's share. The bigger army does not by itself win the siege — what a front base needs to hold its ground is the next round's work.

2026-09-22

The commander lands where it looked

BALANCE v131

The landing scan now prices where a rocket actually comes down, not the cell it aimed at: a pod lands a few cells off its request, and on a crowded Moon that put more than half of one game's landings inside guns the commander had already mapped as covered
Guns still under construction count as guns at the landing site — a railgun finishes inside a pod's flight, and one defender walled the exact landing cell while the stream was in the air
A beachhead construction vehicle no longer launches into an escort that landed seconds ago and is already dying: the commander waits until the escort has actually held before the vehicle rides — one lost-home game that had timed out is now won in thirty-two minutes

2026-09-22

The commander arms its bank

BALANCE v130

A commander that has won its home world no longer holds its garrison at a peace-time ceiling while its treasury climbs: the bank it has already earned now lifts what it may keep under arms — one game held a fifty-eight-thousand army for an hour with the treasury still rising
The lift is bounded by the same war-chest cap the commander's ordinary ceiling reads, so a poor colony still garrisons and a rich one still banks; what it does with the larger army is the next release's question

2026-09-22

The commander takes its turn

BALANCE v129

A colony under an enemy strike weapon no longer freezes after its first umbrella: the commander had asked every few seconds for a second umbrella the rules refuse on a one-yard colony, and built nothing else while it waited — one Mars colony sat as a five-building outpost for forty minutes
The Kessler barrage and the blackout charge take their turn in the build order the moment the commander can pay for them, instead of waiting behind every wall and turret it wants first — a whole game passed without either being built while hundreds of rockets flew overhead
A relief cargo is bought once per need, not once per launch pad: nineteen idle pads had each bought their own cargo for one starving colony, and most of it landed on a stock that was already full
The fuel line no longer scales to a rocket programme the colony has no metal to launch: over a hundred fuel plants had gone up in twenty minutes on a world whose last metal deposit was gone

2026-09-21

The commander finds the door

BALANCE v128

A colony no longer builds its vehicle depot on a raised shelf its own vehicles cannot leave: a Mars colony had minted two construction vehicles onto such a shelf, waited on them for the rest of the game, and never grew a second yard
So a commander driven off its home world can now expand the colony it fled to, build the pads and plants a return needs, and mount the counter-invasion instead of banking millions while one pad idles

2026-09-20

The commander stops dancing

BALANCE v127 BREAKS OLD SAVES

A seat whose trucks a raid just killed now keeps the price of the next truck in hand while the raiders are only in view, so it no longer spends its last credits on guns and sits at a hundred credits for the rest of the game
An assault pressed against a defensive line no longer re-orders every soldier to the spot it already stands on, marches it a few paces to a re-numbered one, or turns it toward a different wall segment as a raze eats the wall, several times a minute for the length of the siege
An assault's settled members are its own: the muster, the home guard, the sortie and the convoy no longer collect a soldier the wave already placed; a convoy escort that has reached the site stays with its convoy, and the counter-battery detachment keeps its post and its aim while the enemy guns shift by a few paces
A wave that has just massed at the door no longer re-gathers and re-departs every few seconds while its reinforcements stand beside it, and it leaves as one body: the slow guns still walking to their places go with it instead of being left behind and re-gathered
A raid on the home base no longer pulls the whole army home every minute: the commander counts the units already answering the raiders before calling anyone else back, so the assault keeps marching while the home guard deals with it
On the Moon the commander no longer sends the same body out and calls it home every forty seconds for an hour: an assault leaves only when the part that will actually march can face what it sees
On Medium a standing assault that is losing badly now stands down as it does on Hard; the hour-long conveyor seen in a tester's game is closed on every difficulty
The invasion program now paces its landing bar by the rate its pods actually gather, so a fleet held in orbit converts a dozen minutes sooner instead of waiting on a ceiling it never reaches

2026-09-18

New ground under the treads

The ground is no longer flat paint: Earth, the Moon and Mars each wear scanned soil on the flats and rock on the slopes, with grain that holds when the camera comes all the way down
The light was rebuilt and the finishing pass finally runs: a fault had kept every earlier build without glow or grade, so emitters now bloom, the Moon reads cold and hard, and Mars sits warm under its haze
Barracks, refineries, solar fields, silos and turrets, with the tank and the harvester, now carry real surfaces: painted shell, bare steel and poured concrete, dusted from above by the world they stand on
Bridges were rebuilt in the same concrete and steel as the bases they connect
Forests, water and the far horizon now sit in the same light as everything else, so a base no longer looks pasted onto its map
The first load is about four megabytes heavier for all of it; frame rates measured the same as before on every world

2026-09-18

The commander finds the exits

BALANCE v126

A standing assault that is losing badly against an army it cannot beat now stands down instead of feeding fresh units into the enemy line one at a time; the hour-long conveyor of the last game is gone
Having stood down, the commander does not throw the next wave at the same line a minute later: while the losses that pulled it back are still fresh and the odds still read hopeless, the door stays shut
Landing parties on a contested world are no longer read as a beachhead the moment one packet survives; while the ground is killing what lands, the invasion keeps assembling instead of dripping tanks into the guns
A treasury that could pay the whole invasion bill no longer buys single pods into a world where nothing of its own stands
Three twitches are gone: a hover craft drifting past the muster ring is no longer pulled back to its spoke every few seconds, a howitzer at the assault's door that turns to answer enemy shellfire is no longer yanked back to the door, and the counter-battery detachment no longer flip-flops between holding behind the yard and advancing to its post when enemy guns stand on two sides of the base
On the Moon the railgun picket gets its turn in the build queue ahead of the endless turret ring, so the coilgun's floor is met and the Long Nine follows
Against a pure howitzer cluster the assault now stands off at the cluster's reach and lets its own guns duel, rather than charging into the splash
A punch whose marching body would be pulled home moments after it left is no longer thrown at the enemy every thirty seconds through alternating doors; the commander waits until the body that will actually march can hold the line

2026-09-16

The first briefing

A briefing card now greets new commanders at the main menu, with the Trade Hub's own portrait: harvested resources are not credits until a Trade Hub sells them, the lesson too many first games learned the hard way
Close the card once and it stays closed; tick DON'T SHOW TIPS to silence every future briefing, and the TIPS switch in the menu's settings row brings them back
The choice is remembered by this browser alone, so a fresh machine gets the briefing again

2026-09-15

The commander stops dancing, part four

BALANCE v125

When the building an army was marching on fell, the next pick is anchored on where the army was actually ordered and on what it is shooting, not on a siege gun's stale door order or a formation slot thirty units off; the detours to a power plant and back are gone
A far army no longer swaps its aim between a factory and the turret the enemy keeps rebuilding beside it every minute; it keeps its aim until it arrives at the cluster, then the usual rules govern
A forward camp under a live wave stays put through a hopeless read that flickers with the enemy units in view; the whole wave used to slosh between the camp and the door every time the read blinked
A siege detachment whose post is the only uncovered ground around keeps it: it no longer walks back to a covered muster point and out again each think, and it keeps aiming at the gun it was posted against
The picket line no longer conscripts a howitzer the siege detachment has posted

2026-09-15

The commander stops dancing, part three

BALANCE v124

When the building an army was marching on fell, the commander's next pick could land on a wall by the door and then bounce back to the gun line the next moment; the pick now goes straight to the next defense in the line
A single turret the enemy rebuilt far across the map no longer drags a besieging army off its line and back again each time it goes up; the breach is chosen on the line the army is actually grinding
A siege detachment holding outside a gun line keeps its howitzers between glimpses of the enemy guns instead of losing them to the main army every few seconds and calling them back
A committed detachment fires from its post rather than chasing a retreating howitzer twenty units out and walking back, over and over
A gunship wing that was sent home stays home until it lands, and a wing already out finishes its sortie; the old read flipped it home and back every think as enemy flak drifted in and out of view
Bombers staging for a strike hold at the staging point instead of drifting toward their pad and being re-sent every second

2026-09-14

The commander stops dancing, part two

BALANCE v123 BREAKS OLD SAVES

An army marching on a base staged at a mid camp, then at the door, and flipped between the two every think once its massed share sat on the key — the last dance the previous release left. The leg is one-way now: once the body advances to the door it stays aimed there until the assault ends or re-musters
A siege detachment holding outside a gun line stands its ground: it no longer chases whatever wanders inside its reach, gets recalled, and chases again every nine seconds; its anchor yard and hold point no longer walk around the yard as the enemy guns move
The wave and the detachment stop fighting over the same howitzers, and the expansion convoy keeps its escorts even when the detachment recruits by rank
A gunship ordered home to the airfield stays home instead of being walked back to the ground camp at the flight cadence; a bomber already parked on the pad it was staging over is no longer relaunched to that spot every think
The muster point under an anti-strike umbrella holds while the umbrella stands: an enemy that rebuilt its Long Nine every forty seconds used to hop the whole reserve between the yard and the umbrella on every flicker
Reinforcements arriving at the door while the assault fights ahead no longer pull the pulse that just left back to the door, and the wave no longer re-aims at a turret foundation the enemy re-places every minute

2026-09-14

The commander stops dancing

BALANCE v122

The exchange withdraw is gone. It and the commit door read the same battlefield two different ways, so every thirty seconds the commander ordered its army out and pulled it straight back, an army marching in place at its own gate. Without it the army commits once and fights; the commander wins as often, and where the flap lived it wins in half the time
A unit that has arrived where it was sent is no longer re-ordered to that spot every think, at the wave, the muster ring and the retreat: the shoving crowd at the yard and the twitching at the staging point stop
An escort assigned to an expansion convoy belongs to the convoy until it arrives: the wave no longer pulls the same howitzers toward the enemy while the convoy pulls them toward the new site, a tug that flipped their orders four times in ten seconds

2026-09-07

The commander stops recalling an army that is already home

BALANCE v121

A wave standing at the commander's own yard now counts as that yard's guard: the home recall no longer pulls a howitzer line a few steps from its own Moon yard every think to answer a few flak tracks, then sends it straight back the same think — the hour-long stalemate in that game is a win
The same law reads at home: an army massed at the doorstep of its Earth base is no longer recalled from a launch it has just begun, so two whole launches that died on the drawing board now leave
After a home recall on a beachhead the commander now waits two thinks before recommitting, the same rule its other stand-downs already follow

2026-09-07

The commander stops dancing at the gate

BALANCE v120

When its army alone reads a fight as lost while its wave is still staging, the commander now keeps the camp and pulls the wave back instead of walking it into the guns: the seventy-odd units that died in half a minute in the last tester games are down to a third
The home guard now counts a siege line shelling the estate from outside the yard ring, and the muster attacks it as one body: the three home yards that fell in the last tester game now stand
The home recall weighs the visible threat against what the muster can raise, and never pulls a wave standing far from home: the army walked home for five flak tracks in the game before now stays on its raze
After a withdraw or a no-contact timeout the commander waits two thinks before recommitting the same objective, instead of re-issuing the charge the same think it stood the wave down
The wave holds its aim on the building it chose while that building stands, and its camp no longer chases the aim around: the two-step every think at the gate, watched on every tester game since spring, is gone
A recalled army spreads around its rally point instead of piling onto one spot and shoving itself for minutes

2026-09-07

The commander's umbrella finds room

BALANCE v119

When its home ring has no room left for an umbrella, the commander now raises it at the edge of the estate and rallies its army under it, instead of sending the umbrella to an outpost and leaving the home muster bare under an enemy long gun
The umbrella also takes its turn: while a long gun stands and the rally point is uncovered it goes up before the next wall or turret, not after them
A hopeless read no longer freezes a wave that has lost its objective: the units already forward take the visible enemy army as their target the same think, instead of standing in front of it until a timeout

2026-09-06

The commander doubles its umbrella

BALANCE v118

The commander's read that its home is won now needs a yard standing on its home world: with its Earth base gone it no longer turns homeward on a verdict from the other worlds
Under an enemy long gun the commander now keeps two umbrellas over its rally point instead of one, so the shot that lands while the first umbrella recharges meets the second
The late game's small lags are put down: the commander no longer re-walks the whole world for every deposit each time it weighs a landing, and the once-a-second hitch on a big board goes with it

2026-09-06

The commander stops shooting itself

BALANCE v117 BREAKS OLD SAVES

The Hard commander now puts a refinery wherever it founds a yard on fresh metals instead of only at its first field: the outposts that ran on nothing for half an hour in the last tester game refine from the start, and the income that a cap of three per world was throttling arrives (Medium and Easy keep the old cap for now)
The defensive Blackout now prices its own vehicles at the moment the pulse lands, not the moment it fires: a punch that would freeze the commander's own arriving column under the enemy's guns is refused
An expansion's escort no longer stands on the very pad its construction vehicle is trying to deploy on: the escorts hold off the pad and guard the site the vehicle is actually walking to, so the whole convoy stops pacing between two spots while the yard waits (every difficulty)
A wave no longer marches out and turns back seconds later: the commander reads the odds its own withdraw rule would apply on first contact before it commits, and holds at home when they already refuse
An open invasion front no longer locks itself shut for an hour: the rate read that demanded a park it had forbidden itself to buy now credits a first window's assembly, and the pods get bought
A gun carpet standing on the commander's own yards no longer eats its siege train one howitzer at a time: a breach with no standoff point is no breach, the train banks, and a hopeless muster inside the guns' reach stops feeding hardsuits into them
The construction-vehicle reel is closed: one vehicle per pick, minted only when the site read has stood clear for three thinks, instead of four popping out of a one-think gap in the enemy's fire

2026-09-05

The commander lands to fight and refuses the enemy's ground

BALANCE v116

A landed force that comes down under the enemy's guns or inside its base now attacks toward its objective at once instead of holding the landing zone: the 115 pods that stood still and died on arrival in the last tester game reach the line that shot them
A fleet parked over an enemy orbital gun no longer refills into it sweep after sweep: once the gun has taken its toll the commander lands what stands before the next shot, and a hundred pods that were lost to one gun for nothing come down as a beachhead with a yard behind it
The commander's read that its home is won now counts only its home world, so it no longer turns homeward on a verdict from the Moon while its Earth base is falling to a siege
An expansion never targets a deposit inside an enemy base or under a gun it can see or has already found, and when every free deposit is the enemy's it refuses to expand there rather than walk a convoy into the guns — eight construction vehicles a game in the last tester game

2026-09-04

The commander keeps its memory across a save

BALANCE v115 BREAKS OLD SAVES

A saved game now plays on exactly as it would have if it had never stopped: the commander's invasion target, its colony target and its read of each world's objective ride the save, where before a reload forgot them for one turn and quietly released a fleet it had deliberately parked in orbit
A parked invasion fleet is no longer scored a failure six seconds after it opens: a wave is judged only once its first landing has had time to resolve, and the third wave on the last tester game, which the old ledger held in orbit for forty minutes, lands and stands instead
When the commander does stop launching, it stops with a plan: the resume checks run every turn the hold stands (not only when no gun covers the orbit), new pods wait on their pads where no orbital gun can sweep them, two failed waves switch the next release from a probe to the full requirement, and a fleet parked with nowhere to land comes home after five minutes instead of sitting under the enemy's gun

2026-09-04

The commander rallies out of reach and fires the gun

BALANCE v114

An attack now gathers at the first point along its own approach that no enemy gun it has seen can reach, instead of massing where the walls can shell it — the staging column that bled one unit at a time on both recent long games stands out of range
The orbital superweapon on the Moon is finally built when its picket stands: the commander counts the railguns on the whole body against a capped bill instead of demanding a full ring at every one of a dozen yards, and once the bill is met the gun goes to the front of the build queue on the first turn it can pay for it — with its power plant placed ahead so the base never browns out. On the last tester game the gun stood within a minute and fired three times where the commander had sat idle for twenty
A colony convoy's route is now measured against the guns along it (two cuts were tried: refusing every covered road, or taking the least-covered one); both cost more than the road they saved, so the read is kept for analysis and the convoy drives as before
New instruments log why a punch was vetoed, which pass chose an expansion site, whether the Moon picket bill was met and whether the build queue ever reached the gun

2026-09-03

The commander reads the fight in front of it

BALANCE v113

The staging laws from the last release stand down: fresh units no longer wait at home for a cohort, and an attack's door count and staging escape read the old way — on the first long game they cost the commander its whole Earth war
A standing attack now judges whether it is losing the exchange by what it can see on the body it is fighting on, not by the enemy's strength across the whole map: a Moon fight no longer retreats because of an army on Earth
When enemy pods are bound for a body the commander holds, its orbital gun for that body jumps to the front of the build queue instead of waiting behind thirty other wants — the gun stands where the landing is coming
The commander logs where every retreat goes and what bar its landing war reads, so the next tester game can be read at the think's own pace

2026-09-02

The river runs under the crossing

BALANCE v112

Every river ford is a concrete causeway at bank level now: the road crosses on it and the river runs beneath through culverts, and the widest crossings carry an open span on piers
The river no longer stops dead at each ford — one continuous sheet flows under the crossing and out the other side
Forests read as forests: each stand is a dozen small trees with overlapping canopies, conifers rising out of the broadleaf, the ground dark beneath, the canopy moving in the wind
A crossing sits at bank level, so a unit standing on it sees the banks like anyone else instead of only the channel it used to stand in

2026-09-02

The commander keeps its army together

BALANCE v111

Fresh units no longer trickle toward a standing attack one at a time: they gather at home and march to the staging camp as one body, and an attack departs with only the troops that are actually staged
The staging count reads the attack's own body — units walking home are not counted against it and units already past the door count as arrived — so a big army no longer stalls at its own door
The staging escape that sent an attack straight in after three minutes now waits for the slowest unit's march when the door is far, instead of dispatching a column across the map
The forward staging camp anchors on the enemy's buildings, never on a wall segment, so a walled base no longer pulls the camp to its wall face
A besieged colony's siege guns hold outside every visible shooter's reach, the answer is priced against the whole enemy line rather than one gun, and it anchors on the colony under fire
The depot stops minting siege guns while the exchange reads as a donation, and the guns it does mint are no longer marched one at a time into a superior line's reach: the pump of guns is closed
The heavy punch counts the part of an enemy base it has not yet seen as fortified in the same measure as the part it has, so a punch into the fog is priced against the whole base instead of the guns in view

2026-09-01

The commander answers the repulse

BALANCE v110

A commander whose opening strike is called home, or pulls a mauled wave back to regroup, no longer sits on a standing army for ten minutes saving up one heavy blow — it re-prices the blow against what it has seen
When the enemy force it believes in is small, the counter goes the moment a wave-sized army stands; when the seen force is large, it still banks for the heavy punch — the live-game fortress lesson stands
A counter-wave never leaves at less than full wave strength: the valve floor is untouched, so the drip of undersized commits into a fortified base cannot return
Mirror games between two commanders end when one side wins the exchange instead of both banking at home: the thirty-to-forty-minute stalemates are gone
Nothing changes for a commander that has not yet fought its opening wave, and a commander that has already given up on breaking a wall keeps its single heavy-punch doctrine

2026-09-01

The commander closes the war

BALANCE v109

The commander now prices an enemy fortress at what it would truly cost to break — every gun's reach, rate and armor — when it sizes a landing, instead of a flat sticker per turret
When its launch pads can assemble that honest force within a few launch windows, the landing waits for it and lands as one blow; when they cannot, the proven serial beachhead doctrine stands
A commander holding the upper hand no longer sits on a mountain of credits and a parked army while the enemy fortifies: the sixty-minute stand-off that never closed is gone
The beachhead builder rides with the landing again — a construction vehicle flies to the new front whenever the landed force can hold its ground, so a foothold becomes a base
A won home now converts three quarters of its standing garrison into the invasion tranche instead of all of it, keeping mid-game closes brisk without the overshoot that stalled them

2026-08-31

The commander opens its eyes

BALANCE v108

Every commander now flies one early look at each enemy home, and sends fresh eyes whenever a report goes stale — no more scouts wandering empty corners while an army masses unseen
An army the commander watches die is no longer feared for half an hour after the fight: the books balance on the spot, and the counter-march prices what is actually left standing
In free-for-alls the commander picks its war by the biggest credible threat it has laid eyes on, not merely the nearest neighbor — a runaway leader now draws attention instead of quietly running the table
A massing force SEEN in the opening minutes arms the home levy early: the draft grows toward the observed threat, and a second troop hall stands apart from the first so one strike cannot silence the whole muster
A commander already under the knife spends on the war the moment the pivot arms — and stands down the moment its own eyes say the threat is gone, not thirty minutes later
Free-for-all matches now insist on a Large map or bigger: the measured old boards gave each commander half the room a proper duel enjoys, and the fairness of every start is now proven, not assumed

2026-08-30

The commander raises the levy

BALANCE v107

Every commander now keeps a standing levy through the opening minutes: the economy boom still comes, but never again at the price of an empty base when an early army walks in
The home yard digs in on a schedule at the higher difficulties — insurance guns stand at the gate by the third minute, whatever style the commander is playing
An enemy force arriving at the gate freezes the shopping list: new trade posts, refineries and campuses wait while the wallet goes to the war, and the boom resumes the moment the threat clears
No commander dies rich anymore — a base under the knife spends its savings on the defense instead of banking them to the wipe
A beaten-off rush now meets a commander with an army already standing: the counter-march leaves sooner, and more often ends the attacker's game for good
Easy keeps its promise to new commanders — its levy is a token force, and a decisive early push still carries the day

2026-08-30

The commander guards its own gate

BALANCE v106

An enemy force standing on the commander's Construction Yard is now answered as the emergency it is: the free garrison musters onto the intruders at once — in the opening minutes included, at every difficulty
An army already marching out turns around when the home yard comes under real threat, instead of trading bases with an attacker who will finish first
A commander whose scouts die young sends out new eyes instead of playing blind — early warning is what turns a base rush from a checkmate into a fight
A beaten-off rush is no longer free practice: with the attacker's army spent and its base seen thin, the commander presses the advantage instead of politely rebuilding
A lone raider poking at the base perimeter still gets ignored — the garrison holds its ground unless the threat at the gate is worth the whole guard

2026-08-29

The stern chase begins

BALANCE v105

A wave that is winning the fight in front of it no longer breaks off because a distant ledger reads scary — the withdraw call now weighs the strength standing at its own battle, not the whole theater's
An attacking force finishes the base it is standing in before marching on: the aim stays with a cluster until nothing of it remains, instead of teleporting to the next target of its preferred kind
An enemy down to scattered remnants gets swept nearest-first — no more standing over a beaten base re-consulting priorities while the last buildings wait
The race for an empty Moon now funds like the race it is: the war chest pays for the landing while the window is open, instead of waiting for an enemy to show up there first
A commander that catches its enemy trading Earth away for space shifts gears — the launch complex surges, the economy escalates, and on Hard the home garrison thins to a survival floor while the standing army keeps taxing the abandoned estate
Holding the Moon now means holding its orbit: enemy convoys parked overhead draw an interdiction battery instead of enjoying impunity
Supply pods no longer queue into an orbit a ready enemy sweeper is watching — launches wait out the gun and surge through the gap it leaves

2026-08-29

The worlds wear their own gravity

Artillery now flies the sky it was fired under — a tight lob on Earth, a long hanging arc over the Moon, the middle path on Mars — and the blast lands with the shell instead of ahead of it
Every impact kicks up the ground it actually struck: lunar regolith leaps in clean fans and falls straight back, Martian dust hangs and drifts downwind, Earth throws honest brown smoke
Guns rock the vehicles that fire them — a sharp snap under Earth gravity, a long floaty settle on the Moon — and wrecks shed armor plates that tumble as far as their world lets them
The lighter rendering preset for laptops now also trims the effects themselves: every readable flash and tracer stays, while decorative smoke trails, debris showers and ambient weather stand down

2026-08-28

The strategist picks a different move

BALANCE v104

A commander whose every attack plan meets a lawful refusal no longer waits out the stalemate rich and idle — it reads the deadlock for what it is, pivots home, and turns its war chest into a standing defense
A commander that has won its home ground but can see the enemy massing elsewhere now garrisons against the army that is actually coming, not the peace it is enjoying — the gun rings and the training lines both re-arm
The race for the Moon starts sooner: the tech that unlocks the first colony vehicle jumps the research queue the moment the opening calls for it, unless a fortified enemy already demands the war chain first
A colony landing that can see enemy convoys inbound to the same body no longer arrives as an unescorted work crew — the escort ships first, sized to hold the beachhead, and the builder follows it down
Easy gives new commanders room to breathe: the first attack comes minutes later and arrives as a probe rather than a verdict, and follow-up pushes pace themselves more slowly
Starting a quick match now fields an Easy opponent by default — Medium and Hard are one tap away in match setup, exactly where they were
Laptops and small machines run smoother: integrated graphics get a lighter rendering preset automatically, and very high-resolution displays stop paying for more pixels than they can afford
A browser running with hardware acceleration disabled now says so plainly instead of crawling in silence

2026-08-28

The garrison answers the guns

BALANCE v103

A colony watching siege guns roll up no longer files its vehicle depot behind the warehouses — the one building that can arm an answer now leads the emergency build, beside the walls
Reinforcement guns stop trickling into a standing artillery line one at a time to die: the garrison gathers its answer out of the line's reach and commits it as one body when it can actually match the guns
The answer is sized against everything riding with the enemy guns, not the guns alone — a flak screen around an artillery line makes the line bigger, and the garrison waits for the weight to meet it
The rule that stops a doomed colony from feeding units into a kill zone keeps its grip, with one exception earned: building the counter-battery that will fight as a mass — turtling no longer means disarming
A besieged colony's relief draws on the commander's whole won-war bank instead of a fixed allowance the siege had outgrown, and a drop that finds its landing covered hunts for clear ground behind the yard before giving up
The air wing stops flying laps: a plane with a working strip stays on it between sorties instead of being recalled to the muster ground every think — and idle wings stop being a gathered target for enemy fire
Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-27

The victory goes back to work

BALANCE v102

A world the commander has fully won finally reads as won: the garrison holds the ground while the factory and the war's attention turn to the next front, instead of drilling an ever-larger parade army against nobody for an hour
The invasion's wallet opens with the win — a commander sitting on a won home funds its off-world force line from the whole bank, where it once nursed a sliver of its treasury while declaring itself too poor to act
The army that won the home war now underwrites the next one: its standing worth releases the reinforcement budget for the contested front, so victory converts into shipping instead of rust
Colony ships stop planting next door to a known enemy estate just because the deposits are rich — an undefended neighbor is still a neighbor, and the pick sites at standoff before the first turret ever shows
Relief pods respect the kill zone: a drop that would come down inside the enemy's grown gun line waits instead of donating itself — reinforcement is for the garrison, not the enemy's ledger
A landing is priced against the guns the defender can raise while the pods are falling, not only the ones standing at launch — the escort that arrives is sized for the wall it will actually meet
The orbital park stops being a farm: no new pods are bought into a swept orbit while the launch door is closed, and a park that has already paid the sweep's toll lands what remains instead of feeding the next pass
Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-26

The foreman walks the line

BALANCE v101

Defenses take real time to raise now: a gun turret builds in twelve seconds, the railgun in nineteen, walls in four and a half — the turret dropped mid-battle can be shot apart on its scaffolding while the scouted, pre-built line still turns the fight
The commander's construction ran one building at a time, and under siege the endless wall repairs starved everything behind them — its invasion once declared thirteen fuel plants short and built none for forty-five minutes on a full treasury
A supply line its war has declared short now gets its own crew: the fuel plant, the launch pad, the refinery it needs rises beside the wall repairs instead of waiting behind them, and the frozen-rich siege camp is gone
Power is now a war resource with teeth: railguns and anti-air go dark on a starved grid until the deficit is fixed, while the mechanical gun turret only slows — brownouts have consequences on both sides of the wall
The commander plans its grid like it plans its guns: a heavy turret whose power the base cannot carry waits for its solar plant first, so its own line never browns itself out
Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-25

The war stops paying tribute

BALANCE v100 BREAKS OLD SAVES

The commander now remembers what its last landings actually bought: two released waves in a row dying at three-to-one close the launch door, and the fleet banks in orbit until the ground changes — a re-aim, a thinned wall, or fresh dry ground reopens it
Pods shredded in orbit finally count: while a covering Kessler keeps collecting parked kills, new launches hold and the stock banks — the conveyor that fed a sweep farm for twenty minutes is out of service
A world whose every landing cell sits inside a gun's reach is refused outright, and the invasion re-aims at a world it can actually come down on — dry ground now outranks a thinner wall
Invading a world the odds already call hopeless demands overwhelming mass: the landing bar doubles there, so the war arrives all at once or not at all
A closed door is now a lease, not a verdict: a rich commander starved of offense re-prices the race for a lost world on its own clock — with its whole treasury argued in — instead of sitting frozen on a fortune
The air wing flies like it means it: planes launch with full racks at the moment the ground assault steps off, strike corridors stop wobbling home, and an arrived escort holds on station instead of shuttling to base and back every second
Buildings rise on real scaffolding now: a fresh construction site starts at a tenth of its strength and grows as it builds, so the turret dropped in front of a charging army can be shot apart mid-frame while the scouted, pre-built line still turns the battle — and the researched targeting network delivers half its old punch
Older saves do not cross this line: the memory the new laws run on lives inside the save itself. Older replays end here too

2026-08-24

The commander storms the fortress

BALANCE v99

Railguns and walls on the target now arm the assault doctrine — a fortress without an orbital gun no longer reads as an open door, and the war stops donating landings to one
When the line is out of reach the commander stops feeding it: launches freeze, ready rockets hold on their pads, and the war resumes only when the numbers work
Fuel plants and launch pads now follow the size of the assault the commander intends, not the size of the fleet it already fields — and a frozen front keeps building them
A victorious home army no longer stands down forever: it converts into the invasion force. Colony ships bound for contested worlds wait for their escort
Beachheads on defended worlds raise walls before comforts, and the assault is priced against the guns still under construction — no stale reads on a growing fortress
A commander besieged at home now answers siege guns gun for gun, and its masonry joins the emergency budget while the line stands
The decisive world is no longer resigned: with an idle army heavy enough to break the siege, the commander mounts the attempt instead of walking away
Orbital assemblies that stop growing release their strike instead of waiting forever, and a collapsing empire finally knows to fight for its survival

2026-08-23

The commander races you to the Moon

BALANCE v98

The Moon is the only world where the Long Nine and the railgun can stand, and the cheapest world to launch from — and the commander never knew it. The colony pick now ranks worlds by what only they can build, and races for the high ground
The first colony rides the opening's own clock — the launch pad and the builder tech, not a timer. The colony pod outranks the GPS and comms birds on the pad, Earth's next base waits for it, and three fuel plants fly the opening instead of one
Enemy pods seen heading for an empty world make it jump the queue the same turn. A landing there is a front, not a garrison: the escort assembles in orbit, sized to what is inbound and visible, lands as one force, and the builder comes down behind it
On its Moon yard the commander wants a railgun picket around the yard and its power before it wants the Long Nine — the wall, then the gun. Once the yard stands, the world trains like a home and the relief pipeline reinforces it
A charged enemy Kessler that its owner simply held pinned the invasion at two pods forever: a ready gun read as an imminent sweep, so the assembly was flushed every turn into a railgun wall for an hour. A held gun is now the owner's choice of when; the assembly flies whole
Against a walled world under such a gun the release bar is the line at which a landing holds, not the full price of the wall, and a park that can never clear it lands massed anyway — one volley per sweep — while the program re-aims at a softer door if one stands, and the beachhead that holds the line stands its yard on it
Fuel is a rate on Earth, not a stock: the plants idle at three launches banked, so a big staging flew what its plants could feed. The program now reads launches per window, sizes its pads to the bar, leads the volley with howitzers, and lands on the least-covered cell when no dry one exists — and the staging stops selling the water its own fuel line drinks
Every law arms at every difficulty at its own clock; Medium gains the hold-through guard it never had. Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-22

The drop comes down in one piece

BALANCE v96–97

A commander that knew an enemy Long Nine stood on another world still gathered its whole army at the construction yard, a few steps outside its own Aegis umbrellas. While a hostile strike weapon stands, the army now musters under the nearest charged umbrella and follows the charge between them
A rich commander could sit on a fortune with its launch program one pad short, because the builder only ever tried the ground around its first yard. A building that cannot fit there now goes to the nearest own yard with room, and the wish list stops naming yards that have none
A commander whose only free worlds were both fortresses sat on four hundred thousand credits and launched nothing for an hour: its colony program had named a fortress it could never escort into, and owned the pad. The colony pick now screens such worlds, and a waiting colony yields the pad to the invasion program
Launch staging flipped between two worlds at every fuel threshold — 163 times in one game — and a walled world was fed pods singly the moment a survivor stood. The staging now follows the park until it has flown, and a wall holds the batch together until the beachhead actually holds
A defender's Kessler sweep fired at the first pod of an assembling wave and killed almost nothing, then sat recharging while the rest came down. The gun now reads the pads feeding the park and waits for it to mature — one sweep, dozens of pods
Pods landed on the deposit farthest from the nearest known building — a range-blind pick that put ten builders in a row under an artillery line. Every landing now reads the guns' reach and the army it can see first, and takes the dry door the wave marches through anyway
The fuel and metals lines follow the launch bill: twelve pads get as many water trucks and the plants to match, the metals line leads while the program is starved on it, and the build queue stalls on a starved producer instead of spending its stock on luxuries behind it
Coherence, not power — every law arms at every difficulty. Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-21

Trucks before towers

BALANCE v95

A commander whose mining trucks were massacred in a raid could spend the next ten minutes buying a university, a vehicle depot, four turrets and six walls on the income of one surviving truck — then put its last credits into a tank instead of the 400-credit truck that would have restarted the economy, and sit broke for the rest of the game
The next truck now outranks every luxury: while the working fleet is under strength, the replacement is bought before the build queue spends anything, and the queue keeps only what the moment demands — power when the base is browning out, guns when an enemy is actually in sight
A raided fleet counts as provisional income: until the kill zone cools and the fleet is back to half strength, the commander rebuilds mining before it rebuilds anything else
The defense still comes first at the gate: with the enemy in view the wallet goes to soldiers and turrets, and the economy rebuilds the moment the gate is quiet
The standing exhibit — a commander that lost five of six trucks at minute three and starved for a hundred minutes — now rebuilds, holds, and wins the same game at minute nine
Coherence, not power: it arms at every difficulty, because a base that starves beside twenty-five standing buildings reads broken at any skill level
Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-21

The guards go first

BALANCE v93–94

A besieged forward base kept winning the wrong auction: its launch pad flew supply crates while the defenders went unreinforced. Under fire the guards outrank the groceries — reinforcement pods take the pad first, and the crate flies only when nothing else claimed the window
A colony under long-range siege used to train its garrison straight into the kill zone, one soldier at a time. Outranged and hopelessly outweighed, it stops feeding the grinder — dig in behind turrets, evacuate, or assemble a force that can actually land a punch
Reinforcement convoys now read the siege line waiting at their destination and pack counter-battery guns to answer it, instead of pricing only the fixed defenses they can see on the map
A commander staring down a hopeless fortress front now trades it for the open flank it already scouted: the front closes, the fleet re-aims, and the war goes where winning lives
Medium commanders learn the toehold doctrine — against a fortress world the plan re-prices from razing everything to one massed landing that stands, so the drop arrives minutes sooner and lands as one blow
Siege fire from beyond its sight lines no longer fades from the commander's memory while the shells still land: a line seen once and firing on stays priced, and even an unseen gun that draws blood gets marked on the ledger
Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-20

The commander stops tripping over its own base

BALANCE v92

Refineries are now placed facing the ore they serve. They used to land wherever the base scan happened to fit them — sometimes on the far side of their own headquarters, adding a long detour to every single haul
A base can no longer wall off its own loading docks. One taped game had a refinery sealed behind ordinary buildings for forty minutes, trucks idling outside a wall nobody meant to build — placements that would cut or badly lengthen a harvest road are refused outright
Bases keep lanes now. Buildings used to fuse into solid slabs that trapped vehicles in dead-end pockets; every structure now leaves a corridor, and defensive walls still close where walls are meant to close
A safe, resource-rich continent finally gets settled. The commander used to stop at a handful of outposts and let a fortune in ore sit untouched — on a quiet front it now keeps founding bases until the map is genuinely claimed
All of it is coherence, not power, so it arms at every difficulty — an opponent that blockades its own trucks or ignores half a continent reads broken at any skill level
Older saves keep loading with the usual notice; older replays end at this line

2026-08-20

The stutter is put down

BALANCE v91

Big battles could seize the whole game in rhythm — freezes of half a second and worse, striking exactly while the fighting peaked. The rhythm section is gone: the same battles now play through clean
The cause was honest bookkeeping done expensively: hundreds of times a tick, the war room asked whether its trucks could still reach a field, and every answer was priced as a full route survey. Reachability is now a living map, and the question costs nothing
A wave ordered forward used to plan a private route for every vehicle, and re-plan them all whenever anything died. The column now marches shared roads and peels off near the objective — same arrival, a fraction of the thinking
Health bars stopped billing for the whole planet: bars beyond the camera's edge no longer cost the frame anything, no matter how wide the war grows
The route engine's hottest loops run leaner after a formal proof pass — identical answers, measurably faster in the browser
This update ships together with the release below: the save format breaks there — older saves refuse to load and older replays end at that line. Finish anything precious before updating

2026-08-20

Embers still burn

BALANCE v90 BREAKS OLD SAVES

A commander whose assault was torn down as hopeless could order the identical assault a minute later, and the minute after that — the same army into the same guns, all night. Now a hopeless verdict stands until the picture actually changes: the defenses thinned, or the army genuinely outgrew the one that failed
Desperation is still legal — a final stand and a breakthrough punch pass the new door untouched; only the mechanical re-run of a judged-hopeless plan dies
A construction vehicle sent to found a colony could be silently abandoned mid-journey when priorities shifted, parking forever within sight of the resources it was sent for. Minted means finished: it now drives on and deploys at the best ground available
A base could wall itself into a pocket its own harvesters couldn't route out of, then starve at full treasury with fresh fields a short drive away. It now notices the seal and opens its own wall, one segment at a time, until the ore trucks roll again
The air wing kept flying raids into anti-air carpets it had already scouted — squadron after squadron into the same flak. Past a known saturation it refuses the run, unless a charged blackout is ready to darken the guns first
All of this is coherence, not power: it arms at every difficulty, because an opponent that flails, starves itself, or donates its air force reads broken at any skill level
This release changes the save format: older saves refuse to load, and older replays end at this line. Finish anything precious before updating

2026-08-19

The last redoubt falls

BALANCE v89

A war the commander had already won could refuse to end: with the enemy's field army destroyed and its industry dead, the delivered invasion force would park outside the last defended corner — sometimes past the two-hour mark — while the ledgers all read victory
The books were the trap: the landing program counted its force delivered and stopped flying, the forward base it would have fought from lay in rubble, and every organ that could have ordered the assault deferred to another that never would
Delivery now implies prosecution: when the war is decided and the landed force already outweighs what the ground demands, that force marches — no reinforcements requested, none needed
Construction yards end wars, so the assault takes the yard first; the sweep that follows retires the turret line and everything behind it instead of leaving a museum of the enemy's last stand
An undecided war, or a landing still short of its requirement, holds exactly as before — the raze arms only where the commander's own arithmetic already calls the war won and the force present
This is coherence, not power: it arms at every difficulty, because an army camping politely outside a beaten opponent's fence reads broken at any skill level
Older replays stop replaying at this line; saves keep loading with the usual notice

2026-08-19

The worlds sit for their portrait

BALANCE v88

The Moon and Mars traded their crater walls for honest holes: the raised rampart rings are gone, and a sheer two-level drop bars an assault exactly as well as the wall it replaced
What can be driven now looks drivable: crater mouths and the canyon fords descend in broad smooth swales — the staircase diamonds that marched across every crossing are gone
A hole's lip now overlooks its floor. No rampart shelters the bowl; a crater's defense lives at its mouths, where it always really lived
A forensic build series ran the terrain's phantom triangles to ground: mesh gaps at lip turns, a winding fault older than the terraces themselves, a checkerboard hiding in the smoothing math. All extinct
Small craters are circles now. They were squares wearing soft lighting; the survey eye that kept squinting at them was right all along
Crater and canyon walls stopped arriving pre-cut: rim dust spills over the lip, the wall face grades into its floor, and the hard seams that made every hole read as a decal are painted out
The Moon wears its history at last — central peaks rise mid-floor in the big holes and ejecta rays streak the mare

2026-08-18

The guns learn to hold their ground

BALANCE v87 BREAKS OLD SAVES

The same rematch tape had one more lesson in it: the commander's siege guns — bought honestly, by the dozen, to answer a great howitzer line — kept dying as assault conscripts, marched at the nearest visible gun and into the envelope of the seventy behind it. Their median life was under three minutes. This release teaches them to hold ground
Counter-battery guns are a detachment now, not a labor pool: while an enemy siege line stands within reach of a base, the guns bought to defend it are exempt from assault duty and serve from posts at the threatened side — the attack train keeps its own guns and its own job
A counter-battery order fires from where the gun stands and never marches it: out-of-reach shooters are answered by position — the gun posts at the shelled building's side, where anything that can reach the victim is in reach of the victim's guard
The commander also learned when the duel is unwinnable: a remembered enemy line three times its lawful maximum answer stops gun replacements cold and the credits go elsewhere — while every gun already standing fights on; prudence is not surrender
That memory survives the dark: a line seen once is priced for ten minutes even when the fog hides it — the old cycle of rebuild, march, die, forget is structurally gone
A charged superweapon on a dying structure now spends its round rather than die with it — if a valid target exists; the tape's orbital sweep that died charged over an empty sky stays silent, correctly
No caps moved: Medium's maximum lawful answer to a great line is still its cap — that gap is the difficulty, by design; the discipline is how those guns serve, and it applies at every difficulty
Older saves cannot cross this line: the commander's line-memory lives inside the save format itself

2026-08-17

The losing commander stops donating

BALANCE v86

A tester's rematch handed the archive its cleanest diagnosis yet: the commander fought the war correctly, lost it honorably — and funded the winner's snowball the whole way down, feeding trucks and base-builders into the same guns. This release closes the donation channels
A mining camp is no longer 'cleared' just because the trucks stopped dying: while a route's memory stays warm the commander risks a probe pair, not the whole replacement fleet — the batch massacre that followed every quiet spell dies here
A route that keeps eating trucks prices itself out: one loss discounts the run, a proven massacre camp multiplies the toll tenfold, and the fleet finally migrates to safer ground instead of re-picking the graveyard
Base-builders consult the commander's own scars at last: expansion sites reached through a warm kill-zone, or parked under guns it knows about, are passed over while the memory lasts — the slow parade of construction vehicles into enemy lines is done
When a world's last yard falls, its war state falls with it: the standing attack stands down with an honest reason instead of haunting the books, and an invasion staged from the fallen world is re-judged from what survives
A surviving commander saving toward a comeback now builds toward it: the campaign bill's missing pieces — pads, fuel, mining — jump the build queue at the new capital instead of waiting politely behind peacetime habits
And when the hammer is already falling on that capital, it re-scopes: the full reconquest bill yields to the toehold it can still throw while emergency defense drains the savings
Applies at every difficulty — these are sanity laws, not power: Easy, Medium and Hard all stop donating; nobody gets smarter about beating you, only about wasting itself

2026-08-17

The long stalemate learns to end

BALANCE v84–85 BREAKS OLD SAVES

A tester's Medium war produced the archive's slowest heartbreak: ninety minutes of absorbing stalemate — the commander floating a fortune, feeding one pod at a time into a grinder, its orbital gun guarding a world nobody was attacking. Two releases answer that tape
The commander now remembers a refused door: discovering your defenses the hard way leaves a debt that prices the next attempt, and repeated refusal flips it to a patient siege footing until the picture materially changes — no more probe, forget, probe again
Defenses are finally weighed by what they do, not what they cost: a wall of gun turrets reads as the wall it is, so the commander neither charges a fortress it should respect nor cowers from one it outguns
The Medium commander learned to take no for an answer in the field too: it breaks off a losing exchange instead of feeding it, re-routes trucks already driving a route its losses just marked fatal, and pods bound for a base that fell mid-flight divert to the nearest standing colony — yours do the same
The one-pod-at-a-time invasion retires on Medium: landings now mass through the priced batch door Hard has used since its own siege lessons, and a parked armada is a real target for your orbital gun — counterplay the dribble never offered
A rich commander now notices the moment its war chest dwarfs its war bill and scales the armada to spend the difference — and every batch sizes itself to the fuel its pads can actually burn, so the mass launches instead of assembling forever
The first orbital gun builds where the war actually is — the body under invasion, not the quiet home ring — and harvest routes through known danger are priced against the detour instead of forbidden outright
Older saves cannot cross this line: the commander's new memory lives inside the save format itself

2026-08-17

The war tells its story

Every match now ends in a debrief: the full arc of army and treasury for every commander drawn as one graph, the war's totals in a strip, and a story row of the moments that decided it — first blood, superweapon fires, the enemy armada massing
The history survives your saves: the debrief's record rides inside the save file itself, so a game finished across any number of save-and-load sessions still tells its whole story — older saves without the record simply say where recording began
Abandoning a match earns the same debrief before the menu — one click to reconsider, one to leave with the story instead of a black screen
The landing beacon tells you what waits: known guns in reach of your chosen zone and the visible force camped on it, read out before the pod commits — the blind landing dies here
Your Aegis umbrellas keep books now: every interception and the rearm bill it charged, totaled in the debrief — the quiet metals drain finally has a face
Pure interface — no balance change; the war underneath is byte-for-byte the release beside this one

2026-08-16

The orbital manifest goes visual

Parked waves now muster as a manifest grid: one portrait chip per pod type with its count, wrapping to fit — every type in the park is always visible and selectable, no matter how many you stack
Land part of a group: select a single type and the LAND SELECTED button grows a counter — dial down from the whole group and the longest-parked pods drop first
When an enemy sweep rolls your park, the verdict lands on the manifest itself: types that lost pods flash the kill red while survivors pulse green
The spaceport panel now fits every window shape: the whole payload manifest — satellites, cargo, and vehicle pods — wraps and scrolls as one shelf, destinations compress to their planet icons on narrow screens, and the LAUNCH button became a full-width bar that can never fall off the card
Transit lists put danger first: a pod knocked adrift mid-flight always shows in the orbital band's inbound rows instead of hiding behind the overflow count
Pure interface — no balance change, no save or replay impact; version stays 83

2026-08-15

Orbit gets its war room

BALANCE v83

The war above the worlds had outgrown its own controls: invasions assemble in orbit, public clocks count down, and until now all of it lived in a status line — this release gives orbit a board
Press O for the orbital console: every body drawn as a disc inside its orbit ring, and the ring itself is the verdict — a hairline when clear, a counting arc while a hostile gun charges, solid red when the orbit is denied
Your parked waves sit on the ring where they actually are, with hold, land, and release mounted beside them; every strategic tile now opens a proper card, and the orbital sweep fires only through its card's two-click confirm
The console does the arithmetic you used to do under a shot clock: a threatened orbit reads '4 parked — expect ~3 lost (60% each)' — the same public numbers the enemy commander computes, now legible to you
The sweep itself stopped being a guillotine: each parked pod now rolls its own survival dice — the rate tuned across a one-hundred-twenty-game battery — so a caught armada is mauled, not erased, and survivors stay parked, still yours to release
Alerts moved off the map and onto the console: routine traffic — launches, touchdowns, cargo receipts — now lives in a quiet wire on the top bar, while true klaxons still strike full-width and then visibly dock into the wire, clocks counting
When an enemy sweep hits your park the verdict plays out pod by pod, ends on the survivor count, and a green chip offers the release the moment the debris clears
The Hard commander learned the same lessons it taught: it can hold an assembling armada through a sweep when the expected survivors still win the landing, and it can fire its own gun to clear a defended orbit before releasing its wave

2026-08-14

The army comes to rest

BALANCE v82

A tester's massed army never went to rest: ordered to one point, the crowd kept milling and spinning in place — and the same theater held map spots where a click near the canyon simply did nothing
Root cause of the mill: a unit shoved by its own crowd counted the shove as movement, so its order never ended — and every order that couldn't end kept stirring the crowd that blocked it
Orders now measure real progress toward the destination and nothing else: a unit that can't get closer parks where it stands within seconds, and a parked crowd goes truly still
Formation slots stopped landing inside buildings: a slot that falls on a structure's footprint shifts to open ground beside it, so the whole formation can actually arrive
The canyon dead spots are gone: pockets of ground beside cliff walls confused the route-finder's sector map into declaring them unreachable — they are now priced through the neighboring ground and route cleanly
A click on genuinely unreachable terrain — a mesa top with no ramp — now walks the force to the nearest reachable ground beside it instead of grinding armor against the cliff
The test fleet grew a stillness instrument: a settled army must freeze to the last coordinate with the separation engine asleep, and the whole suite holds green

2026-08-14

The massed army goes easy on older machines

A tester's Hard war ran the simulation flawlessly while the screen crawled: a nine-hundred-unit army massed at a Moon base dragged an older graphics card down to a slideshow — we replayed the entire war bit-perfectly and profiled the renderer draw by draw
The culprit wasn't the war math, which held full speed throughout: it was the drawing itself — every unit was being submitted to the GPU several times a frame once shadows and see-through silhouettes stacked up
The see-through silhouette that finds your units behind buildings now rides only units actually near structures — out in open terrain it was drawing invisibly and charging full price
Unit shadows learn when to bow out: past a few hundred units in one theater they quietly step aside while buildings and terrain keep their full look — smaller battles are pixel-for-pixel unchanged
Together that cuts the drawing bill for a massed army by more than half, and the roughest case on our reference machine went from a visible struggle to smooth
The game now reports its own frame health: each session quietly notes what graphics hardware it runs on and how frames are holding up, so the next performance report starts from measurements instead of guesswork
The war itself is untouched — no unit, no price, no decision changed; every archived game replays byte-for-byte identical

2026-08-14

The commander acts on its endgame verdicts

BALANCE v81

A tester's Hard war produced the strangest tape in the archive: the commander won the ground war, then sat lawfully silent for ninety minutes — every option correctly refused — while the beaten side took the Moon, built the war's only orbital gun, and shelled it at leisure
It now notices when a war bill can never be paid: a fortress compounding faster than the invasion fund triggers a re-price, from raze-it-all down to take-one-landing-zone — and the smaller armada is one the treasury can actually field
The raiding habit that quietly fed that fortress one pod at a time is held while the armada banks — the trickle was the donation, and it was also what kept resetting the commander's own escalation alarm
Invasions stage from the world that can actually fuel them, and the quartermaster now puts real trucks on the water a volley needs instead of counting a single hauler as a supply line
The siege footing brings artillery doctrine with it: the beachhead is the gun platform — once the commander holds ground on the right world, the big gun rises at the front it serves
A Medium commander that knows its home war is lost stops watching politely: money, production, and the front move to your weaker colony while the home garrison keeps up its relief sorties to the end
It only moves on a real verdict — a hard spell at home is not a lost war, and the commander that patiently massed through one still wins it at home
The full test fleet stayed green through the arming, including thirty straight wins on the standing tester battery, and every archived game replays byte-for-byte identical with the new doctrine dark

2026-08-13

The invasion arrives as an armada

BALANCE v80

A tester's Hard war ended strangely: the commander crushed the shared homeworld, then fed its off-world invasion through a straw — pods landing one at a time into a rebuilding fortress until the window closed on a war it had already won
Invasion drops are now priced to the job: the orbital assembly releases the moment it covers what the target actually requires, instead of building toward one flat armada the opportunity outlives
Against a true fortress nothing changes — the full mass still assembles under the funded bill before anything flies
Assemblies no longer dissolve mid-build: a park in orbit holds together through the commander's changes of posture and lands as one covered wave, never a stream of stragglers
The mass landing promised by an earlier release finally ships — it was built, proven, and shelved when its flat assembly stalled wars; the priced release is what let it come off the shelf
Medium keeps its steady stream of landings on purpose — at its pace the stream genuinely wins; this is Hard's doctrine
The full test fleet stayed green, including the exact battery that shelved the first attempt — no stalls, no timeouts, and every pre-armada game replays byte-for-byte identical

2026-08-13

The Medium commander finds its wallet

BALANCE v79

A tester's Medium opponent spent an hour rich and starving at once: three warehouses pinned full, a fleet of harvesters hauling into them, and never enough cash for the war — watched live, decoded to one closed loop
When every warehouse presses its cap, the commander now builds the trade hubs to empty them — conversion finally grows with the economy instead of waiting on a fortune the caps themselves prevented
Harvester fleets stop growing when hauling already saturates what the market can drain — no more buying trucks for a warehouse that cannot accept another load
The nervous tic is gone: a force that committed and recalled at your walls seven times in half a minute now holds its decision until the picture genuinely changes
Hard was never sick — its economy doctrine already covers this — and it inherits the two safe laws while the fleet governor stays Medium's own
Every archived game replays byte-for-byte identical with the new laws dark, and the full ladder held through the arming — Medium is stronger without touching the difficulty gap

2026-08-12

The empire takes the offensive

BALANCE v78

A tester's three-world sprawl showed the commander fighting every battle superbly but not the war between them — a new strategic layer now sits above the battlefield brains and pursues victory across all worlds
The commander reads the whole war every few seconds — ahead, behind, or closing in — and that one verdict now drives its invasion planning on every difficulty
Falling behind on worlds opens the counter-invasion immediately: target chosen, staging world picked, spaceports rising. The campaign no longer waits on a fortune that never comes
Invasions are billed honestly before they fly: the full force, its reinforcements, and every rocket needed to lift it. A commander with a war to win banks toward the whole bill — and never tips half an army into your guns
Fortress worlds its raids cannot crack get the full treatment: the fleet assembles in orbit and lands as one covered mass at funded strength, never a stream
The big gun softens the beach — while the invasion fund fills, orbital strikes re-prioritize the target world's defenses
A campaign blocked on missing technology pulls it forward: construction vehicles, launch pads, and the Aegis umbrella when a hostile gun hangs over the target
Medium learns the same doctrine at its own deliberate pace; the test fleet stayed green through every change, and games that never touch the new machinery replay identically

2026-08-12

The besieged commander refuses to sit still

BALANCE v77

A tester's 76-minute win exposed one last dead half hour: a Medium commander written off its own war would park the army, bank a fortune and wait for the end. The wait is over
Under siege with no winning move on the board, the commander now mounts a full-strength relief sortie roughly every twelve minutes — a real massed charge at your lines, not a trickle into your guns
The charge comes covered: a banked Blackout rides out with the sortie and blacks out the breach as it hits
It still knows when to stop — each sortie fights down to wave strength and withdraws, so you meet pressure in waves instead of a suicide parade
The hoard finally fights: the credits a cornered commander used to sit on now cycle into the next sortie's army
Hard is untouched — its faster escalation doctrine already answers a siege; this is Medium learning to go down swinging. Every Hard test battery replays identically on the new build

2026-08-11

The two-thousand-unit endgame gets its frames back

A tester's late game — an army past a thousand units, three worlds at war — dragged the game clock itself below real time. We pulled the save, replayed the entire war bit-perfectly, and profiled every hot path
Idle garrisons no longer sweep the whole map for enemies that aren't there: a parked army checks the handful of actual intruders directly instead of walking the whole search ring
A settled army stops paying for collision physics: crowds at rest sleep until something moves, spawns, dies or builds nearby — and wake the very tick it does
The commander's terrain surveys are remembered between decisions instead of re-flooded from scratch when nothing on the ground has changed
Slow frames no longer compound: catching the simulation up after a hitch used to redraw the world once per missed tick — it now syncs once per frame, so one long frame can't snowball into a stutter
All together the biggest late games now simulate 2.1 times faster and hold a steady frame rate through the full-army marches that used to stutter
Not a single game plays differently: every test battery and the tester's own 126-minute war replay byte-for-byte identical on the new code

2026-08-11

The commander challenges worlds it doesn't hold

BALANCE v75–76

A commander at military parity used to postpone its off-world invasion until the home planet was completely won — a day that never comes in a real match. A held front line and a healthy bank now open the space war
Massed attacks land as one punch: a force at full strength commits together at a chosen breach, and below full strength it gathers at a forward camp instead of trickling into your guns
The war readout is honest — an even war no longer reads as hopeless, because the commander counts its own standing army and its own bank before declaring a fight unwinnable
The land grab starts on time: the first spaceport, the scouting birds and the colony program all run during a home standoff, so the race for the Moon begins in the opening minutes
War posture: picket rings hold the approaches even while the shooting is on, and turrets spread out so a single EMP disc can't blanket the lot
For every commander — you included: attack-move now fans units onto a formation grid at the destination instead of stacking them into one shimmering pile
Medium learns all of it at its own pace — gather windows, punch strength and Moon-race clock derived from its difficulty curve — and Hard still beats it decisively in the test ladder

2026-08-10

The war goes off-world

BALANCE v73–74

The silent concession is dead. A Hard commander that owns its home outright used to bank credits forever while calling an invasion hopeless — our reference game watched it sit on 400,000 credits for forty minutes, losing the build race four-to-one. The whole war chest now counts as invasion money
Spaceports scale with the wallet: a rich commander grows toward twelve pads, because pads are landing throughput — squads that arrive together instead of a trickle that dies one pod at a time. And the landing is sized to the garrison actually waiting below
The commander plays the Kessler timing game good players already play: assemble while the gun charges, never park a matured fleet under a ready sweep, offer a bait tranche — and when you spend the sweep on the lure, the main fleet sprints the recharge window
A rich commander keeps its space program running through a ground war. The old wartime freeze was exactly the window you used to quietly take the Moon
Conduct, not difficulty: bases spread out so one EMP disc can't blanket eighteen buildings, pickets ring the approaches instead of standing in the plaza, and planes fly home when their sortie dies instead of loitering until the ammo runs dry
Medium inherits the whole doctrine at its own price — higher bank thresholds, fewer pads, its own army scale — through the same difficulty curve that derives the rest of its play. Easy plays exactly as before

2026-08-10

The economy stops eating itself

BALANCE v71–72

The commander stopped strangling its own economy: 57% of everything it spent once went into harvest trucks it didn't need, while silos, universities and the space program starved behind the truck bill. The harvester program is now a governed valve — it parks when the warehouses pin and reopens when war spending drains the tanks
Storage and income un-deadlocked: the first silo arrives inside the opening two minutes instead of minute eleven, and a full warehouse finally reads as build-more-trade-capacity instead of arithmetic silence
The vertical program runs on solvency, not luck — universities on a human clock, the science core researched first (military answers still jump the queue on contact), and eyes in the sky around minute ten
The Scout is now trainable at the barracks, for you too. Losing both starting scouts used to mean permanent blindness; the commander keeps one alive and re-scouts on cadence, and you get the same 150-credit button
It looks before it leaps: a fresh attack on known defenses demands a live read — the target visible now, or an army sighting under two minutes old. Stale intelligence stages the force forward and sends a scout to LOOK first
Weakness gets punished on sight: a fog-legal read of a decisive advantage attacks NOW, whatever the personality — and a blind commander never jumps its own grace period
Long marches stage along the way — a mid-journey muster camp, reinforcements joining at the front instead of soloing the map, and the assault still departing the final door as one body
Medium graduated the same school the same week: the governed economy, the research opening, the scout-keeper and the march law, each priced through its own difficulty curve

2026-08-10

The commander fights like one

BALANCE v70 BREAKS OLD SAVES

Attacks stage at a forward stronghold — a standing camp on the weak side of your defenses, about a screen out. The force gathers until it is actually sufficient, then rolls in as one body
The reinforcement dribble is dead: cohorts release at real mass instead of on a two-minute timer, and units from outlying factories walk to the camp and join one instead of soloing across the map — 71% of arrivals at the objective used to be lone walkers
The army mix is enforced at the factory gate, not the graveyard — the infantry cap now reads what was ordered, not what survives a grinder, so the barracks can't stream forever
The air force exists before the war is decided: Flight Operations jumps the research queue, and every commander maintains a wing instead of treating aircraft as a leftover-budget luxury
Research runs at player pace — three universities instead of exactly one, forever. In the last tester game the player finished an entire fourteen-tech core at minute 6.7; the commander started researching at 7.0
Satellites fly in the same decade you fly them — the wealth bar deferring the rocket program is halved, so the commander's intelligence organ launches by minute eight instead of minute twenty

2026-08-09

War in pulses

BALANCE v69 BREAKS OLD SAVES

Attacks come as coordinated pulses, not a stream — one tester wave stood at a wall for 31 minutes feeding units in one at a time. Reinforcements now release as massed cohorts and go in together, with the EMP blackout timed to the punch
The commander stops feeding a lost exchange: an assault trading three-to-one against a stronger defender withdraws in order and masses for a bigger, better-composed push instead of donating to your turret line
The army is built to counter yours — against a fortress it fields the screened-siege package (armor screen, artillery core, anti-air escort) instead of streaming barracks infantry into gun turrets
Artillery parity: the siege train answers the gun line it can SEE, not just the turrets it knows about — your mobile artillery was invisible to every quota
A wealthy commander at war builds factories toward its income, and no longer freezes its whole space program — it settles empty worlds mid-war instead of watching you take the Moon and Mars uncontested

2026-08-09

The commander musters a war economy

BALANCE v68

Wartime growth stopped keying on BANKED wealth. Four laws — the harvester cap, the front supply line, the factory build-out, the storage build-out — now read what the commander is doing, so one spending everything on the war still grows its mines, silos and factories
The war metal stays home: a commander at war holds its metal against the market up to what its silos can contain, instead of selling the siege train's ammunition to the trade hubs while the front starves
Attack waves arrive as one army — a wave masses at standoff until sixty percent of its value stands together, so the fast vanguard stops streaming into your guns while the artillery trails half a map behind
A power deficit is treated as the emergency it is: a browned-out base builds the solar plant first, instead of buying trade hubs that sell at half rate in the dark
The orbital interdictor learns geography — the Kessler gun is now one per WORLD, not one per commander. This applies to you too: stand a gun on each world you hold

2026-08-08

The commander learns siege warfare

BALANCE v67

Hard and Medium commanders recognize a fortress war and change verb: when your wall out-counts the siege train three to one, the wave masses at standoff, the guns grind the thinnest segment, and the assault goes through the gap — instead of donating army after army into a turret carpet
Artillery duels are fought first — the siege train answers your howitzer line before chewing walls, instead of standing in it without reply
The supply line runs in wartime: a metals-starved fortress front gets cargo pods flown in from the commander's other worlds, even while those worlds fight their own wars
Defensive superweapon charges stop flinching at routine siege presence — ready charges route to counter-punches that will actually fire

2026-08-07

The commander remembers why it invaded

BALANCE v66 BREAKS OLD SAVES

Hard and Medium commanders no longer abandon a living invasion over a one-moment bookkeeping blip — a front is judged for its whole life by the strategy that opened it, not re-classified every few seconds by whatever the yard census showed that instant
The visible symptom this kills: a losing commander flickering its offensive front open-closed-open several times a minute. The front now stays committed while the war is actually being fought

2026-08-07

The Medium commander goes to war school

BALANCE v65

Medium commanders now run the same strategic doctrine as Hard, scaled to their grade — Medium had been frozen at a year-old snapshot while every new campaign skill shipped Hard-only. Now it knows all of it, at half the tempo, sixty percent of the army scale, and twice the grace time
Difficulty is a curve, not a fork: Medium's numbers derive from Hard's through five authored dials (tempo, army scale, grace, memory, build depth), so every future improvement reaches every difficulty automatically instead of aging Medium out again
The hand-tuned parts of Medium's identity survive where testers signed them: the gentler first wave, the lighter tank mix, no jets by surprise

2026-08-07

The commander stops flinching

BALANCE v64

Hard commanders no longer deepen the home garrison just because a big army is visible somewhere on the map — the reflex never changed who won, only how long the endgame dragged. Commitment now waits for force actually standing at the base, and several long wars close minutes sooner
Under the hood, an entire tuning dial retired from the army-size arithmetic — part of an ongoing cleanup rebuilding Hard's strength calculations into one audited module without changing a single battle outcome

2026-08-06

The commander lands the hammer

BALANCE v63

Hard commanders finish wars they have already won: instead of feeding your fortress one landing pod at a time — hundreds a game, each dying before the next arrived — the whole force assembles in orbit and lands as one massed assault, sited away from your standing army
The pod trickle is gone — a winning commander holding no ground at your world banks the money for the real landing instead of buying one-way scout deliveries. The wasted-pod bill in our stalemate tapes dropped by more than four fifths
Six of our longest-running stalemate wars — including two no build had ever cracked — now end in victory instead of a two-hour standoff

2026-08-05

Second thoughts, dismissed

BALANCE v61–62

An off-world front used to be re-argued against the bank balance every few seconds, flip-flopping the campaign open and closed dozens of times a game. A front with a living beachhead now stays committed until the beachhead dies or the money genuinely runs out
Nuisance construction stops yanking the whole army — a lone supply shack rebuilt in the kill zone draws a small hunting party while the garrison stays pointed at your real war
An engaged assault finishes its work: an army mid-way through razing a base no longer talks itself into standing down because the target got small

2026-08-04

Total recall

BALANCE v60

Hard commanders remember your army. The biggest force you have ever shown one stays in its head for about half an hour — showing your whole hand and then hiding it no longer resets the war to zero
The polite army ceiling is gone: a commander that has SEEN you field five times its lawful army trains toward what it saw, instead of holding a tidy garrison at one fifth of yours and calling that a war
Harvest ambushes stop working twice — Hard and Medium commanders remember up to three kill sites per world, so camping a second mining route while your first camp is remembered no longer farms the fleet

2026-08-04

The commander learns to finish

BALANCE v59

A last surviving squad can no longer sit in plain sight on a conquered world while the garrison marches patrol loops around it — every held world derives an objective, and a remnant gets a hunting party sized to kill exactly that remnant
Sieges pick a gap: the guns concentrate on the thinnest section of your line and hold until it breaks, with the army guarding the guns instead of walking into turret fire
The counter-punch got a price tag — a strike into six-to-one defenses converts into siege support at your weakest section instead of donating itself to the deepest part of your base. At true desperation, it still always comes for you
Orbit guns follow the war: an invaded world gets the orbital sweeper, war chest allowing, instead of the only gun sitting parked at home while the invasion flies past it
Aircraft check the flak map before joining a wave — a wing that would fly into a wall of anti-air stays home on defense. Hunting stragglers stays a flying job

2026-08-03

The commander gets a nerve

BALANCE v58

Hard commanders run a real campaign: their worlds are ranked every few seconds — the home under fire outranks the invasion front, the front outranks the quiet colony — and money flows in that order
You can no longer starve one out of its doctrine — its sense of wealth now reads the economy it is RUNNING, not the cash in its wallet, so grinding its bank to zero with cheap skirmishes no longer switches off its war planning
Silence has a clock. Fifteen minutes of vetoed attacks and the commander starts taking risks on purpose — worse and worse odds, then a full-strength sortie at whatever it can reach. The one that once sat lawfully still for ninety minutes will now always, eventually, come for you

2026-08-03

The silence breaks

BALANCE v57

The stare-down is over: a Hard commander that judged your fortress unbeatable used to stop attacking entirely — one tester game saw exactly one attack in ninety-seven minutes. Unwinnable-war math now applies only to walls; against your army it weighs the odds fight by fight
The counter-punch is back — the Blackout charge is held for the assault it was charged for, not spent zapping whatever stood nearest the walls. Park a siege at a Hard base and expect the lights to go out in front of a push, not as a nervous tic
Counter-battery grows with the war: the answering line scales with the battery it can see and the shellfire it takes from guns it can't, and a wealthy commander facing your turret shell finally fields a real gun park of its own. The artillery farm stops being free
No more gift-wrapped air forces — a besieged wing refuses to sortie into an anti-air wall that outweighs it, and shelled commanders stop marching infantry at ghosts every time a shell lands from the dark
Cornered commanders die fighting again: a doomed last stand throws everything, as it did before an over-careful rule quietly taught it to die waiting
No more frozen armies — a committed attack that can neither reach nor touch its target gives up inside a few minutes, comes home whole, and tries another approach

2026-08-02

The fog cuts both ways

BALANCE v56

The commander stops cheating at hide-and-seek. Retreat to another world and a Hard commander no longer simply KNOWS where you went — recon satellites sweep the candidate worlds one by one, and the invasion comes only once your base has actually been seen. Going dark buys real time
Rich commanders field the air force they were paying for — a full first pad silently wedged all aircraft production, which is why a besieged fortress fought whole wars with one hangar of planes. Wings now grow into every pad built for them, and are replaced when they fall
Counter-battery stops being decoyed: one answering party covers the whole battery's ground instead of chasing each shell's origin, and commanders repair chipped turrets between battles instead of hauling a permanent grudge
Raids finish the job — landed parties whose targets are gone turn on whatever else your outpost shows, and invasion escorts hold the landing zone until the construction vehicle arrives instead of trickling into your guns
Supply lines run like supply lines — a beachhead starving on a mined-out world reliably gets its metals convoy, even through the budget squeezes that used to freeze it
Cheap tricks against expansion die: a token picket on an ore field no longer scares a commander off it forever — if the founding convoy outguns your watchers, it drives through them. And second-world scouts scout now, instead of standing still for entire games

2026-08-01

The guns answer back

BALANCE v55

Artillery duels are real now: a base under standoff shellfire answers in kind, walking its own howitzers out along the shellfire's bearing. Two guns harassing a wall is a skirmish; a battery park is a war, and it gets answered like one
Expansions stop being free kills — founding convoys walk the construction vehicle in under guard, a newborn base under threat builds defenses before economy, and site picks refuse ground a visible force is standing on. The five-second base snipe is over
No more feeding the grinder: an attack marching into overwhelming force pulls back whole and masses, and the war chest funds a standing army to match — the force that eventually comes at you is the banked kind, not the piecemeal kind
Grounded wings fly again — besieged aircraft sortie against forces reaching the base instead of sitting out the war on their pads
The quiet endgame is over: when a full counter-invasion isn't justified, a rich commander raids — small fast parties dropped at your outlying mining operations, priced to trade and sent without regret. Garrison your rear or pay for it

2026-07-31

The fortress wakes

BALANCE v54

The sleeping fortress is over. A commander driven off-world used to bank millions behind its walls and wait for you forever — that wealth now converts into invasion fleets. Leave a rich fortress alone and it is not stalling; it is counting down
The siege blind spot is fixed: parking artillery at maximum range no longer goes unanswered — the garrison sallies out after the guns, and the commander stops rebuilding on ground you are actively shelling. Standoff siege still works; free siege is done
Earth runs about a third richer (new matches) — long games were mining the main theatre to bedrock while the colonies stayed fat, so the late game is fought over ground that still pays
Hard commanders buy strike insurance BEFORE the first shell — hold the Moon, the only body that mounts the biggest gun in the game, and they assume you might build it and raise the umbrella in advance

2026-07-30

The war chest opens

BALANCE v53

Rich commanders finally spend their wealth on WAR. The army cap was flat — a commander sitting on a million credits fielded the same force as one scraping by, turtled behind it, and never finished you. Deep wealth now funds an expedition force sized to what breaking you actually requires
Watch your back door: a healthy, wealthy commander now opens a SECOND FRONT — your Moon or Mars garrison gets scouted from orbit and hit by an invasion-grade force while your main army is busy at home. Fully staged before it flies, never trickled
Raiding cuts both ways — march your army across the map and the commander reads the naked base you left behind. The counter-attack launches into the window, not politely after your return
War-stock stays home: a blocked tank order holds the metal it needs instead of the market auto-selling down to the last ingot while the vehicle depot starves
The homeland is never abandoned — a besieged homeworld pulls relief from the colonies: metals convoys to restart the war factories, reinforcement pods until the defense holds. The empire that escaped to space comes BACK

2026-07-29

The long war runs fast

Simulation performance overhaul for monster endgames — commanders running hundreds of buildings and big harvester fleets across three worlds used to drag the whole game down late. The worst stress case in our lab now runs fifty times faster
Under the hood: idle armies stop scanning worlds with no enemies left, and the can-my-trucks-reach-that-deposit bookkeeping is answered once and remembered instead of recomputed for every truck
Identical gameplay, guaranteed — the same battles replay move-for-move down to the last shot. Saves, replays and balance are untouched

2026-07-29

The famine is over

BALANCE v52

The starved-out commander is gone. Pressure used to freeze the enemy economy at a handful of harvesters for the whole game — growth was priced in banked wealth a besieged commander never banks. Squeeze a Hard commander now and it mines through the squeeze
Colonies look before they leap: a world gets scouted from orbit before a colony ship commits, escorts go ahead when someone is waiting, and contested ground gets settled guns-first. The suicide loop — colony ship after colony ship into a world you hold — is dead
A commander losing its home war treats one colony ship as sacred savings — the escape expedition flies through a losing standoff. Kill the base and you may find the empire already left
Hard commanders raid your economy: small fast squads hunt your exposed harvesters — and refuse the bait when you guard them. Escort your trucks or lose them
Medium shares the new economy at its own scale; Easy is untouched — same opening, same pace, same game

2026-07-28

No more free landings

BALANCE v51 BREAKS OLD SAVES

The back door is closed — no more founding bases on empty worlds straight from the build bar. Presence is earned the designed way: land a colony pod, drive the construction vehicle, deploy. Every cross-world price means something again
A commander razed to its last world stops waiting to die — with the siege at its walls and its income gone, it throws desperate last-stand sorties instead of idling behind a Blackout flash every two minutes
Medium commanders finally spend deep wealth: long games now meet growing turret rings, longer walls, bigger fleets and a deeper garrison instead of a frozen base sitting on a third of a million credits
The Long Nine stops plinking empty ground to dodge your umbrellas — a big enough prize is worth firing at through coverage. And a commander holding a charged Blackout will EMP the umbrella and land the shell inside the blackout window: a tester's discovered play is enemy doctrine now
Deadlocks untangled: two construction vehicles squatting on each other's footprint step aside, hopeless rebuild parades are capped, and harvesters remember which deposit just wedged them
Autosave names tell the truth again — rotating slots restamp the matchup and clock on every overwrite. No more Hard games wearing a Medium label from three saves ago

2026-07-26

The endgame bites back

BALANCE v50

Stage an invasion army on an enemy world and it gets noticed — a landed force with no buildings used to be invisible; the garrison now rides out to spoil your staging instead of watching you mass at its doorstep
Comeback drops stop being free kills: facing hopeless odds, the commander holds its construction vehicles at home — and when it does come back, the army lands FIRST and the builder follows once the beachhead holds
Decoy turrets stop working — a lone gun in a far corner no longer drags a whole attack wave away from the real base
REGOLITH SHIPS: cargo pods and mass drivers carry regolith between worlds at last — a capped mine on one world can supply a construction boom on another. And Mars deposits are noticeably richer on new maps
Enemy colonies stop landing in the middle of the map every game — sites now spread across the whole world, so no two campaigns look the same
Rich Hard commanders keep buying fortification past the old ceilings, and garrisons start massing while your hammer is still forming up, not once it is already inside the base
Enemy air finds the gap — strike wings read your anti-air coverage and route around the flak pack. And the Aegis Umbrella is now one per Construction Yard instead of one per world, so coverage grows with your empire
New tells: an ENEMY LANDING alert with a minimap ping, a warning when a full warehouse is wasting deliveries, and save slots that name themselves with the matchup and clock

2026-07-26

The endgame runs smooth

Late-game performance overhaul: marathon empires — a thousand buildings, wall rings, air wings across three worlds — now render far smoother. Frame cost at that scale is down by a third, and the stutter spikes are cut in half
Under the hood: buildings and units share render materials, off-screen bases skip their idle animation, and the interface stopped re-scanning the whole empire twice per frame
No balance change — saves, replays and the AI are untouched

2026-07-25

The AI builds an empire

BALANCE v49

Hard commanders play for domination: three expansions from minute 3, the Moon from minute 8 — and every base they plant gets its own turret ring, anti-air umbrella and a threat-facing wall line
The AI finally builds WALLS — fortification lines rise across the approach to every base once its gun ring stands. Medium builds a thinner line; Easy still leaves the yard open
EMP assaults land ON TIME: the Blackout's pulse fires as the attack wave reaches your walls, so the blackout actually covers the breach
Bombers join the AI's air war on every world — strike wings hit the turret lines and power plants its assaults are walking into, and its Moon and Mars colonies fly their own interceptors and strike landers
Deep wealth buys standing armies: a rich Hard commander garrisons far past the old ceiling, and its off-world colonies keep more defenders at home
The soundtrack grew: reworked audio throughout, two new background tracks, eleven new Moon and Mars themes in the shuffle, plus a refreshed intro, menu music and attack klaxon

2026-07-25

The AI stands its ground

BALANCE v48

Assault a Hard commander's base and the garrison digs in deeper — defenses train past the peacetime ceiling while your push is at the walls, and a commander driven off its homeworld garrisons the surviving colonies harder. Cornering it no longer makes it easier
The Long Nine banks its 250 He-3 round the moment the charge completes: a gun that reads CHARGED always fires, and a theater that can't cover the next round shows HOLDING — SHOT BILL DUE instead of failing silently
A very rich enemy keeps converting its bank into map presence well past the old limit — deeper turret lines, more refineries, bigger harvester fleets, an extra expansion
Walled-in construction vehicles stop hogging the expansion program, and AI cargo rockets stop shipping into full warehouses — a third of its freight was quietly evaporating at the dock
A shipment of yours destroyed by an orbital sweep now says so — SHIPMENT LOST, ORBITAL SWEEP — instead of a landing that silently never arrives
Saves tell you when the cloud got them: a SAVED TO CLOUD confirmation on save, CLOUD SYNCED / LOCAL tags on every slot. And the Aegis Umbrella shields a real base core again, not just the block it stands on

2026-07-24

The AI plants, spends, and flies

BALANCE v47

Expansion convoys stop parking forever on crater slopes — construction vehicles scout a real, reachable pad before committing, and re-site instead of jittering at a bad spot until someone shoots them
Crater-rim resource prizes spawn on buildable ground on every world (new maps) — the Moon's metal prizes were quietly sitting on the rim band
A rich commander spends it: banked credits buy extra refineries, deeper turret lines, bigger harvester fleets and more expansions — Hard grows instead of hoarding. And regolith gets mined ahead of the construction queue, not one emergency load per building
Hopeless-odds assaults arrive as one heavy, Blackout-led push instead of a constant stream — and no more EMP charges burned on waves that dissolved at birth
The Aegis Umbrella pre-pays its interceptor the moment the charge completes: if it reads charged, it fires — and an owner who can't afford the rearm sees UNARMED on the strategic bar instead of a silent failure
Air-focused enemies commit to the sky: the wing gets funded first, gunships lead the mix, a second airfield arrives at scale, and jets fly escort over ground attacks

2026-07-24

The AI besieges back

BALANCE v46

An enemy commander that can't crack your line stops feeding reinforcements into it — fresh units dig in at home while the siege turns to superweapons
Massed artillery counts as a fortification: AI attacks respect howitzer walls, Blackout punches aim into them, and the Long Nine shells any artillery line it can see
The Aegis Umbrella covers a much wider area — and you can finally see it: a coverage ring shows at placement and whenever the interceptor is armed
AI superweapon guns keep themselves fueled, and cliff-hugging deposits get mined from a face harvesters can actually reach — yours included

2026-07-22

Harvesters stop getting stuck

BALANCE v45

A harvester that can't push all the way to a built-over deposit starts mining from short range after a moment — building tight around your deposits no longer silently strands trucks
Two harvesters meeting head-on on a narrow route no longer lock up nose-to-nose: a truck with nowhere left to go pulls off the road instead of parking in the lane

2026-07-21

The top bar is now a space control center

Every superweapon countdown lives on the top bar as its own tile — your arsenal on the left, enemy programs grouped by type in their owners' colors on the right
Fire from the bar: a ready Long Nine or Blackout arms targeting in one click; the Kessler opens a confirm panel that counts exactly what its sweep will catch
Enemy tiles pulse red at READY, and an armed enemy Aegis shows as shield intel — check it before you commit a strike
One ORBITAL readout replaces the transit, orbit, and satellite chips — click it or press O to manage satellites, inbound flights, and parked waves on every body
The strategic console sits centered, holds still while your credits tick, and only appears once you have assets in space

2026-07-21

The AI learns when not to fight

BALANCE v44 BREAKS OLD SAVES

Enemy commanders facing hopeless odds now hold, regroup, and rebuild instead of feeding endless waves into your defenses
AI harvesters stop rolling replacements into ambush sites — and steer new routes around recent losses
A besieged AI now fires its Blackout Charge defensively into the assault
Kessler sweeps escalate: swept pods are knocked adrift, and a second sweep destroys them — with alerts when it happens to you
Off-world colonies pick landing sites with real mining access, and rally exits no longer strand units on crater rims

2026-07-20

Save slots you can manage

Delete and rename save slots — locally and in the cloud
Overwriting an occupied slot now asks first
Esc inside menus and dialogs no longer unpauses the game underneath

2026-07-19

Superweapons

BALANCE v38

Four late-game programs: the Long Nine coilgun, the Blackout EMP, the Aegis interception umbrella, and the Kessler orbital sweep
New top-of-tree techs gate each program; enemy commanders research, build, and fire them too
Superweapons can be switched off per match in the setup screen
A shared shock rule keeps volleys honest — no single strike can one-shot a key building

2026-07-19

The download got 73% smaller

Music now streams while you play instead of shipping in the download — 45.7 MB down to 12.4 MB
Tracks play at original studio quality
Quitting to the menu no longer doubles the soundtrack

2026-07-18

Map editor, round two

Carve canyons and riverbeds by dragging (SHIFT snaps to 45°)
Player start kits with owner-tinted previews and symmetry-aware placement
Save dialog with rename and overwrite protection
Middle-mouse pan, HOME to frame the map, drag-to-place, and undo ordering fixes

2026-07-17

Worlds look like worlds

Craters read as real excavations; Earthrise hangs over the lunar horizon
Vehicles leave tracks — permanent in Moon dust, fading in Mars sand, none on Earth roads
Vacuum combat: silent flashes and spark jets where there is no air to carry smoke
Per-world skies, light, and color grading

2026-07-16

AI colonies that refuse to die

BALANCE v36

AI colonies no longer freeze when their economy gets walled off — they reroute, rebuild, and fight on
Reconquest: a surviving off-world colony will come back for Earth
Harvesters stop pushing at cliffs forever and find another way

2026-07-15

Combat feel

BALANCE v35

Units prioritize enemy units over buildings in every stance
Everything returns fire when a defense shoots it
Idle aggressive units chew on enemy structures nearby
A proper attack-alert klaxon
Resource deposits 25% leaner on every world
Downloads now resume through connection drops

2026-07-14

Cloud saves and usernames

Optional sign-in syncs six save slots across devices
Unique usernames, picked on first sign-in
A durable save format — future updates load old saves with a notice instead of breaking them
Building picking fixed: you select the building you see, not the one behind it

2026-07-13

Map editor arrives + a fairer AI

BALANCE v30

Build custom maps in the browser editor and play them instantly
The AI ladder rebalanced end to end — an honest Easy / Medium / Hard
AI opening waves sized to its real economy, not a script

2026-07-12

Terrain with teeth

BALANCE v29

Real elevation: craters, canyons, and terraced cliffs that pathfinding respects
Openings softened across every difficulty
FIRST MATCH preset for new commanders

2026-07-11

Aether Ascent

The game has a name — Aether Ascent, by Ovitar Studios
New intro, main menu, and match setup flow
Deep pathfinding and performance passes under the hood