Releases

Until now your defences waited their turn. A raider had to kill every last soldier you had before a single turret opened fire — which meant that in most battles, they never fired at all, and a wall you had paid for might as well not have been there.

That is over. Walls, turrets and troops now defend as one force, from the first round to the last. Your turrets shoot from the moment an attacker arrives, and they can be shot at from that same moment.

What it means when you build:

• A rounded base is genuinely tougher. Turrets hit hard and walls have a lot of hit points, and every round an attacker spends grinding through concrete is a round he is not spending on your army.
• Weapon choice matters more than ever. Siege guns and bombers tear fortifications apart; rifles and light guns barely scratch them. Sending an infantry wave at a turret line is now an expensive way to learn that.
• Your defences can be destroyed while your army still stands. They are in the fight, so they take losses like everything else in it.
• Defended ground resists convoy raids better too. A force riding out to intercept your convoy meets your whole defence, not half of it.

Turret and wall statistics, costs and prices are all unchanged — only the moment they join the battle. And two smaller fixes ride along: your battle reports now list buildings that were damaged in a breach, not just the ones flattened outright, and a spy report gives the target's defence structures their own heading so you can read the turret count at a glance.

Attacking forces now fly a crosshair

Look at the world map during a war and you can tell at a glance which blips are going somewhere to fight. An attacking force — yours or anyone else's — now carries a crosshair instead of the old arrowhead, on the flat map and on the globe alike. The globe draws the full reticle; the flat grid takes the same mark simplified down to something that still reads clearly at map zoom.

The colours have not moved: your own forces stay amber, an enemy's stay red, so telling friend from foe is exactly the one-glance read it always was. Special weapon strikes keep their own distinct marker and are unchanged.

And if your commander is riding along with a force, that force now wears the same gold chevron he wears when he is standing at one of your bases — so you can see where he is without opening anything.

A launched mission shows up instantly

Order a spy, a scout, a deployment or an interception on its way and it now appears in your in-flight list the moment you give the command. Until today the list caught up on its own schedule — a few seconds later, or when you refreshed the page — which made more than one Commander wonder whether the order had gone out at all. It had; now you can see it.

The tier requirement bar no longer says you are ready when you are not

If you were waiting out the days in your current tier, the countdown could round itself up and show you a satisfied requirement — "15 / 15 days" with a full bar — while the Advance button stayed stubbornly greyed out. Nothing was wrong with your account; the gate simply had not opened yet, and only the readout was lying about it.

The readout now tells the truth. It never claims a requirement is met before it actually is, and the days row carries a plain "in 55m" or "in 12d" beside the bar, so you can see exactly how long is left instead of guessing at a stalled number.

Your base answers again right after a launch

Launching anything from your own base — a raid, a scout, a convoy — parked the departing force squarely on top of your base pin, and while it sat there the force was winning every tap. Your own base was unreachable on the map until the force had moved off, which at scout speeds could be a minute of tapping at a pin that would not answer.

Your own base now wins that tap while your own departing force is still on top of it, in both map views. Everything else is untouched: forces on the move still take priority everywhere else on the map, and tapping a force that has cleared your base still selects the force.

Storms are drawn where they actually are

On the flat map, a sandstorm that had drifted south past the edge of the settled band was being pinned to the very bottom row of your map — so it looked like it was bearing down on your southernmost holdings when it was really out over the pole. Storms drift south their whole life, so sooner or later every one of them did this.

A storm sitting across the line between two map quadrants had the opposite problem: it only appeared in the quadrant its centre happened to fall in, so from the other side you saw clear sky over ground the storm was actually covering.

Both are fixed, and so is the same fault in radar coverage and inbound-attack warning circles, which are drawn the same way. A storm out at the far edge of the map now wraps around onto the other side properly as well.

The world map no longer blinks out from under you

On the flat map, the whole board could vanish for a moment — and on iPhones and iPads, where it was far worse, it could sit empty for several seconds after you tapped something, or after the map quietly refreshed itself on its own. Now and then it stayed blank until you touched the map again.

The map refreshes itself every few seconds to keep everything on it current, and each of those refreshes was blanking the board and then putting it back a beat later. On a busy map — a storm running, a raid inbound, a scout in the field — that beat could stretch out long enough to look like the map had died. It is now put back in the same instant it refreshes, so the board simply stays on screen.

The flat map now tells you why the globe won't open

If your browser has 3D graphics switched off or blocked, the world map quietly fell back to the flat view — and the "Switch to 3D view" button did nothing when you pressed it, with no word anywhere about why. The message that was supposed to explain it was hidden behind the very globe it was explaining, so nobody ever saw it.

Now the map says it plainly, right under the button: your browser has 3D switched off, so the flat map is showing instead. The button is properly greyed out rather than looking alive and doing nothing, and if the globe fails to start for any other reason it says so and tells you a reload usually fixes it.

A proper look at what you are building

Tapping a building, unit or vehicle opens its detail card — and until now that card showed the artwork smaller than the tile you tapped to get there. Opening the details actually shrank the picture.

The artwork now leads the card at a size you can read it at, on phone, tablet and desktop alike, with the name and stats set beside it. The newer commissioned renders are stored at far more detail than the old card could show, so for those this is the first time you are seeing what was actually drawn.

Bigger Max buttons in the unit pickers

The little "Max" button next to each unit in the Attack and Move pickers was a precision target — easy to miss on a phone, and a missed tap sometimes landed in the number field instead. It is now a proper fingertip-sized button on every screen size, and it no longer steals taps from the field beside it.

One list of everything you have on the move

Anything you send used to be tracked in whichever place happened to know about it. The world map's panel listed scout runs, spy runs and convoys; your armies and interceptions were on the Attack page; a garrison you wanted back was on the Alliance page; your Commander on the road was on his own service record. Worse, the map's panel would tell you "Nothing on the move" while one of your armies was visibly crossing the globe an inch above the words.

There is now one In-flight list — under Attack / Move, and below the world map, the same list in both places — and it holds everything: raids, special weapons, spy runs, supply convoys, garrisons going out and sitting on station, MCV landing parties, forces riding out to intercept, scout routes, scouts parked at their last stop, and your Commander when he is walking a road. Inbound attacks you have been warned about lead the list, because a threat outranks your own logistics.

Every row shows where the force left from, where it is going, what it is carrying and when it gets there. A force that has taken losses reads the same way everywhere now — how many are left, and how many it cost: 8× Soldier (−4).

And you can call things back from it. Recall was only ever wired up for armies and MCV convoys; a spy run, a supply run or an interception could not be turned around from anywhere, even though the game had always been able to do it. Every one of them has a Recall button now, a parked garrison has a "Bring home", and a scout sitting on station keeps its Recall and Re-task. A launched special weapon still cannot be called back — once it is away, it is away.

Every report reads the same way now

Battle reports, mission reports and the reports behind your event feed had each grown their own layout — six different ways of listing units, four different ways of announcing an outcome, and three different ways of counting casualties. One of them told you how many you lost out of how many you sent; another told you how many were left; a third gave you a fraction. Same fight, three answers.

There is one way now, and it leads with what matters: "8 left (−4)". What survives comes first, because that is the number you act on; what it cost is the subtraction beside it. Every report counts that way — a battle, a returning force, a simulated plan on the Attack screen.

Unit lists are also proper unit rows now, with the sprite and the armour badges you already know from picking the force in the first place, instead of a wall of text. Four kinds of report that never listed a single unit — including the one you get when your own base is attacked — now show you your force and what became of it.

Reports say where, even when the answer is "you don't know yet"

Every report now carries an Origin base and a Target base line, and they are always there. Before, an origin you had not scouted was simply left out, which looks exactly like a report that has no origin at all — you could not tell "I don't know this" from "there is nothing to know". An unearned location now says so in words: unknown — scout them first. Where you have earned it, it names the actual base the force came from, not the enemy's capital.

One home for everything that came back

Attack / Move → Reports is now a real screen: your battles, the movement that has finished, and the intel your scouts and operatives brought home, each row opening the full report. The world map's intel feed links straight to the full report too, rather than to a stub of it. Every report also lives at one tidy address now — old links, bookmarks and the links in emails already sent to you all still work.

Deploy mode keeps to itself

An earlier update today left the green MCV landing rings switched on all the time, so opening the world map scattered it with circles nobody had asked to see. They belong to Deploy MCV mode again — arm it when you want the answer to "where could I put a base", and the map is clear the rest of the time.

Deploy mode is also properly exclusive now. While it is armed the map answers that one question and nothing else: tap a ring to place your base, or cancel. Bases, convoys and scouts stay quiet until you leave the mode, and they come straight back when you do.

Deploy is no longer offered from the ordinary tap menu either. Founding a base is the least reversible thing you can do on the map, and it used to sit one stray tap away from ordering a scout run. The toggle is the only way in.

Composing a strike force tells you more now

The Launch ↔ Plan switch has moved down to sit with the force picker it actually controls, so switching modes no longer feels like changing the whole page. Every unit card gained a Max button that fills in every unit you have at the base with one tap, and a Stats fold-out: hit points, attack, damage type, fire rate, range and speed, plus the familiar strong-against / weak-against line. Fire rate was never shown anywhere before — two units with the same attack number were not equals, and now you can see why.

The Back button no longer shows you old numbers

Pressing Back used to hand you the page exactly as it looked when you left it. Read your last 3mail and press Back, and the unread (1) was sitting in the top bar again as though you had never opened it — and only a full reload cleared it. The same went for anything else that had moved on in the meantime.

Back is still instant, but now everything live on the restored page catches itself up the moment it appears: 3mail, alerts, resources, the build queue, your bases, the events feed and the players-online count. You may catch the old figure for a fraction of a second before it corrects itself; you will not be left reading it.

The login page respects your thumb

The "remember me" checkbox and the "forgot your password?" link on the login page were tiny tap targets — easy to miss, annoying to hit on a phone. Both rows are now full-height touch targets. Behind the scenes the game also gained an automatic sweep that measures every button and link on every page the way a thumb would, so undersized controls like these get caught before they ship.

Your own movements answer a tap now

Every one of your own movements now answers a tap, on the globe and on the flat grid alike. Spy runs, MCV convoys, supply runs, forces riding out to intercept and garrisons on the road all open a card telling you what the mover is, where it is headed and what it carries — and your commander, when he is walking a road, opens one naming where he is going. Your intercept forces and travelling garrisons had never been tappable on either view; they are now.

"Done" now tells you where it is done

Every fix and feature lands first on a test site that only administrators can reach, and only reaches you when someone promotes that tested state to the live game. Until now a Dev Channel thread just said Done for both, which meant a thread could claim victory a day before you could see anything.

Threads now say which one they mean: Done (DEV) is finished and running on the test site — it reaches you at the next release — and Done (PROD) is live here, right now. Both are set by the deploys themselves, so a thread can no longer sit open with the work already shipped, and the release that carries your fix to the live game posts a note on the thread saying so. (Admins: the channel on the test site is read-only, and points you back here to file anything.)

One screen for sending units anywhere

Moving a force used to mean knowing which page hid the right form. Transports lived on the Bases overview, garrisons on the Alliance page, redeploying your Commander on his service record, spy runs and MCV landings out on the world map — four screens, four layouts, four different ideas of the same job.

They are now one screen: Attack / Move → Move. Pick what kind of move it is, pick the force, pick where it goes, send it. The same unit cards you use to compose a strike force are here too, Max buttons and stat fold-outs included, so loading a convoy reads exactly like planning an attack.

A small map of the destination's neighbourhood renders beside it, so you can see where a force is actually headed instead of reading coordinates and guessing. Garrisons show the room left in your ally's Allied Quarters before you commit, and transports and Commander moves show the arrival time as you build them.

The old buttons all still work — the Transport button on a base card, "Station units" on an alliance mate, the Garrison option on the map, the links in an ally-under-attack alert — they simply take you to the new screen with the right kind of move and the right destination already filled in. Which base a force leaves from is now part of the address, so switching base takes the whole form with you rather than quietly sending your units from somewhere else.

Scouting is unchanged and still done on the world map, where you can chain several stops into one route.

Anything you send now maps the road it walks

Until now, only a Trike lifted the fog. You could march an army four hundred tiles across Titan, and the ground it crossed stayed as black on your map as it had been the day you joined — the trip taught you nothing.

That is over. Every force you send now permanently reveals the corridor it walks: raids, spy runs, supply convoys, garrisons on the road, MCV landing parties, forces riding out to intercept, and your Commander on his way between your own bases. The reveal grows behind them as they travel and stays on your map for good, so a season of campaigning leaves you a genuine road network instead of a handful of scouted circles.

It is the road and only the road. A force reveals nothing extra around its destination — that circle is still the Trike's, and recon is still its job. Send an army and you learn the way there; send a Trike and you learn what is waiting. A force you recall maps only as far as it actually got.

Deploy mode keeps to itself

An earlier update today left the green MCV landing rings switched on all the time, so opening the world map scattered it with circles nobody had asked to see. They belong to Deploy MCV mode again — arm it when you want the answer to "where could I put a base", and the map is clear the rest of the time.

Deploy mode is also properly exclusive now. While it is armed the map answers that one question and nothing else: tap a ring to place your base, or cancel. Bases, convoys and scouts stay quiet until you leave the mode, and they come straight back when you do.

Deploy is no longer offered from the ordinary tap menu either. Founding a base is the least reversible thing you can do on the map, and it used to sit one stray tap away from ordering a scout run. The toggle is the only way in.

Composing a strike force tells you more now

The Launch ↔ Plan switch has moved down to sit with the force picker it actually controls, so switching modes no longer feels like changing the whole page. Every unit card gained a Max button that fills in every unit you have at the base with one tap, and a Stats fold-out: hit points, attack, damage type, fire rate, range and speed, plus the familiar strong-against / weak-against line. Fire rate was never shown anywhere before — two units with the same attack number were not equals, and now you can see why.

The Back button no longer shows you old numbers

Pressing Back used to hand you the page exactly as it looked when you left it. Read your last 3mail and press Back, and the unread (1) was sitting in the top bar again as though you had never opened it — and only a full reload cleared it. The same went for anything else that had moved on in the meantime.

Back is still instant, but now everything live on the restored page catches itself up the moment it appears: 3mail, alerts, resources, the build queue, your bases, the events feed and the players-online count. You may catch the old figure for a fraction of a second before it corrects itself; you will not be left reading it.

The login page respects your thumb

The "remember me" checkbox and the "forgot your password?" link on the login page were tiny tap targets — easy to miss, annoying to hit on a phone. Both rows are now full-height touch targets. Behind the scenes the game also gained an automatic sweep that measures every button and link on every page the way a thumb would, so undersized controls like these get caught before they ship.

An earlier update today left the green MCV landing rings switched on all the time, so opening the world map scattered it with circles nobody had asked to see. They belong to Deploy MCV mode again — arm it when you want the answer to "where could I put a base", and the map is clear the rest of the time.

Deploy mode is also properly exclusive now. While it is armed the map answers that one question and nothing else: tap a ring to place your base, or cancel. Bases, convoys and scouts stay quiet until you leave the mode, and they come straight back when you do.

Deploy is no longer offered from the ordinary tap menu either. Founding a base is the least reversible thing you can do on the map, and it used to sit one stray tap away from ordering a scout run. The toggle is the only way in.

Allied supply convoys and commanders on the road used to sit on the world map as decoration — you could see them, but tapping did nothing. They open a detail card now, on the globe and on the flat grid alike, telling you what the mover is and which house it belongs to.

What it will not tell you is where it is going. A convoy's route stays its owner's secret, alliance or not, and a commander in transit still travels anonymously.

These notes are written in a plain text file, and that file gets wrapped to a fixed width so it stays readable while it is being written. That wrapping was being carried all the way through to this page — so sentences stopped dead in the middle and picked up on the next line, at whatever width the writing happened to use rather than the width of your screen.

The text now flows to fit whatever you are reading on, so a phone gets phone lines and a desktop gets desktop lines. Bulleted lists have their bullets back too, and a note with sections shows those as headings instead of as another paragraph. Older notes were all written the same way, so they read better now as well.

Sending units somewhere used to mean knowing which of six screens owned that particular kind of order. Transport lived on Bases, garrisons on Alliance, your Commander on his own record, scouting and MCV deploys on the world map, and attacks somewhere else again — same idea, six front doors.

Attack / Move is now a single entry in the menu, and it opens into four sections: Attack, Move, In flight and Reports. Attack is already fully moved in. The other three name the screen that still owns each job today and take you there in one tap, and they fill in over the coming updates.

Every old link, bookmark and notification still works — they land on the right section by themselves. Each section is its own address too, so you can bookmark the one you use.

Sandstorm alerts arrive before the storm, not after it

Sandstorm proximity alerts were landing late and repeating themselves. A storm only counted as "near" your base once its centre had drifted almost on top of you — and a storm wide enough to swallow a base whole is already battering you long before that. So the danger alert arrived after the damage report, then repeated every few minutes while the storm sat overhead.

Danger is measured from the storm's leading edge now, so the alert reaches you while it is still bearing down. You get one per storm, and once a storm has already hit you it stops warning you about damage it can no longer do.

The green rings marking ground an MCV could claim only appeared once you had armed Deploy mode — so you had to enter the flow to find out whether the flow was worth entering. They are on the map now whenever you actually hold an MCV and have the room for another base. Deploy mode still exists; it just no longer decides what you are allowed to look at.

They also only ever existed on the globe. Switch to the flat grid and there was nothing — no rings, no answer to "where could I put a base". Both views draw them now, in the same green, and on the flat grid the whole square is the target rather than the ring itself, so a thumb finds it.

Traffic on the world map used to blur together. A raid, a special-forces strike and a column riding out to intercept somebody all drew as the same mark, so telling your own operations apart meant tapping them one at a time.

Each kind of force now carries its own silhouette, on the globe and on the flat grid alike:

• Raids keep the broad wedge you already know.
• Special forces take a narrower, sharper version of it.
• Intercepts point down — the one column riding out to meet something rather than travelling to a target of its own.
• Garrison convoys travel as a shield, and settle into the familiar ring once parked at their host.
• An MCV convoy is now a keep rather than a plain crate, so the most expensive thing you can put on a road no longer looks like a supply run.

Two of those were not merely hard to read — they were not drawn at all. A garrison sent to an ally vanished the moment it left your base and reappeared only on arrival, and an intercept had never had a mark of its own. Both are on the map now, for the whole journey.

Tapping bare ground on the world map used to plot a scout stop the instant you touched it — no menu, no way to ask what else you could do there. It now opens the same action ring every other target on the map got last week, and nothing is committed until you pick from it.

What the ring offers depends on what you are doing. On a quiet map it is Scout here, plus Deploy MCV when you have one ready to plant a new base. Once you are plotting a route it becomes Add stop, Launch and Undo, so a multi-stop run can be built and sent without ever leaving the map. It knows when to stop, too: at your stop limit the Add stop segment steps aside rather than quietly ignoring you.

Deploying an MCV no longer means arming a mode first — pick the ground, then pick Deploy.

On the Bases overview, every base's Titanite now counts up in front of you. The figure and its storage bar climb second by second, the same way the number in the top bar always has for the base you are standing in, and the bar turns amber as a silo approaches full.

Until now that figure sat frozen at whatever it was when the page loaded, while the construction and unit timers beside it ticked away quite happily — so a base could look poorer, or richer, than it really was until you refreshed. The overview and the top bar now agree.

Turning the globe with the action ring open used to drag the ring along with it, leaving it hovering over whatever had drifted underneath. It now closes the moment you start turning, the way it should — the world moved, so the menu no longer means anything.

The ring is also smaller on a phone now, without shrinking any of the buttons below the size a thumb needs.

Titan now fills the width of the screen. The narrow column that used to sit beside it is gone, and so is the panel that opened in it.

Tap anything on the map — a base, a scout, a force on the move — and a ring of actions opens right under your finger, with the name of what you tapped in the middle. Attack, Spy, 3mail, Garrison, Recall, Re-task: only the ones that apply to that target, and Cancel always in the same place at the bottom, so you never have to hunt for the way out. Anything the ring cannot say in a word is written just beneath it — including the lines you have earned by scouting, and the ones you have not, which still say so rather than quietly vanishing.

Everything you have in the air now runs full width below the map: inbound attacks first, then your own scouts, spies and convoys. Past intel sits below that, laid out as cards instead of a single narrow strip.

Both views get all of it. The globe and the flat grid are one map in two projections, and the ring works the same on either.

The queue panel at the top of the screen now shows a picture for everything you have running — research included. Research had been the odd one out, sitting there as a bare line of text while its artwork existed all along on the research page; it now carries the same blueprint you already know from there.

Pictures are also shown whole rather than trimmed to fit. A building in the construction line was having its top and bottom shaved off, so a silo looked nothing like the silo on the build page. Both now match.

Each line says where the work is happening, too. The unit rows already named the factory; the construction and research rows now name their own source the same way, so the three lanes read alike.

On a phone, a full queue no longer runs off the bottom of the screen — the panel keeps to a comfortable height and you swipe within it to see the rest.

The panels that drop from the top bar, and the base panel at the bottom, now close exactly the way they opened — folding back up instead of blinking out partway. The flicker at the end of the close is gone: it was a single frame where the panel snapped back to full size just before it disappeared.

Closing now carries the same small bounce as opening, in reverse, and takes the same time, so the two halves finally read as one movement. If your device is set to reduce motion, none of it animates.

Every building, defence, unit, research level, upgrade, achievement and commander skill in the game now has an entry in the Field Manual — costs, build times, power draw, combat stats, limits and prerequisites, all in one place.

The catalog is read straight from the game's own data rather than written by hand, so it is correct today and stays correct through every balance change. Build and research times are quoted at the speed this round actually runs at rather than the factory figure, and hidden achievements keep their secret: you get the name and what it is worth, never the answer.

The pictures in the queue panel now stand exactly as tall as the text beside them — no taller, no shorter — and every row shares one artwork column.

Units with newly drawn artwork were the ones getting it wrong. Those pictures were taking their size from the artwork's own dimensions rather than from the row, so a freshly drawn unit could tower over its own name and squeeze the timers into a sliver, while an older one looked fine. The panel decides the size itself now, so a unit reads the same whether its portrait arrived yesterday or on day one.

All six chapters of the Field Manual are written, so its front page no longer lists them as still to come — it lists what is there, and the opening chapter now points you at the reading order rather than at a promise.

The more useful half of this is invisible. The manual now checks itself: once a week the game looks at what has actually shipped since the last review and, if anything has, puts the chapters those changes could have affected in front of the engineers to be read against the game and corrected. A quiet week raises nothing. It is the difference between a manual that was true when it was written and one that is still true now.

The last of the six mechanics chapters is in the Field Manual.

It covers what an alliance actually buys you — a shared map, joint attacks, garrisons and two kinds of protection from interception — alongside the things that catch people out, including the fact that nothing stops you attacking your own alliance mates, and that the Neutral/Allied/Hostile labels do nothing at all. Then where your score really comes from and what it pointedly ignores, how your Commander earns experience and what his skill points actually do depending on where he is standing, and what the achievement list is measuring.

Two corrections ride along. Your Commander's service record was advertising a defence bonus for every fifth level that battles stopped applying when the skill tree arrived; it now shows what a milestone really grants, which is a skill point. And the rank band that limits who you may attack is currently switched off in this round — the manual says so, rather than describing a rule nobody is playing under.

The fifth chapter of the Field Manual is up: the map, fog and recon.

It covers the world itself — how the four quadrants and the ground beneath them fit together, what each kind of terrain costs you to cross, and why the size of the rock patch you settled on decides how much you can ever build there. Then the rules about what you are allowed to know: revealed ground stays revealed for the whole round, but a base founded on ground you already explored is not discovered until someone goes back and looks. Those are two different facts, and confusing them is how people lose scouts.

The second half is scouting and spying end to end — what a scout run reveals along its route as against at each stop, what it risks every time it crosses someone's perimeter, exactly which fields a spy report does and does not contain, how Espionage sharpens the numbers, and what Counter-Intelligence lets you learn about whoever has been looking at you.

One correction rode along with it: the recon panel on the world map had been quoting the old 200 ISC spy fee. Spying costs 500, as it has for a while, and the page says so now.

The fourth chapter of the Field Manual is up: missions, movement and interception — the companion to the combat chapter.

It covers the eight orders you can give a force and what each does when it lands, then the thing every one of them shares: how long it takes to get there. The travel formula is set out in full, including the two terms that decide most of it — the order you chose, and the speed of the slowest unit you sent. There is a complete speed table for every mobile unit in the game, so you can see exactly what one Harvester costs a wing of Eagles.

Then the parts that catch people out: the way home always takes as long as the way out, a recall costs you however long you have already been flying, and Titanite delivered above a base's storage limit is simply gone.

The chapter closes on riding out — what you can chase down, why the catch is worked out before you commit rather than rolled on arrival, why stopping a raider weakens an attack without turning it back, and why loot you recover goes home to the Commander it was taken from rather than to you.

The third chapter of the Field Manual is open: combat and armour.

It explains what actually happens when a force arrives at your base — why your turrets stay silent until the last soldier falls, how the six rounds are fought, and why a draw pays an attacker nothing at all. At the heart of it is the armour table: every weapon type against every kind of hull, with the real numbers. That includes the one rule that decides more battles than any other — only missiles can touch aircraft, and everything else deals literally zero.

It then covers what a breach costs you: how much can be plundered, why the safe never can be, what enemy engineers do to your buildings, and when a secondary base can be lost outright. Plus who is allowed to attack whom, and exactly what a defender is told before the shooting starts.

Wide tables in the manual now show a soft shadow at the edge when there is more to see off to the side.

You no longer have to wait behind your walls. Tap a rival force crossing your ground — an attack on its way in, or a raider heading home — and ride out to meet it.

Win the clash and the raid is bled, not stopped: whatever survives presses on and still has your garrison to get through. Turning a raid back takes enough force to destroy it outright, not merely enough to bloody it. You may ride out against any force you can see, including an attack aimed at someone else — rescuing a stranger is allowed, and so is standing aside while two rivals wear each other down.

Catch a raider carrying stolen Titanite and destroy it, and that Titanite goes home to the Commander it was taken from, even when you were not the one robbed. The rescuer's reward is the kill and the experience, never the haul.

And the attacker is never warned you are coming. Your interceptors ride the map like any other force, so a watchful opponent may spot them — but the game will not tell him.