Releases

Two big foundations landed behind the scenes tonight. The commander skill tree's groundwork is in place — six branches and forty-one skills, opening for real in a coming update. And the terrain of every base is becoming living, editable art: tiles now carry their own terrain knowledge, with a fresh batch of cliff, canyon and ramp pieces standing by for activation.

Research options can now carry their own artwork instead of sharing one image per line, and upgrades, achievements and house artwork joined the managed-asset system. Behind the scenes the workshop got one-click links between the catalog and the art department — which means custom images will start appearing across the game at a steadier pace.

Follow-up to tonight's cliff cleanup, straight from a Commander's field report: entry tiles no longer stamp a dark gate-mouth onto every jagged stretch of your mesa's edge. The ramp art now only appears where a gate actually fits — sand ahead, rock walls on both sides — and every other entry blends into the cliff line, still marked in gold so you know where your base opens.

The rocky rim around your base just got a cleanup: stray cliff fragments that floated in the sand or pointed the wrong way — several Commanders' bases had them — are gone. The mesa edge now reads as one continuous cliff line.

Also fixed, for Commander Destralak: the Dev Channel no longer sends you a 3mail for every message in the channel — you only get one when the conversation actually involves you.

Buildings can now occupy non-rectangular footprints, just like the classics. The War Factory leads the way: instead of a flat wide strip it now sits on its proper 3×3 block with the extra assembly bay jutting out the top — and the terrain shows through the notch, so you can tuck a wall or turret right up against it.

Admins get a new footprint-shape editor in the catalog to carve these shapes per building.

Also in this drop, for Commander Apocalypse: the Build button on the build tab now sits compactly beside the amount input and Max button on one row — no more oversized button eating your smallest screens.

Heads-up, Commanders: because the War Factory changed shape, any that no longer fit their old spot have been lifted back into your build pool — your building and all its effects are untouched, you just get to drop it onto its new footprint wherever you like.

The base view now renders classic tile-based desert terrain: your rock plateau rises out of the sand with proper cliff edges, rocky corners and ramps at the entrances, instead of a flat texture. Admins get a new Tileset tab in the asset command center with a live terrain preview — swap any individual tile and watch the whole plateau re-render on the spot.

The asset command center now covers everything: every building and defense has its own base-view artwork slot (not just the handful that shipped with art), and each research line can carry its own blueprint image. Related artwork is linked, too — open any image and jump straight to the same subject's other appearances, from build-tab icon to base-view sprite.

A new asset command center: game administrators can now manage the game's artwork — unit and building images, research blueprints, house emblems, backgrounds — directly from the admin panel, with upload, preview and one-click promote or rollback. Every image is automatically fitted, cleaned and formatted on upload. This lays the groundwork for a full custom art pass across the game.

Also in this release, three Commander-reported refinements: the Sell button got its own amber styling (red now exclusively means something is blocked), the Build tab stacks one card per row on narrow phones, and Large Concrete now occupies its true 3×3 footprint from the original design — if a grown slab no longer fits your layout, it returns to your tray, nothing lost.

Two base-view corrections. Power Plants and Barracks now occupy their true 2×3 footprint, matching their artwork — if a rotated building no longer fits where it stood, it returns to your tray with nothing lost, ready to re-place. And placing a building that is still in your construction queue now works as intended: it takes its own spot instead of relocating one you already built.

Commanders reported concrete slabs vanishing from the base layout after completing the Large Concrete upgrade. Fixed: an upgrade that replaces a building type now carries your placed pieces across to the new type, exactly where you left them.

Editing balance values in the admin console no longer commits the instant you leave a field. Changes now stage locally with a clear "unsaved" marker, and nothing touches the live game until you press the section's Save button — Discard throws the whole batch away. Leaving the page or switching tabs with unsaved edits asks first.

Large or unusual changes still get an extra confirmation, now bundled into a single overview instead of one popup per field — and the Houses page gains that safety net for the first time. The audit log keeps recording every field individually, with per-entry revert as before.

Your base is no longer a list — it's a place. The new Base layout page shows your rock patch as a top-down grid where every building stands on real ground. Drag buildings around freely (as long as no attack is inbound), or let Auto-arrange do it for you.

Concrete earns its keep too: slabs no longer consume build space, and any building standing fully on one shrugs off part of the demolition damage when raiders breach your defenses — tougher slab tiers protect more. Aircraft, as always, don't care about your clever layout.

Find it in the Base menu, on the Bases overview, from the Build page, or straight from your base's popover on the world map.

Permission changes now take effect immediately, everywhere: a revoked admin flag or a fresh ban used to leave already-open pages able to keep acting until a reload — that door is closed. Also polished from this morning's catalog work: tapping into a value and back out without changing it no longer announces a change that never happened.

Follow-up to this morning's admin console repairs: on a phone, tapping a catalog value now opens the editor on the second tap — with the keyboard actually appearing — instead of leaving you staring at a selected cell with no way in.

Two fixes for the command staff's war room: catalog values can now be edited the way you'd expect — click a cell and just type — and the "?" help labels across the settings boards now open fully readable instead of being clipped by their surroundings.

Sixteen scattered admin consoles have been consolidated into seven. Balance knobs now live on one searchable board, and the whole catalog — buildings, units, upgrades, researches, achievements, tiers and houses — sits behind a single set of tabs, edited spreadsheet-style with per-cell history and undo. Old bookmarks still land in the right place. Commanders won't see the new war room themselves, but the staff finds and fixes things faster now — and that, you will notice.

The command capacity board kept crediting the engineer who used to hold the night shift, long after the roster had changed. It now reads the duty log instead of going from memory, so it names whoever is genuinely on watch — and stays quiet rather than guessing when the log hasn't been signed yet.

The concrete slab's description promised it would free up build space — a rule from an older era that no longer applies. Spotted by Commander Apocalypse. It now says what slabs actually do today: cheap reinforced cover that soaks enemy fire in a siege. A bigger role for concrete is on the drawing board.

When the command staff shipped your request and closed the thread in one go, that final "it's live" reply slipped past every notification — no 3mail, no unread marker. Spotted by Commander Destralak within the hour. Closed threads now raise the unread signal like any other, and "Mark all as read" covers them too.

The Great Rebalance changed how everything is priced, fought and scored — but converting the old world into the new one fairly proved impossible. So the round has been reset: every Commander starts over on equal footing with a fresh base, the standard starting treasury and the same house. Everything you build from here on lives fully under the new rules.

Also in this drop: the Starport now shows your incoming deliveries and delivered orders separately, and Dev Channel threads sync into your 3mail inbox with unread tracking and auto-scroll to where you left off.

Two small irritations off the Imperial Bank floor, Commanders: the "enter an amount" warning no longer shows up before you have typed anything (it only appears for a genuinely invalid amount now), and the help "?" button sits neatly inside the page header again on mobile. Spotted by Commander Destralak.

Space management is here, Commanders: any building or defense structure can now be sold from the Build page at half its current price — instantly, Dune 2000 style. The freed patch tiles count toward new construction right away. The Construction Yard stays; a factory mid-production finishes or cancels its queue first. Requested by Commander Destralak.

Titanite above your silo capacity — loot, or your conversion credit from the Great Rebalance — was being silently confiscated the next time your base synced. Fixed: production now halts at the cap, but stock above it is yours and stays yours. Every Commander whose credit was clipped has been restored to the full converted amount.

On mobile you can now open the navigation drawer with a gesture: touch the left edge of the screen and swipe right, and the menu slides in — no need to reach up for the hamburger button. The old tap still works exactly as before, and the swipe steps aside on the world map so it never fights panning the globe.

The alliance shield in the top bar used to lead to the same place as your local events — a second door to the same room. It now opens a dedicated Alliance events feed: members joining and leaving, kicks, rank and attitude changes, and your alliance disbanding, all in one place. Your local events log drops those alliance notices entirely, so each surface stays focused and the shield's unread counter finally means what it says — it clears only when you actually read the alliance feed, not the moment you glance at your local log.

One deliberate exception: an "Alliance mate under attack!" alert stays in your local events, where your eye already goes for urgent combat intel.