What changed in each update, newest first. These notes cover the PC versions (Steam, and itch for Windows and Linux) and Android. Lines that apply to only some versions say so.
Show the changes in Build 124
Build 124 doesn't change how online matches work. Players on build 122 and build 124 can still play together.
New tutorial
- 17 short lessons replace How to Play. A chicken instructor pecks at what to press next. The five core lessons (Deploy, Attack & Dice, Fortify, Cards & Trading, Regions & Income) play as one match on a new practice map, Proving Grounds, and unlock in order. Once they're done, the other twelve are open in any order: World Domination, Capital Conquest, King of the Hill, Fog of War, Portals, Firestorms, Setup Modes, Dice Modes, Card Bonus Modes, Region Bonus Modes, Teams and Correspondence.
- Lessons pay gold, once per account. Each core lesson pays 26 gold and each of the others pays 10, so all 17 pay 250 gold in total. That's enough for an avatar or a troop from the Store. You need to be signed in to collect it. If you finish a lesson while offline or signed out, the gold is added the next time you sign in.
- The Basics achievement now unlocks when you finish any lesson. Lessons don't earn any other achievement and don't count as games played.
- New read-more page: Siege & World Peace, the two optional rules that stop a match from stalling. The Pacts page now explains that, under Fog of War, pact partners see what each other sees. See Game Rules.
New map
- Los Angeles, a new built-in map with 42 territories, free for everyone.
Matches
- A chicken now points at Start Attack. When you've placed all your troops and wait, a chicken pecks at the button instead of the old arrow.
- Firestorms and portals no longer tint the whole board. Their glow lights washed out every tile, turning tiles salmon or cyan on maps like Caldris. The lights are gone. Flames, embers, portal rings and the open and closed portal looks stay.
Custom maps
- Everyone in a lobby now plays the host's exact map. Before, a matching map name or id was enough, so two different versions of a map could start the same match.
- Lobbies you can't play on this device say why. If a lobby's map is only on the host's computer, or can only be downloaded on Steam, the lobby list says so and Join is greyed out.
- Correspondence on a device without the map. If a Correspondence match uses a custom map that isn't on this device, the game now says so and offers to abandon the match. Before, it dropped you back to the menu.
- Reporting a map works again. The report button in Community Maps didn't open anything. Fixed.
- Map titles and descriptions are filtered at any length, and Browse hides titles that don't pass the filter.
Workshop (Steam)
- Hosting a map you've edited since publishing now asks you to update it on the Workshop first, so other players get the same version. A subscribed map with a Steam update still downloading can't be hosted until it finishes.
- Publishing. A failed upload, or a retry before you've accepted the Workshop agreement, no longer creates a duplicate Workshop item. Publishing and downloading now time out with a message instead of hanging. Publishing from a new PC finds your existing Workshop item.
- Privacy. Published maps no longer carry the file path of a flat map's background image, which could include your computer's user name. This applies to maps published or updated from now on. Copies already on the Workshop keep the old file until you update them.
Account
- Delete your account from the game. On itch and Android, Settings > Account > Delete Account now sends the request from the game instead of opening a web page. We finish within 30 days, and the game tells you when it's done. Steam players still use account.pactorperil.com.
- Add an email and password. If you sign in with Steam or Google, Settings > Account can add an email and password to the same account, so you can sign in to it on another device.
- Sign-in screen. Enter in the Email field moves to Password, and Enter in Password logs you in.
Phones and tablets
- The hub menu uses two columns on phones, because the list ran past the bottom of the screen.
Main hub
- Two chickens now wander and chat under the hub table.
Map Editor
- Switching to the 3D view keeps your tool if it works there, and otherwise picks Select instead of Sculpt.
- With Select, right-click a territory to select it and open the Tools menu, or right-click the background to open the Map menu.
Show the changes in Build 122
Update required. Build 122 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together. Older versions can't join new matches.
Android gets this update separately. Until it does, Android and PC players can't join each other's new matches.
Rules changes
- Progressive cards pay differently, including in Ranked. Trades now pay 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, then +5 for each trade after that. They used to pay 5, 10, 15, 20 and so on. Every payout is lower than before, and from the 6th trade on each one is 15 troops lower. This applies to every Ranked mode with Progressive cards, including Progressive Capital Conquest. The Step Value setting is gone from Create Game. See Cards.
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- Capital troops now depend on pick order, in every capital mode including Ranked. The first three players to pick a capital get +3 on it, as before. The 4th pick gets +4, the 5th +5, the 6th +6, the 7th +7 and the 8th +8. It goes by the order players pick, not their seat or colour. An auto-assigned capital counts as a pick in the same order. The troops are placed only when you pick. See Game Rules.
- New card mode: Surge. It pays the same as Progressive up to a troop value the host chooses, then multiplies every trade after that. The default switch is 65 troops and the default multiplier is ×1.10, so trade 16 pays 65 and the next trades pay 72, 79, 87 and 95. The host can set the switch from 15 to 100 and the multiplier from 1.01 to 1.35. Surge is not available in Ranked. See Cards.
- Correspondence rewards now follow the same rules as live matches. Bots count towards the number of players, and a seat knocked out in the early rounds no longer earns the placement bonus. Before, it could. Correspondence results already settled keep their old rewards.
Screens
- Store. A category list runs down the left on PC and on phones, and every category now sits in one continuous scroll (2 columns on phones). Pick a category to jump to it, and the list highlights where you are as you scroll. The Store also shows how many Declarations of War you have banked.
- Match Settings. Every section is now in one scrolling list, each with its own Reset. The list on the left jumps you to a section instead of swapping pages.
- Player Customization. It's now a full screen with a category list on the left and one scrolling list through Avatar, Dice, Troop, Sound, Title and Color. There are no more pages.
- Swipe to scroll. You can swipe a list starting from anywhere on it, including on top of a tile or button, on every screen. On PC, dragging with the mouse does the same. Sliders, text fields and similar controls keep their own drags.
- Loading screen. At startup it now waits for real loading instead of always showing for a fixed time.
Phones and tablets
- Quit is gone. There are no more quit-the-app buttons on phones and tablets, including on the Sign-in screen. Close the game the way you close any other app. The tutorial's Quit still leaves the tutorial.
- The on-screen keyboard no longer covers text fields. When it opens, the screen moves up so the field you're typing in stays visible, and the bug report form scrolls above it. One known gap: in Watch by Code, the buttons can stay under the keyboard, so use the keyboard's Enter key to submit.
- Friends. The Back button was off-screen, which could leave you stuck in the panel. Fixed.
- Layout fixes. Overlaps and off-screen buttons fixed on Tournaments, Replays and the Leaderboard, and Next in Create Game stays out of the phone's notch area.
- Hotkey tips no longer show during matches on phones, which have no hotkeys.
Bug reports
- Closing the app no longer loses a bug report. A report is saved before it sends. If the app closes mid-send, it goes out the next time you open the game.
Coalitions
- Bring your Coalition. If you lead a Coalition of 2 or more and create a casual game, the game now asks whether to bring them in. Before, a game created from the hub's Casual station left them behind.
Other fixes and changes
- Pact offers. The Pact Offer card's gold panel never drew, so offers showed up as small bare text in every mode. It's now a proper card.
- Battle Log, King of the Hill. In offline matches, the reinforcement line left out the troops refunded when you were pushed off the Hill. You always received them. Only the line was wrong.
- News now pages through announcements, with arrows or the Left and Right keys. Its text uses proper font weights, because the old bold was hard to read.
- Map packs you don't own. Create Game now shows a clear dialog with Choose Another Map and Go to Store. Go to Store opens on Maps, and Back returns you to Create Game with your settings kept.
- In-match cards. "Player conquered" and "Cards Acquired!" use the purple glass panel, with a thin strip in the loser's colour.
Map Editor
- Hazard and name edits can now be undone.
- Solar system maps from the same seed now come out identical on every computer. A seed you've used before may give a different map than it did last time.
Show the changes in Build 121
Update required. Build 121 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together. Older versions can't join new matches.
Moving maps
- Pieces can take turns. A piece that moves every few rounds can now be offset, so two wheels that each move every 2 rounds move on alternate rounds instead of together.
- Connectors. On some maps a wheel, conveyor or gear only meets still land at fixed connectors. Whichever tile has turned to a connector links to the land there, and the link is drawn as a dashed lane. See Game Rules.
- Better move preview. Hold M and a turning piece shows an arrow in the direction it turns, plus which turn of its full revolution comes next. Sliding and sailing pieces still show a dashed outline, gold links they gain and red crosses on links they lose.
Maps
- Two new maps. Sky Platforms, where platforms fly between docks in the sky, and Starbase Alpha, a space station with turning wheels. They're the first built-in maps that move. Neither is in the Ranked map pools.
- Painted territories on more maps. Maps that still drew territories as solid colour blocks now use the painted look Caldris has: the ground shows through with your colour over it and a bold band along your borders. They also get Caldris's soft lighting and pale shorelines. Space maps no longer throw long, hard-edged shadows across tiles. Workshop maps pick this up too.
- Coasts restyled on 16 built-in maps to match Caldris: shore outline, a soft glow, wave lines and foam. Space maps have no sea, so their coasts look the same. Only the look changed. Territories, borders and bonuses are unchanged.
Matches
- Fast Bots is twice as fast as before, about 10 times normal speed. With it on, a bot's reinforce turn skips the turn pop-up, and bot attacks play without dice or attack sounds. It's still Single Player only. See Bots.
- The turn pop-up now slides in from the left as a narrower card with a see-through background, instead of sitting in the middle of the board.
- Pact requests in the player panel use the new check and cross buttons.
Coalitions
- A Coalition of one isn't a party. On your own, friends don't see you as "In a coalition", and you can still be invited into another Coalition. Accepting moves you across and closes your empty one. The invite list marks friends who are already in a Coalition.
- Ranked follows your party size. On the ranked mode picker, any mode your Coalition can't queue is greyed out with the reason ("Solo queue only" or "Party too big"), and a note explains what the party can play. The tiles update as members join or leave. Only the leader can queue the party.
- Only the leader can start a match. If you're in a Coalition and aren't its leader, Start Conquest is greyed out. Leave the Coalition to play on your own.
- Teams stay together. In a Casual lobby, your team picker is locked while another member of your Coalition is in the lobby.
- If the leader leaves a waiting ranked lobby, the rest of the party leaves too and is told "Your Coalition leader left the ranked lobby." Once the match is starting, nobody is pulled out.
- Fixed: if you left a ranked lobby your Coalition was in, the game could send you straight back into it.
- Fixed: an invite that was declined and then sent again didn't show up a second time.
- When someone leaves your Coalition, you get a message saying who left (not when someone is kicked).
- A Coalition member's new avatar or look now shows up on your hub and Coalition screen without a restart.
See Coalitions.
Friends
- Player search. In the Friends panel, type 3 or more letters of a name. Any part of the name works, names that start with what you typed come first, and up to 10 players are listed, each with an Add Friend button. Players whose block or Friend requests from setting means they couldn't accept your request aren't listed. If you hide yourself from friend finding, you don't show up in search, but a request sent to your exact name still reaches you.
- Friend requests on the main hub. A request you receive appears as a card with Accept, Decline and Later. Later hides the card, and the request waits in Friends. Up to two cards show at once, with a button to see the rest. When someone accepts your request, the hub tells you.
See Friends.
Your account
- Your loadout follows your account. When you're signed in, your equipped avatar, troop, dice, attack sound and colour are saved to your account (your title already was). Signing in on another computer brings the same look with you. If something you had equipped is no longer yours, the free default takes its place and the game tells you. Signed out or offline, your loadout stays on that device. See Cosmetics, Titles & More.
Main hub and tavern
- New lighting in the hub: warm torchlight with soft shadows and flickering torches. Avatars and props have a matte finish, so they no longer look like plastic.
- Room for the whole Coalition. Members 5 to 8 now have their own places in the room: one sits on a barrel, one stands with a tankard, one leans on the pillar under the torch, and one is outside the window trying to get in. The small heads beside your name now only appear for members without an avatar.
- The map on the table has been turned round to face the players sitting at it.
- Specialty room: walking in is one smooth move, with the bar flap lifting and the door opening as you go. Walking out backs straight out and closes the door behind you. A starry space sky now fills the view through the Specialty door. The tavern's lighting matches the hub's.
Menus
- Glass buttons. Check, cross and arrow buttons across the game use a new glass style. More screens use the purple Back and Cancel buttons, including game setup and the Caster Deck.
- Match Stats: the Back button of the screen underneath no longer shows through on top of the panel.
- The Creators section and the creator code button have been taken out of the Store for now. The section had no items in it.
- Auto Diagnostics: when your own connection drops, times out or can't reach the server, the game no longer sends an automatic report about it. It notes it in the log instead, so a bug report you send yourself still shows it. Server errors are still reported.
Map Editor
- Moving pieces:
- Offset (shown when Every is 2 or more) shifts which rounds a piece moves on, so pieces can take turns. You can't join pieces that have different offsets.
- Reverse makes the selected piece turn or run the other way. In a gear network every gear swaps, so they still mesh. Not offered for tides or ferry routes.
- Connectors (wheels, conveyors and gears): click the land, then the piece's edge, to fix where the piece meets still land. A piece with connectors reaches still land only through them. Drag an end to move it, and right-click to delete it. Up to 32 per piece.
- Links (wheels and gears): click two tiles in the same ring or gear to force a link between them in every position, or to cut one the editor made. Click the same pair again to go back to automatic. Forced links show as a white dot, cut links as a red dashed line with a cross.
- Centre and Auto centre put a wheel's turning point in the middle of its tiles. An off-centre wheel makes its tiles overlap as they turn.
- A + New button in every mode, and numbered build steps (1 Pick tiles, 2 Place centre, 3 Make piece).
- Fixed: clicking empty space could select a random piece.
- Fixed: the options panel could get stuck with a scrollbar that cut off rows.
- Fixed: moving, resizing or turning a wheel could shrink its tiles and lose links at its rim.
- Shapes:
- Size and Turn now have a box where you type an exact value, with arrows to step it. Turn takes tenths of a degree.
- Ctrl+Shift+wheel turns a shape 1°.
- Flip mirrors a shape. A shape snapped to a slanted edge flips across that edge and stays on it.
- Fixed: shapes snapped to a border could land slightly off it, leaving a thin gap or an extra parallel border.
- Borders: hold Shift while drawing to keep going straight along the last segment or an existing border (or in 15° steps). Hold Shift while dragging a node to slide it along its own line. A dashed guide shows the line, and it stops where it crosses another border.
- Fills now sit right on their borders. Before, fills along open borders sat slightly inside them.
- Coasts: new maps start with Caldris's coast settings, and the Subtle preset is now lighter. Coasts you've tuned on your own maps are kept.
See Map Editor.
Show the changes in Build 120
Update required. Build 120 changes how matches talk to the server. Older versions can't join new matches, so update before you play.
This is the first PC update since build 118, so it also includes everything from build 119. The Android version gets this update later. Until it does, Android and PC players can't join each other's new matches.
Moving maps
Maps can now have parts that move during a match. Every few rounds, at the end of the round, a piece takes one step. Your troops ride along, and the only thing that changes is who borders whom.
- Five kinds: Wheels (rings that turn), Conveyors, Gears, Ferry routes and Tides (crossings that flood and drain).
- Switches are neutral territories nobody can own. Attacking one costs you 1 army and moves its piece one step. There are no dice, and it can't catch fire. A switch can also be a portal: if Portal Chaos sends an attack onto a switch, the switch is struck.
- Sky ferries are platforms that fly between docks along a route. They dock at land links, which show as dashed lines. An empty dock shows how many rounds until the next platform arrives.
- Preview: hold M to see where the pieces move next (you can remap the key). A countdown chip shows when the next shift is due, and the feed logs "Map shift: end of Round N".
- Bots know how to use switches. They also plan for the next shift when choosing where to deploy, attack and fortify.
- Build moving maps with the Map Editor's new Moving pieces tool (J). They work in Single Player and online.
See Game Rules.
Maps
- 13 new maps: Africa, Arctic, Castle Dunmarrow, Desert Fortress, Emberwyrm, Firebird, Himeji Castle Grounds, Kraken, Luxembourg, Ninefold Isles, Shellback, Starfall and USA 42. That makes 17 built-in maps. The new maps aren't in the Ranked map pool.
- Caldris has been repainted in the new look. Its territories, borders and groups are the same.
- Several other built-in maps have been touched up and have new thumbnails, and "Fortified Bunker" is now spelled correctly.
- 143 Territory Random has been retired. It's no longer in the map list, and old replays recorded on it won't open.
Map Editor
- Rebuilt around painting the world first. There's a thin top bar, a floating tool panel, and an Outliner and Inspector that stay out of the way until you need them, so the map gets most of the window. It also opens about twice as fast.
- Land tool: brush, rectangle, ellipse, lasso and fill, with roughness for natural coastlines. Paint recolours inside the land and never moves a coastline.
- Painting: 165 painted textures in 10 categories, six ground textures per map with Swap Texture, a Tint brush, Smooth and Water brushes, brush hardness and tips, and Blend for soft edges between ground types. Space maps get 10 ground textures of their own, from moon dust to deck plating.
- Roads, rivers and mountain ridges. Rivers follow the map's sea, so they carry lava on a lava map.
- Coast styles: outline, shallow glow, and whitecap waves rolling in to shore, with Off, Subtle, Standard and Bold presets.
- Props: "Scatter trees" in one click, and a prop brush. Everything placed stays an ordinary prop you can move, turn or delete.
- Shapes tool: stamp hexes, squares, triangles, circles and more that snap together into neighbouring territories.
- Edit nodes is now one tool: drag, box-select, group-move, and Smooth, Simplify and Even out. Border edits no longer freeze the editor. Fills wait for a Recalculate fills bar.
- Groups tool with click and lasso picking, plus name, bonus and colour editing in the panel. Changes to a group's colour and bonus can now be undone.
- A Layers panel (show/hide and lock), a square or hex grid with Snap to grid, and a Cells brush.
- The start menu is now Start New, Load and Back. The New Map setup screen is gone, and new maps start in the painted Meadow look.
- My Maps shows a Draft, Published or Update available tag on each map. Each row also has Unpublish, which frees up your publish slot, plus Play in Single Player and Delete.
See Map Editor.
Main menu and menus
- New main menu. Your avatar sits at a tavern table, and Coalition members take the empty seats. Click your own avatar to open your Profile, or a seated member (gold name tag) to open theirs. Up to four more members show as small heads beside your name, and you can click those too. An empty chair's "+" invites a friend.
- Mode select is now a walk-through tavern. Each match screen uses its station's view as the background.
- New look for menus. Panels and buttons have a painted-glass look. The red X and green check are now purple Back and Confirm buttons. Back sits bottom-left, and the forward action sits bottom-right where there is one.
- New in-match menu. Press Esc or the Menu button on the right-hand bar. It has Resume, Settings, and the right way out for where you are: Resign Match while you're still playing, Back to Main Menu once you're out or the match is over, Leave for now in Correspondence, and Quit Game. Each exit asks you to confirm. Press Esc again to close it. The game keeps running while it's open.
- Esc menu outside matches too. On any other screen, Esc opens Settings, Report a Bug, Back to Main Menu and Quit. Report a Bug now lives in these menus. The floating bug buttons on the map and the main menu are gone.
- Settings has a new layout. The categories are listed down the left, like the Store, and the one you pick shows its settings on the right. The panel takes 60% of the screen width.
- Match Settings has a new layout. The setting groups are listed down the left with their current values. The group you pick shows its settings on the right, with a Reset section button. Presets are behind a button beside Create Game, and a preset is applied only when you press Load. Picking one in the list no longer applies it. See Match Settings.
- News uses larger, easier-to-read text.
- Online replays in the After Action Report. After an online match the report shows "Replay saving...", then a Watch Replay button for everyone who played, not just the host.
The board
- The edge of the map fades into haze and drifting mist instead of ending in black.
- Territories cast soft shadows that follow the sun, and slopes catch the light. On High graphics, cloud shadows drift across the map.
- New default lava.
- Troop badges have a brighter face and an even dark edge, so they stay readable on territories of the same colour. Troop numbers now sit level and centred. Before, some digits sat higher or lower than others.
- Cliffs use the mountain texture. On painted maps, territory walls take the group's border colour, which turns to the owner's highlight while one player holds the whole group.
- The flat 2D board shows a map's painted terrain and coast, not a flat dark background (on maps without a background image).
- Automatic scenery is gone. The ships, crates and auto-placed trees and rocks added in build 116 no longer appear. Props a map maker placed, or baked from scenery, stay. The editor's Scenery section is gone too. Use Scatter trees instead.
Rigged Capitals
- The Moderator's unfinished abilities (Double Vote, Lookout, Rumor, Sabotage) are now labelled "(coming soon)", and their descriptions say they have no effect yet. You could already be handed them, and they did nothing without telling you. See Rigged Capitals Abilities.
Fixes
- Fixed: returning to the main menu could record an abandon, and in Ranked a strike, for a match you hadn't abandoned. This happened when your PC's clock ran ahead of the server's, when the game briefly couldn't check your active match after a crash, or after a fair-play kick (which could also count twice). It's fixed from this build on. Abandons and strikes recorded before the update stay as they are.
- Fixed: a long black screen at the start of online matches. On slower machines the server dropped the connection while the match was still loading, and you waited around 40 seconds for the game to reconnect. The game now keeps the connection alive while loading, and the server waits longer for a player who's still loading. The cost: when someone really drops, the game takes 20 to 30 seconds to notice, where it used to take about 5.
- Lobbies:
- Fixed: a single network hiccup could throw you out of a lobby you'd joined with "The host has closed the lobby".
- If you're hosting and your lobby closes on the server, you now get a "This lobby has closed" message and go back to where you came from. Before, you were left in a lobby that could never start.
- "This lobby can no longer be started." now stays under the player list until you press Start again or the lobby changes. A lobby that has gone back to waiting can no longer be reopened behind your back.
- Clicks that went nowhere:
- Fixed: the "card earned" popup swallowed your next click on the map for about two seconds.
- Fixed: clicks in the Fortify phase could stop working after you'd been attacking.
- Fixed: leaving a match while the card trade window was open (for example when the connection dropped) could leave an invisible screen over the main menu that blocked every click until you restarted.
- Fixed: in Single Player, clicking End Turn during the short pause after earning a card could skip a turn.
- Fixed: in the Capitals tutorial, fortifying anywhere other than Outpost locked the End Turn button for good. Any fortify now moves the tutorial on.
- Capital Conquest replays now show capitals. Before, replays left out every capital pick. This only applies to matches played on build 120 or later. Older replays still open but won't show capitals.
- Fixed: watching a replay could unlock achievements for you. For example, a replay of someone breaking a pact could award you the Betrayer achievement.
- Streamer Mode: if you turn it on after joining a lobby (outside Ranked), the others now see your alias, a free avatar and no title. Before, they could still see your real name, avatar and title.
- Single Player setup opens much faster when you have a lot of custom maps.
Show the changes in Build 119
Build 119 was only released as an Android test build. Its changes reached PC players in build 120 and are listed there.
Show the changes in Build 118
Update required. Build 118 changes how matches talk to the server. Older versions can't join new matches, so update before you play.
Region Bonuses
A new match setting, under Cards, that changes how much each region pays:
- Default: every region pays what the map says.
- Shuffled: the map's bonus values are shuffled between regions at the start of the match.
- Progressive: every region's bonus goes up every 3 rounds. You pick the step, +1 to +4 (default +1).
- Dynamic: at the start, each region's bonus moves up or down by up to a range you pick, ±1 to ±5 (default ±2). No bonus drops below 1, and the total across the map stays the same.
- The map labels and your income always show the bonuses in play. The setting is listed in the lobby, the match browser and the in-match Match Settings panel, and replays show the bonuses that were actually rolled.
- Casual, Correspondence and Single Player only. Ranked and Rigged Capitals always use the map's own bonuses.
See Match Settings.
Declarations of War
Every match you start now costs one Declaration: online lobbies, Correspondence, the Ranked queue and Single Player against bots. The tutorial is free, and you can still play your Tournament games with none left. Your count is shown at the top of the main screen.
- Free ones: one on your first sign-in each day, then one every 4 hours while you're in the game. You can bank up to 10 this way.
- On Android: watch a short optional ad for one, up to 3 a day. Ads are non-personalised, and Premium members never see them.
- Buy them with gold: 3 for 100 gold or 20 for 500 gold, in the Store's Buy Gold section or from the "out of Declarations" message. Bought Declarations can take you past 10.
- You get a held Declaration back if you leave a lobby or the match never starts. Rejoining a match you already paid for is free.
See Declarations of War.
Premium and the Store
- Premium membership: $5.00 a month or $40.00 a year. Unlimited Declarations of War, unlimited map editor saves and publishing, every Standard and Premium cosmetic, and no ads on mobile. Premium members can also play Single Player without signing in. Buy it from the Premium tab in the Store on the itch.io version. Steam is coming soon. It isn't sold in the Android app. Cancel or switch plans any time through the billing portal. See Premium.
- Every cosmetic can still be bought with gold, Premium ones included. Premium just unlocks them all without buying.
- Creator codes. Enter a creator's code in the Store, and for the next 14 days part of what you spend with real money goes to that creator. It costs you nothing extra.
- Redesigned Store. A category rail down the left (Featured, Premium, Maps, Dice, Avatars, Troops, Sounds, Animated Emotes, Bundles, Creators, Buy Gold), filter chips (All, Not owned, In Premium) and a preview pane. On phones the rail becomes a scrolling bar across the top.
- Back in the Store now returns you to where you opened it from (Create Game, the map editor, Community Maps), and Go Premium opens the Premium tab directly.
Tournaments and Honor
- Tournaments are open to everyone. The 🏆 button now sits at the top of the main screen, next to your Declarations. See Tournaments.
- Honor. After a match, rate the other players you faced on Skill, Sportsmanship and (in live matches) Speed, or give them a ✓ commendation. You see someone's Honor once you've sent yours. Leaving a match and staying gone costs a point. See Honor.
Creating a game
- Create Game is now three steps: Mode, then Map, then Settings (Casual and Single Player).
- Mode: pick Free-For-All, 1v1 or Teams (and team size), then the game type. Single Player just picks the game type.
- The chips along the top show your mode and map. Click one, or press Back, to change it without losing anything you've set. Each match type remembers its own player count.
- The Single Player button on the main menu still works without an account and opens the same steps.
- Match Settings has a section list down the left (Players, Timer, Region Bonuses, Cards, Fog of War, Portals and the rest). Each entry shows its current value, a gold dot marks anything changed from the default, and clicking an entry jumps to it. On desktop the lobby name, Private switch, a This Match summary and the presets sit in the left column.
Changed
- Map editor limits. Free accounts can keep 3 saved maps and 1 published Workshop map. Premium has no limit. Maps you already published count toward the 1. Nothing you've already saved or published is removed, and you can always re-save or update a map you already have. See Map Editor.
- Rigged Capitals lobbies are humans only. There's no Add Bot in a Rigged lobby. A bot only takes over mid-match for a player who leaves or goes idle, and keeps that player's role.
- The Coalition button has moved to the top-left of the main screen.
- Correspondence catch-up now shows only what the other players did since your last turn, one round at most. It never replays your own turn, even if a bot played it for you or your time ran out. Players who've been knocked out see just the latest round.
Fixes
- Fixed: in Rigged Capitals, a lobby could start with only the Moderator and no other players. That match could never begin and closed itself a minute later.
- Fixed: in Rigged Capitals, if the Moderator cancelled the God Mode prompt, they were left in a stuck lobby. They now go back to the lobby, or to the browser if the lobby has closed.
- Fixed: the match browser could list a lobby of yours that you'd just left, so you could accidentally rejoin it.
- The Heatmap now only appears in 1v1 matches (created as 1v1, or Ranked 1v1). A Free-For-All or Single Player game that happens to have two players no longer shows it.
- The Region Bonuses options now explain themselves when you hover them.
- Fixed: in Correspondence, after the server restarted, catch-up could show a shortened recap on the wrong board, and your whole-match battle log could be lost.
Privacy Policy update
We've updated our Privacy Policy (last updated 10/20/2026) for the new features in this build. Old links still work.
- Rewarded ads (Android only, always optional). If you choose to watch one, Google AdMob serves it. The ads are non-personalised. Google receives information from your device to show and measure the ad and to prevent fraud, which can include your advertising ID and IP address. We give Google only your Pact or Peril account ID, so our server knows whom to credit, and nothing else about you. Premium members never see ads.
- EU, UK and Switzerland: you'll see Google's consent form before your first ad, with a Do not consent button. Change your choice any time from Settings → Privacy → Ad privacy choices.
- Declarations of War: we keep your Declaration balance, when you were given one, and a record of each match that used one, until your account is deleted.
- Premium: we keep your membership status, subscription and invoice details and the billing periods. Card details stay with the payment provider and never reach us.
- Creator codes: we record which creator you support and when you entered the code. Creators only ever see totals, never who bought what.
- Payment records are kept for tax and accounting even after an account is deleted, no longer linked to it. Deleting your account does not cancel a Premium subscription, so cancel it in the billing portal first.
Show the changes in Build 117
New rule: pacts share vision
- Pact partners now share vision on fog maps. While a pact is active you see your partner's territories and every territory next to them, and they see yours. It goes one hop only: you don't see what your partner's other pact partners see.
- The shared area fogs over again the moment the pact ends, whether you break it, they break it, or one of you is taken over by a bot.
- Teammates are always pacted, so teams now share vision too.
- In Rigged Capitals the Imposters' hidden pact shares vision the same way. The Crew gets nothing from it.
See Game Rules.
Rigged Capitals
- Voted-out players: the last forced move now places only that turn's reinforcements on your capital (or your strongest territory). Your other troops stay where they are.
- Voted out means out. A voted-out seat no longer comes back into play later in the match. A voted-out player also sees the whole board when watching the replay. See Voted Out.
- Your role and abilities are now in your own profile. Click your own seat to open it. It also has a small Connection section with your ping.
- The vote prompt now fits on the screen, and the live vote status is pinned at the top of the game feed in the top left.
- Clearer messages when the game refuses a Rigged action (for example, while a vote is pending).
Updates without interruptions
- Server updates no longer cut games short. Games in progress keep playing to the end on the version they started on. Once you update, you play on the new servers. After a while the old version stops taking new games, and the game may ask you to update before you can start or join one.
- Correspondence matches get extra time on the turn clock automatically while an update rolls out, so nobody misses a deadline because of it.
Changed
- Calculated dice: the attack picker now shows "Win this roll" with a percentage for manual rolls too, not just for Full Send.
- Smoother frame rate on desktop while you watch other players' turns. Computers were capped at 20 frames per second during another human's turn. They now run at your normal frame rate. Phones and tablets keep the cap to save battery.
Fixes
- Fixed: if you inherited cards by eliminating someone mid-attack and went over the limit, the forced card trade could fail to open and leave you stuck. It opens again now, waits for a pending Rigged vote, and no longer covers the Rigged forced-move prompt.
- Fixed: a Rigged vote or forced-move prompt that was open when the match ended stayed on top of the game-over screen. It now closes.
Show the changes in Build 116
New: Rigged Capitals
A new Specialty Mode: social deduction on top of Capital Conquest. Hidden Imposters play among the Crew, and a human Moderator runs the table.
- Where to find it: Main Hub → Start Conquest → second page → Specialty Modes → Rigged Capitals. You need to be signed in. It has its own lobby browser.
- 5 to 8 players plus one Moderator seat. The host can fill empty seats with Neutral bots, picks the Turn Timer (60, 90 or 120 seconds) and, at 7 or 8 players, 2 or 3 Imposters.
- Fixed rules: fog on, calculated dice, auto setup, fixed cards and no time limit. The host can still turn Portals and Firestorms on or off.
- The Mastermind. One player is secretly the Mastermind. Between rounds 1 and 2 the game stops for a 60-second recruiting break, where the Mastermind picks the other Imposter(s). Imposters share a pact the Crew can't see, and the Crew can't make pacts.
- The Moderator sees the whole board and every role. They can pause the match, take Mod turns (adjust troops, hand over territories, start or put out firestorms, skip turns, block attacks, make announcements) and call votes. Board changes are always announced in the battle log.
- Votes: a once-per-game Mayoral Election (the Mayor's vote counts double in the Emergency Meeting that follows), Emergency Meetings to vote a player out, and a unanimous Vote to End the Game. A player who is voted out makes one last forced move and is then eliminated. Their seat goes Neutral.
- Abilities: the first live one is Secret Handshake. With the Moderator's approval, a Crew member can send one pact proposal, and if it's accepted the pact can't be broken. More abilities are coming.
- Winning: Imposters win by holding every capital (checked from round 3), by removing every Crew member, or if an End Game vote passes while an Imposter is still in. The Crew wins only by voting the game to an end after every Imposter is gone. Every role is revealed at the end.
- Rigged Capitals is Casual and live only: no RP, no Correspondence, and no spectators or casters, because the roles are secret.
See Rigged Capitals.
New
- Two new match settings, both on by default, in every mode (on the Create Game screen):
- Fogged Attack FX: turn it off and attacks you can't fully see through the fog play no dice animation or sound.
- Show Troops Earned: turn it off and other players' troops earned and troops left to deploy are hidden. You always see your own.
- Capital keeps. Capitals on the 3D board now have a small keep on them.
- Map Editor: you can delete the selected lane under Adjacency → Edit Lane. Map thumbnails are now taken from the 3D view. The tool options strip scrolls instead of stretching the editor.
Ranked
- Ranked RP is now an Elo rating. The entry-fee pot is gone. Every ranked match is now scored as a set of head-to-heads: you beat everyone who finished below you and lost to everyone above you. Beating a stronger player is worth a lot. Beating a weaker one is worth very little, and losing to them costs more. Your change is the average of those head-to-heads, so a 6-player win against an even field is worth about the same as a 1v1 win (+32, or +64 during your first 20 games in a mode). The winner never loses RP, and bots never move anyone's RP.
- New rank scale, chess-style: Bronze below 800, Silver 800, Gold 1,200, Platinum 1,600, Diamond 2,000, Master 2,200, GrandMaster 2,500 and the new Super GrandMaster at 2,700. Every rank is based on your rating alone. GrandMaster no longer depends on a leaderboard position.
- LEGEND now means Super GrandMaster in any 2 of the 3 main ranked modes.
- Fresh start: every ranked ladder starts again at 1,000 RP (Silver). RP from the old system doesn't carry over, and the old system's Season 0 awards no season titles.
- Eliminations: you get +1 RP for each opponent you eliminate. Eliminating a bot or a teammate doesn't count.
- Team modes: each team is rated as one, at its players' average RP. A teammate still in their first 20 games moves about twice as far.
- Draws: a World Peace ending costs everyone still in the match 32 RP, and players already eliminated can't gain from it. A time-limit draw costs everyone still in the match 64 RP (was 250). A player who surrendered but still held territory now counts as finishing below the survivors, not as one of them.
- Penalties: abandoning a ranked match forfeits any RP you would have gained and costs a further 64 RP (was 250). A stall kick costs 64 RP on top of your result.
- Seasons: at the start of a new season every rating moves 25% of the way back toward 1,000, and your next 10 games in each mode count double. There's no longer any inactivity decay for GrandMasters.
- Ranked achievements now unlock at the new rank floors: Silver 800, Gold 1,200, Platinum 1,600, Diamond 2,000, Master 2,200.
See Ranked.
3D board look
- Smoother, lower territories. Territories are now low, smooth plates with edges in their owner's colour instead of thick black slabs, and the sun and the day/night cycle now light them.
- Scenery on every map. Ships sail the shipping lanes on water maps, crates and barrels stack up where lanes reach the coast, and trees and rocks from the map's biome fill the open land. Every player sees the same scenery, and it never covers a territory.
- Soft shadows. Props and scenery cast a soft shadow on the ground, and the land at the foot of each territory is gently shaded.
- Fog borders: borders between fogged territories are now dimmer, thinner and grey, and sit under the mist instead of floating over it.
- Map Editor: a new Scenery section on the map's Inspector turns auto scenery on or off, rerolls the layout, or bakes it into ordinary props you can move and delete.
- Scenery is drawn in batches, so it adds very little work for phones and tablets.
Phones, tablets and performance
- New Graphics setting with three levels: High, Simpler and Mobile (lightest). It's in Settings → Display and replaces the old Simpler Graphics switch. Phones and tablets start on Mobile, which adds a lower 3D resolution, no edge smoothing, no glow from firestorms and portals and fewer embers on top of everything Simpler does. Your old Simpler Graphics choice carries over.
- Phones and tablets (and any computer set to Mobile) run at up to 30 frames per second, which keeps them cooler and saves battery. On the Mobile setting the board drops to 15 frames per second when nothing is moving and springs back the moment you touch it.
- Much faster 3D board on phones and tablets. On a low-end tablet a 3D match went from about 10 frames per second to a steady 30 on Mobile.
- The attack picker opens faster, and changing the number of dice no longer rebuilds the dice.
- The game uses less memory, which makes it less likely that your phone closes it in the background.
- Settings screen now fits small and phone screens: the tab bar wraps, pages scroll, and the panel stays clear of notches and rounded corners.
- On Simpler and Mobile, glowing ground on some maps no longer pulses, and close-up ground detail is a little softer.
Map overlays
- Adjacency overlay (A): links you can use are now green, and links to Firestorm tiles are red (they were cyan and grey). Every link and territory dot has a black outline so it stands out against territory colours. On the 3D board the links now lie flat on the map instead of floating as tubes. Coastal sea lanes are drawn as dashed lines, because the straight line passes over territories the two ends aren't linked to.
Fixes
- Fixed: the first attack of a match (or the first after an update) could freeze phones for several seconds while the dice and duel views got ready. That now happens while the match loads.
- Touch: dragging with two fingers no longer pans the map (it felt backwards). Pan with one finger. Pinch still zooms.
Show the changes in Build 115
Ranked
- Ranked 1v1 arrives with this update. There's a new 1v1 tile in the ranked queue. Each lobby rolls its win condition when it opens, and the lobby shows which one you got. You then vote on a small map.
- Setup is manual, cards are progressive, dice are calculated and fog is on. Firestorms and Portals start off and only turn on if both players vote for them.
- The player who goes second gets +3 troops on their first reinforcement.
- 1v1 matches have a 60-minute limit and their own ladder. They don't count toward True rank or the main season title. 1v1 has its own season titles instead (for example "Season 0 1v1 Diamond").
- Ranked 2v2 and 3v3 are live. Each lobby rolls World Domination, Capital Conquest or World Domination 70%, a third each, on a map from the team pool.
- Fog is on, cards are progressive, dice are calculated and setup is automatic. Firestorms and Portals are decided by majority vote, and a tie means off.
- Teams are set when the seats fill, balanced by RP, and shown grouped in the lobby. Teammates start in a pact that can't be broken.
- Matches have a 120-minute limit and count toward the main season title, but not True rank.
- Queue solo or with your Coalition (up to 2 players for 2v2, up to 3 for 3v3). Solo players fill any open seats.
See Ranked.
Friends and Coalitions
- Friends. Send and accept friend requests, see who is online, and see when offline friends were last on. There are four new privacy settings, in the Friends panel and in Settings → Privacy:
- Allow friend joins: on, friends can join you without an invite. Off, invite only.
- Friend requests from: Anyone, Players I've met, or Nobody.
- Let platform friends find me.
- Appear offline: hides you in friends' lists and from friend joins. Players in the same lobby or Coalition still see you.
- Steam friends. On Steam, the Friends panel lists your Steam friends who play Pact or Peril, so you can add or invite them.
- Coalitions. Form a party of up to 8 players with a leader. When the leader starts a private casual game, every member follows, and the Coalition stays together for a rematch. In ranked, Coalitions can queue for 2v2 and 3v3. Ranked FFA and 1v1 stay solo queues.
- Invite to Coalition and Add Friend buttons in the in-match player panel.
See Friends and Coalitions.
Lobbies and matches
- Lobby Codes. Private casual games now use a single Lobby Code instead of a lobby name and password. Your code stays the same until you choose a new one. Private games no longer show in the game browser. To get in, use Join by Code on the Main Hub or in the multiplayer browser. As host, you can see your code in the lobby.
- Heatmap overlay (H) for two-player matches. It colours every territory from red (few connections) to blue (many) and labels it with how many territories it connects to. A Firestorm removes connections and an open Portal adds them.
- Team games, ranked and casual: teammates now start the match already in a pact. The pact can't be broken, and you can't make a pact with someone on another team. The Pacts option is greyed out in team modes. These automatic pacts don't count toward pact stats or pact achievements, and Lone Wolf can't be earned in team games.
- Manual setup under fog: while territories are being claimed, unclaimed ones are visible to everyone and drawn with a light fill. A territory goes back into fog once someone claims it.
Store
- Animated avatar emotes in a new Animated Emotes store tab: six emotes at 150 gold each, or all six for 700. They can only be used in matches. Regular emotes and quick chat stay free.
Fixes
- Fixed: a new default hotkey could take a key you had already bound to something else. If your saved bindings had two actions on one key, or used a reserved key, those actions now load unbound instead of clashing.
- Fixed: skeleton avatars showed only their hat or hood. They now show the whole head.
Privacy
- The Privacy Policy is updated to cover Friends, Coalitions, Lobby Codes and platform friend finding.
- Friends, Coalition and friend-finding logs are now deleted automatically after 30 days.
Show the changes in Build 114
Added
- You can resize the HUD. Settings ▸ HUD has sliders for Overall size, Player Turn Bar, Cards Button, Cards Button Height, Phase Button, Dice / Troop Box and Troop Slider, each 50–150%. Changes show up live, and the Settings panel now opens at the top of the screen so you can watch the HUD change while you drag. Reset HUD Size puts everything back. Only you see your sizes.
- Cards Button Height can lower the Cards button right down to the bottom edge of the screen. The hotkey list moves above it when you do.
- The player wheel replaces the strip of player banners at the top. Players now sit along the bottom of the screen: the player whose turn it is in the middle, the players who just went on the left, the players coming up on the right. A gold line marks where the next round starts, and knocked-out players sit greyed out at the ends. The round, phase and hourglass sit beside it, and on your turn End Phase sits above your seat.
- W hides or shows the territory and troop counts on the wheel (card counts stay). Keys 1–8 now go by turn order, so 1 is always the first player, however far the wheel has turned.
- Countdown for the last 5 seconds of every turn: one beat per second, each faster and higher, with a heavier hit on the last. It plays at your sound effects volume. There is no countdown in Correspondence.
- Hotkey tips stay on screen in the bottom-left corner. To hide them, turn off "Always Show Hotkey Tips" in Settings ▸ Controls.
- Enter starts your attack during your Reinforce phase. It never ends an attack or a turn.
- Click your own seat to see your ping and server region.
- Ranked lobby: a Social button (or S) lets you send emotes and quick-chat, which show on your banner. Click your own banner to change your colour; colours other players already have are crossed out.
Changed
- Combat has been reworked. In the attack window the avatars slide in from the sides, and each loss is a troop thrown across the screen that lands with a POW. Duel panels now sit just above the turn bar instead of covering the screen.
- Rolls, card trades and eliminations now go into the game feed (top-left). The pop-ups that used to appear in the middle of the screen for trades and conquests are gone, and the dice cards in the feed are smaller.
- A bot attack with fewer than 3 troops now counts as a manual roll, so you see it like any other manual attack.
- When someone else conquers a territory, the captured tile now stays empty until they choose how many troops to move in.
- Region Bonus and Adjacency overlays are now one at a time: turning one on turns the other off. Both have a button on the side menu, so they work on phones too.
- Ranked fog of war is now fixed per mode: off in Fixed World Domination, on in Pact Capital Conquest. It is no longer a lobby vote; pacts are the only rule you vote on.
- When the game ends, the victory screen is now the only thing on screen. Leftover cards, toasts and duel windows close.
- On the 3D board, borders between two fogged territories are now drawn, so fogged areas no longer blur into one patch of mist.
- Single-player bots now play at a human pace, so you can follow what they do. Turn on Fast Bots to get the old speed back.
- Single-player Easy and Normal bots no longer trade in a set of 3 cards; they wait until they hold 4. Hard and Brutal bots are unchanged.
Fixed
- In team games, the winner's teammates were shown DEFEAT. They now see VICTORY.
- Fully zoomed out, the 3D board cut off the lower corners of the map. The camera now pulls back to show the full width.
- You couldn't pan the bottom row of the map out from under the bottom HUD. Now you can, and the top edge no longer leaves extra space for the old banner strip.
- New Caldris map: the old Caldris is replaced by a new map with the same layout as Risk Classic (42 territories, 6 regions, sea lanes) and its own artwork. Replays recorded on the old Caldris no longer show the right board.
- Bot personalities are revealed in the After Action Report at the end of online matches, as they already are in single-player.
- Online bots also play at a human pace, and online Easy/Normal bots also hold 3-card sets.
Show the changes in Build 112
Released 2026-10-10.
Update required. Build 112 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together.
Ranked, rebuilt
- Ranked is now matchmade. Click Ranked and pick one of six modes. The game finds you a lobby with the best connection for you, starting with players near your rank and widening the search the longer you wait. There's no lobby browser, no host and nothing to set up.
- Two modes are live now: Fixed World Domination and Progressive Capital Conquest. Both are six players with no bots, on Caldris, Dwarven Fortress or King's Castle. 1v1 and World Domination 70% are coming soon. The last two tiles are seasonal modes that will change each season.
- In the lobby you vote on the map (three are offered) and on Pacts and Fog of War, then press Ready. The match starts when all six seats are full and every player is ready. Once the lobby is full, anyone who isn't ready within 30 seconds loses their seat.
- Each mode has its own ladder, RP and leaderboard tab. You need 5 games in a mode to be placed in it.
- True Rank is your overall standing across the main modes. It's the first tab on the Leaderboard. Reach GrandMaster in any two main modes and you're LEGEND, which ranks above GrandMaster and earns a season title.
- The old ranked ladders are gone, including Ranked 1v1, Teams and King of the Hill.
- This is Season 0, and everyone's RP starts from zero. RP from the old ladders does not carry over. End-of-season titles will read "Season 0".
- In ranked you now see your own custom colour on your seat. Other players still see the standard colour.
- If your game closes during a ranked match, signing back in should put you straight back into it.
See Ranked.
Ranked penalties
- No-shows count as abandons. A player who doesn't turn up when a ranked match starts is treated as abandoning it. A bot plays their seat, and they get the full abandon penalty: a ban strike, the loss of any RP from that match and a further 250 RP. If they reconnect and take the seat back, the penalty is removed.
- If only one player arrives, the match is cancelled. Nobody gains or loses RP, and the player who showed up isn't penalised.
- If you leave a lobby or miss the ready check, you can't be placed back in that same lobby for 5 minutes. Miss the ready check 3 times within an hour and you get a 5-minute queue cooldown.
World Peace (new rule)
- A match now ends in World Peace if nobody's continent-bonus income changes for 5 rounds in a row. Eliminating a player resets the count. So does a capital capture in Capital Conquest, or the Hill changing hands in King of the Hill. You get a warning when World Peace is one round away.
- Casual: on by default, and the host can turn it off. It ends as a draw for everyone still in the game. Correspondence uses it too.
- Ranked: always on. If a ranked match ends in World Peace, every player still in it gets nothing back from the pot and loses their entry fee. It still counts as a game played.
- Players already eliminated keep their place as a normal loss. World Peace isn't used in team games, tournaments or Single Player. Matches started before this update finish without it.
See Game Rules.
Changed
- Siege is now off by default. Siege is the fair-play rule that kicks a player for rounds with no real attacking. It used to apply in every live online match. Now it never applies in ranked, and in casual it's a match setting the host can turn on.
- Streamer Mode now needs approval. Go to Settings → Privacy and request access with your channel link. Once you're approved you can turn it on as before. If you had Streamer Mode on without approval, it has been switched off.
- Phones and tablets: pressing and holding a territory no longer opens a name-report menu. That menu used to pop up in the middle of a pinch and block zooming. Tap selects, drag pans. You can still report a name through the bug reporter.
Fixes
- Android: starting a second match in the same session should no longer crash the game. The game also uses much less graphics memory in menus and matches.
- Simpler Graphics now runs noticeably faster on low-end phones and tablets, especially on maps with fog. Hills look a little softer and the fog has harder edges.
- Join buttons go grey while you're already joining a game, so you can't join two lobbies at once. If you're kicked from a waiting lobby, the browser now says "You were removed from the lobby."
- On 3:2 and 4:3 tablets, the Single Player and Tutorial banners now hang from the top of the screen instead of floating below it.
Show the changes in Build 110
Update required. Build 110 changes how your game talks to the match servers. Once the servers are updated, older builds can't join online matches, including taking your turn in a Correspondence match. Hub stats and titles also stop working on older builds. Single Player plays as before.
Online play
- The server deals the board. In Casual, Ranked and Correspondence matches, the match server now deals the starting territories, troops and turn order itself. It also runs every turn and phase from then on. Who hosts no longer makes any difference to the deal.
- A start can be refused. If the server won't start a match, everyone goes back to the lobby and nothing is recorded.
- "…refused to start this match because it didn't match the lobby" means the players or settings changed at the moment Start was pressed, for example someone leaving just then.
- "The match server couldn't start this match" covers everything else.
- Wait a few seconds, and the host can press Start Game again.
- Size limits for custom maps online. A custom map in a Casual or Correspondence match must stay within limits on territory count, links between territories, name length and drawing detail. The built-in maps are well inside them. An over-limit map is refused with "The match server couldn't start this match". It still plays in Single Player.
- Harder to cheat. The server now checks card trades, captures, battles and resignations itself instead of taking the host's word for them. Online dice rolls are drawn privately on the server, so nobody can work them out in advance. Fog of war is stricter: your game no longer receives troop, card-bonus or capital numbers for territories you can't see, and the bots' hidden personalities stay hidden. A broken map, impossible settings or junk messages from one player's game can no longer stall a match or the server.
- If the server can't be reached when the host presses Start, the host now goes back to the lobby with a message, like everyone else. Before, the host's game started a match on its own that the other players were never in.
- Muting a player also mutes their pact offers. A muted player's offers no longer pop up, write to the log or show a bubble. They still wait in that player's interaction panel with Accept and Decline. Repeated pact offers to the same player are also limited.
- Linking Discord now ends with a code. Go to Settings → Notifications → Link Discord and finish in your browser. Then type the code the browser shows into the new box in Settings. Since a server update on 5 October, linking from older builds can't finish, so update and link again. Links you already have are untouched.
Battles
- Huge Full Sends resolve straight away. Long Exponential card games can put hundreds of thousands or millions of troops on one territory. A Full Send at that size used to stall the game while it rolled every round. It now finishes at once. The odds are unchanged: the long middle of the fight is counted in batches, and the final rounds are still real rolls. One side effect: in very large Full Sends, your Best and Worst Dice Roll records only look at some of that battle's rolls.
- Exponential card trades keep working in very long games. Past a very high trade count, the payout number overflowed and every trade after it was refused. Payouts now keep growing until they reach a ceiling far beyond any normal match, and trading carries on.
- No more freezes from giant stacks. Bots holding enormous stacks no longer freeze the game when they conquer a territory and decide how many troops to move in. Nor does the turn timer when it places millions of leftover troops for you.
See Combat and Dice.
Ranked
- Results are checked against the starting line-up. When a ranked match starts, the server records exactly who is in it. A result that doesn't match is held for review instead of being scored, and earns no RP until it's cleared. When it's cleared, your RP, ranked history and ranked stats update together. If it's voided, it doesn't count. Your ranked history and stats now come from the same checked result that pays out RP, not from your own game's copy.
Fixes
- Fixed: your hub stats kept the first Best and Worst Dice Roll ever saved and never replaced them. This was fixed on the server on 5 October: a better roll now replaces your Best Dice Roll and a worse one your Worst. Records from earlier matches were not recalculated.
- Fixed: since a server change on 5 October, a wrong lobby password showed "Could not join the lobby." It now says "Incorrect password.", and after too many wrong guesses you're asked to wait a few minutes before trying that lobby again. Email sign-in now also tells you how long to wait after too many failed attempts.
Also new
- Simpler Graphics. Settings → Graphics → Simpler Graphics turns off sun shadows, glow and edge smoothing, and draws the board at a lower resolution. The board stays 3D and the game plays the same. It takes effect straight away, even mid-match. If your device is clearly struggling during a match, the game asks you once whether to switch.
Show the changes in Build 109
A new attack window
Rolling dice has a new, cleaner look. When you pick a target, the attack window now shows the fight itself.
- Both sides, face to face. Your territory on the left and the defender's on the right, as 3D pieces in each player's colour, with each player's avatar and troop count in front.
- Watch the losses. After every roll, each side's losses rise off its troop count in that player's colour and fade away.
- The last two rolls sit between you, one row per die, highest on top, so you can see exactly which die beat which.
- Simpler controls. Your dice choice and the Cancel and Attack buttons sit in one panel at the bottom of the screen, level with the phase button, with your chosen dice just above it.
- Keep rolling. The window stays open for 1, 2 and 3-dice attacks. Press Attack again to roll the next round, with no more re-selecting both territories after every roll. It closes when you take the territory, when your attacking troops run out, when you press Cancel or Esc, or when your turn ends. The deciding roll then shows in the top-left corner. Full Send works as before.
- A short pause between attacks (about a third of a second), so a fast double click or held Enter no longer fires two rolls.
See Combat and Dice.
Dice in 3D
- The dice by your player panel are thrown together. The dice on the attack marker in the bottom-left used to be separate pictures stacked on top of each other. They now sit together on the table with soft shadows, and tip onto their rolled faces one after another with a small hop.
- Better-lit dice. All the 3D dice, in your player panel, in combat rolls and on the turn marker, have new lighting. White dice no longer look washed out, and the pips read as cut into the die.
- The marker behind your troop and dice count now has the gold frame of the cards button, filled with the current player's colour to match their banner, instead of a dark grey square.
Changed
- Recolour an opponent on your screen only. Click another player's banner (or press their number) and pick a colour under Colour (only you see this). It's handy when two colours clash, or if you're colourblind. Reset puts it back. Nobody else sees the change, and your own colour can't be changed this way. Your picks last to the end-of-game screen. The next match starts fresh.
- Day and night now pass in real time. On maps with a day/night cycle, the clock runs at one minute per second, a full 24-hour day every 24 minutes, instead of moving on with each placement, attack and fortify. Every match still starts at a random time of day.
- Other players' dice rolls show in the top-left corner below the player banners, at most two at a time, in the same new layout. Your own rolls show in the attack window.
- The "Attacking" label is gone from above the territory you're attacking from.
- No more numbers under the troop slider. The count above the slider already updates as you drag.
- Captures sweep in. When a territory changes hands, the new owner's colour now sweeps across it from the side it was attacked from, over about a second.
- A new defeat card. When a player is knocked out, their card now shows a 3D gravestone with their avatar on it.
The board
- A new 3D look. More stylised colours and lighting, a softer sun, territories that glow gently in their owner's colour, and a subtle ground texture on every territory. Grass is now chunky tufts on PC. Phones and tablets don't draw grass, to keep the board smooth.
- New water. Water is now flat-toned, with a lighter shallow band along every shore and short drifting wave lines. It replaces the whitecaps.
- New lava. Lava is now drifting plates of crust with glowing cracks between them, in crisp red, orange and yellow bands, flowing slowly across the board.
- A taller rim. The rim around the 3D board now stands as tall as the territories.
- Territory edges glow on space maps. On a space backdrop, the bottom of every territory now has a light neon glow, with a soft halo on the ground around it, so the edges stand out against the dark sky. The glow takes the colour of the player whose turn it is, and slowly pulses.
- Fog stays put. On the 3D board, the fog-of-war mist now stays inside fogged territories instead of spilling over their neighbours.
- Caldris, King's Castle, Dwarven Fortress and Fortified Bunker have been touched up.
Biomes
Every map now has a biome: Temperate, Underground, Desert or Space. It's purely for looks. It sets the colours of the painted land, the grass, the lighting and which 3D objects suit the map.
- Fortified Bunker now floats in Space, Dwarven Fortress is Underground and King's Castle is Desert. The other built-in maps, and every existing Workshop map, are Temperate.
- Underground and Space maps have their own lighting and don't show the day/night cycle (the match clock still runs). That means Fortified Bunker no longer shows day and night. Caldris and King's Castle still do.
- Hundreds of new 3D objects for map makers: buildings, walls, dungeon pieces, Halloween pieces, trees, rocks and space props, sorted by biome.
Map Editor
- A new layout, built to work like a professional editing tool.
- Menus along the top (File, Edit, View, Map, Tools and Help), with every command's keyboard shortcut shown beside it.
- A toolbox on the left. Every tool is one button with its own key: Select (Q), Add territory (T), borders (B, F, N, I, R), links and lanes (L, S, C, E), Paint (P), Sculpt (H), Props (O), Move landmass (M) and Trace image (K). The bar under the menus shows the settings for the tool you're using.
- An Outliner and an Inspector on the right. The Outliner lists your groups and territories. Click one to edit it in the Inspector. With nothing selected, the Inspector shows the map's own settings (name, hazards, backdrop and biome, day/night, trace image and thumbnail), so there are no more pop-up windows.
- Redo. Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y brings back what you undid.
- Standard shortcuts: Ctrl+N new, Ctrl+O open, Ctrl+S save (straight back to the same file), Ctrl+Shift+S save as, Home to frame the map, Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- to zoom.
- A tidier board. Border lines show while you use a border tool, and links while you use a link tool, so the rest of the time you see the map as players will.
- Make room. Drag the right-hand panel wider or narrower, fold the Outliner or Inspector, or tuck the whole panel away with » (
Ctrl+\). The editor remembers your layout.
- The status bar shows what's selected, territory and group counts, the cursor position and the zoom.
- Biomes and props:
- Pick a biome from the Paint toolbar or the map's settings. Switching biome keeps your painting and suggests a matching backdrop.
- A new prop browser shows every object as a picture, sorted by biome and category, with search.
- Build straight onto the board. The editor now shows your map from directly above, looking the way it will in a match: territories in player colours with troop badges, edges and walls as on the real board. Press F3 to orbit around it in 3D as before.
- Territory names appear when you zoom in, as in a match. The Names button shows them all the time.
- Random maps, rebuilt. Generate random map now builds from a choice of nine layouts, each with its own options.
- Natural layouts: Continents (several landmasses with mountain ridges and passes, and ragged coasts that stop short of the map's edge) and Archipelago (island chains and ring-shaped atolls).
- Planned layouts: Space station, Building / fortress, Solar system, Command base, Spaceport, Starship and Flying Fortress, with rooms, decks, rings and orbits instead of coastlines.
- Classic or Corridor. Classic maps avoid dead ends and choke points. Corridor maps lean into them.
- Fairer bonuses. A continent's bonus is set by how big it is and how many ways in it has.
- Ready to play. Generated maps come with painted land, terrain and a biome to match the layout.
- Every link is visible. Neighbours on a generated map share a drawn border or a shipping lane, with no more hidden links across the water.
- Solar system and Spaceport go up to 120 territories.
- The old shapes are still there, under Legacy shapes.
- Generating a big map no longer freezes the editor while it works.
- More for map makers:
- The map keeps itself in step. Territory fills, land links and shipping-lane ends now follow your borders after every edit. "Weld ends" is gone, "Auto-calc adjacency" is now Reset links to borders, and links you add or cut by hand survive later border edits.
- An Issues list at the top of the Outliner flags problems as you work, such as loose ends and territories with no neighbours or cut off from the map. A click jumps to each one. Save tells you what's left.
- Shipping lanes can be drawn as a Sea lane, Walkway or Vent. It only changes the look. The rules are the same as any shipping lane.
- Move landmass (M). Drag a whole landmass (borders, territories and its shipping lanes) somewhere else on the map.
- Place the trace image (K). Move and scale the picture you're tracing, fit it to the canvas or lock it.
- Match overlays in both the top-down and 3D views: Groups (G, recolours territories by group as Tab does in a match), Links, Portals, Badges and Names.
- Left-drag pans the map when no tool is picked or with Select. Select now selects when you let go.
- Territories and scenery are edited separately. Moving land leaves your paint, terrain and props where they were. A prop left under a territory shows up in Issues as "Prop hidden under …". Click it, then drag the prop clear. Props also get X and Y fields next to their Rotation and Scale.
- Network-path maps. A map on a network path (for example
\\nas\maps\my_map.popmap) can no longer be opened or saved from the editor. Reaching such a path made Windows sign in to that computer. Maps on a mapped drive letter (for example Z:\maps) and all local folders work as before. Map the share to a drive letter, or copy the maps into your local maps folder.
See Map Editor.
Fixes
- Fixed: the dice picker slipped back to 1 die. After an attack that could only roll one die (a stack down to 2 troops), the picker kept choosing 1 die for later attacks, even from a big stack, and online even on your next turn. It now keeps the choice you made while you attack from the same stack, and starts each attack phase (and each new stack) on the strongest roll.
- Fixed: the How to Play tutorial board didn't show its border lines.
- Fixed: generated maps could save unplayable, with border ends left unjoined. They are now joined up.
- Clear all borders can now be undone.
Show the changes in Build 108
Update required. Build 108 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together.
A new 3D board
The map is now fully 3D. Territories are raised blocks, and the camera tilts as you zoom: it looks down on the board when zoomed out and swings lower as you zoom in.
- Rotate the view. On PC, hold the middle mouse button and drag to turn the board up to about 60° either way. Double-click the middle button to snap it back.
- 3D troop tokens. Troop counts now sit on each territory as thick tokens cut in the shape of your badge, tipped back so they always face you, with a gold rim once a territory holds 15 or more troops. Capitals and the Hill get the same treatment. When you rotate the view, all the tokens turn together.
- Troops on the move. Attack previews, marches and fortify trails now use your 3D troop models.
- Living hazards. Fog of war drifts across the board as real mist, firestorm territories burn charcoal-grey with one big flame and drifting embers, and portals swirl behind their token.
- Floating labels. Territory names, continent labels and the adjacency lines hover just above the board, and names stay readable on fogged and burning territories.
- 3D troop slider. The knob on the troop slider is now your 3D troop, turning toward the way you drag.
Water, lava and space
The wooden table is gone. The board now sits inside a raised purple rim, surrounded by whatever the map is set in.
- Water, lava, space or a plain colour. Each map chooses what its territories stand in. Water is the default for every map.
- Water ripples, reflects the sky, and breaks into whitecaps along every shore.
- Lava flows and swirls, with glowing molten veins running through it.
- Space is full of stars and nebulae that shift as you move the camera.
- No more background pictures. The backdrop replaces a map's background picture everywhere. Paint land in the editor to give your map its coastline.
- The built-in maps have coastlines. Every built-in map now has painted land and beaches, and some are dressed with trees and rocks.
- Workshop maps made before this update show open water around their territories until their maker paints land, and their background pictures no longer appear.
3D terrain and objects
Maps can now have real 3D land. Map makers paint land, beach and stone around the territories, and on the 3D board it rises out of the water.
- Painted land stands up from the sea and slopes down into the water, with surf breaking along the shore. Steep slopes show as rock.
- Territories always stay on top. The land never rises through a territory.
Day and night
Maps can now have a day/night cycle. Time passes as the match is played: every troop placement, attack and fortify move advances the clock by one minute, so 60 actions make an hour.
- The sun moves across the board. It rises in the east, turns golden at dawn and dusk, and sets in the west. At night a cool moon lights the board. Player colours stay easy to tell apart after dark.
- A clock in the top bar shows the time of day, and whether it's day or night.
- Every match starts at a random time of day.
- Try it on Caldris, Fortified Bunker and King's Castle, which have the cycle turned on.
- Purely for looks. Day and night don't change any rules.
Map Editor
- Backdrops: pick the backdrop, its colour and how strong the effect is in the new Backdrop 🌊 settings.
- Trace an image. The background picker is replaced by a Trace image that every map maker can use: load a picture from your computer, set how see-through it is, and draw your borders over it. Only you see it. It's never shown in matches or to other players.
- Removed: the built-in background pictures and the background generator. New maps start blank, straight into setup.
- Sculpt the land. New Sculpt brushes raise, lower, smooth and flatten the ground anywhere on the map. Raise the seabed into a new island, or carve a lake into the land.
- Place 3D objects. Dress your map with over 60 stylised nature models (common, pine, dead and twisted trees, bushes, ferns, flowers, grass, mushrooms, rocks, pebbles and stepping-stone paths, from Quaternius' Stylized Nature kit, CC0), plus huts, towers and ruins. The Prop picker is a menu with a folder for each kind. Objects sit on the land around your territories and never cover a territory or get in the way of a click.
- Draw in 2D, shape it in 3D. Draw your territories on the flat map as before, then press F3 (or 2D ⇄ 3D) to switch the editor into a live 3D view of the board and sculpt, paint and place objects right on it. Hill-shading shows the shape of your land in the 2D view too.
- Day/night: turn the cycle on in the new Day / Night ☀ settings, and choose how many hours a day and a night last. The default is a 16-hour day and an 8-hour night.
See Map Editor.
Smarter bots
Every bot has been rebuilt. Bots now weigh every move (attacks, deploys, fortifies and card trades) by what it's actually worth to them, instead of following fixed rules.
- They read the real odds before attacking, the same odds the Dice Picker shows you.
- They go after continents: taking them, breaking yours, and defending their own borders.
- They hunt eliminations. A bot that can knock a player out this turn (and take their cards) will plan the attacks to do it.
- Better deploys. Bots stack what an attack needs, then spread the rest to threatened borders, rather than dumping everything on one tile.
- Difficulty is now how well a bot plays, not what it wants. An Easy bot has the same goals as a Brutal one. It just misjudges fights and misses threats more often.
- Team bots work together. Bots on the same team pick one enemy to focus, follow a human teammate's lead, and cover each other's borders.
- No more endless bot stalemates. If a game stops moving for several rounds, bots get more aggressive until something breaks.
- King of the Hill: bots now fight for the Hill and hold it, and bots vote in the opening Hill vote. Easy bots vote at random half the time. Neutral bots don't vote.
- Card trading: bots must still trade at 5 cards. Below that they weigh trading now against holding for a bigger set. This replaces the old rule where online bots never traded below 4 cards.
- Capital Conquest bots keep 20% on their capital at every difficulty. Before, harder bots parked more troops at home (up to 80%), which actually made Hard and Brutal bots weaker in Capital Conquest. Neutral bots no longer add any extra troops to their capital.
See Bots.
New personality: Dynamic
- A tenth bot personality. A Dynamic bot rolls its own tastes fresh each match, so no two play alike. It always has at least one thing it clearly cares about. Higher difficulties keep its judgement sensible.
- Personality odds have changed. Dynamic joins the random pool at about 1 in 10 at every difficulty. The Noob personality now appears 45% of the time on Easy, 22.5% on Normal, 9% on Hard and under 1% on Brutal.
Single Player
- Pick each bot's personality. On the setup screen, every bot slot now has a personality choice next to its difficulty: Random (the default), any of the nine, or Dynamic. Personalities stay hidden online.
- See what Dynamic rolled. After a Single Player match, the After Action Report shows each Dynamic bot's rolled traits.
See Single Player.
Changed
- Timeouts place your troops sensibly. If your setup timer runs out, your troops now go where a bot would put them (toward your cheapest continent, onto chokepoints, next to your own territories) instead of a random tile. A timed-out capital pick now chooses a defensible spot instead of simply your biggest stack.
- Attack targets pulse. Territories you can attack now gently pulse so they're easier to spot.
- Card icons show on every territory. The icon marking a territory from one of your cards now appears on fogged and firestorm territories too.
Fixes
- Fixed: after conquering a territory and moving your troops in, its attack previews stayed hidden until you clicked the territory twice. They now appear on their own a moment later.
- Fixed: Hard and Brutal bots could never attack a capital holding 3 or more troops, which stalled Capital Conquest games against them.
- Fixed: playing online against bots, a short internet hiccup ended the match on the spot, and every attempt to reconnect failed. When you're the only human in an online match, it now waits up to two minutes for you to come back.
- Fixed: "Return to Menu" on the connection-lost screen did nothing, leaving you stuck until you closed the game.
- A clear message when a match can't be rejoined. If the match has ended while you were disconnected, you're now told so, instead of being offered a Retry that could never work.
- Fixed: the bottom line of text in some confirm dialogs was cut off.
Show the changes in Build 107
Update required. Build 107 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together.
Calculated dice, reworked
Full Send in Calculated mode now works the way the slider says it does.
- The % on the slider is the real chance. Away from a sure thing it shows the same odds as Classic dice, then climbs smoothly to 100% as you commit enough troops for a guaranteed win. No more jumps between one troop and the next.
- Guaranteed wins start at 5 v 1 and scale up smoothly with the size of the fight: about even troops around 150 v 150, and fewer attackers than defenders in the biggest battles (475 v 500).
- A 0% attack is now a real attack. Commit a few troops to bleed a big stack: you spend the troops you committed, the defender loses troops too, and you never take the territory (so no card for either side). Before, a 0% attack wiped your troops and left the defender untouched.
- Losses are predictable. A win costs close to the troops real dice would cost on average, with a small spread. No more losing a huge stack to a single defender on a bad streak.
- You see every roll. Every Calculated attack plays out as dice rounds in the battle log, online and offline. Online, a 0% attack used to remove your troops with no dice and no log line at all.
- Classic dice, and 1, 2 and 3-dice attacks, are unchanged.
See Combat and Dice.
Changed
- Clearer Calculated Dice panel. The troops you're committing (for example
5 / 8) now sit on the left above the slider, with your chance of conquest on the right, so both numbers are readable at a glance.
- Your troop on the sliders. The Calculated Dice slider and the troop-moving slider (deploy, advance, fortify) now use your own troop figure, in your colour, as the handle.
Fixes
- Eliminated players stay in the Battle Log. Once a player was knocked out, you could no longer filter the log to their turns and battles. They now keep their filter button (dimmed), so everything they did stays easy to find.
- Fixed: getting eliminated hid some of your own log lines. Your card-trade bonuses and income breakdowns now stay in your Battle Log in full after you're knocked out.
- Fixed: replays of online matches were missing the portals, with no starting layout and no changes as portals moved each round. They now show both. This applies to new matches. Replays already saved in the cloud are unchanged.
Known issues
- Cloud replays saved before this update still show no portals.
Privacy Policy update
We've updated our Privacy Policy to keep ranked fair:
- The game now notices when two accounts are online at the same time from the same internet address. Our server scrambles the address straight away and keeps only the scrambled value, for no more than about 20 minutes. What we keep after that is just a note that the two accounts were online together, never your IP address.
- Using the same address at different times is never recorded, because no history of your addresses is kept.
- This is only ever supporting evidence for a moderator looking into a fair-play problem. Lots of people share an internet connection (families, dorms, cafés, mobile networks), so it never puts a hold on or restricts an account by itself. Those notes are deleted after 90 days.
Show the changes in Build 106
Update required. Build 106 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together.
New
- Live casting. Trusted casters can now watch live matches as they happen, with no delay. A caster needs the caster role (granted by an admin) and a code for that one match.
- When a caster is watching, you see a 🎙 Being cast badge and a one-time notice. It goes away when they leave.
- Ranked and Correspondence matches are never cast.
- Casters get a live theater: rewind, jump to the previous or next turn, a LIVE button to catch back up, and a Chat tab.
- Pact messages now show up in replays. The pre-made pact message icons appear in the replay's Chat tab, for online and single-player matches.
- Moderation dashboard (staff): new Live Matches and Casters tabs. Admins can watch any live match for moderation. This is silent and watch-only.
Changed
- Round 1 always starts with the first player in turn order, in every mode. It used to start with whoever placed the last setup army, which could make round 1 a single turn long.
- News checks for new posts when you open it, instead of showing what it fetched up to an hour earlier.
- Streamer Mode always uses a free avatar for your disguise.
- Bots pick colours that are easier to tell apart. A table can no longer be dealt look-alikes like Cyan and Teal or Green and Lime. Colours you pick yourself are unchanged.
- Cloud replays download through a secure service. Share codes work as before. Too many wrong codes in a row and you'll see "Too many wrong codes — try again in a few minutes."
Fixes
- Replays now record every troop change. Online replays from the server used to start with 0 troops on every territory and could miss players' own moves. Fixed for new matches. Replays already in the cloud are unchanged.
- Matches end only when the server says they're over. A fog-of-war domination match could occasionally show the end screen early while play carried on.
- A host can no longer turn another player into a bot or break other players' pacts.
- Briefly disconnecting no longer gets you replaced by a bot if you rejoin quickly.
- Ranked's check on reported wins now works, so a wrongly claimed win is caught.
- Your bug reports no longer include other players' pact messages.
- Moderators' fair-play review queue loads again.
- Fixed: resigning on your first turn could stall the match. Everyone else now moves straight on to the next player.
- Fixed: in Correspondence, missing the deadline on the last capital pick froze the match. Your richest territory now becomes your capital and round 1 begins.
- The tutorial's Region Bonus tip shows the right key after you remap or clear it.
- Fixed: in online matches the host lost the Back to Attack button in Fortify for the rest of the match after their first troop move.
Known issues
- Cloud replays saved before this update still start with 0 troops.
Privacy Policy update
We've updated our Privacy Policy to protect fair play in ranked:
- Ban evasion checks now also recognise your device. Alongside the random installation identifier the game already used, it now reads the identifier your operating system gives apps and scrambles it with a one-way hash on your device before sending it. The original value never leaves your computer or phone.
- Steam tells us which account owns your copy of the game, so we can tell when a game is borrowed through Steam Family Sharing.
- We use these only to spot a restricted player coming back on a new account. They're not advertising identifiers, they're never sold or shared, and links are deleted after 90 days without use. Sharing a computer or a Steam library with family is fine. A moderator clears those cases.
Show the changes in Build 105
Update required. Build 105 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together.
New
- Hotkeys, and you can remap them. Settings has a new Controls tab (PC) where every hotkey has two slots, so one action can be on two keys, or on a key and the mouse wheel. The defaults:
- S: Social (emotes and quick chat)
- B: Battle Log
- C: Card Hand (trade in a set, when you can)
- R (or Tab): Region Bonuses overlay
- A: Adjacency overlay
- T: Card Territories overlay
- 1 to 8 (or the numpad): open that player's panel, same as clicking their card in the top strip
- Left and Right Arrow (or the mouse wheel): move the troop slider and the dice sliders
- Press a hotkey again to close what it opened. Hotkeys don't fire while you're typing. Hover a button on the side menu to see its key. The tooltip follows you if you remap it. See Controls for every control in the game, including touch on Android.
- Emotes in the lobby. A new Social button in the online lobby (or press S) lets you send emotes and quick-chat lines while you wait for the match to start. They pop up inside your player banner for everyone in the lobby to see.
- New quick-chat line: "Get Toasted!"
Changed
- Resigning no longer throws you back to the main menu. You now get the defeat screen inside the match, and you can stay and watch the rest of it (except in fog-of-war matches, where you can only leave). Leave whenever you like from that screen. In Correspondence it takes you back to Your Games.
- Drag with the left mouse button to move the map. Hold the left button and drag to pan (middle-drag still works too). A normal click still selects a territory.
- You can move the map on any player's turn. Left-drag on PC and one-finger drag on Android now work while you wait for your turn, not just on it.
- Bots get a random colour instead of always taking the next colour in the list.
- New lobbies are named after the match instead of after the host, for example "Fixed World Domination on Caldris" or "Progressive Capital Conquest on King's Castle". The name follows your card type, game type and map as you change them. Type your own name to use that instead.
- The map overlays now stay on until you turn them off. The Region Bonuses, Adjacency and Card Territories overlays used to switch themselves off at every turn change and whenever you closed a menu.
- Region Bonus works on any player's turn. It used to work only on your own turn. Tap R to turn it on and again to turn it off, or hold it (or Tab) to peek and let go.
- Esc closes the Settings window. In a match it used to open the Resign prompt instead.
- Bots now play by the turn timer, same as everyone else. In online matches with a turn timer, a bot that runs out of time has its turn ended just like a player would, including a bot that took over for someone who left. Single Player is unchanged (it has no turn timer).
- Semi-Auto troop placement: one turn each, in the open. Each player now places all of their starting armies in a single turn before the next player goes, instead of one army at a time round the table. Troop counts are visible to everyone while armies go down, and there is no reveal screen at the end any more.
- King of the Hill now defaults to 5 points to win, and you can set it anywhere from 3 to 10. It used to default to 10 with a 5 to 25 range. If you liked the long game, 10 is still there. Ranked is unchanged: 10 points in FFA and 1v1, 15 in Teams.
- Capital picks are now timed. In an online Capital Conquest match with a turn timer, each player's capital pick runs on the turn timer. If your time runs out, your territory with the most armies becomes your capital and the next player picks. "Still there?" can now appear during the capital picks too.
Improved
- You can always see how much time the current player has left. The turn hourglass comes straight from the server, so everyone sees the same clock. If the hourglass reaches 0:00 before the server ends the turn, it now stays on screen at 0:00 instead of disappearing.
- Fixed: the hourglass disappeared on another player's turn after they knocked someone out or had to trade cards, didn't come back after you reconnected mid-turn, and vanished on long bot turns.
- King of the Hill now tells you when a point is actually scored. Holding the Hill on your own turn does not score. The point goes to whoever holds the Hill when the round ends, after every player has moved, and the first point is scored at the end of Round 3. This is now explained on the in-match Hill scoreboard (expand it, or hover the button), including which round's end scores next, and in the King of the Hill card and the Game Type and Points to Win info popups when you create a game.
- You can leave a contact when you report a bug, if you want a reply. The report form has a new optional field for an email address or Discord handle. Leave it blank and the report stays anonymous, as before. Fill it in and we can come back to you about that report. Reporting a player is unchanged: those go to moderators and have no contact field.
- The Battle Log shows how many armies every player gets at the start of their turn, for example
Gorthrax +10 armies (7 territory + 3 group). It appears under that player's turn heading in the All view and in that player's own filter. With fog of war on, you see the breakdown for your own turns only. Other players' lines show just the total.
- You can see how many armies an opponent is deploying. On another player's turn the status line now reads "Gorthrax is deploying 10 armies…" and counts down as they place them.
- News opens on its own when there's something new. After you close the Early Access window on the main menu, News opens automatically if there's an announcement you haven't seen yet. If there's nothing new, it stays closed.
- The player strip across the top of a match is smaller, so the map gets more of the screen.
- Portals are easier to see on any territory colour. Open portals now swirl purple and blue. Closed portals swirl purple and red and turn much more slowly, so you can tell them apart by colour and by motion. The dark centre that got lost on dark territories is gone, and portals are slightly smaller so they cover less of the map.
- In the Adjacency view, links to and from Firestorm tiles are now greyed out and drawn under the normal links, so you can see at a glance which connections you can actually use.
- Player portraits in the social panel now sit on a plate in that player's colour, so you can tell at a glance who you're talking to.
- Replays no longer freeze when you jump around them. On a long match, skipping ahead, rewinding or stepping back could lock up the game for several seconds at a time. Now:
- Stepping back an action or a round is near-instant.
- Long jumps no longer lock up the game. You see "Seeking… NN%" in the controls while they catch up.
- You can drag the scrub bar freely in both directions. Playback pauses while you drag and picks up again when you let go.
- Replays play back at a smooth 60 fps. For most of a match they were held at 20 fps.
Fixes
- Your custom colour sticks when you join a lobby. Joining someone else's lobby with a custom colour from your Loadout could reset you to a standard palette colour. The lobby also now shows every player the colour they will actually have in the match.
- Fixed: if you were knocked out and watched the rest of the match, the end screen said VICTORY. It now says DEFEAT.
- Fixed: after choosing to watch a match you'd been knocked out of, Esc and the Resign button did nothing. Both now ask if you want to leave.
- Fixed: on PCs with more than one monitor, dragging a volume slider in Settings could throw the game onto another screen. The sliders now only change the sound.
- The volume sliders now make an audible difference. Most of each slider's range used to change the sound so little it seemed to do nothing. Now 50% sounds about half as loud. Because of this, your current volume levels may sound a bit quieter than before.
- Fixed: in online matches with Manual or Semi-Auto troop placement, the player who went first could be left with nothing to place, and the match stayed stuck on their turn. Setup turns are now also on the turn timer: if one runs out, that turn's armies are placed for you at random and play moves on.
- Finishing off a player who resigned now gives you their cards. When someone resigns, their territories stay on the map until captured. Taking their last territory now counts as eliminating them: you get their cards and the kill, like any other elimination.
- Fixed: in large matches (8 players), clicking the Adjacency toggle could open a player's info panel instead.
- Menus scroll instead of zooming the map. While a menu is open, the map no longer reacts to the wheel, clicks or hover through it, and clicking outside any side panel closes it.
- Territory names show up as soon as you zoom in. Before, they only appeared once you moved the map. They also hide again when you zoom back out.
- Fixed: your own private Battle Log lines, such as your card-trade territory bonuses, switched to the short public version when you reopened the log on someone else's turn.
- Fixed: the Map Editor's curated backgrounds didn't show up in the released game, and new maps started with no background.
- Replay fixes:
- The mouse wheel over the replay's scrub bar no longer jumps the replay around.
- The replay's event list no longer goes blank after you rewind, and the Battle Log no longer repeats entries after a rewind.
- Damage numbers no longer pile up on the map after you jump.
- Replays now seat everyone in the match's real turn order. Opening a replay used to shuffle the players along the top bar and could start on the wrong player's turn.
- Fixed: a lobby name longer than 32 characters was cut off. Names up to 72 characters now go through whole.
Show the changes in Build 103
Update required. Build 103 changes how online matches work, so everyone needs it to play online together.
This is the first update since build 100.
Dice
- Dice Type is gone. Every match rolls a d6. The Defensive (d4), Standard (d6) and Aggressive (d8) choice has been removed, along with its filter and tags in the match browser and lobby. Every match (Casual, Ranked, Single Player, Correspondence) now plays on the d6 that Standard always used. If you usually hosted Defensive or Aggressive, your combat odds have changed. Ranked was on the d6 already.
- Dice Mode is untouched. Classic and Calculated are still yours to pick, Ranked included.
See Combat and Dice.
Match stats
- The three stats screens now match. The After Action Report, the in-match Your Stats panel and the Replay Browser's Match Stats report show the same figures under the same names. Captions also wrap properly, so the groups fit on a phone.
- Three figures were renamed: Troops Left is now Troops Remaining, Cards from Eliminations is now Cards Captured, and Cards Earned (total) is now Total Cards Earned. Cards Captured is part of Total Cards Earned, not a separate pile, so don't add the two together.
- New: where your armies came from. Troops from Territories, Troops from Regions, Troops from Capitals (Capital Conquest only) and Troops from Cards, plus Territories Lost and Capitals Lost. They're on the Your Stats panel, the Match Stats report and its CSV export. The four income figures are named sources, not a breakdown of Troops Deployed, so they won't add up to it.
- New: Traded on 3 Cards, Traded on 4 Cards, Traded on 5 Cards. How big your hand was each time you chose to trade a set in. A trade you're forced into by inheriting a knocked-out player's cards counts in none of the three, so in a match where somebody was eliminated they can add up to less than Card Sets Traded.
- The replay's Final Standings card is now a summary. It shows what the After Action Report shows: Troops Remaining, Players Eliminated, Total Cards Earned, Cards Captured, the three trade figures, plus RP in Ranked and Hill Points in King of the Hill. The full per-player breakdown is still in the report's Your Stats grid and its CSV export.
- These figures are recorded from this build on. Matches recorded before a figure existed show "—" rather than 0.
Changed
- Replays no longer show other players' pact counts. Pacts are private for good, not just while the match is running. A cloud replay now shows Pacts Made and Pacts Broken for nobody, and a replay you recorded yourself shows only your own. A replay recorded before this build may show "—" for your own count too.
- Adjacency now replaces the region overlay instead of drawing on top of it. In the region view (hold Tab, or the Group Highlights button), turning Adjacency on hides the region colouring and shows just the link graph. Turning it off brings the colouring back. Closing the region view clears both. The Caster Deck's Overlays and Adjacency toggles work the same way.
- Single Player has moved to the centre of the offline mode-select page, with the large pennant. Tutorial stays on the right.
Fixes
- Fixed: on the in-match Your Stats panel in an online match, Troops Earned was too high for everyone except the host. A full turn's income was counted again each time somebody joined or rejoined during your turn.
- Fixed: in firestorm matches, the battle log could report your region bonus as territory income, drop the region row, or show a negative territory count. Every part of that breakdown now comes from the same figures the game pays you.
- Fixed: in Single Player, Territories Lost and Capitals Lost read 0 all match, and a bot that knocked a player out recorded 0 Cards Captured.
- Fixed: fogged replays showed other players' Territories Held based on what your seat could see. They now use the recorded figure.
On our servers
- Fixed: Correspondence matches could finish without recording anything. Your games played, stat totals and coins for that match could be dropped. Ranked was not affected. This was fixed on our servers on 17 September, so it didn't need an update. If a Correspondence match stopped counting for you before that date, this is why.