Releases

A follow-up to tonight's briefing-form fix. When a briefing is re-sent — because
the first one was broken, or because its questions stopped making sense — the old
form now disappears from the thread instead of lingering underneath the new one,
asking to be filled in. A briefing you actually answered is never removed: that one
is the record of what was decided.

Two things land tonight, and both are about seeing what is actually happening.

Your scan ring is on the map. Your Scanning research has always bought you an
early warning before an attack lands — but it was a number you never saw. Now it
is a ring drawn around your main base, and it means exactly what it looks like: a
hostile force crossing that line is a force you have been warned about. Push
Scanning higher and the ring grows with it. Inbound attacks now appear on your own
globe the moment your warning window opens, so an attack is something you watch
coming in rather than read about afterwards.

You learn nothing sooner than you did before — the ring is the warning you
already had, finally drawn where you can see it.

The Starport has a cart. Ordering a mixed force used to mean a separate order,
and a separate delivery, for every unit type. Now you fill a cart across every row
and send the lot as one delivery.

One thing worth knowing: you can have two deliveries in transit at once, and a
third has to wait until one of them lands. Anything already in the air when this
ships is untouched — every one of those orders arrives exactly as you placed it.

And a fix for the briefing forms. On a question where you could pick several
answers, ticking one box ticked them all — and the form then refused to submit,
insisting you had not answered. Both are gone. Any briefing that was left hanging
because of it has been re-sent.

When you ask the command staff to grill or brainstorm an idea in the Dev Channel, you now
always get a structured briefing back — every open question in one go, each with a recommended
option, a free-text answer when none of the presets fit, and a notes box. You answer it once and
submit once, and the work starts from there.

Before this, those questions could come back as plain prose, and sometimes one at a time across
separate replies. If you were away from your desk that turned a single design conversation into a
string of round-trips spread over hours. The form is now the only way that conversation can go out.

Tapping a force on the World Map now works the way your finger actually works.

A tap only registered if your finger landed and lifted within a hair's breadth of the same
pixel. Fingers don't do that — they drift a little. So on a phone, taps on small targets like
your own attacking force were quietly ignored, no matter how many times you tried. The map now
allows for that natural drift, exactly as the press-and-hold gesture already did. Rival and
allied force blips got easier to hit in the same pass.

Nothing changed about what you can see or who can see it — only whether the map answers when
you touch it.

An in-flight spy no longer hides as a plain line in the World Map's Intel panel. It now gets the same treatment a Scout does: a live progress track over its real route, an ETA readout, and tap-to-inspect — tap the entry and the spy's corridor and target light up on the globe (tap the blip itself and its entry highlights back). Still your own covert view; other Commanders see nothing.

Your spies in flight are no longer just a marker you can't touch. Tap a spy's covert-eye blip on the World Map and it now traces the real path it's flying over the terrain — the full corridor, a marker on its target, and a pulse on the spy itself — exactly the way tapping a Scout works. It's your own operational view; a spy still stays invisible to everyone else. Tap anywhere else to clear it.

More spy intel — the in-flight progress track and the report reveal below the map — is on its way in the next update.

Send an informant behind enemy lines and you'll now spot them on the World Map — a distinct covert "watching eye" blip in your house colour, no longer lost among your marching armies. It's a placeholder marker for now; a bespoke agent sprite, a tappable route-and-status overlay, and the Scout-style intel animation are already queued to follow.

Founding a new base no longer means guessing. Switch on Deploy MCV on the world
map and every valid rock landing site inside your explored territory now glows green —
only the spots where a landing will actually succeed: unclaimed, far enough from other
bases, and on true rock. No more long-pressing a patch that merely looks stony only to
be turned away — pick a glowing site and preview your new base straight away.

Your base's "under attack" indicator used to start blinking the instant an
enemy force launched — long before your scanners could resolve any detail,
leaving you with a red light and nothing to read. It now lights exactly when
the incoming-attack warning becomes viewable, so the blink and its detail
always arrive together. Investing in Scanning still buys you an earlier
warning, just as it should.

Tap one of your own outbound attacks on the world map and its full flight path now traces across the globe, origin to target, so you can read the run at a glance. Allies see the same corridor on any attack you share intel with — and, as with a scout, a rival tapping your force still sees nothing but your commander name and House. The line stays yours to know.

Tap one of your own outbound attacks on the world map and the force panel now carries a Recall attack button — turn your army around and send it home without leaving the map. It shows only while the attack is still on its way out (a launched special weapon is committed and can't be pulled back), and it's yours alone: a rival or ally tapping your force never sees it.

Your own forces on the world map are now tappable too. Tap one of your outbound attack dots and the full picture opens: the units you sent and how many, your aggression and focus orders, the arrival countdown, and the target and origin coordinates — all of it, because it's your army and you always know where you sent it. Rival and ally forces keep the disclosure they had: a rival still shows only who commands it and its House, an ally the shared-intel view. Live paths on the globe and a recall button land in the next slice.

Attacking forces on the world map are now tappable. Tap a rival's force and you'll see who commands it and which House flies its colours — nothing more, the same discipline a scout blip keeps. Tap an ally's and the full picture opens up: unit composition, their aggression and focus orders, the arrival countdown, and the target and origin coordinates. Your own forces stay read-only for now — clickable own dots land next.

Hostile forces on the move now appear on the globe. When an attacking force crosses ground your fog has revealed — an ally's forces show wherever they are — a marked blip flags it: a red ring for a rival, green for an ally, tinted to the commander's house. Hover to see whether it's friend or foe. Who's behind it, where it's headed and how strong it is stay hidden for now — tapping a force to inspect it lands next.

Tapping a base in the top bar's base menu could throw a 405 error instead of switching to it. The switcher now reloads cleanly onto the page you're on with the selected base active.

The top bar has had a clean-up, Commander.

The base icon is a real control now. Tap it anywhere — the icon itself, not just
the name beside it — and your base list opens: switch base, read each one's status at
a glance, and jump straight to Bases. It opens even when you hold only a single base,
where it used to sit there looking like a button that did nothing.

Every base can fly its own colour. Pick one on the Bases page — any colour you
like, or one tap on a preset — and the top bar's base icon wears it, so you always
know which base you are commanding. Your main base always keeps its clear M.

Fewer things in the way. The stray expand arrow on the right of the bar is gone;
tap your name to open your menu instead. Commander, Achievements and the Points Shop
have left that menu — all three were always one tap away in the side menu.

And if you command from a tablet: the bar no longer sprawls, with your name marooned
at one end and everything else at the other.

The new Max control shipped with real faults, and they are now corrected everywhere
it appears.

On phones it was too large for the Build cards and pushed the layout out of shape.
Worse, it was sitting on top of the button next to it — so a tap aimed at Build, or
at the Bank's own Sell, Buy, Deposit and Withdraw buttons, could fire Max instead.
The Bank was affected on every screen size, not just phones.

The amount field and Max now fill the width together on a phone, with the action
button on its own line beneath, and every control keeps a comfortable tap target.

The icon has changed too: a battery says "charged", not "buy as many as I can
afford". It is now an arrow driven up into a ceiling — fill it to the limit.

Every globe built the way ours is has the same flaw: the terrain wraps around the
planet in columns that all meet at a single point at the top and bottom, so the
ground smears into an ugly pinch exactly where you were looking.

Both poles now wear a scoured, wind-blasted polar flat that covers the convergence
and reads as part of the planet rather than a glitch in it. Tilt the map up or down
as far as it goes: the pucker is gone.

The global events feed treated a storm sitting on top of your base and an exchange
rate wobble on the far side of the planet as the same kind of news.

Every event now carries a severity — info, warning, or danger — and anything within
range of one of your bases is marked "near you" and sorted to the top of the feed.
A storm crossing empty desert is a warning; the moment it reaches your ground, it is
a danger, and it says so.

You can also opt in to be alerted when something dangerous reaches you, using the
same alerts you already get for allied defence. It is off by default — switch it on
from your Commander page.

The Imperial Bank had a Max button. Nowhere else did — so every build order and
every starport purchase meant doing the arithmetic yourself, then discovering the
cap you forgot about.

Now the Build page, the Starport and the Bank all carry the same one-tap Max
control. It is an icon rather than a word, so it does not crowd the field on a
phone, and it is honest: it fills in the largest amount the game will actually
accept, having already accounted for what you can afford, your build caps, and
your order limits. If the answer is zero, it tells you so instead of letting you
find out at the confirm step.

Until you have researched Colonization, you command exactly one base — so a "Bases"
entry in the menu had nothing to offer but a page telling you so.

It is now hidden until the moment you unlock it, and when that moment comes it
arrives with the same amber reveal the World map and Starport already use, in step
with the base selector appearing in your top bar.

If you scout from an iPhone or iPad, your recon snapshots were arriving rough:
hard stair-stepped edges, no soft feather around the mapped corridor, and washed-out
terrain colours — while the same plate looked perfect on desktop.

Safari draws its maps with a different engine, and it was quietly skipping every
blur and colour pass we asked for. The rendering pipeline has been rebuilt so every
device now draws the exact same plate, pixel for pixel.

Bonus fix for everyone: an unscouted sandworm tremor on Safari was showing the
crawler's crisp silhouette through the fog. A tremor is a rumour, not a photograph —
it is a dim pulse again, on every device.

More work on the scout recon snapshot.

Sandstorm losses finally show their plate. A trike killed by a sandstorm maps
ground right up to the moment it dies, exactly like one that is intercepted or
taken by a worm — but that was the one death that showed you nothing at all. The
intel your trike paid for is now on the table where it belongs.

The wreck and homecoming plates got their edges back. They draw the run's
whole corridor rather than a scan disc, and were being cut to a circle that never
fitted them. They now follow the ground the trike actually mapped.

The scout's approach trail is visible. It was always drawn, but a thin line
against bright sand or black rock is no line at all. It now carries a dark casing
and a marker at the point the trike crossed into scan range.

Terrain seams blend properly, on every plate.

The scout recon snapshot now blends the borders between terrain types into a soft transition instead of a blocky, stair-stepped edge — and it finally looks right on high-resolution phone screens, where the smoothing was slipping out of place before. The reveal circle stays crisply round.

The scout recon snapshot had a stair-stepped edge — the disc was drawn from square tiles, so its rim came out as a staircase rather than a circle. The smooth edge we added last time was being drawn outside the staircase, which meant it trimmed almost nothing and you only ever glimpsed it flickering at the rim.

The circle now sits inside the tile edge, where it can actually do its job: the plate reads as a clean, round scan disc.