ONLINE IS OPEN
Two weeks. Real opponents. A ladder that keeps score.
Last update I told you online existed, that it was built and that it ran, and that it was not going in your hands until it worked properly. It has been behind that sentence ever since, playing against itself. Harnesses, house players, two copies of the game talking to each other inside one process, thousands of matches proving it does not come apart.
Not one of them was a person. That is the part I cannot test on my own, and it is the reason this is a test and not a launch.
Online is open now, for two weeks. Then I close it, read everything that comes back, fix what it tells me to fix, and bring it back properly for the full release.
What a match is
A level field. That is the whole design, and it is not a setting you can change:
- Six cards a side: four agents and two items.
- No dread. No collection. Nothing you own. Every card in the game is available to both players at its base strength.
- A match is two fights, not one. More on that below.
Nothing you ground for comes with you to the table. What you bring is what you decide when you sit down.
Ranked is a draft
Fourteen cards come off a shuffle only the two of you can see. Eight of them go face up on the table.
You take three. They take three. Out of the same eight: whatever they take, you cannot. Then the table fills back up and you do it again. Two cards nobody gets at all.
Fifteen seconds a pick. The pile is shared, so a player who sits there for two minutes is spending it out of the other one's cards.
By the end you are each holding six, and neither of you brought anything.
I moved the ladder onto a draft because a squad built out of the whole roster is built once. Solve it, press the button that hands it to you, and every match after the first is the same match. A table of eight cannot be solved that way: it is different every time, most of it goes to the other player, and the question of which of these to take, knowing they are looking at the same eight, gets asked twelve times a match instead of once a career.
Every match is played twice, with the seats swapped
Whoever moves first in this game has an advantage, and it is not a small one. On identical squads, the player who opened won about four times out of five.
I tried to price it. Hand the second player a spare body. Hand them turn points. Every fixed number I tried under-corrected among weak squads and over-corrected among strong ones, because what moving first is worth depends entirely on what your squad can do with it. No single number tracks that.
So there is no number. A match is a tie of two legs. You open one, they open the other, both off the same shuffle, and the tie settles on the aggregate: who was left standing, and how much of them was left. Nothing to be unlucky about and no coin flip to lose.
The ladder
Recruit. Asset. Operative. Handler. Spymaster.
A real rating sits underneath and you never see it. What you see is the title and how far through it you are, because a number on a screen is a thing to grind and a standing in the city is a thing to hold.
Only ranked moves it. A friendly is the same draft with nothing staked. Sandbox lets you bring any legal six out of the whole roster. A practice bout is the machine, over the same netcode a real match runs on. All of them pay experience. None of them touches your standing.
And walking out of a ranked match is a loss. It has to be. Otherwise leaving while you are behind is a move.
The ways in
- Ranked match. Whoever else is looking. Drafted. Rated. The result stands.
- Sandbox match. The whole roster, any legal six, against whoever the city sends back. Unrated.
- Invite a friend, or join by code. The ranked table, dealt for someone you picked. Unrated.
- Practice bout. Nobody has to answer, and you do not have to be online.
You can queue as Anonymous if you would rather not be named across the table.
Your standing lives on your account rather than in your save file, so burning a campaign does not launder a bad record, and it does not cost you a good one either.
Before you queue, the honest list
You will meet all of this inside two weeks, so you may as well hear it from me first.
- The ladder is empty, and the queue might not be. If nobody answers in about a minute and a half, the city sends somebody. That somebody is a house player, drafting out of the same table you are looking at, and the result counts exactly like any other. It is not hidden and it is not pretending to be a person. It is there because a ranked button that waits for a population the game does not have yet is a button that does nothing.
- Matchmaking does not sort by rating yet. It takes the first open lobby. On a crowd this size that is the honest answer. With a real one it will not be, and the rating it will sort on is already being kept.
- Six against six has never been balance-tuned. Every fight I have ever measured is your squad against one the game assembled to a budget. Two player squads facing each other is a different game, and you are the first people to play it. If something turns out to be the answer to everything, that is precisely what I want to hear about.
- It is peer to peer. There is no server in the middle. If the link itself dies, each side sees the other go quiet and each awards itself the win. That is the price of having no server, and it is not worth farming: pulling your own connection ends your match as an abort that pays nothing and hands them the win.
- A silent opponent gets a grace window, then the match is yours. Long enough that an ordinary blip is not a result. There is no rejoin.
- A turn you do not end gets ended for you. There is a clock. Nobody is holding anybody hostage.
- If the two games stop agreeing, the match stops. Every turn, both copies compare a fingerprint of the entire board. On the first disagreement I kill the match rather than let two people sit there playing two different fights. Nothing counts when that happens.
What I need from you
Anything that read as broken rather than as losing. Specifically:
- "The match came apart." That message means the two copies disagreed. It is the single most valuable thing you can send me. Tell me what was on the board and what you had just done.
- A result you did not agree with. Especially at the end of a two leg tie.
- Anything that wins every time. A card, a pair of cards, a shape of squad.
- Drafts where the pile decided it before either of you played a turn.
- Disconnects, hangs, and anything that left you staring at a screen with nothing happening on it.
Post it in the Steam discussions, email me or use Discord. I read all of it.
Two weeks
That is the window. It is short on purpose: I would rather have a bunch of real matches and then take the mode away and fix it properly than leave something half-proven open forever and call that a release.
The doors are open. Go and find out what somebody else brought.