Hex Battle System Performance Hotfix
Watching a hex battle is smooth again. Some players were hitting lag and I knocked out a pile of efficiency hardening that should solve the issue.
This is why I wanted to sneak in a patch today, so some fresh features are making it in today a bit earlier than I had planned. Fingers crossed everything is working ;)
The Tactician's Desk
I've been teasing for quite some time that the Tactician was going to become a star cornerstone of your guild someday, and that day is today.
Press T or go to the Registry tab, once you unlock the War Room, to reach the new gambit-like system (Doctrine) and battlefield placement system (Formations). Fights will always be auto-battlers, but this is your way to guide your party members within constraints you set through your Tactician.
Your Tactician's standing orders and your parties' drawn battle lines now actually deploy across all battle content — every quest, raid, garrison skirmish and duel read your orders. This is the first step of a broader rollout aimed squarely at the Tower, so more to come on this front.
Combat & Battles
You can now edit, customize, and rearrange the modules in the hex battlefield!
Trial by Fire auditions now fight on the hex battle engine, with the full arena to watch, instead of the old off-screen ten-round tally. Every one of the ten recruits also now has a distinct face — all ten used to resolve to the same default portrait.
Damage numbers carry a small element mark — fire, frost, lightning and the rest — in the arena and in the battle log, so you can read at a glance what an attack was made of. Every mark now sits on a soft light backing plate, so Shadow's dusk violet reads as clearly as the pale tints do.
Heal numbers carry a + mark beside them, matching how damage numbers carry their element sigil.
The pre-raid muster screen states the predicted outcome band for the floor you are about to descend to.
In-battle party rails now show a departed hero's true rating instead of an inflated number. A member who died, was released or was renamed after the fight no longer reads 145 in the rail while their dossier reads 54. Applies to quest, raid and garrison replays recorded from this patch onward.
Rival Challenge & Crown Cup
Both pickers now show the full party-power model you fight with — effective OVR plus synergy, teamwork, morale, chemistry and guild bonuses — instead of a bare average.
Save your five as a reusable PvP lineup and it pre-fills the picker next time.
The Rival Challenge party screen shows the opposing five before you commit, revealed as far as your Scouting Post tier and your scouting on those units allows — roles and a coarse OVR band at first, class and exact OVR deeper, level at full intel — with a Favored / Even / Underdog read against your selection.
Clicking a portrait in the challenge picker opens that unit's mini-dossier.
Multiplayer
A guildmaster who never takes a turn is auto-demoted to AI after seven consecutive covered weeks, so one absent player no longer makes every week wait out the timer. Their slot keeps their name and they reclaim it exactly on return. Hosts are never demoted this way.
Press the pulsing turn-ready dot on the main menu to load the waiting league game directly, rather than opening the lobby and finding it yourself.
Guild Management
The Standing Orders panel has a Gambit Template Manager: each saved template shows how many parties use it, how many have drifted from it, and a one-click Push to all that re-broadcasts its rules to every attached party. A party whose gambits no longer match its template carries a Diverged badge; click it to re-sync that party.
Party rows and roster pickers show a member's ambition — the active Drive by name, "Ready for its Proving" when they are, or their earned legend title once they have ascended.
The Tower and Raid party pickers show how many weeks until a deployed party returns, so you can pick the one that frees up soonest without leaving the screen.
Party pickers now say why a company is unavailable and for how long: a company in the Training Grounds or recovering from injury shows "Training · 3w left" or "Injured · 2w left" instead of an "out" chip with no countdown.
The contract renewal modal shows the adventurer's potential and how likely they are to reach it, when your intel on them is fresh.
A party header now carries a Battle Plan button that opens that company's Tactician desk with it already selected, instead of making you find it in the companies rail.
The War Room's Tier 2 roadmap now names what Tier 2 actually grants — the Tactician's Formations board and a second standing order — instead of listing only the seasonal Strategic Focus.
The Sage's Wisdom
Three new entries: how hex battles flow, how movement, range and speed work on the grid, and how Battle Doctrine works.
The Outfitter
The Outfitter opens in the Marketplace at Tier 1 — a shelf of six basic gear pieces you can buy outright with gold, restocked every week. Kit out new recruits instead of waiting on loot or a crafter. Stock is capped at Uncommon and priced at twice its resale value, so it's a way to equip a young guild, not a way to make money.
Balance — The Tower Rebalance
The Tower's default difficulty is now higher for new games, and the custom difficulty slider range is broader. In short, a developed guild's tower power was inflated to ~2.5–3× its real roster strength, so every floor was a guaranteed walkover — this rebalance folds permanent guild bonuses into your OVR once instead of stacking them as a second multiplier, so Effective Power now reads close to your party's true strength. The result is a real climb: early floors stay easy, but deep floors tighten and final bosses become earned wins with casualties for strong guilds and a genuine risk of defeat for under-prepared ones, so the fortification and floor-reclaim systems finally matter. The harder difficulty presets (C/B/A/S-Tier) were retuned to stay brutal-but-winnable at the new scale, while Normal's sliders are unchanged (though the default endgame does play harder as a result).
A save started under a named difficulty preset keeps the Tower curve it was created with, rather than inheriting this patch's harder default retroactively.
A new Combat License Ceiling slider scales the Crown's ROVR cap for every guild tier — at 2x a Tier 10 guild's quest cap rises from 110 to 220 and its raid cap from 115 to 230. Quest and Raid Enemy Strength were being clipped by that cap at high tiers; this is the dial that lifts it.
Tower XP no longer inflates when you raise the difficulty sliders — it is calculated against the floor's base curve, so a harder Tower pays the same experience.
Class synergies that grant bonus damage of a type now apply in the Tower and in raids, not only on quests. A dual-element class also picks whichever of its elements fares best against the enemy instead of eating the penalty when one of them is resisted.
Set pieces roll a base item and extra stats that match the set's own theme, so a set drop is far less likely to arrive on an off-archetype frame.
Bug Fixes
Contract auto-renewal retries members it skipped for cost. Raise the budget cap between week 48 and year's end and anyone the higher cap now affords re-signs, instead of walking at the year-end decrement.
Escape at the Week Summary no longer forfeits a Rival Challenge you cannot even see, and the challenge modal no longer opens on top of a raid, quest or tower battle still playing out.
A fulfilled ambition reads 100% on the Star Chart instead of a drifting bar, and an abandoned one reads a frozen 0%. The ledger, the star tooltip and the hover card all show the same number.
Raid results show the experience raiders actually receive. The amount granted is unchanged — the report was over-reporting it above the easiest difficulty.
The raid elemental risk preview now matches how the fight resolves.
Combat damage numbers clear a large boss's crown instead of vanishing behind its artwork.
Injury severity is translated everywhere it is shown — the dossier, the week summary, the rival guild pages and the battle report's injuries card.
Custom portraits dropped into the loose pool apply to every adventurer, not the roughly one in six whose exact slot you happened to fill. This covers the roster, the battle arena, and the report and party thumbnails.
The quest debrief line for severe injuries appears again; it was matching on labels that no longer existed.
Bestiary creature art fills the top of the dossier card edge to edge instead of floating in empty parchment.
Going to the Registry from a contract expiration alert lands on the Receptionist tab where contracts are handled.
In online leagues, recruits your own guild turns up — vendor finds, star applicants, walk-ins — stay in the pool long enough to sign instead of being swept out by the shared pool sync.
Text & Translation
The recruit zodiac filter is labelled correctly in eleven languages. In Russian it read "ПОДПИСАТЬ:" — the verb for signing a contract — above a list of zodiac signs; it now reads "Знак:". The same correction landed in Czech, Finnish, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.
The recruit filter bar's "Classes", "Sign" and "N selected" labels are translated rather than left in English.