Changelog

2026-08-20 🔗

Season 4 balance pass: sharper roles, and a reason to trust someone 🔗

Season 4, "Love and Betrayal," arrives with the biggest rebalance we've shipped.

Rulers. Every ruler had skills moved between slots, so check your build — your points may now sit on a different effect. Maja swapped her workshop discount and her research payout; the payout at max is now 1M gold. Borin traded life restoration for artifact retention, and his ultimate now grants bonus gold per critter killed. Alric moved the artifact stealing package to his ultimate and now slows enemy sieges earlier in the tree. Nandi and Lucien kept their layouts but had every tier rescaled.

Units and towers. The goal was to make each class feel like its class. Tanks are genuinely hard to kill now — the Mech Warrior went from 18 to 35 armor, out of reach of most single-shot towers. Fast units are faster and arrive in tighter packs; the Helicopter now spawns every 500ms instead of 900ms. Carriers move quicker, and the Cargo dropped to three wave slots while gaining armor. Because armor subtracts flat damage, the counter to all this armor is fire: burn damage ignores armor entirely, and every burn tower got a serious lift — the Fire Tower's burn went from 1.25 to 4 damage per second. The Rocket Tower changed job completely, from a single heavy hit to splash damage, and the Laser Tower is now a future-era tower.

Most units also lost their building prerequisites and now unlock from research alone, so armies come online much earlier.

Economy and diplomacy. Late-era upgrades cost far more — the last era step went from 730k to 2.73M — while early citizens got cheaper, so the opening is faster and the endgame is a real grind. Artifacts are more common but individually weaker, and now mostly grant culture. Spy intel is no longer bought with gold; you send a spy army instead. And you can now ally with one other empire: allies can't attack each other, they're ranked together by combined culture, and forming or breaking the pact costs 5% of your culture.

2026-08-15 🔗

Season 3 wrap-up: The Rise of the Robots 🔗

Season 3 has come to a close! Final standings by culture:

1. 🥇 Zornbolds — ~115.5M culture. Zornbolds also triggered the season-end criterion outright, closing out the season on their own terms.
2. 🥈 Empire strikes back — ~94.0M culture
3. 🥉 500: InternAal Server Error — ~91.6M culture
4. Proxmoxia — ~84.0M culture
5. Limperium — ~51.6M culture

The final stretch got a real jolt of energy from the Mech Warrior, the future-era heavy tank unit — 937 HP, 24 armor, and two Special Ops released on death. It turned into a serious wall for attackers to chew through, and a serious hammer for whoever fielded it well. Mech Warrior-driven pushes were a big part of what kept the final rally so contested and unpredictable right up to the wire.

To everyone who built, defended, raided, and pushed through Season 3 — thank you. Whether you were fighting for first place or just trying to survive one more wave, you're what made this season worth playing. Season 4, "Love and Betrayal," kicks off soon. See you on the battlefield.

2026-07-16 🔗

Bully protection: repeated attacks on the same defender now pay off less 🔗

If you beat the same opponent more than 3 times within 24 hours, every attack after that against them earns no ruler XP and only 33% of the normal culture loot — your battle report will tell you exactly when this kicks in. Beating a weaker empire once or twice is fine; parking an army on someone's doorstep all day is not.

The flip side: the defender getting farmed isn't left empty-handed. While the protection is active, they earn triple gold for every wave they repel against that attacker — a direct reward for being repeatedly targeted, credited live during the siege.

This only applies to player-vs-player fights. Grinding AI waves is unaffected — go nuts.

2026-07-14 🔗

TL;DR: OP settings get nerfed 🔗

Found something that feels too strong? Use it — that's smart play, not cheating. But don't build your whole empire around a single loophole: if a setting is OP, it gets nerfed, no exceptions. Full policy on the new Fair Play page.

2026-07-13 🔗

Ruler balance pass 🔗

Several rulers received skill tuning:

• Maja — gold rewards from Erudite Synergy (gold bonus after research) increased significantly, in some tiers up to 10x.
• Nandi — base speed slightly reduced; the Cultural Footprint bonus was split into finer tiers and slightly weakened at the top end.
• Lucien — gold bonus on skill-up doubled.
• Borin — two skills reworked: one skill now delays enemy waves instead of refunding tower sell value, and Undying Defiance now grants a longer artifact retention time instead of a wave-delay bonus.

2026-07-12 🔗

Season 3: The Rise of the Robots 🔗

Tomorrow Season 3: The Rise of the Robots starts! This season brings trophies, tech tree branches, and a wide balance pass across towers and critters.

Trophies now reward sustained defensive performance, not just single wins. Each trophy tracks a running total — battles won, AI waves repelled, human attackers turned away — and unlocks at set thresholds, with higher tiers granting small permanent bonuses on top of the bragging rights. Unbroken is your first taste of it: win a single defense and it's yours. Keep winning and you'll climb through Centurion (100 defensive wins) all the way to Iron Wall (500 wins), which also shaves 2% off your outgoing travel time — a trophy that pays for itself.

The knowledge tree is now split into a main branch and optional side branches. Main-branch techs are the required backbone — you'll eventually need all of them to keep advancing eras, including the tech that unlocks your ruler. Left and right branches (Trade, Military, Science, Culture, and more) are where the real power spikes live: Caravan Networks, for instance, adds a flat +0.3 gold/s once researched. But every hour spent down a branch is an hour not spent pushing toward the next era's tech — branches make you stronger now at the cost of getting there later. Choosing when to detour, and how far, is the new strategic knob.

Towers and critters also saw dozens of balance changes this cycle — damage, reload times, health, new units, and a few retirements. The full list, era by era, is up on the tower & critter changes page.

2026-06-10 🔗

Culture Raiding — fairer loot even for lost attacks 🔗

When attacking another empire, culture is now stolen even if the attack fails — as long as the defender lost lives in the process.

New calculation:

The stolen culture amount consists of two parts:

1. Lives share (always applies, even on attacker defeat): defender's lost lives × era factor × rate The more lives the defender lost and the more advanced their era, the more culture is stolen.

2. Pool share (only on attacker victory): Additionally a random percentage (1–5%) of the defender's total culture pool.

Era penalty: If a player attacks an empire in a lower era, they receive only 50% of the stolen culture — cultural progress protects.