Since Operatives shipped a fortnight ago I've kept my head down on the part of the game you've had the least of so far: the world itself. The headline is a proper map. The rest is economy plumbing that should make the day-to-day feel less fiddly. Here's the lot, honestly, including the bits that are foundation rather than finished.
One thing up front: none of this is in your alpha yet. It's built and tested, and it's the next drop - I wanted to walk you through it before it lands rather than after.
A real map
The old map was a placeholder - a flat hex grid I stood up so coordinates meant something. It's gone. The world now renders properly, with panning, zoom and a minimap, and it's built on a foundation I can actually grow.
The change that matters most: armies show up on it. Forces in transit are no longer an abstract line on a target list - they're objects moving across the world, with distance and travel time you can read at a glance. The map is starting to be a place rather than a menu.
And it pays off a promise I made in the last dispatch. Back in "How Intel Works" I said the sharp play was counter-scouting an inbound raid - sending a spy at the attacker to read what they're bringing before it lands. That's built now: you'll be able to scout any army on the move, not just a base sitting still. See a force heading your way, send an operative to read it, re-garrison to suit. The map is what makes that legible.
What's underneath it (and not finished)
Here's the honest part. Under the map I've built a dispatch engine and a tile-object system - the machinery that lets the world hold things that aren't bases. Wreckage to pick over, sites to run operations against, that sort of thing. You send a force out, it travels, it arrives, it resolves, it comes home.
Right now that layer is scaffolding, not content. The engine works and it's tested, but the only objects on the map today are debug markers I spawn for myself. The point of building it now is that PvE - reasons to send your army somewhere that isn't another player - is the next big thing the world needs, and this is the groundwork it stands on. I'd rather tell you it's a foundation than dress up an empty map as a feature.
Salvage and Ore
The two resources have new names. What used to be Credits and Parts are now Salvage and Ore - names that actually belong in a world built out of what the collapse left behind, instead of placeholder economy words. Nothing about how you earn or spend them changed; they read better, that's all.
The real change is underneath: each resource now has its own storage. Previously they shared a pool. Now Salvage and Ore fill and cap independently, so you can be flush on one and tight on the other, and your storage buildings matter per-resource rather than as one lump. It makes the economy something you balance rather than a single bar.
The build queue, reworked
Three changes here, all aimed at the same thing - queueing should feel generous, not punishing.
You pay when a build starts, not when you queue it. Line up a stack of structures and the cost comes off as each one actually begins, when a slot opens. No more emptying your stores the moment you plan ahead. Queue freely; the economy catches up as things get built.
Base and Defence are separate queues now. Putting up a structure no longer blocks reinforcing your walls. Your base builds run off your HQ level, your defences run off your Defence Bay, and the two progress side by side. It's a small thing that removes a constant, annoying either/or.
Build times are hand-authored. They used to fall out of a formula; now I've set them deliberately, structure by structure, so the pacing is something I tuned rather than something I inherited. Expect me to keep nudging these as I watch how they feel.
(Training got the same pay-on-start treatment while I was in there.)
The smaller stuff
A couple of espionage tweaks rode along - notably, sitting still on a scout now cools your detection heat a touch faster, so holding position to let things calm down is a more real option. And there was a bug pass: a scouting edge case, a profile-login handoff and a couple of interface snags, all tidied. Housekeeping, but the kind that stops paper cuts.
What's next
The map is the platform for the next stretch. With the dispatch engine in place, the work now is filling the world - PvE sites worth sending an army to, wreckage worth the trip, reasons to push out from your base that aren't another player's front door. That's where the alpha's been thin, and it's what the last fortnight was really setting up.
I'll bundle this into a proper versioned release shortly, and you'll get it then. As ever: once it's in your hands, if the new queues, the split storage or anything on the map feels off, that's exactly the feedback I want while it's still soft.
This is the next drop, not something to poke at tonight - but it lands soon, and it's a different game when you can see the world move.
- The Dev