Live now - 10/06/26, 8pm BST.
Devlog #002 made defending matter and fixed what Power measures. This one is about two things the first weeks of alpha made obvious: how fast you climb, and somewhere to see where you stand.
A board to climb
There's now a player leaderboard. It ranks everyone by rating - the same rating your raids have quietly been moving all along - and it puts a "you are here" marker on it so you can find yourself in the pack, not just stare at the top ten. It's in the nav from today.
It's deliberately simple for this first cut: the board, your rank, and a way to get to it. The ladder fills out as more rated fights happen, so if you're provisional and bouncing around, that's the system still learning you. Climbing it is the point - go climb it.
Pacing the economy
The biggest change you'll feel is how upgrades are paced. I've reworked building costs and, more importantly, split build time away from cost so the two can be tuned separately.
The principle: the late game shouldn't be a wall of unaffordable costs - it should be a question of time. So costs grow only a little faster than your production (an economy that keeps pace can always bank for the next upgrade), and the real "this is a serious commitment" feeling now lives in build time on the headline buildings.
In practice:
Early game is softer. Your first HQ levels and your defences are cheaper to get moving - alpha showed the opening was too grindy.
Your economy buildings stay cheap and quick. Generators and barracks are meant to be upgraded often, not left running for a day - the economy should never be strangled.
The big buildings take real time in the mid-game. HQ and the Research Lab are where the multi-day builds start to show up. That's intended: they're the pace-setters.
Defences stay affordable. Walls, vault and bay grew gently so you can always afford to survive a raid.
Your numbers will move. That's the tuning pass landing, not a bug.
Research that doesn't snowball
Tied to the same pass: research was doing too much. When I replayed real raids with research turned off, all three flipped - including a 65-turret fortress that went from wiped to basically impenetrable purely because the attacker had a runaway research lead. That's too much power in one variable.
So, an interim pass ahead of the bigger research overhaul:
Unit research bonuses grow more slowly now, which pulls in the snowball where one player's tech lead decides the fight before it starts.
Turret research was left alone on purpose - turrets are meant to be your main defensive lever, so that line still scales.
Research now costs real economy and real time - it starts at roughly a full day at the first level and grows from there (lab speed still helps). It's a deliberate investment, not a flat buy.
This is interim and the numbers are a knob I'll keep turning as live fights pile up. If research now feels under-powered, tell me - that's the read I need.
Smaller things you'll notice
The number inputs across the game got fixed - steppers behave, values validate properly, and you get a toast telling you what happened instead of an input silently doing nothing. Small, but it was overdue.
A pile of fixes
A batch of closed-alpha bugs you flagged, cleared in one go:
Scout reports are kept now. Each scout you run keeps its own report instead of overwriting the last one - you've got a history to look back through.
"Last Battles" doesn't error anymore.
Signals Bunker upgrades apply straight away - the first upgrade no longer stalls for half a minute looking like nothing happened.
Combat reports show the right wall soak per clash instead of repeating the round figure on every row.
The activity feed shows Parts, not just Credits, for scouting and raids.
Mistyping your 2FA code won't get you locked out - that was wrongly tripping a ban before.
Plus the welcome popup typo and some behind-the-scenes hardening.
Still alpha, still tuning
Same honesty as always: this is a pacing pass and a first leaderboard, not the final word on either. The point is to make the climb feel deliberate and give you something to climb toward. If the pacing now drags, or research swung too far, or the board's missing the one thing you want on it - that's exactly what I want to hear.
Play the loop, find yourself on the board, and tell me where it's off.
I'll post the next one when there's something worth telling.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com · The world, if you want it: breachlands.com/lore