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NEW FEATURES
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Reserved Deployments
- Reserve a raid or a Tower descent while your parties are still in the field: pick the full formation, and the reservation holds those parties off every automated path — quest and contract queues, gambits, commander directives, auto-training — then launches the deployment itself the week the last party comes home.
- The raid board and the Tower prep screen now list parties that are merely out on assignment (marked "out"), so a formation can be staged with a scattered roster instead of only from idle parties.
- A reservation releases itself if its bounty leaves the board, a reserved party is disbanded, the Tower is entered by another route, or the formation fails to assemble within 12 weeks — the parties return to their standing orders with a feed notice.
Rival Guild Duels
- Call out any NPC rival guild from its profile page for a 750g purse — the same 5v5 challenge bout the Crown's quarterly fixtures use, on your schedule.
- Your guild carries a ladder rating: 1200 to start, five placement matches at heavier swings, then ranks from Unproven up through Contender, Proven, Renowned and Peerless. Rivals are rated from their OVR, so a guild that improves over the season becomes a stiffer test.
- Repeat meetings escalate: from the 2nd bout the stakes ride ×1.15, from the 5th ×1.30, and from the 9th ×1.50 — scaling the chosen wager and both sides' rewards alike.
- Farming is fenced off four ways: the purse is spent on declaration and never refunded, six weeks must pass before you can call out the same guild again, you get twelve declarations a season, and annual renown from a win scales from 0.4× for stomping a weakling to 1.6× for a real upset.
- Declaring and then walking away — by forfeit or by letting the match go stale — counts as a ladder loss and moves your rating as if you had been beaten.
- Each new season compresses your rating halfway back toward 1200, re-runs placements and refills your declaration budget; grudges, career record and peak rating are kept as history.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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War Table
Every region now has named towns and wildlands anchoring it (working names for now, I have some more work to do on this front), quest markers cluster around the places they belong, and a new toggle lets you shelve the labels and compass for a clean view when you want one.
Marches and supply caravans now follow an actual road network across the frontier instead of cutting straight lines. ALSO, seasons now matter: summer opens boat routes, winter storms and frozen passes slow the roads and raise the risk.
Each frontier region has specific signature exports, and when a festering threat takes hold, it chokes those goods — prices climb and stock dries up in the city market until you break the threat.
Instead of grinding down a high-tier threat over weeks of patrol skirmishes, you can now order a direct assault — go in solo, or call up to two allied guilds to march with you.
Your guild's tier now sets how many frontier regions you can hold, and rival guilds show their home turf and what they're short on.
Build waystations, forts, and bastions out on the frontier to harden your patrols, keep morale up, cut convoy risk and travel time, and get early warning when new threats appear.
Big bulk market buys now arrive by caravan two weeks later rather than instantly — with the Merchant specialization keeping instant bulk buys for those who want them.
Othersss
- Every party in Standing Orders now carries a queue button — click it to jump straight to the Faction Contracts board with that party already selected. It shows the queued count when there is one and reads "Queue…" when there isn't, instead of vanishing entirely.
- Parties currently deployed can be selected on the Faction Contracts tab, so you can queue their next contracts while they're away.
- Building descriptions now name the gatherers they unlock: the Granary lists Forager, Farmer and Fisher, the Quarry lists Miner and Lumberjack, and the Salvage Station lists the Salvager.
- The Class Field Guide got some style edits.
- The treasury statement now itemizes training-commission gold on its own "Training Commissions" income row.
- The battle log gains a category filter — All, Combat, Skill, Slain — plus an independent Hide Moves toggle that strips movement and skip lines. Filtering runs before the 120-line tail, so a strict filter still shows a full log rather than a handful of lines.
- The damage board in Battles now ranks by Dealt, Taken or Healed, so support work finally shows up on the scoreboard.
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BALANCE
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- Winning is no longer the same as surviving: every won quest, raid and tower floor now carries a small per-member death chance, scaled by the content's threat and damped by how far you outclass it (never below 0.35× of base). It runs through the usual mitigation, death saves and the Lethality difficulty setting, and Aegis of the Absolute still grants true invincibility.
NOTE: All content now has a higher death-rate and adjusts with your Lethality slider.
- Veteran crafters are now more prevalent. They arrive with stats drawn from 60–95% of their potential ceiling instead of the usual 25–85% — a genuinely high-skill crafter with no training required.
- Staff, crafter and gatherer applicant potential now respects the same renown gates as adventurers: A-tier requires 500 renown, S-tier 2000.
Gatherers
- The Miner now unlocks at Quarry Tier 2 instead of the Granary, and the Salvager unlocks at Salvage Station Tier 1 instead of Pathfinder's Lodge Tier 3.
Training Commissions Got Buffed
- Training commissions pay more renown: 60 for C-Tier, 110 for B-Tier, 190 for A-Tier (up from 50/90/160).
- Fulfilling a training commission now also pays gold — 1,500 / 3,000 / 6,000 by tier — plus +8/+12/+18 standing with the ordering faction, or the same amount of trust with a rival.
- Graduating a trainee off-spec or letting a training commission's deadline lapse costs 40% of that standing or trust alongside the renown penalty.
Crown Cup & Rival Challenge Bouts
- Tanks no longer wall off the whole fight: enemies still favor a tank by one hex of pull, but nothing is excluded any more, and a tank already engaged by two other attackers stops pulling so the rest of the line flanks to the back rank.
- Tanks in PvP bouts can taunt — every 15 rounds, everything within 3 hexes is yanked back onto the tank for one round.
- Mobile classes (Rogue, Assassin, Monk, Ranger, Bard, Lancer, Dragoon, Reaper and the rest) can now path straight through a blocking line in PvP bouts, though they still can't end their move on an occupied hex and crossing still costs movement.
- Leaving — or crossing — an adjacent enemy's reach in a PvP bout draws one free Attack of Opportunity from that enemy, so slipping the line is a real trade.
- Together these end the 20-plus-round tournament slap-fights: an even bout now resolves on the board about 57% of the time instead of 1%, and a clearly favored party kills through instead of grinding to a round-cap points decision.
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BUG FIXES
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- Free Agent Pool Quality, Noble Court and faction applicant-quality bonuses, Exclusive Contracts and Elite Talent Rarity now shape crafter, gatherer and guild-staff applicants as well as adventurers. Those levers previously did nothing for the roughly one-in-five walk-ins who weren't adventurers, so high-skill crafters almost never appeared.