Spire Factions Introduced: At Year 2, the game now pauses and forces players to choose a permanent, game-changing space-elevator augmentation.
Aegis Tether [ ZONE DENIAL ]: A vertical high-voltage barrier slicing the board in half. Paralyzes and melts enemies who cross it.
M.A.C. Carriage [ AREA DPS ]: A heavy magnetic artillery platform that patrols the rail, spitting hyper-fast, straight-line piercing slugs.
Logistics Elevator [ TURTLE / ECON ]: A heavy cargo crawler that scales the Spire to harvest deep space debris, dropping massive Stardust and Population payouts.
Dynamic Visual Scaling: Spire Factions now scale their math and their visuals perfectly with your Orbital Tech Level. Barrels extend, tethers shift to unstable fuchsia, fire rates become bullet hoses, and cargo pods turn into blinding gold bullion as you upgrade.
New Evolution Protocol: "Reclaimer Swarm": A brand new "necromancer" draft pick. Destroying capital ships or anomalies now instantly reconstructs their debris into friendly Strike Drones that hunt down surviving enemies. (Scales up to 3 drones per kill at Rank 3).
Vertical Mission Report (9:16 Optimized): Completely overhauled the Game Over / Mission Report screen. It's now a sleek, centered vertical stack designed perfectly for portrait/mobile viewing.
RPG Class Tooltips: The Faction Selection screen now features "Class Tags" and "Recommended Synergies" to implicitly teach players how to build around their choices without forcing them through a tutorial.
The Meteor Massacre: Completely stripped down and rewrote the asteroid SVG rendering engine. Trashed the heavy CSS opacity animations and 10-node geometry that was tanking the GPU during cluster waves. Rocks are now rendered using just two ultra-fast paths with a zero-cost "fake 3D" linear gradient and rim-light. Framerates should be buttery smooth now.
Zero-Allocation MAC Tracers: Rewrote the MAC Carriage physics to use the ultra-lightweight Canvas tracer renderer instead of the heavy DOM-based homing missile logic.
The MAC Cockroach is Dead: Fixed a massive stale-closure/state-leak bug where a phantom, invisible M.A.C. Carriage would continue firing curving, invisible bullets at Year 0 after the player restarted a run.
Nanite Restoration Re-wired: The "Nanite Restoration" UI button is no longer a fake doorbell. It has been successfully wired to the physics engine and now correctly deducts 2 Billion Pop, heals 20% Stability, and triggers a massive purple visual flash.
Comms Radio Hang-up: Fixed an issue where the Adjutant's radio text queue would survive a Game Over and start bleeding into your next run. The comms radio is now properly smashed to pieces when Earth explodes.