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FEATURES
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I've been teasing for quite some time that the Tactician was going to become a star cornerstone of your guild someday, and that day is today.
Press T or go to the Registry tab, once you unlock the War Room, you will have access to the new gambit-like system (Doctrine) and battlefield placement system (Formations).
Fights in GT1 will always be auto-battlers, but this is your way to guide your party members within constraints you set through your Tactician.
This is the first step of a broader rollout (for the Tower, specifically), so more to come on this front.
Trial by Fire auditions now fight on the hex battle engine, with the full arena to watch, instead of the old off-screen ten-round tally.
Damage numbers carry a small element mark — fire, frost, lightning and the rest — in the arena and in the battle log, so you can read at a glance what an attack was made of.
The pre-raid muster screen states the predicted outcome band for the floor you are about to descend to.
Both pickers now show the full party-power model you fight with — effective OVR plus synergy, teamwork, morale, chemistry and guild bonuses — instead of a bare average.
Save your five as a reusable PvP lineup and it pre-fills the picker next time.
The Rival Challenge party screen shows the opposing five before you commit, revealed as far as your Scouting Post tier and your scouting on those units allows — roles and a coarse OVR band at first, class and exact OVR deeper, level at full intel — with a Favored / Even / Underdog read against your selection.
Clicking a portrait in the challenge picker opens that unit's mini-dossier.
A guildmaster who never takes a turn is auto-demoted to AI after seven consecutive covered weeks, so one absent player no longer makes every week wait out the timer. Their slot keeps their name and they reclaim it exactly on return. Hosts are never demoted this way.
Press the pulsing turn-ready dot on the main menu to load the waiting league game directly, rather than opening the lobby and finding it yourself.
The Standing Orders panel has a Gambit Template Manager: each saved template shows how many parties use it, how many have drifted from it, and a one-click Push to all that re-broadcasts its rules to every attached party.
A party whose gambits no longer match its template carries a Diverged badge; click it to re-sync that party.
Party rows and roster pickers show a member's ambition — the active Drive by name, "Ready for its Proving" when they are, or their earned legend title once they have ascended.
The Tower and Raid party pickers show how many weeks until a deployed party returns, so you can pick the one that frees up soonest without leaving the screen.
The contract renewal modal shows the adventurer's potential and how likely they are to reach it, when your intel on them is fresh.
Three new entries: how hex battles flow, how movement, range and speed work on the grid, and how Battle Doctrine works.
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BALANCE
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The Tower's default difficulty is now higher for new games and I've added a broader custom difficulty slider range.
In short, a developed guild's tower power was inflated to ~2.5–3× its real roster strength, so every floor was a guaranteed walkover — this rebalance folds permanent guild bonuses into your OVR once instead of stacking them as a second multiplier, so Effective Power now reads close to your party's true strength. The result is a real climb: early floors stay easy, but deep floors tighten and final bosses become a earned wins with casualties for strong guilds and a genuine risk of defeat for under-prepared ones, so the fortification and floor-reclaim systems finally matter. The harder difficulty presets (C/B/A/S-Tier) were retuned to stay brutal-but-winnable at the new scale, while Normal's sliders are unchanged (though the default endgame does play harder as a result).
A save started under a named difficulty preset keeps the Tower curve it was created with, rather than inheriting this patch's harder default retroactively.
A new Combat License Ceiling slider scales the Crown's ROVR cap for every guild tier — at 2x a Tier 10 guild's quest cap rises from 110 to 220 and its raid cap from 115 to 230. Quest and Raid Enemy Strength were being clipped by that cap at high tiers; this is the dial that lifts it.
Deep in the Tower, healing thins with altitude: past roughly 200 floor strength, heals lose effectiveness on a sliding scale. A lost fight at those depths now costs you people instead of ending as a bloodless forty-round stall.
Tower XP no longer inflates when you raise the difficulty sliders — it is calculated against the floor's base curve, so a harder Tower pays the same experience.
Class synergies that grant bonus damage of a type now apply in the Tower and in raids, not only on quests. A dual-element class also picks whichever of its elements fares best against the enemy instead of eating the penalty when one of them is resisted.
Set pieces roll a base item and extra stats that match the set's own theme, so a set drop is far less likely to arrive on an off-archetype frame.
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BUG FIXES
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Contract auto-renewal retries members it skipped for cost. Raise the budget cap between week 48 and year's end and anyone the higher cap now affords re-signs, instead of walking at the year-end decrement.
Escape at the Week Summary no longer forfeits a Rival Challenge you cannot even see, and the challenge modal no longer opens on top of a raid, quest or tower battle still playing out.
A fulfilled ambition reads 100% on the Star Chart instead of a drifting bar, and an abandoned one reads a frozen 0%. The ledger, the star tooltip and the hover card all show the same number.
Raid results show the experience raiders actually receive. The amount granted is unchanged — the report was over-reporting it above the easiest difficulty.
The raid elemental risk preview now matches how the fight resolves.
Combat damage numbers clear a large boss's crown instead of vanishing behind its artwork.
Injury severity is translated everywhere it is shown — the dossier, the week summary, the rival guild pages and the battle report's injuries card.
Custom portraits dropped into the loose pool apply to every adventurer, not the roughly one in six whose exact slot you happened to fill. This covers the roster, the battle arena, and the report and party thumbnails.
The quest debrief line for severe injuries appears again; it was matching on labels that no longer existed.
Bestiary creature art fills the top of the dossier card edge to edge instead of floating in empty parchment.
Going to the Registry from a contract expiration alert lands on the Receptionist tab where contracts are handled.
In online leagues, recruits your own guild turns up — vendor finds, star applicants, walk-ins — stay in the pool long enough to sign instead of being swept out by the shared pool sync.