Across thousands of games no one died in our battles. The casualty counter lied. Not this time.
A battle in Kepler Protocol is fought, won or lost, formations break — and afterwards, in the report, a number: the fallen. Across thousands of test games that number read zero. On both sides. Not one soldier who failed to come home. The formations dissolved, but the people in them went nowhere — they had never existed, on paper.
It was a silent bug, slipped in during a rebuild of the combat system. The message "this formation is destroyed" ran into the void — it looked for sub-units the rebuild had done away with, and found none. So no one died. An army that burns at no cost.
At the start of modern battlefield medicine stands one name: Dominique-Jean Larrey, surgeon of the Grande Armée. Before him the wounded lay where they fell until the battle was over — often for days. Many bled out who could have been saved. Larrey invented the "ambulances volantes", the flying ambulances: light, fast carts that pulled the wounded out during the fighting.
And he invented triage — from the French trier, to sort. Who is treated first? Not the highest in rank, not even one's own men before the enemy — but the most gravely wounded who could still be saved. For the first time, dying was decided not by rank but by the wound.
What Larrey made visible: a dead man and a wounded man are not the same. One does not return. The other might — if someone counts him.
We repaired the chain of report: a broken formation now reports its own loss, cleanly and exactly once. And we drew in Larrey's distinction — whoever falls is not automatically dead. A share of the losses are wounded, not a headstone but an open question.
How deadly a battle should be is a dial, not a roll of the dice. Our measurements show the curve: at low lethality a whole campaign costs one destroyed formation — symbolic, without consequence. One step up: nine. Another: nineteen. Only from about twice the base lethality does a battle begin to hurt. In one verified engagement: twenty-five dead, twenty wounded — of forty-five casualties, twenty might yet return. No grave, an open question.
For now the blood toll can be switched off while we tune the curve. But the principle stands. Now it costs.
The 17th Pioneer Brigade had no flying ambulance. Stranded, no resupply, no homecoming. Their journal lists the wounded apart from the dead — a hope that thins with every page, until, in the end, only one column remains: the dead. The Kaiserreich of the main mission reads these lists today. From them it learned triage. The homecoming, not yet.
The Land Remembers the Dead. Man tries to bring the fallen back. The Swarm does the opposite: where its dead fall, the ground itself changes. Next week we dig in the creep.
Wishlist on Steam: Kepler Protocol
Early Access: November 2026
Next devblog: The Land Remembers the Dead — biomass that stays
Kepler Protocol — 4X strategy on a foreign planet. Discipline against the Swarm. Codex against pheromone. A red sun over both.