The new CCL is here and I am stoked!
The CCL has been core to the annual experience in GT1, but it was one of the first systems I designed and over time piled up a good amount of tech debt and, frankly, felt just kind of outdated.
Enter the new Hex Battle and Doctrine systems and that was my excuse to blow everything up ;)
As always, this is just step one of many, but I am excited about the foundation so far!
Let's get into it.
Resources, personnel, treasury. All of it stacks up over the years to get you deeper into the Tower and the CCL is no small part of that effort.
In truth, the CCL is the Crown's thinly veiled attempt to harden the guilds of the realm. To make the peoples of Hiltrcrest stronger in the face of a power they don't understand and cannot begin to control. The Crown's goal is to forge strong enough forces to make a dent in an ancient menace that has dominated the lands of Irda since time began and the CCL is just one of their many efforts to make a difference. Your job is to embrace the system and make your mark to gain renown, economic resources, and political reach.
Hopefully this update makes the Crown's efforts a little more fun ;)
Here's how it works now:
Every one of them resolves live, in a single week, the way the Cup always did, but now there is bracket infrastructure, pre-made parties, tactics/doctrines, chemistry, synergy, and no role lock.
The three new festivals seed the fourth. Placement renown lands in your seasonal ledger, the ledger is what seeds the Winter draw, and the Winter cutoff is the top four of each division. A strong Autumn is how you get into the Cup. A bad Spring is how you don't.
This was the part I wanted to shake-up the most. Four tournaments that all play like a 5v5 with different headcounts would have been four times the same evening. Plus, the new Hex Battle System allows me to bend a lot of rules that I couldn't before, so this is the first seasonal iteration.
Spring is the expected vanilla one. Five heroes, one bout, no tricks. It's the format the Cup already was, opened up to the whole realm.
Summer is a duellists' tournament and it needed real rules to become one. Plain 1v1 on the HBS engine is an OVR sort — the role table is a straight dominance ladder with no counter-pick, so everyone sends their three biggest hitters and the bracket sorts itself. Worse, a healer in a duel is close to unkillable and just stalls out the clock. Pretty lame.
So! Three rules fixed it.
1.) Champions only: melee and ranged only, no tanks, no healers, no support.
2.) Blind order: you name three duelists in a declared order, they're matched one-to-one, best of three.
3.) Terrain: Summer alone is fought on a rotating venue, five hand-authored boards on a five-year cycle. A ranged duelist kiting from high ground against a melee closing through cover is an actual fight and gets more and more interesting as I build out board maps (more to come).
Autumn is thirty heroes on one board. It's the spectacle event and is a lot of chaos. In testing, this format has led to the most variance and most interest pre-game strategy making (in my opinion). The format has a lot of angles and since there are no role locks, you can get very creating with your raid team compositions.
Winter is the Crown Cup still, but it's four times the tournament it was: sixteen guilds instead of four, three parties instead of one, best of three instead of one bout. Round one is inside your division, 1v4 and 2v3. Win that and you're in a division final. Win that and you're in the cross-division semis with a patron faction behind you.
A pan/zoom tournament tree, not a modal. Every match offers Sim or Watch — including matches that aren't yours, so you can scout the guild you'll meet in the semis. Between rounds: spend an idle scout on a field report, place a wager, and see who got hurt.
Tournament bouts wound, never kill. A hero knocked down yields and walks away. Injuries are why the reserve list matters — and why a hard Autumn can cost you the Cup in December.
The standings are still decided by Seasonal Renown, just like classic CCL, but it is now a combined PVE + PVP ledger. Questing and fighting pay into the same number, so the Cup field is seeded by everything you did all year. PvE is untouched; nothing was nerfed to make room.
Tournament renown is flat. It ignores the patron 2×, the Nemesis bonus, the Vanguard override, every buff in the game — those are tuned for a weekly drip, not a lump sum.
Winning Autumn is worth about six competing weeks. Enough to meaningfully move the needle, but never enough to catch a leader who's out-worked you since Spring. Tournaments decide the cut line; the year decides the standings.
The Cup pays permanent renown only — it never touches the season it concludes, because the division race is final at week 51. Biggest prize of the year, zero cost to the standings.
And a first-round exit pays nothing. Missing the cut is a failure, not a consolation tier.
NOTE: the rewards are currently unchanged from classic CCL, but I am considering seriously buffing CCL rewards in the next round of CCL updates.
Preparation is everything in this game ;)
Each festival has a squad registry: entrants plus reserves. Two weeks out, the rolls seal — no changes, and sealed heroes can't be traded until it's over. If you forget (or skip it), your roster will be auto-filled.
You can also prep all of your doctrines in the CCL Loadout page for each Festival tournament.
Also, if this feature is not for you, there is now a "Disable CCL Events" custom difficulty toggle: with it on, the Crown Cup and its year-end fallback never run. Standings and division rewards are unaffected.
That covers the nuts and bolts, but there is more to come. For now, dive in an hit me with feedback!
Now, onto the patch notes:
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FEATURES
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Boards & Formations
Tower Loadout and the Registry Tactician now open on a tilted, three-dimensional hex board with standing pieces you drag into place. A 3D · 2D toggle sits beside the board and remembers your choice per device.
The Rival Challenge party screen gains a mini formation board. Pick a stance off the shelf, then drag anyone to redraw the line by hand — a drawn line is saved with your lineup and changes the fight, so the same five arranged differently is a genuinely different match.
Appearance
A new Artwork setting keeps the game's original art. Classic renders every adventurer, faction character, rival guild leader, monster, tower boss, building, map furnishing, workshop station, item icon and panel emblem from a frozen snapshot instead of the current shipped art. NOTE: This does mean new waves of art are coming in and you'll see those pop up soon!
An Accent color control lets you pick the interface's highlight hue from the full wheel. The choice is remembered per theme, so a dark hall and a parchment desk can each carry their own color.
New Game & Modes
New Game (Standard mode) has a Starting Facilities slider: choose 0 to 8 inherited Shoddy buildings, default 3.
Competitive online leagues now offer a no-renown Exhibition Match against an AI rival at weeks 13, 26 and 39. Winning pays gold and morale only.
Community
A commemorative redeem code for the first thousand Discord members is live. Join Discord to get it ;)
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BUG FIXES
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Crown Cup & The Tower
Winning your Crown Cup bout now crowns you. A Cup match you fight is decided by the leg the arena shows you, so the standings, coronation and bracket can no longer hand the title to the guild you just beat.
Tower muster placements now land on the party member you placed there. Tiles were being matched against the raw party order while the battlefield deployed tanks-first, so a fully authored War Room board arrived scrambled — tanks shoved to one half, healers to the other — on every tower fight.
In co-op fronts and league play, a won tower floor can no longer kill a member the fight never touched. On those paths a death now requires the member to have been wounded first. Single-player tower fights are unchanged.
The tower muster and "Call up the best" no longer offer staff members as fighters.
The Crown & Correspondence
Opening an unread Crown Administrator letter now marks it read. It previously filed a phantom reply into your correspondence — evicting older letters as the record filled — and left the letter unread, so it re-fired every time you opened it.
The Great Sage no longer taunts you to advance a tier the council would reject. Advancement advice now checks the Crown's real certification gates — quest counts, raid counts, tower depth, roster size — not just renown and gold.
Merchant "bulk materials" and "rare reagents" offers and the Crown "certification review" now grant on the spot and show what arrived; a failed purchase neither charges nor consumes the letter. Answered service letters are marked Replied.
The Tier 2 certification preview no longer promises faction-contract and Academy licenses that were never gated on tier.
The faction letter postscript that recalls an earlier subject now shows that subject in your language.
Markets & Gold
The treasurer's automatic purchases now take the goods off the market. Bought units stayed listed and could be bought a second time by hand; the treasurer also now pays the same bulk premium you do.
Buying one Merchant deal no longer voids the other on the same letter. The bulk bundle and the rare-reagent offer are separate purchases, and the unbought one stays live until the letter rotates out.
Faction rotating-stock and permanent-upgrade purchases now appear in the transaction ledger, matching every other vendor purchase.
Parties & Roster
Editing a deployed party's queued lineup can no longer place the same bench hero in several slots at once.
The Chemistry and Zodiac sort buttons in queued-lineup mode now sort by the planned lineup, matching the badges on each row.
With the No Party Restrictions sandbox toggle on, the Formation slot builder now accepts any composition, not just the deploy check.
Late Bloomer now works: holders gain 50% more from each stat-growth tick from age 30 and keep growing five years longer than other heroes.
A retirement notice is no longer issued for a scout, astrologer, tactician, crafter or gatherer the guild no longer lists. Any such staff stranded on the roster is moved back to the correct panel on load.
Owned crafters and gatherers hired under contract now show their work and social characteristics in the staff comparison overlay, and every staff type shows a Specialty row.
Guild Life
Adventurers away on a quest, raid, contract or tower descent no longer turn up in the Guild Life feed's overheard chatter. Heroes training at home still count as present — they are at the guild's own facilities.
The founding grand reward no longer locks out when a task you already claimed later falls out of completion. Losing a full party of five after claiming Strength in Numbers used to bar the bonus permanently.
The Ascension road card now shows the Ascension's name in its header instead of the Calling you already finished.
The quest deploy advisor no longer promises to advance an underdog Calling on a deployment where your party is the favorite.
Growth tasks now measure the growth phase. Two of them counted history carried over from founding and could arrive already ticked.
Scouting
A Watch Mode scout with no eligible recruit now shows a WAITING label with an empty bar instead of looking identical to a broken scout.
The recruit tab no longer counts a scout away on a faction dispatch as idle. The "send idle scouts" prompt appeared with nothing to send.
Guides hidden in this build are no longer reachable through related-wisdom chips or a direct link in Sage's Wisdom.
Steam, Desktop & Multiplayer
Redemption codes work on the Steam desktop build. The code catalog was fetched from a path that cannot resolve there, so every published code read as unknown; it now loads from the canonical host.
Closing the game or returning to the menu on Steam now pushes your active manual save slot to Steam Cloud, not just the autosave, so multiple savepoints survive across machines.
Steam demo players can host and join Multiplayer games; ranked leagues remain full-game only.
iPad & Touch
Difficulty sliders no longer jump to the opposite extreme when dragged to an end on iPad. The setup board is single-column on touch devices.
Slider handles on touch devices are larger (24px) with a taller grab area.
Appearance & Accessibility
Tower and Quest Board headings now follow your Appearance font choices. A settings note explains that the battle arena keeps its own typography.
High-Contrast Text now also brightens the dim season-coloured tab labels and reduced-opacity amber text.
Tutorial
The class-color tip states the real head start. A rarer class adds a flat bonus to every stat, which lifts Overall by the same amount — Uncommon +5, Rare +10, Ultra Rare +15, Legendary +20, not the +2/+3/+4 the tip claimed. Uncommon is now listed alongside the others.
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BALANCE
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The Military's Tactical Briefings favor now grants the +10% training XP its guest-instructor promise described. The perk previously carried an effect nothing read.
Weekly auto-repair follows the Repair All threshold and rarity floor you configure in the Armory. Left alone it maintains gear at the same Damaged (under 70%) point as before, so a guild that never touched the setting sees no change in its repair bill.
Academy drill instructors now share out the idle roster. Several instructors were each drilling the same one or two heroes — stacking training XP on them and reporting more idle adventurers than the guild had.
Receptionist auto-renewal is no longer a gold trap. Offers now step toward market value by 30% of the gap and never exceed +20% over the member's current wage. A new setting caps raises at +5%, +10% or +15% over current wage.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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Hex Battle Photosensitivity Toggle
You can now turn off the ability flashes in your Settings > Display.
Panels & Filters
Filter, sort and grouping choices in the guild trade menu and the Ambitions Star Chart survive navigating away and back for the rest of the session.
Reading the Roster
The morale panel now shows a hero's restlessness whenever a neglected Calling is draining them — including while they are deployed — and names the remedy: keep sending them on work that matches the Calling.
The bartender no longer contradicts themselves. A personally happy hero who sours the hall now gets one connected thought instead of a cheerful report followed by a damning one, on both the detail panel and the dossier.
The quest board's ambition badge lights automatically for any member of the party you have selected, not only for a hero you picked by hand.
The deploy panel shows the teammates-quested-with grid for anyone on the party chasing teammate variety, so party choice and teammate history sit together.
Recruiting & Roster
The Recruit screen shows "Roster gaps" chips when you are short on Tanks, Healers or Damage; tapping one applies the role filter.
The Recruit and Registry detail rail is hidden when nothing is selected, can be collapsed, and floats as a drawer on narrow screens. The Party Manager side panel is collapsible.
Academy
The Academy career-track picker explains its green/grey stat colours and labels each class's cost in gold, showing "Free" for the first track.
Tactics & Trade
Pre-battle tactical guidance cross-references itself. A unit that is both a recommended archetype and a flagged risk — a fast light-armour Rogue against brutes — now says so on both lines instead of reading as a contradiction.
When a rival values your goods below market, the trade builder names which lever applied: goods refined from raw you recently supplied them, or a material you have repeatedly dumped on them.
A rival's Supply and Demand lists are ordered most-valuable-first and shaded by what each good is worth to them, with the figure on hover.
The Merchants' Bulk Purchasing and Rare Imports favours now say "the open market" — the only place they apply — instead of pointing at faction storefronts where they never did.
The Guild Trading materials filter lists every material, including ones you have never traded.
Touch & Mobile
Touch builds get a Jump button opening the command palette and a bottom navigation bar with the six most-used tabs.
Naming
The Proving Ladder is now simply the Ladder, and its action reads "Challenge" rather than "Declare" — matching the challenges, cooldowns and grudges already named around it. Your season budget reads "challenges left".
Language
Individual Training, party statuses, the correspondence inbox, workshop alerts, movement-log roles, the Star Chart and the open-beta welcome are now translated in every supported language instead of falling back to English.
Switching language now updates the Front Desk inbox filters immediately; they were frozen to whichever language was active when the game loaded.
Seventeen Settings strings that were showing English in other languages are now translated.