Army Experience Update

Greetings Autocrats!

Some good news! Kiloton was just announced as a finalist in the 2026 Independent Games Festival! We are a nominee for Best Student Game. If you are a fellow game person and plan on coming to the GDC this march, you'll find Kiloton (and me) in the IGF section.

Anyhow, here are todays patch notes:

ARMY EXPERIENCE

Armies now gain experience over time. As they gain experience, their speed, health, and damage all go up. This experience caps out at two minutes, where they have significant advantages over fresh conscripts. Experience can be seen visually as a team-colored tint. (Thanks Sock)

ARMY SIZES

Army sizes have been tweaked! It used to be that a nation's maximum army count was something like 2% of their total population, meant to model cold-war army sizes. This rapidly becomes unrealistic in a total-war scenario, so I've made a tweak to the multipliers, and now it's closer to 10%. Each individual white square now represents about a division-sized military unit. (Thanks Sock)

ISLAND

Tweaked scenario to hopefully avoid the auto-lose condition that some players were experiencing

TUTORIALS

Added a bit more pizzazz to some of the tutorial text. It can always be more heavy handed.

REBINDS

You can now rebind the UI keys. They still default to the arrow keys, but by typing BIND in console you can see new commands have been added: UI_UP, UI_DOWN, UI_RIGHT, and UI_LEFT.

BIND UI_UP = P

for instance, will mean you now have to press the P key to move your UI selection up.

TWEAKS

• Research is now half as loud. It had been bugging me.

• I've swapped out various sprites and materials throughout the game to reduce draw-calls. I didn't really know how any of this worked back in 2023 when half this code was written. It probably won't help framerates that much, but I'll be able to sleep at night. This will affect:

  • Nukes

  • Unit Spawn Effect

  • Missiles

  • ATAMS

  • Cities

  • Some other behind-the scenes stuff.

DISCORD

No changes, just giving it another plug. Join the discord for all questions, multiplayer shenanigans, feature requests, and especially bug reports.

Thanks for playing Kiloton! Until next time.

- spacemann