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FEATURES
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The Goblin Siege
The World Event: Goblin Siege has received its next round of upgrades.
The goblin warband no longer sends three quests to the board — it comes down the roads. Named hosts spawn in the outer regions and march on Hiltcrest hop by hop over eight weeks, and you fight them on the War Table.
Order a sortie against any host on the map, one party per host and one host per party. A repelled host breaks outright; a hard-fought one breaks after the second grind.
A patrol stationed in a region is the picket line: it auto-engages any unbroken host standing there, with no order needed.
Every unbroken host is commanded from one muster on the siege's home region panel, sorted by urgency — the goblin emblem and every host stamp on the map open it, scrolled to the host you clicked.
A host that reaches the harbor ring strikes the wall when the week turns: a forced alarm, a muster of up to two parties, and a fight at the gate of Hiltcrest. Patrols from the Bridge and the East Ridge fall back to the walls at no rest cost.
Lose the gate fight and a building burns. A damaged building contributes nothing to effects, unlocks or synergies until an overseer repairs it — but it keeps its tier, so a damaged fortress is still a fortress.
Hosts on the road cut supply lines and suppress region threats in the regions they occupy, and a town whose region carries your outpost costs them an extra hop to pass.
A fourth wave lands in siege-week 7 that hardens every surviving host without spawning any, so a warband you let fester can reach the tier-4 Goblin Lord at the gate.
The Quests tab carries an "Under siege" strip with a Muster CTA, and a red dot sits on the nav tab while the town is besieged.
The Frontier
Twenty-three faction characters have new portraits, including Aldric Ravencroft III, Aurelia Thane, Elara Voss, Viktor Krenn and the Underworld's Whisper, Rat and Ghost.
A new game now opens with a word from the Sage about the frontier map, so the veiled regions read as land to push into rather than a blank.
Correspondence & Command
Faction request and offer letters now carry a reply window — twelve weeks by default, with a countdown in the inbox and a red warning the week before it closes. Let one lapse and it locks, and silence costs half of what an outright refusal would have.
Your Guild Commander writes as soon as unrest crosses into insubordination, a full stage before the resignation threat, and names the one thing driving it. You can hear them out, promise a lineup change, or back the call — each with its own price.
Multiplayer
A multiplayer host can switch the four seasonal festivals on for a league already in progress, co-op leagues included, and a league running without them now says so on the Crown Cup page instead of falling back silently.
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BALANCE
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The Party of Heroes commission is an occasion, not a standing order. It no longer posts a duplicate while one is away in the field, it waits 26 weeks after a success, and each one you complete raises its gold and renown by 15%, to a cap of +75% — drawing a different title each time.
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BUG FIXES
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The Academy also reconciles a trainee's potential tier at every semester boundary instead of only at graduation, so a promotion earned early pays for the training weeks that follow it rather than arriving after them.
Youth prospects' seven category potentials are budgeted against their headline tier, so a C-Tier prospect can no longer show six B-Tier attribute groups — and no longer trains under a growth cap meant for a lesser talent.
Scouting a Trading Block listing no longer collapses its buyout price onto the wage. A 79-OVR listing was asking roughly one year's salary after a scout — about a 90% discount. Existing listings are restored on load.
A rival guild short of a material never bids below the open market for it again. The anti-arbitrage knock-down could value a shortage good at half market price, and it is now scoped to only the units your supplied raw could actually have refined.
Crafted gear is priced off its craft quality again. A basic or standard recipe was taking the free-loot 50% haircut meant for drops, which pushed nearly every low-tier craft below the cost of its materials and inverted the quality gradient.
Academy trainees keep their per-category spread. Every stat was converging on one flat number, so a trainee graded S in Vitality and Arcane trained to the same ceiling as their dump stats.
A Treasury's passive income grows from the year it was built, not the campaign year.
Harder difficulties no longer erase A- and S-potential recruits. Above Normal the elite bands were being driven to exactly zero, leaving a hard C-Tier ceiling on the recruit board that contradicted the Elite Talent slider sitting right beside it.
The tower muster's death forecast quotes what the fight actually does. It was composing a model the hex descent stopped using and dividing by mitigations the descent never applied, so a party could read a 2% death chance and bury fourteen.
The Party Combat Stats chemistry chip read from a band table that disagreed with every chemistry tier: a Harmonious party showed −4%. The chip and the Teamwork and Chemistry rows now render the shape the engine applies.
The Commander no longer reveals an unscouted recruit's exact OVR. A dossier reading OVR ??? while the Commander said "82 OVR at this stage" was ground truth leaking through the fog; he now gives the scouted range, or no number at all.
Guild Trading no longer advertises a surplus a rival has already sold out of. Flags are recomputed at every stockpile write, the trade builder prints the rival's real holding, and a sold-out row is disabled instead of offering an unfulfillable "1 / 0" line.
The Artisans panel said "No Artisans Hired" beside its own list of live seminars. The empty state now says how many are hidden by your filters and offers one click to show all, and the idle counter reads against the whole roster instead of the filtered view.
The tournament bracket no longer jumps to the bottom of the tree when it focuses a match, and dragging to pan no longer text-selects the seeds and names underneath.
Adventurer career-goal progress counted two quest categories that were mis-stamped and lit no chip. The count is corrected on load and both quests now stamp real categories.
Aldric's favor-milestone letters printed their reward as a bracketed aside inside the prose. The reward is a chip below the letter now, read from the numbers actually paid.
Staff contract negotiations no longer offer "Questing Uptime" as a priority to people who never ride a party — it had been landing at #1 for bartenders.
Paying for a faction crate from the Front Desk now tells you what arrived; that path used to execute in silence.
A quest's ROVR chip shows its difficulty colour and the number when you can see it, instead of falling back to a flat red.
The Front Desk's Under Construction badge counts projects, with overseer utilisation on its own labelled row.
Abilities with no authored name render a readable name instead of their internal id.
A contract extension shows the potential badge for every target. Signed free agents and academy graduates were failing an intel check meant for the free-agent pool, so most of your own roster showed nothing.
A multiplayer host switching festivals off mid-season no longer leaves a staged tournament sitting in the save.
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QUALITY OF LIFE
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Roster & Logistics
The Sets tab has an explicit "Equip all · +N" per hero over a searchable, roster-wide list. Empty slots fill at once; pieces blocked by worn gear open a confirmed swap that names what comes off, so the hero ends up with the whole set and its set effect.
The party member-swap picker has search, role filters and sorting instead of one long unfiltered list.
Instructors can take the paid training trip, blocked while they are coaching, drilling or seated on the Academy faculty. An instructor away on a trip is dropped from the training pickers rather than silently voiding an enrollment.
Set a potential tier and any completed scouting report at or above it is flagged in the Live Feed.
The Regional outpost card buys materials per-material, or every affordable missing one in a click.
Trade & Markets
Standing restock lists carry a per-material max price per unit and a High / Normal / Low funding priority, and a list surface shows every material you have a target for with why it did or didn't buy this week — stocked, out of stock, warehouse full, or priced out by your ceiling.
By default "Restock all" now stops before the AMM bulk premium instead of spilling into it, and names the trim on the toolbar. The Portfolio's "even into the bulk premium" toggle turns it back off.
The Guilds list and the Portfolio demand panel show what each guild pays per unit, so finding a fair buyer is a sort instead of a tour of thirty-one guilds.
Crafting
The Workshop's craft-quality bar says "Quality" on every letter it prints, so it stops reading as a contradiction of the potential badge above it, and it draws the crafter's talent ceiling — bands beyond reach are dimmed, with a marker at the skill seminars can carry them to.
The Estimated Sale Price forecast is the true expected value across the roll, not a floored point estimate that could misstate a basic recipe by nearly double.
Battles & Tournaments
The Hex Battle System now has a 1.5× playback speed.
Click a fighter in the initiative strip who has already acted and playback rewinds to their last turn.
A guild name on the tournament bracket opens that guild's profile, like everywhere else in the tab.
The tournament Registration screen's Backups strip has its own two-click Clear, so emptying a fifteen-deep backup list is two clicks, not fifteen.