Surprise Friday Live Patch --> v2.0.0-beta.1801 (Live)

With all the new goodies hitting the Live version this week, I wanted to make sure I was fixing and pushing any must-have fixes heading into the weekend in order to achieve optimal gaming. Thank you to everyone who has shared a bug report or an idea, I'm hustling!

Steam post image New Features

Online Leagues

• Write to other guildmasters. Send free-text dispatches to anyone in your league. Letters travel by weekly courier and arrive in your Front Desk inbox alongside your other correspondence, with their own League filter tab, unread badges, and read/unread tracking — no shared world state ever changes hands.

• Host Controls. League hosts get a control panel in My League: force-advance a stalled week (absent guildmasters are commander-played), pause and resume the league, change the turn timer mid-game, kick a member, or hand off the host role. If the host leaves, the role passes to the next player automatically.

• Invite with a link. The lobby's Copy Invite button copies your code, a join link, and instructions in one go — and a friend who opens the link lands straight on the Multiplayer screen with the code pre-filled and validated.

• Standings in-game from week 1. See every guildmaster in your league — divisions, annual renown, and tower progress — right in the CCL Rankings area, instead of only inside the lobby.

Academy

• Trainee morale. A new morale meter (on the dashboard and trainee detail) drifts each week toward how well a trainee is supported. Role-matched instructors, mentors, and a better dormitory lift it; grueling regimens and cross-training drag it down. High morale speeds up weekly training, low morale slows it, and a trainee's mood across their Academy years shapes the disposition trait they graduate with.

• In-semester events. Small, frequent moments — sharp sessions, festivals, scoldings, homesickness — fire throughout each semester and gather in a per-trainee "Recent Events" timeline alongside the bigger semester-end events.

• Graduate early. Once a trainee is 18 with a full year done, you can pull them from the Academy and field them today, trading their remaining growth for an adventurer you can use immediately. A non-binding projection previews their likely class, potential, and estimated overall before you commit.

• Class Affinity meter. A new meter shows how strongly a trainee is locked onto their career-track class. It fills as they train on-role and replaces the old hidden weighting — a fresh track already pulls toward its target, and a fully built-up track makes graduating as that class nearly assured.

• Training Commissions. Factions and rivals now commission your established Academy to raise a trainee to a target role and potential tier by a deadline. Assign a trainee, deliver on spec for a renown reward, or miss and take a renown hit.

Steam Cloud

• Cloud saves restore across machines. Start the game on a new PC and your Steam Cloud saves appear and load automatically, even with no local copy. At startup the game adopts a cloud save only when it represents strictly greater progress, so a full local save is never overwritten by a smaller cloud copy after a crash or hard shutdown.

• NOTE: Steam has broken my heart before. So, try this out and let me know how it goes. It should work, but Steam Cloud Saves is a moving target.

Guilds

• Trophy Room. Click any guild to see its Trophy Room — Crown Cup championships, runner-up and third-place finishes, and total appearances. Your own pedigree appears at the top of your Crown Cup history in the same medals.

Quality of Life

Online Leagues

• See who's around. The week-advance waiting banner and the lobby member list now show who's online — an active guildmaster taking their turn versus one last seen hours ago — plus an at-a-glance "3/5 ready to advance" summary, so you know whether to wait or force the tick.

• Connection trouble is visible. A persistent outage now shows a "can't reach the league server — reconnecting" notice (your turn stays safe) instead of looking like an endless wait, and a league that's gone after a server restart shows a clear "can't find this league" message pointing you to recovery.

Academy

• See who's teaching whom. The faculty UI now shows which instructor actually teaches each trainee, and warns more accurately: a strong "losing potential" alert only when no faculty is assigned at all, and a gentler advisory when a trainee's exact role slot is empty but a fallback instructor still covers them. Faculty slots beyond your Academy's capacity show a clear locked tile explaining you must upgrade.

• Career Track picker confirms before charging. Browse target classes without paying — a trainee's first career track is free, and clearing and re-setting later costs the normal fee.

• Curriculum unfolds by semester. Early semesters offer broad foundations, with specialized focuses unlocking as a trainee matures, instead of showing every option from day one.

• Swap instructors in place. Change the instructor on a filled faculty slot with a single control, instead of having to clear the slot first.

Scouts

• Stop All Watching returns every board-watching scout to idle in one click.

• Send All Idle Scouts on recruitment pages puts all your idle scouts on board-watch for that recruit type at once. Scouts already on orders are never disturbed.

Trade & Treasurer

• Stable trade builder. The source list and your selected items now sit side by side, so clicking an item to add it no longer pushes the list out from under your cursor.

• Calmer trade flow. The "Trade Complete" toast auto-dismisses after a few seconds and no longer reflows the form. Selling a portfolio asset in full keeps it selected instead of snapping the view to the top, and completing a trade clears the rival's lingering counter-offers.

• Steady material dropdown. The Guild Trading material list keeps a stable alphabetical order instead of reshuffling each week, and materials pinned in your Portfolio are marked here too.

• Treasurer trade-status banner. The Treasurer now explains why no trades are happening — whether market auto-trading is off, or you've enabled it but haven't added any rules yet — and clarifies that Inbound Offer Handling is a separate, independent system.

Roster

• Party notes remember their state. Your party notes box now stays the way you left it — open or collapsed — across navigation and save/load, instead of always reopening.

Misc

• [ENTER] makes an offer on the staff contract screen, matching the button's prompt.

• Easier hotkeys toggle. The on/off switch for keyboard shortcuts now lives in Settings → Hotkeys, next to the shortcut reference, and surfaces when you search settings for "disable" or "turn off" — useful if you keep nudging Space by accident.

• A-Tier difficulty preset now displays its proper "A-Tier" label instead of a raw text key.

Balance

Academy

• Fourth instructor slot. A max-tier Academy now funds a 4th instructor slot, so all four role disciplines (Tank / Healer / Melee / Ranged) can each have a dedicated instructor.

Academy-Only Mode

• A survivable opening. Academy-only games now start with a founding class of five recent Academy graduates on contract to earn quest income while you raise the next class, guaranteed fast-track prospects, and a one-time starting-gold cushion (15,000) to bridge to your first home-grown graduates. Your founding five guarantee coverage for every party role, so you can always form a working party instead of being stuck with idle, wage-draining adventurers.

• More room for stories. The whole academy-only opening has been reframed.

• Scouting Templates fit the mode. In Academy-only mode, Scouting Templates can now target Crafters, Staff, and Gatherers — the supported scopes are the visible ones, and scopes that did nothing in this mode no longer clutter the picker.

• No off-limits chatter. Rival recruitment chatter (a rival signed a free agent, rivals are eyeing someone) is no longer shown in academy-only mode, where you can't sign from the free-agent pool anyway.

Bug Fixes

Online Leagues

• Fixed a league wedging when a guildmaster left and rejoined, which spawned a duplicate player and an orphan bot and stopped the week from advancing. Returning players now reclaim their original guild cleanly.

• Fixed a host being permanently pinned one week behind the shared world while their co-player stayed in sync.

• Dispatches sent to a guildmaster who has left or been kicked now bounce back with an "undeliverable" courier notice, so you know to resend, instead of silently vanishing.

• Hardened leagues against cheating clients: another player can no longer defraud you in a trade or steal contested signings with gold they don't actually have.

• Online leagues are far more stable overall — simultaneous joins and ready calls no longer lose data, and malformed world data can no longer wedge a league into a permanent error state.

Combat & Traits

• Party passives apply everywhere. Crit bonuses, crowd-control, loot bonuses, synergy crit, and party-bond effects now carry into raids, the Tower, and the Crown Cup (with quest-matching caps), so a crit-focused, control-heavy, or tightly-bonded party finally earns its specialty outside of questing.

• Crown Cup overtime respects your edges. The deciding overtime phase now factors in your party's synergy, chemistry, guild, and captain bonuses, so a clearly stronger party no longer loses on raw averages alone.

• Traits do what their tooltips promise. Charismatic's renown bonus and Vanguard's party-damage bonus now apply, while Giant Slayer, Prodigy, Lone Wolf, and Team Player now check their stated conditions instead of always firing.

• Faithful battle animations. Shields, heals, and summons now narrate correctly — protective buffs render as buffs, heals as healing, and the Necromancer's undead legion as a shadow assault, instead of being shown as enemy attacks.

Academy-Only Mode

• Watch-mode scouts no longer get stuck "Observing" un-hirable external adventurers, and stray external adventurers, veteran recruits, and "incoming S-Tier" warnings no longer appear where they can't be hired.

Treasurer

• Fixed the Treasurer's inbound-offer auto-accept valuation so it matches the value shown on the offer card. Offers that looked favorable to you are no longer silently left pending.

Localization

• Russian localization for the Tower is more consistent: Strength/Weakness intel labels are unified, lore text and the War Room name now display in Russian, and gear names show translated everywhere — tooltips, vault, salvage, and market included.