Open Playtest Update

Playtest Week One — Seven Builds, A Lot of Feedback

We kicked the playtest off on May 15th, and it's been an incredible week. Seven builds have shipped since then, almost entirely driven by what you've been sending in — bug reports, confused-face screenshots, "wait this is supposed to do what?" DMs. Thank you!

📖 The Manual (NEW)

The single most-requested thing from week one: "I don't know what any of this does." So we shipped a real in-game manual. Press "?" anywhere, or hit a triggered popup, and you get a full-window panel with a captioned screenshot of the actual UI and arrows pointing at the relevant buttons. 54 authored entries across First Steps, Builder, Tactical, Galaxy Map, Empire Command, and Research.

💰 Builder: Capacity Pools

Modules and struts are free to place now. The old build-time credit math is gone — multiple of you (correctly) said it added friction without adding decisions. Two pools gate what you can build:

• Module Slots — earned by Tendril milestones.

• Frame — how large the ship can be.

Live Frame preview at the cursor, budget bar turns orange before it goes red, shape tools refuse curves you can't afford. Leviathan and Titan thresholds also dropped so they're reachable through normal progression. You can make realllly big ships now!

🔤 Vocabulary Cleanup

Three terms kept tripping people up. They're gone:

• Shards → Module Slots

• Structure → Frame

• Energy → Supplies

🌌 Galaxy AI — The Galaxy Pushes Back

Several of you said the late game felt sleepy — AI factions sitting on their hands while you mopped up. Big push to fix that by making things much more active. I built a dev tool that let me iterate really fast with galaxy simulations, so I could adjust logic and then run multiple games at once with telemetry to see how it went. Did five full rounds of changes, each round with five variations plus a control, going from game start to turn 400. The sim is bloody now!!

• Captain personalities now drive mobilization, neutral-bypass, and siege commitment.

• AI intercepts player captains on home turf. EXPAND captains lost their retreat exemption.

• History has consequences now — doctrine drift, vendettas, prophets, splinters with asymmetric goals.

• Per-captain fuel tank with stationary regen and combat rewards. Captains pace themselves and can be starved.

• Three-tier news pipeline (routine / notable / defining) so the important beats don't drown in flavor.

• Captain knockout + refractory recovery — a wounded captain can soft-reset and rebuild on supplies.

💥 Tactical Polish

• Spacebar pauses combat — multiple playtesters reflexively hit it expecting pause. It now does. (Fire moved off spacebar.)

• Prime-then-fire abilities — abilities now use a reticle + range indicator targeting model. Click to prime, click again to fire where you mean. Now it feels like I'm playing Heroes of the Storm again!

• Stance rework: HOLD / SCOUT replace IDLE / PATROL.

• VFX rework on shockwaves, hull flashes, and torpedoes.

• Dead modules char visibly and tint as damage stacks.

🐛 Playtest Bug Wave

A pile of these came straight from your reports:

• Warp Jump, Brass Cavalry, fighter targeting, sprite fallbacks — all fixed.

• Clicking the HUD no longer fires your weapons through it.

• SteamBomber max_hp crash fixed.

• Galaxy map hang on long sessions — fixed.

• Builder Stats / Help button overlap fixed.

• Tutorial popup clusters cleaned up so the briefing flow doesn't pile up on you.

🌿 Tendril Abilities

13 of 18 Player abilities are wired in and 24 ability entries were added to the codex so you can read what they do. Builder gained a new ability loadout button section — it's still a placeholder but at least it doesn't look like a DOS terminal now!

Still Going

The playtest is still on. We're cranking through reports daily — keep them coming. The cadence will keep being "ship a build, watch you play it, fix what breaks, do it again." Specifically helpful right now: anything weird in the new ability targeting flow, anywhere the Manual doesn't cover something it should, and any late-game galaxy behavior that still feels sleepy after the AI pass. Thank you for playing the messy build. This is the part of development where your eyes catch things mine can't.

— Mark