vAlpha.40 - Brand New Combat System! +patches

Combat has been rebuilt from scratch. Five styles that play like five different games, a Practice Arena to learn them in, and opponents that learned to defend by watching real players.

This may be the biggest single update we have had.

TL;DR

• Combat is completely new. Five styles, five different things your hands actually do — drag a slash, draw a path, hold dead still, tap out a rhythm, or swing a magic sword with a wave of your own element crashing in behind it.

• New: Practice Arena. Real combat, no save, no server, no consequences. Any character, any opponent, any level, any time.

• New: Guided Walkthrough. A coached first fight with a demo attack frozen mid-flight so you can finally see what those rings mean.

• Opponents got smarter. Enemy defence now runs on trained models built from recorded human play, not a hand-written formula.

• Early fights are winnable. A low-level fighter used to need 17 rounds to kill something that killed them in 3. It's now 3 against 3.

• Half the CPU load. A frame cap that had never actually worked is fixed.

• The UI stopped breaking on your monitor. No more "it only looks right at 1080p, 100% scaling."

• Keyboard shortcuts for every right-hand panel, plus full keyboard controls in combat.

• Villages joined the road network, rest better, and there's a long list of multiplayer and general fixes.

Combat, rebuilt

The old mini-game — a box appears, you click it — is gone. What replaced it is five fights that genuinely feel different, because each one tests a different skill and asks something different of your hands.

• Physical — drag a slash. Pure spatial reaction, with the roomiest window in the game. The friendliest place to start.

• Wizard — draw a path, and it resolves where you release. Fewer, heavier hits. Draw decisively and your rune flies faster.

• Trooper — press, hold perfectly still, release. The fewest shots in the game and the heaviest. Twitch your mouse and you'll feel it.

• Elemental — single clicks, tapped out to a rhythm. Twice the attacks at a fraction of the weight each, and the only style built to drain a guard completely dry.

• Magic Sword — you drag like Physical, but a wave of your element follows the cut in a beat later. Two threats per swing. It hits hardest in the game, and it's earned: you have to find it, forge it and train it first.

Defending changed just as much. A ring contracts around every incoming attack. Green means you can still dodge it for free. Blue means you're down to blocking.

Click dead centre and you land a perfect parry that costs you nothing — the most useful rule in the entire fight, and until now the game never told you it existed. Close to centre is a clean block for one charge. Clip the edge and you graze it: you bleed some damage off, but the attack is still coming.

Right-click throws a feint — a fake, drawn fainter, whose entire job is baiting a block out of your opponent for nothing. Higher Cunning makes yours harder to read.

Full keyboard controls: A attack, F feint, D dodge, B block, S lock your power. D and B are deliberately separate keys — a mouse click just answers whichever window the attack happens to be in, but a keypress says which one you meant.

The fight page gets out of your way

Press Fight and the entire pre-fight stat panel now collapses out of the way. It's exactly what you want right up until combat starts, and dead weight for every second after — while parked in the middle of the screen between you and the person you're trying to hit.

• Health bars move up above each fighter, where they belong.

• Run and Simulate move to opposite bottom corners, far from both arenas. A misclick mid-beat can't end your fight any more.

• Both fighters grow and step in, and the middle stays empty. Two fighters facing off across clear ground.

• The idle fighter dims, so you always know which side you're working on — without a coloured box drawn over the exact thing you're aiming at.

• Your attacks and feints are now boxes you can count at a glance instead of a line of text you have to read and do subtraction on, mid-timing.

• Hits flash red, and damage now lands on the bar as each strike connects instead of dumping all at once at the end of the round.

• Click somewhere useless and the game tells you why — whether you missed the box, or you're simply out of attacks this round.

Every word of combat text is now fully translated, including every verdict and every per-style hint.

New: the Practice Arena

A new button on the main menu. No save, no server, no board, no consequences — just the fight.

• Pick your character (each origin city has its own style), your opponent, the backdrop, and the level for both sides — a quick level band, or ten individual sliders if you want to build something specific.

• A live preview shows both fighters and tells you who has the matchup advantage before you commit. That penalty used to only show up as a line of text once the fight was already going — which is exactly when nobody's reading.

• Every bout shows its seed. "Seed 4417, Anafola vs Trooper, level band 3" is a fight you can hand to a friend and have them play the identical one.

• Switch timers off entirely and take all the time you want to learn a rhythm.

• Magic Sword stays locked until you actually own one — and it unlocks the specific blade you forged, because the ranks are absolutely not cosmetic.

Nothing here touches your save. No XP, no coins, no risk. Go break things.

New: the Combat Walkthrough

A guided first fight, offered in the Practice Arena and from the Sparring Area in-game. Both fighters get the same tiny stat block, you always go first, and no timer can punish you.

A coach takes you through the power bar — including the two things nobody discovers safely on their own: it speeds up as it climbs, and it wraps back to nothing if you overshoot. Then placing your attack. Then the good part: a demonstration attack that cannot hurt you. It arrives exactly like a real one and freezes in its dodge phase, so the green ring can be pointed at while it's actually on screen. Then it resumes, turns blue, and freezes again for the block.

The three grades get shown rather than described — a marker pulses at three distances from the attack and the game's own words float up: PERFECT, CLEAN, GRAZED.

Costs no action and no coin, and runs entirely in a sandbox. Your real character, board and save aren't part of it.

Opponents that learned from real players

Enemy defence used to be a formula someone wrote by hand. It's now five trained models — one per style — built from recorded human play, deciding how far your opponent gets down the ladder: dodge, perfect parry, block, partial answer, or eat it.

They're sampled rather than certain, so an opponent who "should" stop 70% of this actually stops 70% of it, and no two fights play out the same way.

Early fights are actually winnable now

A player put it like this:"When I click an attack it almost always misses. When I do get an attack it does very little damage even when they have 0 defense. And when they attack, even though they have the same stats as me, they never ever miss."

All three complaints were real, they were three separate problems, and every one of them was worst at the bottom of the stat range. A level-6 fighter needed 17 rounds to kill an identical enemy that killed them in 2.7.

• The power bar was uncontrollable at low Attack. It used to cross its entire range in under a tenth of a second — faster than a human can react. One box now takes nearly a full second.

• Whiffing the power bar is gone entirely. Overshoot now wraps down to a minimum swing instead of nothing, so every lock you can physically make buys at least one attack. Reaching high is now a real risk/reward call with a genuine sweet spot — and a cliff just past it.

• Zero-Defence enemies stopped soaking your damage. They were absorbing 37% of everything. Now it's 8%.

• Zero-Agility enemies stopped dodging. They used to dodge 10-34% of everything with no Agility at all, because nobody had ever tested that end of the range.

• Your opponent now uses your power bar. Literally the same one — so their Stability finally matters, and difficulty behaves the way it reads.

Same matchup after: 3.4 rounds against 3.3. That's a fight.

Stability finally does what it says

If you'd noticed that stacking Stability sometimes made your attacks worse — you weren't imagining it. The shake it protects you from pushed your swing in a predictable direction, so a patient player could just wait it out, and a perfectly steady fighter measurably performed worse than one still shaking.

The shake is now a real coin toss, and the cost of overreaching moved onto recoil: swing above what your Stability can hold and the swing can wound you. There's a live recoil-risk read-out beside the bar so you can see the trade before you take it — and your opponents play by the exact same rule.

Performance and display

• The game has been running at 60 FPS this entire time, not 30. The cap was written to the wrong place and had never once been read. That's half the drawing work for zero visual difference — and almost certainly why your fan spins up.

• The drifting clouds were re-laying-out all 255 board tiles, 60 times a second. Roughly 150x less work now.

• The interface stopped following your Windows scaling setting. Text and spacing were sized off your OS display scale instead of the game's own frame, which is exactly why it "only looked right at 1920x1080 at 100%".

• Tile hover on the board is fixed on ultrawide and scaled displays, along with cursor accuracy inside the fight arena.

Multiplayer

• PvP fights now report back. Each side used to only apply damage to itself — so both players watched their own health fall and neither ever saw the other's. Both could hit zero on their own screen and both would be shown the loss, with rewards handed out from two completely disagreeing views of one fight.

• PvP no longer freezes after the first exchange. The arena was being torn down between rounds and never rebuilt.

• Health is reconciled every round as a safety net, so one dropped packet can't leave you fighting someone who's already dead on their own screen.

• Two causes of the wilderness desync are fixed — a timing race between the round advance and the shared world seed, and a skirmish result that could leave both participants believing different players won.

• Player-to-player interaction only ever worked one way. Whoever walked up got the option to trade or fight; whoever was already standing there never did. Both sides update now, and the option correctly vanishes when someone walks off.

• Losing a fight could cost you four times your entire purse. A defeated player holding 13 coins was paying out 52.

• Sending a PvP fight request could crash. A fight could end twice and take the game down with it. Finishing a fight could drop you back into the old one on your next encounter. All fixed.

• Single-player Continue and Load no longer offer you a multiplayer save.

World and quality of life

• Keyboard shortcuts. 1 - 6 jump straight to Combat, Knowledge, Capital, Reputation, Fellowship and Titles. V VP, B Bag, C Crafting, S Smithing, A Allies. Hints are printed on the panels themselves, and they're all disabled during a fight so a panel can never steal a block from you.

• Villages joined the road network. Passing through one costs a road move instead of a full action. City → village → city used to cost two full actions while city → road → city cost part of one, which made villages more expensive to travel through than empty road. That's backwards, and it's fixed.

• Villages rest properly. Recovery is 2 instead of 1, and Defender protections still stack on top — a village you've defended twice rests for 4.

• Lost Pet now pays out in Excavating (plus a Findersfern), which is the skill it actually tests. It used to give you one coin.

• Low-level fishing and hunting eased — pond fishing and plains herds now start at 35% instead of 25%.

• Starting bag capacity is 6, up from 5.

• Gifting a craft is now a minor action.

• "Season Visuals"(was "Seasons Overlay") now covers the season icon as well as the falling-leaves effect, and switching it off mid-game genuinely frees the memory. The season text and colour always stay — the season changes your odds and you need to be able to read it.

Bug fixes

• Health bars never actually reached zero. Two separate causes — every value from 1 to 14 HP drew identically, and a graphics quirk meant a bar emptied to exactly zero kept drawing at its last size. Fixed across every bar in the game: health, energy, timers, combat XP, knowledge.

• A killing blow could open a full attack round against an already-dead enemy — timer running, attacks on screen, nothing to hit.

• A missing enemy portrait could kill the whole fight screen. Reachable any time a magic-sword wielder was your opponent.

• Pressing S before your first attack crashed the game — easy to do, since you defend first whenever your opponent wins the fight order.

• A road tile could be left permanently empty by a rare excavation find on converted wilderness.

• The item count badge left its coloured circle behind in your bag when the item was removed.

• The chance pill stopped covering the tile it's describing — it now sits beside whatever you're hovering instead of at a fixed spot on screen.

• The Smithing page's Defense section uses shields instead of weapon art, and action cards sit correctly behind the black strip.

Known limits — we'd rather tell you

• Magic Sword ships with the Water blade only. The other seven ranks exist mechanically and are waiting on artwork.

• Multiplayer can still desync, typically around the third wilderness expansion. Two causes are fixed in this build; the remaining one is identified and queued for the next.

• Style balance was measured hard against the AI, but the fine-tuning between the five styles genuinely wants human hands on it.

That last one is where you come in. If a style feels overpowered, useless, or just weird to play — tell us. This is the release where that feedback matters most, and we're reading all of it.