Version 1.5.0

A content release built around three things

a mandate menu for Skirmish Hard, a ground-up overhaul of the premium card pool, and a new common card tier that changes what a finished board drafts.

On top of that

a player profile with 51 collectible badges, and a campaign that now runs breach events and the wave-20 finale. Late-game runs read very differently than they did in 1.4.7

Mandate Protocol

Clearing any map on Hard unlocks the Mandate Protocol: twelve individually toggleable mandates on the Hard map-select screen. Your rating is the sum of the point costs you check (max 18) - no unlock order, no forced sequence. The mandates alternate pressure axes (HP, speed, draft size, reroll cost, ban charges, sealed hardpoints, starting lives, breach events, Colossus hull, modifier cap), so mixing them changes how a run feels, not just how big the numbers are. The full list, with point costs, is on the picker.

• Rating multiplies your score

• Three new achievements:

  • Mandate Five: Clear a map with a Mandate Protocol rating of 5 or higher

  • Deep Mandate: Clear a map with a Mandate Protocol rating of 10 or higher

  • Total Mandate: Clear a map with every Mandate Protocol active

• Skirmish only, full game only: the campaign, Daily Rift, custom games and the tutorial are untouched.

The premium card pool, rebuilt

The 25-card pool had four cards that were all, at heart, "+X% damage" with different labels. They are consolidated, and three genuinely rule-changing cards take their place. The pool stands at 24.

Merged:

• Escalation Engine absorbed Compound Interest. One ramp card now: +1.5% damage per wave cleared after each copy is picked (up to 3 copies). The old retroactive jump - picking it late and instantly collecting the whole run's accumulation - is gone; when you commit to the ramp now matters.

• Threshold Protocol absorbed Finisher Protocol into Target Lock's slot: +15% damage per copy against enemies above 80% or below 35% HP. One card, both ends of the fight.

Removed: Deep Slotting and Specialization Bonus. Singularity Core and Hardpoint Reinforcement remain as the two "modifiers = damage" cards.

New:

• Cascade Grid (Rare): when a tower surges, the 2 nearest other towers gain 15% of their own surge meter per copy. Board layout now feeds the spectacle layer - a tight cluster chains its surges.

• Anomaly Feed (Super Rare): at the end of every wave, one card you didn't pick from that wave's draft is applied to a random eligible target, free. Deterministic per run; if nothing applies, nothing happens.

• RemovedDecommission Order (Super Rare, one-time)pick one placed tower. It is removed, the slot is freed, and every modifier it carried becomes a permanent +5% global damage bonus. The one deliberate exception to "picks are permanent" - a bad early tower is no longer a life sentence.

Common Field Mods - a new card tier

Once your board was fully built - every slot filled, every modifier socket used - drafts collapsed into four guaranteed premium cards every wave, which quietly made "Super Rare" mean "guaranteed by wave 15". Finished boards now draft 12 Common Field Mods instead: tiny single-tower stat trades in bronze frames, applied like modifiers (pick the card, then the tower). Ten are trades - Bore Polish (+2% damage, -5 px range), Choke Rings (+8 px range, -2% damage), Heavy Rounds (+3% damage, fires 3% slower), Shaped Charge, Hot Bearings, Tight Coupling, Live Wire, Overdrive Fuse, Cryo Lining, Ember Jacket - and two are small clean bonuses (Maintenance Pass, Rail Shims).

The design rules are deliberately sharp:

• No unlock gates, and floors instead of caps. Any card can target any tower - but only if the tower can pay the tradeoff in full against its stat floors. A long-range tower absorbs more Bore Polish than a short-range one; capacity is something you read off your board, not a number on the card. The tier's one copy cap: Shaped Charge stops at 3 per tower, because its blast-radius cost has no stat floor.

• Inert halves are intentional. Shaped Charge on a splashless tower is a free +3%. The tier rewards knowing your board and punishes autopiloting. The exception is Live Wire: it only targets towers that actually chain, so its bonus half is never dead weight.

• They stay relevant forever - the numbers are percentages of the tower's own stats, so commons matter in deep endless without ever becoming the win condition.

• Anomaly Feed can only draw the two no-tradeoff fillers - it will never grief you with a random tradeoff.

• Demo players get commons too, which also closes a real edge case: a finished demo board used to hit the premium-only draft with most of the pool demo-excluded, and could run the remaining copy caps dry.

Premium spawn rates, reworked

The old model was a single 20% roll per draft. Premiums now roll two independent chances per draft: 12% Super Rare / 22% Rare on the first, 7% / 14% on the second. Roughly half your drafts show a premium, about 1 in 14 shows two, and Super Rares stay genuinely rare (one every five to six drafts). Injected premiums still replace normal options, so drafts never grow. Verified on the reference benchmark at the 70% win rate - premium-richer drafting without breaking the curve.

Player Profile - 51 collectible badges

A new PROFILE screen (button above the operator portrait on the main menu) shows your identity card, lifetime stats, and a grid of 51 collectible badges - procedurally drawn chassis icons with count pips on the repeatable ones. Badges are awarded at the end of any real run, the end screen shows a badges-earned strip, and hovering a badge anywhere gives its name and count. All 51, earned or not, are listed on the profile screen.

• Your existing progress counts. A one-time backfill on first load seeds badges from what your saves already prove: personal bests, protocol stamps, achievements, the operator unlock chain, and campaign progress.

• The endless wave-50 and wave-99 badges count any run that reached that wave - no win required.

• FLAWLESS RUN means zero leaks; spending lives on rerolls does not disqualify you.

• Continuing into endless never double-counts a run's stats.

Campaign - breach events and the Colossus arrive

Campaign stages now run the mid-run breach events (from stage 3, Pinch & Bleed) and the wave-20 Breach Colossus finale (from stage 5, Double Back) - the same threats Skirmish already has, layered on top of each stage's mandate.

Tuned so mandates and breaches do not multiply into a wall: the two breach elites are exempt from stage HP mandates, finale stages soften the Colossus hull per chapter, the four toughest high-HP low-lives stages had their HP mandates trimmed, and Fault Lines opts out of breach events entirely (its finale stays - the stage is hard enough). Validated by full campaign sweeps; a couple of late Hard stages remain deliberately brutal.

Interface

• Tower tooltips now tell the truth about everything. Slow duration, burn damage, blast radius and chain reach printed their base values even when cards had changed them - Cryo Lock, Long Fuse and Multitarget Relay had been invisible in tooltips since they shipped. Every stat line now shows the live per-tower value from every source, and a new FIELD MODS section lists each common applied to that tower, with stack counts.

• You can inspect towers while targeting a card. Choosing which tower gets a stat trade is the whole decision, so hovering towers during the pick shows their full stats.

• The three new premium cards visibly do their thing. Anomaly Feed announces what it applied - a note on the next draft and a ping at the receiving tower when combat resumes - and its tooltip names the card properly. Decommission Order tears the tower down with a burst and a "+X% GLOBAL DAMAGE" payoff readout. Cascade Grid draws arcs from the surging tower to the two towers it feeds.

• The Slot Codex's Upgrades tab lists the reworked premium pool and the full commons tier.

Fixes

• Fixed an unreachable tower slot on Unstable Anomaly. Procedural layouts could park one of the six hardpoints in the bottom-left corner, underneath the operator portrait - invisible below the HUD, so you filled every socket you could see while the draft kept offering tower cards for a hardpoint you had no way to find. Nearly a third of generated layouts were affected. Layouts now keep slots clear of the portrait, the map editor refuses to save a custom map that parks one there, and hand-made maps were never affected.

• The Breach Colossus warning no longer follows you into the next run. The boss bar and "IF IT BREACHES, THE SECTOR FALLS" banner only cleared when the Colossus was killed or reached the core; any other ending - losing to an ordinary leak while it walked, or restarting mid-fight - left the banner frozen on screen, at the dead run's hull value, for the whole next run.

• Tooltips are opaque. The engine-default semi-transparent tooltip panel was unreadable over the battlefield.

• A leftover Mandate Protocol selection no longer haunts the main menu. The auto-played background game behind the menu could inherit your previous run's mandates and pop the mandate briefing over the menu.