Status report 2026.07.09: HEAT, biomes and the howitzer

Since the mobile arena and Combiner landed, the game has grown a shared HEAT meter that turns spending into faction-wide OVERDRIVE surges, five distinct arena biomes with real battle effects, and a brand-new siege weapon: plus a big desktop command view and much smarter mech AI. The big strokes:

HEAT & OVERDRIVE

• Added the HEAT meter: every NXR spent anywhere in the game feeds one shared, decaying gauge. Fill it and the horn blows: an OVERDRIVE window of surged rewards and rarer drops for everyone, with a bonus for the faction that tipped it over.
• Added the FLARE: a one-tap burst buy that slams HEAT upward and rains random ordnance on the battlefield, publicly credited to you. Big spends are announced to everyone watching.
• Added a weekly “Horns blown” faction scoreboard, so the factions race to trigger OVERDRIVE.

Arena Biomes

• Added five battle arenas: grassland, desert, snow, red rock, and a full city with streets and buildings: picked by roulette every battle.
• Added real battle effects per biome: snow slows movement, desert saps shield regen. The intro banner, HUD badge and bet panels all state the active effect, and the deploy queue shows the next battle’s biome before you commit a mech.

The Howitzer & Hardpoints

• Added the Howitzer: a new artillery weapon class that fires over cover in a high arc. Huge range, but silent inside its minimum range: dive it and it can’t answer. Drops in weapon crates now, and the RM house mech fields two as its new siege loadout.
• Added hardpoint restrictions: weapons are now arm-mount, shoulder-mount or universal, with the loadout picker filtering and badging what fits where.

Smarter Battles

• Changed mech AI to keep fighting while repositioning: guns stay live during retreats, zone runs and crate grabs, and mechs now always shoot whoever they can actually hit instead of fixating on an unreachable target.
• Added cover to the open arenas and taught each mech to fight according to its own loadout: brawlers close in, snipers hold their range band.
• Retuned battle length and house-mech fairness across every biome toward closer, longer three-way fights.

Desktop Command View

• Rebuilt the desktop battle screen as a command layout: your faction roster down the left (collapsible to at-a-glance HP discs), a docked rail on the right with minimap, deploy queue and chat that collapses to an icon strip.
• Added an auto-framing minimap that follows the living mechs, kill-feed toasts, Battle History in the navbar, and a top-bar cluster with OPS, CHAT and ALERTS: including a proper notifications dropdown.
• Added emoji-war stakes to the in-battle chat, with a full-screen chat view on mobile.

New-Player Journey

• Added First Steps: a rewarded checklist that walks new pilots from first login to first deploy, with each step jumping you straight to where it happens and paying out as you go.

Economy & Spending Clarity

• Changed every button that spends NXR to carry its price on its face, and running low now offers a top-up right at the point of spend.
• Changed Tug-of-War bidding to one tap at your own stake (set once in Settings), with no bid cap.
• Changed subsystem power to be tier-driven with roll variance removed: combining up a tier is now a clean, predictable upgrade, and the Combiner matches like kinds deterministically.
• Added context to your transaction history: every charge and payout now says what it was for; marketplace sales pay sellers in a single clean leg and count as earnings.

Stability

• Fixed a wave of arena and quality issues: death animations play out fully, mechs spawn facing the right way and never inside walls, the grid matches the storm circle, returning to a backgrounded tab catches up silently, and on mobile the music now stops when you leave the page.

Spotted something off? Drop it in Discord: playtest feedback is shaping every one of these.