Card battle: the combat we played 840 times before you did

VIDEO SUGGESTION (cover) — does not exist yet 60s of a real match: deck build, three cards committed, table resolving, KO. Known partial blocker: 42 of the 47 battle sound effects have not been recorded. Either record first, or ship the video with the current library and no finisher sound.

The old Chaos City combat was one number against another number with an overlay on top. We rewrote all of it.

Combat today is a turn-based card battle. The cards are not a separate deck — they come from your character: gear becomes a card, skills become cards, consumables become cards, class becomes cards. What you built is your deck.

What changes for you

• You build a deck out of what you already own: weapon, armour, potion, skill, collectible.
• A turn is a table, not a click. You commit up to three cards, see what the table will do, can take one back, and only then resolve.
• Enemy intent is visible. If the next hit kills you, the game tells you first.
• Live PvP with a turn clock, and PvE in four modes: Elo arena, tower, boss and region assault.
• A match survives a deploy. Shipping a new version mid-fight does not lose the fight.

The turn became a table

The original version resolved card by card, on the click. That was fast and bad: you learned the result of the first decision before making the second, so there was never a plan — there was a sequence of reactions.

Now it is commit and resolve. You put the cards on the table, they sit face-down at your edge, you can pull one back before confirming, and resolution happens in one pass.

On a phone the card does not shrink: it opens

On a 390px screen, a legible card takes up half the device. The answer was press-and-hold: the card opens into a reader above the hand, at real text size, and returns when you let go.

The numbers that changed the balance

You cannot find this by playing. We wrote a simulator that builds decks from the game's real item values and runs 90 matches per measurement.

The tower was a wall. Before the retune, floor 20 was a 0% win rate for every profile — including the strongest deck the game could assemble. All the progression in the game was worth six floors.

Legendary gear was a downgrade. Rarity scaled price and drop chance, but not attributes. The best weapon gave the same power for 3 mana at legendary as for 2 at rare: improving your gear made your deck worse. The test that existed to prevent exactly this passed green, because it measured absolute power, and the defect was power per mana.

Passing your turn forever won. Across 840 simulated matches of pure defensive play, the result is 0 wins — after the fix. Before it, the problem was not even a card: it was the clock. A player who only passed froze the match and, with it, the whole region's timer.

What shipped:

• Attrition from turn 12 and a 20-round ceiling.
• Draws resolved by health share, not a coin flip.
• An absolute match deadline, per mode, so nobody can hold the table.
• Rarity now buys power (×1.35 per tier), and the tower was capped at floor 25 with the curve re-sloped.

The stage

The battle moved out of the page and became full-screen. Its own background, real cards, a combatant band, and the resolution treated as tape: every card gets its beat.

The sound came with it: the effects library is loudness-normalised and pitch-varied at runtime, so the same card played ten times does not sound the same ten times.

Why rewrite instead of improve

Because the old combat had no decision in it. It had gear. Two characters of the same level settled the fight before the first click, and the only way to win was to buy more attributes — which is exactly the monetisation design we do not want.

A card table puts the decision back inside the match. Gear still matters (it is what goes into the deck), but it stopped being the whole match.

What comes next

Devlog 04: an honest economy. The ceiling on paid advantage, and the four ways to buy an item and sell it back for more — which existed in our game and have been closed.

→ Join the Discord and ask for a beta seat.