The first battle now teaches itself, and the weapon you are holding finally tells you what it is. YOUR FIRST SHOT, DRAWN Fire the opening shot of a run and the guide is not a straight line any more: it is the shell's actual flight, integrated with the gravity and the wind of that round, with a ring where it lands. It says so on screen, and it says when it goes away — from your second shot on, the guide is the straight line again, and a note points at the wind gauge to explain what you now have to read for yourself. A new run also drops you straight into the fight: no armoury before you have fired a shot, because buying blind is not a decision. FIELD DATALINK Tap the weapon screen or the defence screen in the combat bar and the armoury's own display opens mid-match: the warhead turning in 3D with its moving parts, its dossier, and how many you have left. Along the bottom, only what you are actually carrying — loaded shells and fitted systems. Pick one there and it is engaged; the window is the selector, not a catalogue. AN EMPTY MAGAZINE SAYS SO Out of that shell? The icon and the count pulse red, FIRE greys out and the bar tells you to switch. Pressing it used to do nothing at all and explain nothing. CONTROLS YOU CAN ACTUALLY HIT • The power knob is more than twice as wide and slides to its value instead of jumping to it. • Sliders, steppers and settings tabs are all bigger, square and consistent from screen to screen. • Player setup shows the whole squad as six slots that light up as you fill them, human or bot. • Settings drops the master volume — music and effects are the mix — and Reset Defaults now sits by Back, reachable from any tab. • The quit button in the combat bar is a quiet key with a symbol, not the loudest thing on screen. SCENERY The night city reads as a city: the towers have body against the sky, each one is cut from its neighbour, and the lit and dark windows both count now. Soft Backdrop blurs half as much, so the skyline behind the fight is still a skyline.

Two releases in one: the incendiary shell and the save point from 1.2, plus a scenery, weather and lighting pass that changes what a match looks like. THE LAVA BOMB The eighth warhead, and the only one whose impact is the least of it. The drum splits and pyrogel runs along the surface, following the terrain up slopes and down into gullies for 78 pixels either side of where it landed. Anything standing in the front burns for as long as it stays there, the fire eats the ground down as it passes, and what it leaves behind is embers still glowing in the soil. A shot that falls short can still finish the job. STOP MID-RUN, PICK IT UP LATER Pause between shots and save, and the run waits for you: the level, the round, whose turn it is, every crater already carved into the terrain and every shell and defence system still in each tank. Continue appears on the main menu when there is something to come back to. It is a continuation point, not a rewind — loading it consumes it, so a run you walk away from is still a run you can lose. A BATTLEFIELD WORTH LOOKING AT • Forests are drawn tree by tree now. Conifers taper with branch tips catching the light at different lengths; jungle canopies are overlapping crowns on crooked trunks with vines hanging off them. Ridgelines have a lit face and a shadowed one, snow on the high peaks, glowing veins on the volcanoes and a bright crest on every dune. • Your first battle of a new run is fought under a lit city at night — street lamps with light pooling under them, neon on the facades, and a grid of windows where the dark ones are as much a part of it as the lit ones. • The sun and moon travel across the sky over the course of a match, and they bring lens flare with them: ghosts strung along the line to the centre of frame, an anamorphic streak, and warm light washing in from their side. • Birds cross the sky in flocks and meteors come down trailing fire. A shell that runs into one bursts it and carries on — nobody loses a turn to a passing bird. WEATHER YOU ARE STANDING IN Snowfall is new. Rain and snow now fall in three depths and the nearest one passes in front of the tanks instead of behind the terrain, with drops that leave a splash where they land. Thunderstorms hold off until you are a few levels in — lightning can kill, and it should not be the first thing a new player meets. ENEMIES THAT TAKE AIM Bots used to sit motionless through their thinking time and then fire. Now the gun travels to the solution while they think, with the hand steadying as it arrives — and they think for about half as long. The aiming guide no longer draws on their turn either; it was giving away the shot before it left the barrel. CONTROLS AND INTERFACE • The weapon and the fitted defence system are now lit panels with a key either side. The defence selector finally goes both ways instead of only forward. • Settings has proper tabs joined to the page below them, switches that light up, arrow keys that are square and the same size everywhere, and a slider grip wide enough for a thumb. • The wind gauge is a solid bar growing from zero toward the side it is blowing. The power track is a third wider — that is where the fine control lives. • The standard shell finally explodes like something: radial lances, a skirt of dust hugging the ground and embers raining down after. • Shell trails fade from the tail as they should, and nothing carries over between turns any more. SMALL THINGS • The best score on the main menu is the one at the top of the leaderboard. It used to be a number that never updated. • How To Play shows itself before your first match instead of sitting in the menu forever. • Coming back from the leaderboard no longer restarts the music from the top.

Smarter enemies, a settings screen worth opening, and a lot more to read mid-battle. ENEMIES THAT LEARN YOUR RANGE Bots now walk their fire onto you. Each one watches where its own shell landed and corrects the next shot from the miss — the way real artillery brackets a target — so a ridge or a cliff between you buys a turn or two, not the whole match. They also visit the armory now, instead of firing the starter shell forever: shield cells and reactive plates first, then ordnance that escalates as you climb the levels, up to a nuke deep into a run. Low skill barely learns and never touches the heavy stuff. High skill brackets in fast, and saves the expensive shell until it has your range. READ THE FIGHT AT A GLANCE • Floating damage numbers on every hit, color-coded for hull, shield, and a reactive plate that ate the blow whole. They show the damage that actually got through, not the weapon's paper figure. • A callsign banner on your turn and on every elimination — no more hunting for whose move it is in a six-tank squad. • An optional turn clock at 15, 30 or 60 seconds. Run it down and the gun fires as aimed. A REAL SETTINGS SCREEN Four tabs — audio, video, game and accessibility — and every option explains itself in a line at the foot of the panel, so you never have to start a match to find out what a switch does. New in it: master volume, four steps of screen shake, turn clock, aim guide modes, damage numbers and banners. ACCESSIBILITY • Reduced motion stills the screen shake, the full-screen flashes and every drifting background layer. • A colorblind-safe player set, with no red-green pair in it. LOOKS • Clouds are actual clouds now. Overcast and storm skies were drawing them as stacked grey rectangles. • Explosions finally kick the camera. • How To Play gained a field briefing on wind, ground hardness, shields and edge rules — the things that decide a shot and aren't on any key. • The leaderboard shows its empty slots instead of half a blank panel. FIXED • Volume levels drifted down by a point every session.