The command deck

Weapons

• Smaller opening blasts. The RPG's warhead and the balloon mines start with a tighter splash. The RPG still grows its blast every level, so a leveled launcher reaches past where it used to start.

Specializations

• Cluster Warhead's bomblets fly smaller, so the RPG's split reads as three bomblets rather than three rockets.

Enemies

• Every enemy has its own toughness. Gnats die to anything, drones still go down in one hit, javelins take two, tumblers have to be shot off their feet, and the heavies are heavier still.
• Leaks hurt. A drone through the line costs six integrity instead of four, and the rest of the roster hits harder in step. Seventeen leaks end a fresh array, not twenty-five.

Waves

• The roster arrives sooner. Bricks at wave 5, tumblers at 6, javelins at 9, the warden at 13, rams at 16: the whole roster is on the field before the second boss.

Draft

• Leveling paced out. The first draft lands as wave 2 opens rather than in the middle of wave 1, and each level asks a fixed step more than the last instead of a third more. The opening is slower and deep runs level far more often: past wave 30 a draft comes every two or three waves instead of every eight.

Perks

• Starting Level lifts only the opening weapon. The weapon you start the run with gets the levels, and later drafts enter at level 1. It costs a third of what it did.
• Three perks retired. Refit Crews lowered the level a weapon could specialize at, and reaching level 5 is the whole point of that payoff. Integration Lab and Synergy Schematics only affected synergies, which no longer appear in runs, so they did nothing. Ranks already bought are set aside.

Prestige

• The first rank is within reach. Prestige starts at 5,000 flux and doubles every two ranks to 20,000 at rank 5, then climbs more gently to 100,000 at rank 10. It used to start at 50,000, which put the first promotion weeks away on a new save.

Economy

• Deep runs pay. Past the wave-30 boss every bounty, scrap drop and pickup climbs 3% a wave, up to three times by the deepest runs. XP is unchanged.
• Batteries recover more. Each Automated Defenses rank brings in 120 scrap an hour instead of 72.

Orbit

• Ships cost less. Every hull is a third cheaper in flux and well under half the scrap, so a fleet is a few days' income rather than a week's. Build times are unchanged.
• Longer programs. The lean end of a launch schedule now asks you to hold for ten minutes of play. The crash end is still thirty seconds on the pad, at the price it always was.

Interface

• A terminal, not a web page. The screens between fights are one dark world: a display face for names, a mono face for every number, cut-corner controls, bracketed panels with lit corners, and a faint grid behind everything. The footer is gone.
• Every room wears it. Perks, Arsenal, Programs, Deep Survey, the Record, Gallery, Archive, Patch Notes, Options and the dispatch reader share the same panels, titles and readouts. So do the battlefield's own screens: the draft, the run menu, the orbit call, the leave prompt and the defeat report.
• The status strip. The header is the deck's top edge: the station name, the systems as tabs, Play as a control and your balance as a readout. On a phone the systems fold into a side panel.
• Dark, always. Light mode is retired and every save is pinned dark, whatever a browser remembered from the old selector. The battlefield was always dark, and the deck has no honest light version.
• Pick what the bar tracks. Once you have scrap, the balance popover lets you choose whether a phone's bar shows flux or scrap.
• Only rooms with something waiting. Perks, Arsenal and Programs appear on the hub while there is something in them you can afford right now, and step aside when there is not. The header menu still reaches every room.
• The hub boots in. The front page rises into place panel by panel, unless your device asks for reduced motion.
• A phone on its side. The shops, the deploy screen and the hangar lay out for a wide, short screen instead of shrinking to a sliver: the globe on the left, everything else on the right.
• The homecoming report opens wherever you land, says how long you were away, warns when the two-day stockpile filled, and names the rooms where something is affordable.
• Line breached. When integrity falls under thirty percent the field says so with a banner, an alarm, and an integrity bar that pulses until you repair it.
• A quieter HUD. The site's modifier and buff no longer sit in the top bar all run long. They are in the run menu and on the defeat report.
• The defeat report says more. It shows where you fought and under what conditions, and every damage source with its damage per second beside its share. Copy report puts the whole run on the clipboard as text: deployment, how it ended, run level, cannons, harvest, loadout, the perks it deployed with, the seed, and every damage source with its share and DPS. The screen itself is one panel with one way back to command, and the shops and yards sit in a grid of matching doors.
• Your favorite specialization. The Command Record names it where it used to name a favorite synergy, which no run can draft anymore. It counts from your next run.

Sound

• Controls answer. They tick under the pointer and blip when pressed, on the same switch and slider as every other effect.