The outpost and the Corkscrew Beam

Orbit

• Outpost worlds. Probes can now find a fifth kind of world: the invasion's own staging grounds. Nothing lives on them, but their guns are still up and they fire the beam the tumblers use. They sit between foundry and fortress worlds in what it takes to hold them, and they pay accordingly.
• They look the part. On the chart an outpost is a dead violet rock veined with light, and a fleet that lands there fights under a violet sky of grounded hives and pulsing beacons.
• Deep Survey wears the Orbital Command frame. The star chart holds the top of the frame and the worlds and battles scroll under it. On a phone held sideways the chart takes the left and the list the right, as in the hangar. The charted-world count and fleet strength now sit on the chart itself, and the reminder that charted worlds survive prestige sits under the frame.

Weapons

• Corkscrew Beam. Take an outpost and its beam is yours, like every other spoil. It stands a line of violet from the battery to the farthest enemy along its aim, cooks everything on the line while it holds, then bursts where it ends. Levels lengthen the hold, sharpen the line and grow the burst.

Specializations

• Three for the Corkscrew Beam at level 5. Trident fans the line into three, each with its own burst. Stun Burst makes the far end's burst hold everything it catches still for a beat. Tether locks the line on one mark, holds it in place and cooks it until the hold runs out, then bursts on it.

Draft

• The pick shows. When a hand is answered, the chosen card wears a ring and a check while the others fall away, so you always see which card the run took. A card you tapped needs only a beat; a card auto-pick chose stays lit long enough to read.

Interface

• A run survives a reload. When the phone reclaims the browser mid-run, for a screenshot, a call or a memory-hungry app, coming back used to mean a fresh page and a lost run. The run now saves itself as it goes: on return the field replays it at full speed behind a curtain, then goes live with wave, level, loadout, integrity, earned flux and scrap, and any open hand exactly as they were. Auto-pick waits until the field is live.
• Resume from the deploy screen. If the app reopens on the deploy screen instead, a Resume button brings the run back. Deploying a new run lets the old one go.
• The screen stays on. While a run is live the phone no longer dims or locks on its own, so an auto-pick run plays out in view. It lets go the moment the run ends or you leave it. Options has a switch, Keep the screen on, on by default.

Fixes

• Thermal Lance's trail is one line. The burning trail behind the beam is continuous and fades from the back, with no dark ground between pieces.
• Ring of Fire burns the whole circle. The moat used to cook only in patches around its edge.