Forts Bite Back: Repair Timers, Siege Scaling & Losing Attacks

Round two for today. Earlier we shipped Salvage Funds and the casualty rework, now it's the forts turn. Short version: forts are no longer a formality. Breaking one means something, and fixing one costs you time instead of pocket change.

🔧 Fort repairs take time now

Repairing used to be instant. You got zeroed, you clicked repair, and three seconds later you were back to full. For the bigger wallets in this game the gold cost was basically a rounding error, so zeroing someone's fort achieved exactly nothing.

Now a repair runs on a timer at 10 HP per second:

• Wooden Palisade (1,000 HP): 1m 40s
• Fortified Outpost (3,000 HP): 5 minutes
• Fortified Stronghold (6,000 HP): 10 minutes
• Fortified Fortress (10,000 HP): 16m 40s
• Citadel (15,000 HP): 25 minutes

Important bit: your HP goes up while the timer runs. It is not locked at damaged until the clock finishes. You can watch it climb live on your fort page, your profile, the dashboard and the battlelist, and if you stop halfway you keep everything you already paid for.

A few rules so nobody gets surprised:

• Only one repair at a time. The server enforces this, not just the button.
• Getting attacked mid repair does not cancel it. Otherwise someone could poke you every 30 seconds and freeze your fort forever. Not happening.
• Small forts still feel basically instant, because 100 seconds on a Palisade is nothing. That is on purpose.

Why: gold cannot buy your way out of a clock. A full Citadel rebuild costs about 0.004% of the biggest bank in the game, so cost was never going to be the brake. Time is.

🏗️ The Siege Workshop finally does something for spies

Sabotage used to deal a flat 400 to 750 fort damage no matter who you hit. Sounds fine until you do the maths: forts regenerate 10% of their max every night, and you can only sabotage the same person once a day.

A Citadel regenerates 1,500 HP a night. Sabotage averaged about 575. That is not "hard", that is negative progress forever. Zeroing a top tier fort solo was not difficult, it was mathematically impossible.

So sabotage now also scales with your Siege Workshop, hitting a share of the target's maximum fort HP:

• Level 1: 10%    Level 2: 15%    Level 3: 20%    Level 4: 25%    Level 5: 30%

Against a Citadel at Siege 5 that is 4,500 damage instead of 575. Suddenly that building has more reasons to exist.

Small forts are untouched. You always get whichever is higher, the flat roll or the percentage, and 30% of a 1,000 HP Palisade is only 300. So early game plays exactly the same as yesterday.

🎓 The Spy Academy sharpens Assassinate

Same problem, different op. Assassinate killed 10 to 51 units whether the target had 3,000 units or 100,000. Against a big army that is a rounding error.

From Spy Academy level 2 it now also kills a share of the unit category you pick. It is deliberately a small share, and there is a hard cap of 100 kills per op. This is meant to make big armies feel reachable, not to delete anyone's week of training. Small armies keep the old flat roll.

Yes, we tuned this one down before it went live. The first version would have been closer to 250 kills and that is just mean. But possible if people would rather have a full spy build.

Oh, and workers are on the target list now. Sleep well. 😈

⚔️ Losing an attack is no longer completely pointless

This one is fresh, just went live. If you attacked someone and lost, you did zero fort damage. Even if you took a chunk out of their army on the way down, the fort did not care.

Now a losing attack chips the fort based on how close you came. It scales itself:

• Came within a hair of winning: roughly 70 to 120 HP, about a third of a maximum winning hit.
• Threw yourself at someone ten times your size: under 5 HP. Basically nothing.

Before anyone asks: no, you cannot farm this. Suicide attacks are worth a fraction of a point, and losses still count toward your 5 attacks per target per day. Winning is still massively better. This is a consolation prize, not a strategy.

If something feels wrong, post your numbers in Discord and we will pull the real data and look. If we got it wrong we will say so and fix it, same as always. 🍻 More updates to come.. October vibes :D