Defences you have to pay for, and a game that can finally end

Until this morning the farm was decoration. Turrets arrived free, one a day, whether or not the village milled a single plank — so the entire economy sat beside the tower defense rather than feeding it. Now defences are bought: a turret costs 25 planks, a barricade 10, and the free daily turret is gone. What you can raise tomorrow is whatever the village milled today, minus whatever the repairs cost you. You still open with exactly two turrets and a barricade, because that is the loadout the fun gate passed on — it is just spent now rather than granted.

The measurable effect was immediate. Spare planks used to climb to 257 by day eleven with nothing to buy; they now run at five to fifty across a whole run, and every day’s surplus goes into the ground.

Then the automated harness embarrassed us twice, which is exactly what it is for. First it revealed that the game could not end. With planks actually being spent, a run reached day 26 with eighteen turrets and 116 collectors a wave, and the granary had not been scratched since day 9. Waves were only growing in number, and one turret is worth considerably more than four collectors, so the defence outscaled the offence forever. A game scored on days survived that cannot kill you is not a game.

So collectors started getting individually tougher each day — and the next run died on day three. The obvious conclusion was that the scaling was too steep. The actual culprit was the harness itself: it held back fifteen planks for repairs, so faced with 33 planks it refused to buy a 25-plank turret and froze itself at two turrets while the waves doubled. A flat reserve looks prudent and quietly starves the defence. It now holds back exactly what the standing damage will cost to repair and not a plank more.

That still died on day four, and this time the scaling really was at fault — for a structural reason worth writing down. A turret costs 25 planks and the village mills about 25 planks a day. In the opening days there is no capacity to absorb enemies getting tougher, because there is no capacity to build anything. So toughness now waits four days: early waves grow in number only and teach you the loop, and per-collector scaling arrives once there is an economy capable of answering it.

The result is a curve with an actual shape to it. The granary fell to 42 out of 260 on day nine, the builders clawed it back to full by day eleven, it dropped to 82 on day fourteen, and the collectors finished it there. Two near-deaths and one genuine recovery in a fourteen-day run — which is a far better story than seventeen days of nothing happening.

Villagers also stopped getting their forests for free. Felled trees leave a stump, and the stump stays a stump until a reseeder walks out and plants it. Forestry became a job rather than scenery, and the log pile that used to climb past 130 now sits steady around 30. The job board grew target headcounts to match — WOODCUTTER 2/2, red when short-handed — and the targets add up to more villagers than the village has, so the board tells you it is under-staffed from the very first glance.

Two smaller things. Motion blur is off and camera shake is now opt-in and off by default, because this is a game about reading a busy field while the camera moves; hitstop stays, since a freeze on contact sharpens a hit without smearing the picture. And the engine had been printing a “multiple directional lights are competing” warning across every screenshot — the fix was a one-line render state flush, and captures are clean again.