BallOrcs Battle: supply wagons, tired legs and a smarter war

In plain words

Armies in the war game now have to think about their stomachs and their feet. Long marches wear units down, fields need upkeep, and supply wagons carry what the front line needs. The computer opponent was taught to settle and gather before it marches off to fight, and melee soldiers now turn on the shooter that is picking them off. There is a realm editor where you can paint your own terrain, with hills, lakes and cliffs, and a first set of scenarios, including Disaster Recovery and Open Rebellion. Units are easier to tell apart by shape and pattern, and the game speed can be changed with the bracket keys while you test. Some of the largest maps still run into the match time limit, and that is written up honestly rather than hidden.

Under the hood

• Logistics: march fatigue, field upkeep and supply wagons, with a settle-first AI (merged on 15 Oct).
• AI policy: melee soldiers turn on their shooter, the baseline army mix moved to 50/35/8/4/3, and node tie order is now mirror-symmetric. On ranked_realms_151, gate 1 went from 34.4% to 51.8%. The Balance README records each change, the gates that still fail on the large maps, and how to revert.
• Pathfinding (#67): flow fields are swept only as far as they are asked for, with 64 cache slots. Lone walkers use an A* step probe, and a spatial hash costs the units rather than the map.
• Finite gatherer nodes (#62, M2): nodes block, with a payer cap and GreedyArmy expansion. Biome yields differ now: forest 120, highlands 150, volcanic 180, swamp 80, tundra 70, desert 60.
• Terrain and realms: a terrain map generator and ranked_realms_151 (island, ocean ring, lakes, cliffs, regional resources). A realm validator lives in the sim layer, and custom realms load from user:// in the skirmish menu.
• Realm editor (#72): a spray-can height brush with strength and falloff, an Earth-scale height range, a visible name field, and a compact three-column layout. Re-saving keeps nodes and hollow blocks.
• Scenarios (#74, S1): a data format, a runner, a menu picker, and the first two scenarios.
• Unit silhouettes (#73, U1): units are sized by role, and eleven distinct role patterns replace the old ones.
• Shaders: water, terrain detail and a per-hex overlay for fire, barricades and orders.
• Dev tools: game speed from 0.5x to 8x on the ] and [ keys (#69, first half). Tap-M walk order for touchpads (#71).
• CI: the tests:gd job runs the headless GDScript suites, and check_pipeline got two more gaps closed.