Hi everyone, 

After last month's Anniversary Update, we’ve been hard at work on the Warfare update and today we're diving deeper into the heart of it: The Fronts! This will be a new gameplay mechanic that activates when war breaks out between you and a bordering region, allowing both sides to allocate armies and resources to push through and capture the opposing region. There’s a lot to cover in this dev diary entry so let’s dive into it! 

New Front warfare UI - Still WIP but giving you a good idea of what we’ll be talking about below.

Let's talk about war! Specifically, let's talk about how we tore the entire combat system apart and rebuilt it from scratch.

If you've played Kaiserpunk before, you’re familiar with the current combat system: You train an army, march it to a border, and wait for the army's turn to attack. Then repeat the process. And once you got to a bunch of armies... you get the gist of it... It’s fine. It works. But it doesn’t feel right for a game that's fundamentally about being an industrial war minister running an empire. Something you’ve all given us a lot of feedback about. 

So we asked ourselves: What if war wasn't something you paused to fight, but something your empire waged while you’re running it?

A front is now a persistent battle line on a border between two regions. When war breaks out, every shared border between you and your enemy becomes an active front. That's it! No armies marching into a void. No abstract combat screens. Just a line on the map, and two sides pouring their resources and people into it.

Each front runs on 12-hour battle cycles, same as your factories, just that in this case it’s two shifts at a really unpleasant factory. Every cycle, both sides calculate their total attack power and total defense power from whatever units are stationed there, then exchange "pressure." The side applying more pressure pushes a progress bar in their direction. Push it all the way to +1.0? The border falls. Get pushed back to -1.0? You've been repelled.

Here's where it gets interesting: you don't assign armies to a front. You assign units. Infantry, tanks, artillery - they all flow into the front's combat pool as raw numbers. The front doesn't care about neat little army formations. It cares about how many tanks you have and whether you remembered to send artillery.

Before we get into these numbers, please keep in mind that they’re being used for example only and once the update is released these might not be the exact modifiers and values we end up with. The update is still being iterated on and constant balancing work is still happening, but they will indicate the direction we’re going for here. 

Let's say you've got a front with 200 infantry and 20 tanks on your side. Your enemy has 150 infantry and 15 tanks. You've got a roughly 1.3:1 advantage - decent, but not a steamroller. The progress bar inches your way, maybe a couple of cycles to break through.

Now imagine the same scenario, but you also deployed 30 artillery units. Here's the thing - infantry and artillery have a combined arms synergy. With 100+ infantry supporting them, your artillery gets a +50% attack bonus. That's not just "more stuff" - that's your existing stuff hitting dramatically harder. Your effective attack power jumped way more than adding another 30 infantry would have.

Or take the opposite situation: You're outnumbered, but you switch to the Defensive directive (+30% defense, -10% attack). Your troops dig in, entrenchment builds 50% faster, and suddenly your enemy's numerical advantage is grinding against a wall. Add a commander with the Defender specialty and fortifications in the adjacent region? Now your defensive bonus is stacking up to the point where your enemy needs a 2:1 advantage just to make progress.

The point is: smart allocation beats raw numbers. A well-composed force with the right directive on the right terrain will punch way above its weight. Having a mighty industry and lots of manpower can still win you wars, but tactics and player choices will matter.

Yeah, about that. Multiple fronts are where the system really comes alive - and where being an industrial war minister actually means something.

Every front is independent. They each tick their own 12-hour cycles, each with their own weather, their own terrain modifiers, their own supply stockpiles. You can set a different directive on each one: maybe you're playing Aggressive on your southern front where you have a 2:1 advantage, Defensive on the northern mountain pass (mountains are brutal for tanks - 0.5x effectiveness), and Attrition on the eastern border where your enemy has long supply lines and you're content to bleed them dry.

There's also an automatic Pincer Movement bonus: if two of your fronts border the same enemy region and both are actively winning (progress> 0.5), each front gets +20% attack effectiveness. The game rewards you for thinking about the map, not just individual battles.

Here's something that's fundamentally different from the old system: nothing happens instantly.

In the old Kaiserpunk, you could train an army and throw it at a border in minutes. Now, warfare is a process with real time costs at every step.

Units are produced at your capital. They spawn in a rally division near your capital city. From there, you need to march them to wherever the fighting is. Movement is real-time along the road network, and the speed depends on infrastructure - a region with the appropriate infrastructure lets troops pass through in a quarter of the time compared to bare roads. A 4-step route with mixed infrastructure might take 2 full cycles (a full in-game day) before those reinforcements arrive.

Then there's the front itself. Even at a 2:1 advantage, you're looking at roughly 4 cycles - two in-game days - to achieve a breakthrough. At more even odds, a front can grind for days or even weeks of game time. 

And breaking a border is only Phase 1. Once the border falls, your troops hold position as guards. You have to explicitly order an attack into the enemy's region to start Phase 2: the Region Conquest siege. The defender can now reinforce from any connected garrison or frontline, so deep regions are genuinely hard to crack. Even intentionally abandoning a frontline to “combine troops in the center of the region” is a very valid tactical decision. You might get synergies that you wouldn’t have when dispersed on several fronts for example…

Let's walk through it. You're happily building factories in your capital when you get a notification: an enemy faction just declared war. All shared borders are now active fronts.

Don't panic! Here's what's happening: 

Your regions already have militia - local defense forces that scale with population and regenerate every hour. They can't attack, but they add real defensive value to buy you time. Your borders also start at 0 entrenchment, and both sides begin digging in immediately. The defender gets +5% defense per entrenchment level, stacking up to +50% at max level 10. Time is actually your friend here - the longer a front sits without a breakthrough, the harder it gets for the attacker.

You've probably got divisions stationed in nearby regions from earlier production. March them to the threatened borders and merge them into the front. Switch to Defensive directive for an immediate +30% defense bonus.

The key takeaway: the attacker has to cross the same time barriers you do. Their reinforcements are also multiple cycles away. Their supply lines are stretching. And if they're attacking through mountains or across rivers, they're eating massive penalties (river crossings halve attacker effectiveness).

You typically have at least 2-4 cycles (1-2 in-game days) before any front is in real danger, assuming you haven't left your borders completely naked. That's enough time to redirect production, reposition divisions, and make strategic choices about which fronts to reinforce and which ones to let grind.

Every front (and division) burns real resources from your economy - food rations, ammunition, oil, kerosene. If any single resource runs dry, that front hits Critical and your troops drop to 15% effectiveness. No gradual decline - they fight at full strength until the cupboard is bare, then collapse. Still, it gives you enough time and warning to react and fix the situation, even if you need to call in air supply drops... And every front costs supply whether it's fighting or not (active frontlines cost more). Overextension isn't just a military problem - it's an economic one.

How fast supply flows depends on your infrastructure. Supply depots (replacing Logistics centers) boost the flow rate. Roads and other infrastructure can amp it up further, but naval blockades choke it. Lose a connecting region and the land route disappears altogether. Unlike originally, it's not so much about distance and micro-managing what logistics centers have in their inventories, but making sure your supply chains function uninterrupted and at sufficient levels.

We know you're going to be elbow-deep in production chains when the fighting starts. We're working on a notification system that keeps you informed without yanking you out of the city builder - think alerts for front progress changes, border breakthroughs, supply warnings, and incoming attacks. We'll have more details on this in an upcoming dev log, but the short version is: you'll know when something needs your attention, and you'll be able to make strategic decisions without constantly babysitting the world map.

Beyond your units and supply allocation, a bunch of systems interact to shape how a front plays out:

Terrain matters - a lot. Infantry thrive in forests (1.2x) and urban areas (1.4x), while tanks dominate open plains and deserts (1.2x) but are nearly useless in mountains (0.5x). River crossings punish attackers, and tundra is miserable for everyone.

Weather rolls independently per front each cycle, based on the region's climate zone and the current season. Rain turns tank country into a slog (0.7x for armor). Blizzards ground all air support entirely (0.0x) and jack up supply costs by 50%. You get a 3-cycle forecast, so you can time your pushes around the weather.

Directives are your strategic lever - six options ranging from Aggressive (more damage, more casualties) to Prepared Defense (takes 2 cycles to activate, but +50% defense and halves enemy progress). Blitzkrieg is the haymaker: +30% progress at double supply cost, but it requires stockpiled resources to even activate.

Commanders - who emerge organically from veteran units, level up through victories (max level 10, +2% attack/defense per level), and carry stackable traits - 22 in total across terrain specialization, unit mastery, and tactical categories. A level 10 Infantry Leader on a forested front with the right troops is a genuine force multiplier.

Entrenchment builds passively over time - both sides dig in, gaining defensive bonuses cycle by cycle. Bombardment can break enemy entrenchment (-2 levels per cycle), and overwhelming force (3:1 ratio) bypasses it entirely. This is why stalemates eventually break: someone brings in some extra heavy guns, or someone gets reinforcements, or someone runs out of supply.

That's the core warfare overhaul in a nutshell. We've turned combat from a tactical minigame into a strategic system that actually talks to your economy, your infrastructure, your geography, and your long-term planning.

We’re very aware of your feedback about the AI and how it currently behaves. The reason it hasn’t received much attention lately is that it’s being completely overhauled as part of the Warfare update. The initial implementation of our AI came with a number of issues that unfortunately became very apparent after Kaiserpunk was put into your hands, and we’ve since had to revisit older code to address these concerns.

So let's talk about the AI. Specifically, let's talk about why we threw it away and started over.

The original Kaiserpunk AI was, on paper, impressive. Under the hood it ran 16 separate manager systems - army creation, army movement, army supply, army upgrades, garrison management, resource management, population management, development, diplomacy... each one with its own 4-step asynchronous processing pipeline. That's 64 code paths running per faction per cycle, spread across dozens of frames.

It was complex. It was ambitious. And it was a nightmare to work with.

Here's the irony that a lot of players have picked up on: the AI sometimes feels like it's cheating - suddenly sprinting ahead in development or spitting out higher-tier units like there's no tomorrow. But the reality is actually the opposite. The AI wasn't cheating. It was drowning in its own complexity.

When you have 16 interconnected systems all trying to make decisions asynchronously, what happens isn't strategic brilliance - it's chaos. One manager decides to invest heavily in military production. Another manager, running two frames later with a slightly different state, decides the economy needs attention. A third manager tries to upgrade units that the first manager already committed to a front. The result is an AI that lurches between strategies unpredictably, occasionally stumbling into a configuration that looks like genius (or cheating) to the player, but is really just noise.

Worse, because the systems were so intertwined, tuning one thing broke three others. Want to make the AI less aggressive on Hard difficulty? Great, now its economy collapses because the resource manager was calibrated around a certain military spending level. Fix that, and suddenly its diplomacy breaks because the diplomatic manager assumed a different resource surplus. It was a house of cards, and every balance pass was a game of Jenga.

With the Warfare update this AI will be completely replaced with something much better, cleaner and more clearly interpretable for players Here's the design principle we built the new AI around:

“The AI should feel like a rival leader with a plan — not a spreadsheet having a seizure.”

We also want to make sure we have an AI that allows us to adjust and balance the game based on specific feedback from different types of players without running the risk of breaking a ton of other aspects of the AI and hunting down 17 new edge cases. Not to mention that the new AI will also mean another performance boost as the new AI is far more efficient. We will share much more details about the new AI in a future dev log as there’s a lot more to say about it. 

Things are shaping up with all the new systems and changes, and we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel! We’re almost at an Alpha version of the new Warfare update, where all new features and systems are in place and working. Once we’ve reached this goal, we “just” need to spend some time with the game to iterate, balance, and improve the UI in order to have it ready for you all to sink your teeth into. We really can’t wait!  

This time, much of the focus has been primarily on land armies and the fronts, but what about specific units and what about sea and air units? How will they work? This is something we’re eager to share more about in our next devlog. What do you think about the direction warfare is taking? What are you hoping for when it comes to sea and air units? Please let us know!
Until next time

/The Overseer Team