0.5.56: the fight looks like a fight now

Written while the game was still called Warlords. It is Cardboard Conquest now, and the same game: that post explains the change.

Five builds have gone out since I last wrote one of these, so this covers 0.5.52 through 0.5.56. Most of it is the fight itself: what it looks like, what it sounds like, and how much of it you can read while it is happening.

The fight looks like a fight now

• Archers loose real arrows and melee lands real swings. Damage used to simply appear on a unit. Every attack now has ammunition you can watch cross the field, or a swing you can see connect.
• The arena breathes. The camera pushes in once the opening taunts are done, the ground answers a heavy landing, and your commander visibly takes the hits that reach him.
• A boss arrives with his name. The fly-over lands, his nameplate slams in on a forged strip coloured by his first phase, he postures, the ground shakes, and then he talks. It used to read as a drive-by.
• Your Turn and Enemy Turn are a moment rather than a word. A smoked-glass band across the screen, two gilt rails drawing out from the centre, one shaft of light sweeping the lettering. It spends the same time the old pop did.
• Chests strain before they give. Three heaves with light leaking wider from under the lid on each, then the burst, then every relic's gem launches out of the mouth, arcs, and lands on its cartouche a beat apart. The bar of light drawn across the chest that a playtester reported as a loading bar is gone, because it was never a loading bar.
• The weather is audible. Arenas with weather in them now sound like it.
• Reduce motion still turns all of that off and keeps the plain version.

The road to the boss

• The act boss is the end of the road, not a chip on it. He stands on the parchment at full width now, region-shaped ridges receding behind him, the cartographer's pen bearing down along the ground he stands on, and a warm pool of light gathering and breathing behind him once the road reaches him.
• The Twins hold one node with a single split face.
• The pack draft zoom now dives at the field, and a chosen genie rises out of the card you picked.

Reading the fight

• A silenced unit's keywords are struck through. Silence used to print every keyword in full gold, so there was no way to see what had actually stopped. The ones the hush really takes are struck out and drained to grey, their definition panels grey with them, and the ones that keep working, like Mitosis and Requiem, stay upright.
• Every status names its clock. Silenced 5s, Slow 4s, Burn 3/s 4s, counting down live while you hover instead of leaving you to guess.
• Relics stop lying about their triggers. The trigger families now sit behind the same gate as everything else, so Unlocks says what it means, and Locked Shields says Shield 2 rather than something vaguer.
• The upgrade green lands on the number that changed rather than on the trigger word beside it.
• The Herald's discount reads "all your Bugs cost 1 less to play" instead of "all your Bugs gain cost 1 less to play".

It fits on a laptop

Every full-screen view now holds together at 1440x900, which is where the layout floor sits. The arena's bench bar folds onto a second line instead of hanging FIGHT off the right edge, character select swaps to swatches when the window is short, and all 47 screens get stood up at both ends of the range and photographed so the next one that breaks gets caught before it ships.

Controller

• The pad you pick up is the pad that works. Plugging in a second controller mid-session used to leave the game listening to the first one.
• Picking a card and playing it are two decisions again.
• End Turn hands you the fight back, and can press its own button.
• The deck overlay is walkable card by card, and a card revealed at the edge of a scrolled list comes out from under the fold whole instead of with its cost gem or its stat discs sliced off.
• A step means the next thing along the same row or column. Diagonals only when the line holds nothing. The settings footer used to send every sideways step into the full-width Wishlist row a line below.
• The focus ring learned every shape a card face actually has.
• Inspect mode settles in and out, Y means what it says, the potion popup answers and puts itself away, and the quit confirm takes a controller again.

In the browser

The itch embed was reading as a small laptop panel to the automatic interface scale, which took a size bump and shrank the canvas below what the layouts assume. That is the "things drawing on top of each other" report, and it is fixed: the web build pins the scale, so the whole design canvas is there and simply rendered smaller. There is also a real way out of the frame now. F11 or the settings checkbox asks the browser for actual fullscreen, and the main menu grows a Toggle fullscreen row one click from the title.

Balance

• Two Barrel Tosses are two barrels. A second copy used to fatten the same keg and still send one barrel down one lane. Every copy now throws its own barrel down its own lane and grows its own charge, 5 and 5, then 10 and 10, and a copy gained mid-battle starts fresh rather than inheriting the veteran's charge. Lanes come out of a bag so two kegs never land perfectly stacked. The round's total damage is unchanged. It just covers twice the ground.

Also

• The battle onboarding teaches the speed controls.
• The window flies the banner icon rather than the old lion shield.

What's next

Act 1 is still where most runs end and Act 3 barely appears in the death statistics, so difficulty across the run is what I am looking at. One thing that got much clearer this month: the Boar King is the single biggest killer in the game at 26 deaths, which is 23% of every run that ends in a loss. He read as a tie for first until a telemetry fix stopped filing him under four different names at once.

If something in here reads wrong, or you hit something that is not on the list, use the in-game feedback button. Most of the above came from a report.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 3 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, or through the quill in game.