0.5.62: the rosters get their retune, and it plays on a phone

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

This covers 0.5.59 through 0.5.62. Last time the hidden multipliers came out, which left every lord's difficulty living entirely in its roster, and said the rosters had not been retuned for that yet. This is that retune, plus the touch pass that makes the game playable on a phone.

The difficulty is in the rosters now, and the rosters were rebuilt

• Every enemy body is priced against the same law its lord's budget spends. With no multiplier left to hide behind, a creature that cost too little was simply free value, and a handful of them were carrying whole fights on their own.
• Act 1 lets you lose gracefully. The on-ramp hits softer rather than thinner. The opening act still brings a real army; it just stops deciding the run in the first two rounds.
• The run-killers come down to what a first clear can actually answer. The Swamp Treant was the fight rather than a unit in it, and thins out. The Hulking Troll is one you can kill. The Heartwood, the foundry and five stragglers get the same treatment.
• A boss's budget is parity. The extras are what make it a boss. Boss musters are a patrol's now, and bosses wear boss bars, with the old ramp paid back in squad size where you can see it.
• Three summoning spots, minimum, in every fight. Some layouts left you with fewer places to stand than cards to play.
• Morning Glare enrages the survivors instead of the whole army. Rabble is 1 cost, 6 bodies, Exhaust, and its upgrade doubles the bank. A splitter costs what it summons. A Swarm Rat sheds one cousin, not two.
• Movement Speed is the only speed a unit moves at. There was a second one.
• The Magma Magnate takes his hands off your crown. His fire asks the same price of a soldier as of a king, his kiln keeps the ground and drops the board wipe, and his lane fronts come every fourth round instead of every third.
• Uncle Jim is 6 attack and 45 health, down from 18 and 80. Eighteen a swing was more than some bosses carry in total, on a body with cleave and lifesteal behind it. His squirrels are 3/3 with Pounce, and they finally have a face.

The fight stops keeping secrets

• A telegraph tells you how long you have, not just that something is coming.
• A boss spell says whose head it is coming for, and a lane wave can be pointed at and asked what it is.
• The blast that killed you has a name.
• A boss that grows says its rate. A kiln that burns says for how long, and what its rage buys. Seven more things the fight was quietly doing now say so on screen.

It plays on a phone

• Every commit is a tap, and every screen fits a thumb. Sixteen screens were rebuilt to a phone's shape and floor rather than being an ultrawide layout squeezed sideways.
• Your finger is the pointer: aiming, hovering and the deck all follow it, and a tap casts where the finger is rather than where it last was.
• Every "click anywhere" surface waits for the finger to come back up, so the first touch of a scroll stops dismissing the thing you were trying to scroll.

Your potions are where you are already looking

• The flasks you are carrying now stand in an arc around the energy gem, half again the size of the belt chips, and you can click or drag them from there exactly as from the top bar. Playtesters were finishing whole runs without spending one, and the gem is the thing you look at every single turn.
• A potion played from either place empties both in the same frame.

Cards and text say the rule, then stop

• Keyword definitions drop their preambles, flavour and tips. Sixteen more lines say what the keyword does and end there, and card faces stop re-explaining keywords they have already named.
• The glossary says the rule and stops. The Commander's Heart says four things instead of four paragraphs. Four upgrade rungs say what they actually did.
• The compendium's sections are tabs now, wrapping in even ranks, and a name too long for its tab is trimmed and says so.
• A card that ends up fitting its plate no longer scrolls its text off the card. The shrink and the scroll were disagreeing about how much there was to read.
• Long card names sit on the banner's centre line. The Slime Lord is called the Slime Lord.

A card you are given stops arriving like a curse

• Gaining Uncle Jim, hatching the campfire's egg, and every borderless card an event hands over all played the curse cinematic: smoke, two red eyes and dread, over the rarest thing a run can give you. There is a gift reveal now: warm light, rising motes, a chime.
• Both reveals hold the card at the size a card in your hand lifts to, so you can read what you just got.
• Jim's Calling Card stops reciting his stats and links his actual card instead. Hover it and you see the card you will be holding.

Reloading does not reroll

• Your opening hand belongs to the run, not to the reload, and a lord musters off the run's seed. Quitting and coming back no longer deals you a different fight.

Also

• The fight ends when the lord falls, not when the banner finishes landing, and no screen flash when one does.
• The Verdant Queen's hive reads as a hive. Buff badges above a card wear their own power's icon. The march-on glow traces the plate instead of an oval.
• The title screen stops asking whether you meant to quit when there is nothing to lose.
• A Mac measures a cursor in points, and now gets handed points.
• Four locales stopped calling one card by two names in their lore, and the CJK locales stopped shipping a second word for cards they had already named.

What's next

The retune above was decided from live runs rather than from a simulator, and it is a first pass over a lot of numbers at once. If a fight now feels too soft or still feels unfair, the in-game feedback button is the fastest way to say so. Most of this list started as a report.

This post went out to players on itch.io on 6 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, or through the quill in game.