0.5.64: what the enemy pays

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

An enemy lord spends a purse each round exactly like you do. That number was always there and you could never see it, so a fight that felt arbitrary was often just a lord spending three energy on eight bodies. This update puts the enemy's economy on the card, and gives its powers the same plain wording your own cards got.

You can read the enemy's budget

• Every enemy card shows its energy cost on the card's own gem. The Bestiary prints what the lord paid, so you can see where a fight's weight actually went.
• A summon card is named in the number it arrives in. Warren Goblins times four is a different card from Warren Goblins times eight, and they no longer look identical.
• The roster stands on three grounds: Normal, Elite and Boss, so you can see which shelf a thing you just lost to came off.

Enemy powers say what they do

• Open the Graves buys ten seconds of ground that is yours alone, and says so.
• The Green Tide throws a d20 you can watch land. It was always a roll. Now it is a roll you see.
• The foundry's Overload is the Lightning Storm, and it prints how long the Stun holds. It also aims its barrage at the front rank instead of going straight for your crown.
• Mob Rule pays out on the crowd rather than a flat point, and Contagion admits it catches its own strain.
• Shields say Shield 8 instead of describing an eight-point shield, which is the same rule in the same words the rest of the game uses.

Forbidden Lore settles in

• Marginalia joins the pack, and Blood Summon is retired.
• The Hungering Sigil got its own painting. The dome came off the circle, the arms ring it properly, and when something steps on the ward it reaches back.
• Initiates gain their Decay, and a named curse now reads in curse violet so you can tell it from a card you chose.
• The Warchief costs a rare slot, and the horde's cards say what they do. The Brass Sapper stopped wearing the face off his own card.

Screens

• The map's roads break into visible facets, two roads meeting end their edges in one corner, and a road that crosses itself stops inking over the join.
• The desk stops magnifying the chart and shows more road instead.
• The battle corner became one designed unit. Reaching for the top bar no longer scrolls the field out from under you, and the run bar stays tucked when the cursor is on another screen.
• Speed controls grew a real affordance, hairlines found the half pixel, and the boot card went sable with the rest of the game.
• The merchant's cart reads at a glance, the poison-seller's third row is a hand rather than a bow, and the round caption sits inside its band instead of on the line.
• A card you are given and the card flying to your hand are now one card, not two.

Also

• The mimic's lure chest is found by its shape rather than by where it sits.
• The turned earth beside each grave reads at battle zoom.
• Twenty packs stopped shouting in English on the eighth wedge of the wheel, and the graveyard, the foundry barrage and the horde's new wording all landed in ten languages.

What's next

The Bestiary now shows the enemy's economy, which means for the first time you can argue with it. If a fight still reads as unfair with the numbers visible, that is worth telling me, and the in-game feedback button is the fastest way. Most of the list above started as a report from someone playing.

This post went out to players on Steam and itch.io on 7 August 2026, and is kept here. Comments and questions are read on either of those, or through the quill in game.