Crowded battles and more ways through Markoria

Two earned routes, no replay grind

A new 114-run progression check clears both the eight-stage main route and the eleven-encounter route with optional battles on three seeds at normal and fast speed. The main-only route reaches Oakheart without a hero and clears it with six lives; the optional route clears Elden Grove with eleven lives and Oakheart with fifteen. These are reproducible automated strategies, not a guarantee of first-try player enjoyment.

Opening waves, enemy statistics, bounty, starting gold, stage XP and save data are unchanged in this follow-up. The Menu Lore now includes Holding divided roads, explaining complementary coverage at Oakheart and Elden Grove and the risks of calling waves early.

Real moving packets and finite calls

Production late-wave infantry packets were checked without towers, heroes or blockers on Eastern Road, Whispering Hills and King’s Rest. Eight-unit packets stayed within approximately 86–117 road units at both game speeds, with matching results at normal and fast speed.

The Captain still has finite reinforcement packets, committed calls survive his death, and called Ironclads award no bounty. Queue changes preserve equal-time spawn ordering. All 198 before-and-after campaign runs retain the same recorded outcomes, purchases, rewards and combat totals.

Less repeated work; measurement limits remain

Reinforcement queues sort only when new arrivals are added. Horn reservations no longer require constructing an army-wide ID set every simulation tick. Gravecallers skip capacity scans during cooldown, while active casts still recheck their limits. Combat callouts reuse the existing target index, passive effect sprites retain direct references, and levels without occlusion zones skip unnecessary bounds calculations. No animation frames or enemy counts were removed.

Simulator stress measurements are development evidence only. The 80-enemy mixed workload uses increased health and review gold; it is not an ordinary campaign run. Current results do not establish a reliable overall frame-time or memory improvement, and physical-device thermal and older-phone memory checks remain outstanding.

Ravenbridge crash follow-up

Phone debugging identified an obsolete Orc Brute idle-frame request in the battle renderer. The local fix selects the authored directional idle frames and passed animation regression tests and a simulator build. The player installed the corrected build; a full monitored physical-phone replay after that fix has not been recorded.