The Biggest Update Since Launch
A Battle Hub where you choose your fight, three maps by day and by night, mouse aiming, rebuilt tank handling and a dedicated server behind every match.
You choose the fight
Quick Match is gone. PLAY now opens the Battle Hub: Global Chat on the left, Current Battles in the middle, Battle Details on the right. You see every battle that is running, who is in it, the score, the map, day or night, and you pick.
Six permanent battles are always online: COLONY, REACTOR and DUST, each by day and by night. Bots keep every one of them alive around the clock and always leave a seat open, so there is a match to join the moment you log in.
- Create your own battle: name, map, day or night, score limit and a time limit of up to 999 minutes
- Private battles with a password, for events, tournaments and practice with friends
- Join the team you want, or let Quick Play drop you into a random open public battle
- Global chat with rank icons and premium names, plus a live roster with score, kills and ping for every battle
- Your battle runs alongside the permanent six and closes itself after three minutes with nobody in it
- Battle Details shows exactly what the match shows: the same score, the same names, always in sync
Three maps, day and night
COLONY, the arena you know, now has a night version and hand-laid bot routes around its central hall. REACTOR is a station deck under the open sky: raised platforms, vents, solar arrays and cargo crates for cover, railed in on every side and built for 4v4. Short lanes, fast contact, nowhere to hide for long.
DUST is brand new: a desert town built for 10v10. Terraces to fight from, flank tunnels under the lanes, a palm forest through the middle and corner bases, laid out symmetric by construction so neither side gets a shortcut.
- COLONY: 5v5, the original arena, by day and by night
- REACTOR: 4v4, an open station deck of platforms, vents and cargo crates
- DUST: 10v10, terraces, tunnels, palms and corner bases in the desert
- Day and night previews in the battle list, so you know what you are walking into
Night belongs to the battle
Night mode has been rebuilt from the sky down: a real moon that casts shadows, night-graded ground, and no fog on the battlefield. The hangar stays night, always.
Each battle keeps its own lighting. Enter a night battle and you get night, no matter what any other battle is doing and no matter when you join.
Aim with the mouse
Mouse Control locks the pointer and puts the turret on your mouse. The view leads and the barrel catches up, with adjustable sensitivity.
Your aim is a direction in the world, not an angle on the hull. The turret keeps pointing where you pointed while the tank drives, climbs, tilts or ends up on its side, and it turns just as fast at any angle. Hold the right mouse button to look freely around your tank without moving the turret. You always spawn looking straight ahead, and Escape releases the cursor without pausing the game.
Tanks that drive like tanks
The chassis was rebuilt from the ground up: suspension, drive, grip, braking and turning for three hull classes, light, medium and heavy. Reversing is immediate, a ramp edge no longer launches you, and hull collision is now five shaped boxes, so tanks climb, tip and settle the way they should.
Weapon hits and knockback land at the point of impact. A destroyed tank pops into the air and rolls out as a wreck. Tracks kick up sand-coloured dust that reacts to recoil. On respawn the camera flies to your spawn point instead of cutting to it.
- Follow camera on a curved rig: Q and E swing it along an arc
- Wall collision, floor clamp, and auto-lift when a tank parks on your roof
- Heading turns with real inertia: it winds up, carries and settles instead of snapping
- Self-destruct on DEL with a countdown; an overturned tank shows a hint instead of exploding on its own
- Turrets turn 25% faster and reverse instantly
- HP bar, reload bar and booster icons ride with your tank on screen
Read the fight
A universal loading screen covers every transition. The pause menu owns the screen: Garage (G) and Settings open inside a battle, and a loadout change applies in the same match, for everyone.
Tab opens a scoreboard that grows with the roster and hides the rest of the HUD, and the end-of-match screen shows the gems and NTX you earned. The kill feed shows joins and leaves with names and ranks, premium names get their gold sweep in chat, and every top bar, in the lobby, the garage and the cases, has a fullscreen button that stays in sync with F11.
Smarter bots, better drops, exact weapons
Bots navigate to the objective and go around walls instead of following fixed paths. In Capture the Flag they follow three rules, hold and fight, return our flag, take a dropped one, and they earn score for captures just like you do. They pay for their boosters, and their numbers follow each battle's own team size.
Box drops have been rebuilt: the parachute canopy collapses on landing, the box lands square, a warm pool of light marks it, and you collect it by driving through. Drop rates are one tunable number with per-type odds.
- Nemesis beam is exact for everyone: the shot the shooter resolved is the one every viewer sees, with a hit effect on every tank it pierced
- Inferno fires with the mouse
- Damage numbers: one number per hit, red only on a kill
- Bots earn score for captures, pay for boosters and fill to the battle's team size
A dedicated server behind every battle
Every battle now runs on a dedicated game server. The server is the authority for scores, kills, flags, teams, names and ping, so the list, the details panel and the match itself can no longer disagree, and a late join gets the real state of the battle from the first second.
The online experience was rebuilt around it: remote tanks move smoothly, with no shiver and no sliding after a respawn; flags land on the ground and drop when their carrier leaves; every join, spectate and reconnect keeps your team, your password and your name; and the hub's buttons never get stuck again.
- Real ping in the scoreboard
- Windows desktop client with an auto-updating launcher
- The web client remains the main way to play, with pointer lock and fullscreen behaving in every browser
What comes next
This is the foundation the rest of Open Beta is built on. Balance, bots and presentation will keep changing as more commanders enter the rebuilt battlefield, and the fastest way to shape that is to play, then tell us what happened, in Discord or through support.
