Period: September 3, 2025 Total Commits: 16

Daily Dev Update: Faster Paths, Smarter Bots - September 3, 2025

Hey all — kept it tight today. We focused on performance during building, cleaned up bot behavior, tweaked the economy, and fixed some post-match UI rough edges. It’s getting smoother, especially in late-game tower spam scenarios.

What’s New

• Economy pass

  • Starting gold back to 200. Early openings should feel less cramped again.
  • Level-up costs lowered. Smoother progression curve. This mainly helps you hit critical tower thresholds sooner without stalling your minion flow.

• Smarter bots with a modular brain

  • Refactored into Strategy, Placement, and Transaction managers.
  • Bots can now upgrade to level 10 (aligned with config), plan persistent goals, and adapt strategy based on game phase and field state.
  • Better unit variety: mixes air/ground and balances towers vs. minions with adaptive biases.

• Combat feel

  • Bolts and cannonballs travel faster. Shots land more predictably; less “just missed because it crawled” moments.

[screenshot: multiplayer battle with updated post-match HUD at b5a6907]

[screenshot: projectile speed tweaks in a large skirmish at 3c54445]

What Got Fixed

• Post-match polish

  • Wave timer hides correctly when the match ends.
  • Gold stops increasing after game over.
  • Prevented a bunch of unnecessary UI ticks once the match is done.

• Bots behaving better

  • Stopped bots cleanly when matches end. No more “ghost bot” threads hanging around.
  • Fixed a parameter order bug that blocked minion spawn assignments.
  • Fixed double-counting gold on level-ups and overspending around level purchases.
  • Team A spawn checks now parse correctly; bots place minions as intended.
  • Event handling aligns with the human client, so bots actually track their level and gold state properly.

• Balance

  • Corpse Exploder nerfed. Still useful. Less oppressive chain pops in clustered fights.

[screenshot: end-of-match screen without stray timers at b5a6907]

What’s Still Broken (or a bit rough)

• We’re keeping an eye on late-game projectile-heavy comps after the projectile speed change. Could swing certain tower synergies; we’ll nudge numbers if needed.
• Flow field caching is a big win, but we’ll likely tune edge-case regenerations on very busy boards.
• Bot strategic variety is improved, not perfect. You may still see repetitive openers in some matchups.

If you’re seeing odd post-match UI states or bots idling when they shouldn’t, a short clip helps a ton.

Under the Hood

• Pathfinding and build-phase stutter

  • Flow Field Caching. We now regenerate only when it matters (towers placed or castles change) and reuse it for all minions. The result is effectively O(1) lookups per minion.
  • BFS over Dijkstra for uniform-cost tiles. Queue-based, O(1) operations per step. Cuts out the heavy sorting cost.
  • Single regeneration per update. First minion triggers, others read from cache. This largely eliminates the freeze you felt when dropping a tower into a huge swarm.

• Spatial and GC performance

  • SpatialHash replaces Quadtree for near O(1) spatial queries.
  • PathCache + ObjectPool reduce redundant calculations and garbage.
  • Cached arrays and string keys in hot paths; fewer closures; fewer allocations.
  • Minions now move NSEW only to keep costs consistent and pathing predictable.
  • Dirty flagging across systems to skip unnecessary work.
  • Tick rate adjusted from 30 → 20 FPS to reduce GC pressure in crowded battles while keeping input and feel tight.

• Infrastructure

  • First pass at a simple monitor with proper compose setup to keep an eye on live process state and thread lifecycles.

[screenshot: updated tower placement grid under heavy load at 9f80e25]

[screenshot: large wave navigating smoothly during rapid building at 4d4bb96]

What’s Next

• Watch-and-adjust on Corpse Exploder and related AoE synergies after today’s nerf.
• More tuning on bot opener diversity and mid-game pivots.
• Small UI quality-of-life improvements post-match (summary clarity, less noise).
• Continued micro-optimizations on path caching invalidations during intense build phases.

Thanks for the reports and replays — they help us find the rough edges faster. If you notice builds or comps that suddenly feel off after the speed and economy changes, send them our way. We’ll keep chipping away.