Daily Dev Update: Pressure Builds with Minion Health Buff - September 18, 2025

Opening

Quick one today. We wired up a momentum mechanic for PvP: minions now get tougher as you take enemy castles. It’s simple, it works, and it changes how pushes feel mid-match.

What’s New

• Minions gain +10% max health per enemy castle your team destroys (cumulative).
  • Applies to newly spawned minions only; existing minions don’t retroactively change.
  • Team-wide: your whole side benefits once you knock a castle down.
  • No cap yet. We’ll watch how far this snowballs in real matches and tune if needed.
• Practical impact:
  • Win a siege, your next waves last longer under tower fire. That’s pressure the other side has to respect.
  • If your plan is to turtle, you’ll want to contest harder before the first castle falls or pivot to higher burst/percent damage tools.
  • Example for scale: if a minion had 500 HP, it spawns at 550 HP after one castle, 600 HP after two, etc.

[screenshot: mid-lane wave tanking more tower fire after a castle falls at 6c7a608]

[screenshot: base siege with stacked health buff pushing into last defenses at 6c7a608]

What Got Fixed

• Nothing targeted today. All effort went into getting the buff logic plumbed through the spawn pipeline cleanly.

What’s Still Broken

• Missing UI indicator: The game doesn’t currently surface the exact buff amount. Health bars reflect the actual higher max HP, but there’s no “+10% per castle” readout yet.
• Bots aren’t aware (yet): Practice bots don’t account for the new health scaling in their push/defense heuristics. They’ll learn soon.

Under the Hood

• State tracking: SimCore now maintains a per-team count of destroyed enemy castles.
• Spawn-time application: When a minion spawns, we compute a buff multiplier of 1 + 0.10 × castles_destroyed for that team and apply it to the minion’s base health during initialization.
• Spawn chain passthrough: The buff percentage flows from the SimCore state through the spawn chain into the Minion constructor, keeping the logic deterministic and server-authoritative.
• Scope: The buff is applied before other spawn-time effects, and it only impacts new spawns. No retroactive changes.

What’s Next

• UI clarity: Add a clear indicator for the active minion health buff (team HUD, tooltips, or scoreboard).
• Bot updates: Teach bots to factor the buff into push timing and defense prioritization.
• Balance watchlist: Monitor how sustain/attrition builds vs. burst comps perform with this change, especially in mid-game swing moments.

Thanks to everyone sending match recordings and notes. Keep the feedback coming—especially if you see matches decided by a single castle swing without comeback windows. That’s the kind of thing we want to tune quickly.