Devlog #14: Every Commander Is Different

Posted 2026-11-11 · Foundation MVP phase

Until this week, a hero's rarity decided one thing about an army: how many men they could lead. A Legendary commanding a hundred spearmen fought exactly like a Common commanding the same hundred.

That is over. Every hero now leads in their own way.

A kit of their own

Every hero in the catalog has a commander kit: eight to ten skills that belong to that hero and nobody else. No skill repeats anywhere in the game.

The skills come in five bands, and each band offers two of them. You pick one per band, so a hero in the field carries five, and the other five are the builds you did not choose. Some second options also ask for stars, so a rarer hero has more real choices, not just bigger numbers.

The skills come in five kinds, by what sets them off:

• Command: takes hold when the fight starts, for a few seconds or for the whole fight.
• Active: the big strike. It fires on fury, which fills as the squad fires and as it takes hits, and it grows with the size of the squad.
• Barrage: after each volley there is a chance of an extra one.
• Passive: kicks in on a condition, like dropping below half strength or facing cavalry.
• Prepare: a heavy strike with a few seconds of wind-up that the enemy can see coming.

Take Captain Hael, an old infantry officer. At his first band he chooses between Hold the Line, which makes his men take a little less damage for the whole fight, and Shield Wall, which makes them take a lot less, but only for the opening seconds. One is for a long grind, the other is for surviving the first charge. Further up his kit there is a roar that hits hard and makes the enemy flinch, and an oath that grows stronger with every man he has already lost.

Eira Stormborn, on the other hand, lives on barrages: her archers keep loosing extra volleys, and her best skills make those volleys come more often.

When a skill fires, its name appears over the hero, and a Prepare counts down over the hero's head, so the side on the receiving end can see it coming.

Levels come from fighting

The bands open with the hero's combat level, from 1 to 30, and the only way up is to fight: beasts, lairs, and heroes or squads of other Houses. Everything a squad does counts for its commander, because the commander is the one learning.

That changes what a roster is for. The woodcutter who never leaves the base will never get past his first band. Every hero in the House now has a reason to go out and fight.

What the hero has, the troops get

Each hero also has a specialty, a troop type they know best. Leading that type, their men hit harder and last longer. And the commander's kit and the commander's own gear now apply to the troops they lead, not just to the hero's sword.

You can change your picks, but only inside your own land, out of combat, and once a day. A build is a decision, not something you swap between two volleys.

Sieges got real

Siege crews are the troops built to bring down walls. Until this week they could not actually shoot at one: a squad only fired at its commander's target in a fight, and breaking a wall was a hero's job. Now, when a commander attacks a wall, the squad fires at the same stretch of wall.

That exposed the second problem straight away. The walls did not hold. A typical siege squad opened the strongest wall in the game on contact, which left the defender's towers and archers with nothing to do.

So walls are now much, much tougher. A good wall holds a siege squad for close to a minute, long enough for the defence to matter. Without the right commander, a siege under archer fire now fails. With a siege specialist like Greta Stonefoot or Mira Deepvein, it gets through. The commander is what decides it.

Behind the scenes: one army that could not die

Before any of this was balanced in the game, every kit was balanced in a separate model, a simulation built only to measure fights. This week I ran the real game code through the same fights and compared the two side by side.

The first run said every army lost every fight, including the ones with no commander at all. That was not the kits. It was an older bug: when two squads fought each other in the same place, the second one to fire was quietly undoing the damage it had just taken. One side of every squad-on-squad battle could never lose a man.

It is fixed. After that, the game and the model agree within a few points on every build I measured.

Next week

Research, rebuilt as two trees with levels, and what a House finds when it explores the world.

Wishlist

Stand Eternal is on Steam. There is nothing to buy and nothing to install yet. The wishlist is how you hear when there is, and it is the single most useful thing anyone reading this can do for the game.

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Stand Eternal is a 24/7 civilisation MMO with one world, no pay-to-win, and the same game on PC and mobile. It is in development, and the devlog is how I show the work.

The conversation happens on Discord.