Patch 0.27.0: First Flight

Stellarch has never explained itself. You landed on the play screen, drafted seven cards on instinct, and worked out over a dozen matches that speed decides who swings first and that your commander is not just another Fighter. That is a bad way to learn a game this deterministic, because almost everything here is knowable in advance.
There is now a proper flight plan: seven briefings, in order. It opens with Know Your Line, a lesson on the vocabulary a match already assumes you have, the eight affinities and what binds a team to one, the difference between a commander and a Fighter, the five numbers on every card, and what an ability is. Then First Contact, Speed and Targeting, Ability Showcase, Rulesets and Mana and Assemble Your Team put those ideas into real seeded battles you get talked through as they resolve. It closes with Your Flight Plan, a briefing on the ranked ladder, the season window and what climbing it is actually for.
Two of those seven teach without staging a fight at all, which needed a new kind of curriculum stage to exist. There is also a Combat Cheat Sheet: every ability, ruleset, affinity and stat on one page, readable in the browser or printable to keep next to you.

The tutorial does not pause the battle and drop a wall of text on you. It runs the fight and stops at the moments that matter, with a callout anchored on the exact Fighter being discussed. That Fighter is lit up while the rest of the board dims, so there is no guessing which one the coach means.
Getting that right took most of the polish in this release. The callout tracks its Fighter as the board moves instead of freezing or parking itself in the middle of the screen, it waits for a defeated Fighter to finish its death animation before holding, and the last line of every lesson waits for you to press Next rather than vanishing after a second.

A new account is met by a welcome ceremony that introduces its first three Fighters as real finished cards, the same composites you see everywhere else in the game, over proper backdrop art rather than a flat panel.
Until the course is finished or skipped, opening Play takes you into the tutorial instead of the usual deck. That is deliberate: the whole point is that a brand-new pilot sees it before their first real match. Skip is on screen the entire time and drops you straight onto the play screen, so nobody is trapped in a lesson they do not need.

Finishing every briefing earns two cosmetics that exist nowhere else: the Academy Graduate title and the Academy Vanguard avatar. Neither is for sale, neither drops from a pack, and neither can be traded. The only way to hold them is to have done the course.
They sit locked and visible on the hub while you work through it, so you can see what you are playing for.

You can copy a link to any replay straight from the results screen and send it to anyone. They do not need an account to watch it. If the copy fails, which browsers do sometimes refuse, you now get told and shown the raw link instead of a button that silently did nothing.
The waiting screen before a match also got honest: it names whose pick clock is actually running instead of always implying it is your opponent holding things up.

Searching the ability and rule catalogs only ever matched names, which is useless when you remember an effect but not what it is called. Both catalogs now search descriptions too, so looking for the thing that hits the whole enemy back line finds it. The German pages search German text instead of quietly falling back to English.
The combat guide was also brought back in line with the engine: it now lists every step a hit really passes through, the Solar Flare entry no longer describes its bonus landing in the wrong place, and the Shock entry finally spells out which defenses a Shocked Fighter loses and which it keeps.

When no human is queued near your rating, ranked hands you an AI Trainer. Building that opponent was happening on the wrong clock, so it could take two minutes or more to appear after you pressed PLAY, and while it churned it held up everyone else in the queue behind it. The build moved off that path entirely.
Two smaller fairness fixes ride along. When more players want a Trainer at once than can be served in one pass, the ones who have waited longest go first instead of being skipped. And queue position is now worked out from real elapsed time, which matters for exactly one hour each autumn when the clocks go back.

Ghost Ranked runs on its own monthly rating, separate from your league. Internally it carries a placeholder that the interface was reading as a real standing, so the draft screen, the results screen and the match panels all painted a Champion crest, badge and rank that no one had earned. That is gone from every one of those surfaces.
The same screens also stopped showing a stale rating and a fake plus-or-minus-zero change on results that do not move your rating at all, and the live popup after such a match now says nothing about rating instead of announcing a change of exactly zero.

A match that failed before it ever ran was being recorded as a draw, counted toward your record, and then disappearing from your history entirely. It now reads NO RESULT, stays in the list where you can see it, and counts toward nothing.
Two more history fixes: an AI Trainer on the other side of a ranked results screen no longer wears your own league crest, and the before and after rating shown on a result now comes from the ladder you actually played on, so the results screen and your ranked history agree.

Splash damage spreads to the Fighters beside its target, but only one of them was ever reflecting it back. Every Fighter that takes splash now reflects it, so counter and mirror effects pay out on each victim instead of just the first.
This changes how some fights resolve. Replays recorded before this patch played out under the old behaviour and are unchanged; a fresh battle from the same setup can now end differently.

Restorative Field was picking its heal target differently from Frontline Mend, which does the same job, so the same board could get two different answers about who gets patched up. It now heals the front-most surviving Fighter, matching the behaviour it was always meant to share.

Under a ruleset that shrinks the team size, the AI Trainer was drafting a full-size lineup and the ranked match died before the fight started. That cost you the energy and gave you nothing back. The Trainer is now capped at whatever the ruleset allows, so those matches run and settle normally.

Battle replays were overflowing the window in Firefox instead of scaling to it. They now fit, the same way they always did everywhere else.

A match could roll two mana-limit rules at once where one of them already covered the other, which burned a rule slot on nothing. That pairing is now rejected, so every rule a match rolls actually does something.

A Charter or tournament cosmetic reward could refuse to grant because you already held a similar item from a different source, and a grant that failed part way through could leave a reward half delivered. Entitlements are now tracked per source, and a grant either completes or does not happen at all.

The tutorial went through a full dogfooding pass before it shipped. The stage page has real page chrome and shows its result as a panel over the arena rather than far below it, with Continue returning you to the hub. The site footer no longer paints over the coach at the bottom of a page, so Skip and Next stay clickable. On phones and small tablets the caption no longer covers the Skip button or your own Fighter row. The hub fits real content on the first screen, the resume bar sits correctly on mobile, and the cheat sheet has one clear home instead of two competing links. Armor shown on a tutorial Fighter now matches the armor the fight is actually using.