Play it here: https://prosti-gospodi.itch.io/herald-core
You never aim in herald-core. The suit fires by itself. What you decide is what it fires with — and then sixty seconds of automatic combat tell you whether you were right.
The loop. Arsenal → watch → loot → arsenal. A watch runs 60 seconds. Drones come in packs and push for the breach ring behind you; the suit shoots on its own. Your hands do two things: build the loadout beforehand, and drag the pickup hand across the arena during the fight, because credits, ore and materials fall to the floor and sit there for twelve seconds. If the suit's integrity runs out, everything still on the floor is lost and the watch ends early.
Ten weapons, four mod cards on a 10-point weapon budget, three suit mods on a separate 6-point budget. Every hover recomputes the result before you click.
Eight drone models, none wanting the same answer. Swarm arrives 9–13 weak bodies and wants chain and rate. Bastion regenerates its barrier the moment you stop shooting, so it wants magazine and reload, not damage. Swift spirals in sideways, and the suit doesn't lead its shots — projectile speed is the whole answer. And the builds fight each other: stacked punch-through intercepts ~74% of Splitters and ~14% of Rams, because falloff and armour stack. The card that best solves one model is dead weight against another.
Around that: a star map of 118 nodes, contracts that must break your current best build to ship, arenas that spread the weapons apart instead of just getting harder, and a forge where blueprints only ever drop — there is no blueprint shop in the game.
Measured, not guessed. The combat core is engine-free JavaScript, and the same simulation runs in your browser and on a headless bench — the tooltip number is the balance-report number. Same seed, same fight: add ?seed=4242 and run one watch with two loadouts to see whether a card did anything or you just got lucky.
Rough edges, honestly. Blaze (the flamethrower) leads on all four arenas with empty slots — a weapon defect, not an arena one. Pit (the grenade launcher) has no cell where it's first. Platinum has no payments; it's a prototype.
On which watch did you first change your build because something specifically beat you? That's the answer I'm after.
