Devlog #1: building a war out of everyone's runs

We wanted a persistent community war that never holds the single-player game hostage. The rule we set ourselves: the game must play identically offline.

The shape

Each run produces a small anonymous summary. Opted-in clients batch those up and post them to the ARG Net. Every 15 minutes the server aggregates the last 24 hours per sector and recomputes a pressure state — Stable, Contested, Surging, or Overrun — plus the featured contracts and any active Priority Directive.

That gets baked into a single tiny war_state.json. The game fetches it on hub entry. If it’s missing, stale, or fails validation, the client falls back to a byte-identical local estimate. No war state, no problem — you just play.

Why it’s cheap to run

• One small JSON blob, edge-cached, under 50 KB.
• No per-player server state on the hot path.
• Designers pin contracts and launch Directives from a config table — no deploy.

More on the anti-abuse model and the directive system next time.