v0.9.8 – Full rulebook alignment (2026-07-27)

Focus: A large batch of movement, combat, victory-condition, and bot-opponent fixes accumulated across many small commits since v0.9.3 was officially aligned and verified against the current NUKES rulebook v0.9.8. Most of these were bug fixes closing a gap between documented rules and actual server behavior, not new rule changes.

Movement — Infantry

• Fixed biome-chaining incorrectly breaking immediately after crossing a bridge tile (a friendly Airborne/Base sitting on a mountain, or a City) — chaining now correctly continues in the original biome on the far side.
• Infantry may now step onto or merge with its own water/desert stack when the combined unit count reaches a safe platoon type, not only when a safe stack was already there beforehand.
• Infantry can now pass through a friendly-owned (or empty) City/Base with only 1–2 units stationed; previously any hex with 1–2 units, friend or foe, blocked passage outright.

Movement — Artillery

• Fixed artillery jumping across empty regions: a ray could previously find an occupied hex anywhere further down a straight line and treat that as a valid jump, gliding across arbitrary empty gaps to reach it (and even continuing past it). Every hop now needs its own adjacent, occupied stepping stone — matching "an empty intermediate prevents any jump."
• Artillery can now move onto or through forest hexes (previously forbidden entirely as a landing spot); a unit starting its turn in a forest still cannot use that move to attack.
• Jump landings are now computed as the exact straight-line mirror hex across whatever was jumped over, instead of any hex merely adjacent to it.
• Fixed artillery's own hex always being listed as a valid destination even though moving to your own current hex isn't a legal move — this used to highlight a move that would then get rejected on click.
• Fixed a short-lived regression blocking Artillery from entering or passing through empty desert: an earlier fix meant to close a water-related gap accidentally extended the same restriction to desert. The rulebook's own Terrain Restriction Summary only restricts Artillery by water — desert is explicitly "No restriction." Artillery can once again move through and land on empty desert freely; only water still requires existing friendly support.
• Fixed artillery landing directly on the first adjacent friendly hex it found, with no real jump. The rulebook has artillery jump over adjacent units and land beyond them — merging straight onto an adjacent friendly stack (zero jump distance) is Infantry's job, not Artillery's. Landing on an occupied hex now requires having already jumped over at least one other hex first; attacking an adjacent enemy hex directly (combat) is unaffected.

Movement — Airborne

• Airborne can now use the documented Base exception on mountains — passing through a mountain if a friendly Base (4+) is already there, or landing safely on one with any friendly units present. Previously mountains blocked Airborne unconditionally, with no exception.
• Fixed client-side slingshot validation counting an in-progress continuation against itself, which rejected the first legal continuation of a slingshot chain every time.

Nukes

• Nukes can now legally target any enemy-occupied hex — Artillery, Airborne, or Base stacks — gated only by strength (your strength must exceed theirs), not by stack size. Previously only a lone enemy Infantry unit could ever be struck at all; anything bigger was rejected outright.
• Fixed nukes being able to fire through an empty intermediate hex whenever the target itself happened to hold a unit — the target's own occupancy no longer wrongly satisfies the "must cross an occupied region first" requirement.
• Nuke movement now travels in a straight line, turning only at a friendly Airborne, Base, or home City, and can only strike a hex 2+ steps from the launching base. A nuke path can no longer enter a biohazard region at all, as a target or in transit.
• A nuke can now be launched from any of your hexes holding 4+ units, not only your original home-base tile.
• A nuke strike now verifies the target is actually reachable along a legal path before executing — previously the server accepted any target hex without checking the path at all.
• Fixed nuke paths crossing just one occupied hex anywhere, then gliding through unlimited empty terrain beyond it. A nuke's "road" now requires a fresh occupied stepping stone for every hop, matching Artillery — your own units, or a lone enemy Infantry, count as road; enemy Artillery/Airborne/Base still block the road beyond them (though any of them can still be struck directly as a final target).

Combat

• Hostage-capture math corrected: capturing hostages via combat sacrifice now costs exactly one of your units per hostage captured (previously any amount at or above that was accepted), and you can no longer wipe out your entire attacking force doing it — at least one unit is now guaranteed to survive and occupy the region after a win.
• City tiles only grant the combat bonus (attack pass-through and defensive adjacency) with 4+ units garrisoned, exactly like a Base — previously a City granted the bonus no matter how few units (even zero) were stationed on it.
• Fixed Infantry's "+1 per Base passed through" attack bonus silently dropping to 0 whenever the defending stack was only 1–2 units.
• A hex you attacked from no longer counts toward your own adjacent-support bonus once every unit there has moved out to make the attack.
• Artillery starting its turn in a Forest can still move to empty/friendly hexes but can no longer initiate an attack that same turn — a documented rule that wasn't actually enforced server-side.
• You now choose which region pays a combat sacrifice — the moving stack, or any specific adjacent hex that contributed support — instead of the game auto-draining support hexes for you in a fixed order. Matches the rulebook: "sacrifice one of your own units from the attacking platoon or from an adjacent region that contributed support strength" was always meant to be the attacker's call.

Victory & elimination

• Destroying an opponent's city (including via a hostage-return Meltdown) or moving 4+ units onto their city now immediately ends the game with the correct winner — neither victory condition was actually wired up before, despite being documented rules.
• The game now correctly ends the instant only one player remains, whether that's from Hostage Attrition (no hostages left to return), Total Annihilation, or a Phase 3 end-of-turn terrain death.
• Fixed a 3-player bug where eliminating a player who happened to be holding a different (still-active) survivor's captured units would incorrectly wipe out that survivor's own captured-unit records too — now only the eliminated player's own tokens are removed.
• An eliminated player's city is now correctly destroyed and marked a permanent biohazard, per the rulebook.
• Turn order after an elimination now correctly skips players who are already out, instead of potentially landing on an eliminated player.
• Hosts can now cleanly leave or end a game: if the host leaves, control passes to another human player rather than a bot; a game left empty is now properly finalized instead of stuck in limbo; and a host can end an active game outright, correctly declaring the last remaining player the winner if only one is left.

Other

• Removed the standalone "Convert to Isotope" action, which allowed converting units to isotopes any number of times per turn with no move attached — conversion is now only available as part of an actual move, once per qualifying move.
• Fixed a crash where every artillery attack returned a server error, caused by a helper function being referenced before its own declaration.

Bot opponent

• The bot's nuke-targeting logic was fixed alongside the rules above — a bug meant it could never select an enemy-occupied hex as a nuke target at all, so it previously never used nukes offensively.
• The bot will no longer fire a nuke that costs it more units than it destroys of yours (the blast hits the target and all 6 surrounding hexes regardless of owner); when several targets are available it now picks the one with the best net outcome.
• The bot no longer marches its own units into an obvious end-of-turn death trap (a lone unit stranded on water/desert, or an unsupported 3-stack alone on a mountain), and won't throw its entire remaining force at an enemy hex in one all-or-nothing move.
• Fixed several movement miscalculations that previously made the bot merge, attack, or biome-chain incorrectly.
• The bot now captures hostages when it has spare adjacent support to pay with, rather than always destroying defenders outright — it never weakens its own attacking stack to do this, and drains its smallest/most expendable support stack first.
• All three difficulty levels now hold back some hostage returns instead of always returning the maximum every turn (roughly a 15%/35%/50% chance of returning fewer, on Easy/Medium/Hard respectively), and Easy/Medium bots use much more of their movement budget instead of ending their turn early.
• The bot recovers on its own from a rejected move instead of stalling out, and resumes correctly if the server restarts mid-game rather than leaving a game stuck forever.

v0.9.3 – Official rulebook (2026-05-20)

Focus: Aligns with the published NUKES rulebook v0.9.3 on Moddable.Games.

Movement

• Artillery: May jump over enemy infantry and enemy artillery; cannot jump enemy airborne or enemy bases.
• Airborne: May pass over enemy airborne and enemy bases; blocked by enemy infantry and artillery. May pass through empty biohazards.
• Nuke paths: May jump own units or enemy infantry only (not enemy artillery, airborne, or bases).

Economy & nukes

• Setup: 4 units on board + 1 starting isotope (no free nuke in inventory).
• Harvest removed: Nukes launch from a base using isotopes from supply; convert 1 unit → 1 isotope when you add units to your own base (5+ after merge).
• Hostage returns: Bolstering an opponent’s base does not grant them isotope conversion (FAQ).

Earlier HTML-edition features (Meltdown, Total Annihilation, optional moves, biohazard routing) remain in effect — see v0.9.2-html.

v0.9.2-html – HTML rulebook alignment (2026-05-20)

Focus: Aligns the app with the expanded web rulebook (Meltdown, Total Annihilation, optional moves, biohazard routing). Superseded for canonical links by v0.9.3 on rules.moddable.games.

• Total Annihilation: Zero board units → immediate elimination (hostages removed everywhere).
• Meltdown: Hostage return to a 9-unit region biohazards that hex only; earns a move.
• Optional moves: Up to one move per hostage returned; fewer moves allowed.
• Biohazards: Artillery/nukes may route through empty biohazards; nukes may strike biohazard hexes; platoons still cannot end on biohazards.
• Phase 3: End-turn summary labels terrain cleanup as end-of-turn resolution.

v0.9.2 – Transit combat (2026-04-14)

Focus: Official v0.9.2 clarification on cities: combat strength from passing through or over bases/cities now implemented; your starting city does not add that transit bonus when you begin the attack there.

• Shared module js/combatTransit.js (browser + Node) for infantry, artillery, and airborne paths.
• Server move validation matches client combat strength (including transit).

v0.9.1 – Rulebook Update (2026-03-01)

Focus: Updated to the v0.9.1 official Nukes rulebook: tighter platoon restrictions, no HQ/General, cleaner combat and harvest rules.

Player count & board

• 2–3 players only (removed 4–6).
• Fixed 37-hex, 3-ring board.
• 4 units at start; 20 hostages total.

General / HQ removed

• No General; 1 unit on a base is shown as Infantry.
• Nukes launch from any base with 4+ units and an isotope.
• Launching a nuke removes 1 unit from the base.

Combat & terrain

• Removed terrain bonuses (Forest/Mountain, Field/Desert).
• Cities now count for defender support even with <4 units.

Platoon restrictions

• Infantry cannot pass through Infantry or Artillery (any player).
• Artillery can only jump over your own units.
• Airborne can only pass through your own units.
• Nukes can only jump over your own units.

Victory & other changes

• Removed “capture all Nukes” as a win condition.
• Harvest allowed from any base, including the starting city.
• Added in-game Rules Reference panel for platoon/biome tables.

v0.3.0 – v0.7.1 Official Rulebook (2025-11-04)

Focus: Implements the major changes from the v0.7.1 rulebook – terrain-based combat bonuses, tightened movement, and biohazards.

Combat system

• Added terrain bonuses:
  • Forest/Mountain: defender +1 strength.
  • Field/Desert: attacker +1 strength.
• Defender base support now only comes from bases (4+ units).
• UI shows detailed strength breakdown in combat prompts.

Movement

• Infantry: move freely within same biome, then 1 step into a different biome; cannot end alone in water or desert; own Airborne/Bases act as biome bridges.
• Artillery: explicit “cannot end alone in water”; cannot end on biohazards (see v0.9.2-html for step-through routing).
• Airborne: cannot pass through or end on mountains; can pass through, but not end on, biohazards.

Biohazards & destruction

• Regions with >9 units are destroyed and become biohazards.
• Added `destroyed_regions` table and API for destroyed regions.
• v0.7.1: Infantry/Artillery/Nukes could not pass through biohazards; Airborne pass only. Updated in v0.9.2-html.

Invalid placement cleanup

• 1 unit alone in water or desert → destroyed at turn end.
• 2 units alone in water → destroyed.
• 3 units alone in mountain → destroyed.

v0.2.1 – Staging System & Setup (2025-10-30)

Focus: Adds turn staging on the client and refines starting token/hostage distribution.

Turn staging

• Active-turn staging for hostage returns and movement.
• “Confirm Turn” applies all staged actions in order.
• Shortcuts: Z undo last action, X clear all staged actions.

Setup & hostages

• Token distribution based on players and board size (rings).
• Hostages per opponent and total tokens now follow a table.
• First player’s first turn: must return a hostage if possible.

v0.2.0 – v0.6.2 Official Rulebook (2025-10-13)

Focus: Complete overhaul to match the v0.6.2 official Nukes rulebook.

Combat

• Replaced unit-specific capture rules with a strength-based system:
  • Attacker strength = moving units + adjacent friendly regions.
  • Defender strength = units in target region.
  • Attack only allowed if attacker strength > defender strength.
  • Excess strength can be spent to capture hostages by sacrificing attackers.

Movement

• Reworked Infantry, Artillery, and Airborne movement to match v0.6.2.
• Added slingshot mechanic for Airborne (chainable jumps).
• Introduced tighter restrictions on movement paths and blocking.

Elimination & limits

• Player elimination when you have no hostages to return (with a first-turn exception).
• 10+ units in a single region destroys that region.
• Max 9 units per region enforced in placement and movement.

v0.1.0-alpha – Initial Alpha Release (2025-10-11)

Focus: First playable version of Nukes.

Core gameplay

• Multiplayer hex-based map with 2–6 players.
• Two-phase turn structure: Hostage Return → Movement.
• Five biome types: Water, Fields, Forests, Mountains, Deserts.
• Real-time sync via WebSocket and session persistence.

Units & combat

• Infantry, Artillery, Airborne, Base, General, and Nukes as token stacks.
• Original combat rules with support and terrain-based restrictions.
• Terrain validation and basic destruction rules at turn end.