KAISERPUNK Patch Notes — June 11, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Hi everyone,
In our last Dev Diary we covered a lot about how the new Front mechanics work in the upcoming Warfare update. Today, I (Danijel) will be telling you all more about how your different military units will work, what makes them different from before and how they all fight differently across Land, Sea and Air. Let's dive into it!
What Happened to My Armies?
First off let’s talk about the Army, the work horse of your military might. The old army system - the one where you'd create an 8-slot army, pick units, and march it around as a single entity - is gone. In its place we now have divisions.
A division is a new flexible container of units. You produce units at your capital, they accumulate in a rally division, and you split them up however you want. Want to send a mixed force of infantry and tanks? Split them off. Want to keep a reserve of pure artillery? Do that. Want to merge two battered divisions into one fighting force? Click and done.
Military bases still produce your units, but the production flow is streamlined. Everything spawns near your capital in category-specific rally points (land, air, naval), and you decide where it goes from there. No more fiddling around with individual army training queues.
Generals are now simply defined as Commanders and they're way more interesting than before. Instead of being assigned to an army slot, commanders attach to divisions and they emerge organically from your veteran troops. When a max-veterancy unit gains enough combat experience, there's a small chance (~1.5%) a commander emerges. They're category-locked so a commander who emerged from your tank division is an armored commander and one emerging from your air force becomes an air force commander, and they all level up through victories. Each level-up lets you pick from a shortlist of traits, and traits stack up to 3 times. A seasoned commander with triple-stacked Mountain Fighter and Defensive Tactician traits is going to make any mountain front a nightmare for the enemy.
Commanders are also physical entities on the map. They can travel independently (faster than divisions), be attached or detached from divisions at will, and if an enemy division reaches a standalone commander's region, there's a real risk that they can get captured or killed. Your best general behind enemy lines is a hero. Your best general caught without an escort is a tragedy and a loss.
Bigger Roles
We've restructured unit tiers a bit to be more distinct. Units fall into 6 categories across 4 tiers so 24 unit types in total. Infantry are decent defenders but modest attackers. Tanks hit hard but are vulnerable on bad terrain. Artillery has a high attack potential, but relies on infantry to protect it (and gets +50% attack when properly supported).
Then there's veterancy: three tiers (Conscript at 75% effectiveness, Regular at 100%, Veteran at 125%). Veterans can't be produced - they can only be forged through combat. When you win a battle, 25% of your surviving troops get promoted. Successful defenses promote 15%. And when casualties are taken, conscripts die first, veterans last. Your battle-hardened troops become genuinely precious. Losing a division full of veterans hurts in a way that losing fresh conscripts doesn't.
In a pinch you can rush-produce emergency conscripts at -25% resource cost, but they enter at that 75% effectiveness tier. Cheap bodies for a desperate defense, but you won't be winning any breakthroughs with them.
The result: army composition is a real decision. Do you send a balanced force? A tank-heavy spearhead with mechanized infantry support (tanks take 30% fewer casualties when properly screened)? A fighter-bomber package to soften up the front before your ground troops make a push? Every combination plays differently, and the combined arms synergies reward you for thinking about how your force is composed, not just how many units you have.
Taking it to the Seas
So what about your navy? In the current live version, ships are basically land armies that float. You'd build ships, stick them into Naval Fleets and move them around along limited sea routes. Now, naval divisions, "fleets", are their own thing entirely.
When you produce naval units, they show up at your capital like everything else, but they're landlocked. We know it would make more sense to force you to have a coastal naval base and produce the units there, but we wanted to make sure you're not drastically punished just because your capital region is in-land. So before your fleet can actually do anything, you have to deploy them to water first. Select your shiny new fleet, pick a coastal deployment point (remember those sea-to-land links?) and your ships will be transported overland to be launched to sea. Of course, you cannot expect to deploy your navy through hostile territory. Once they're in the water, they move freely across the ocean; no road network, no rigid paths, just open water. There are "better sea routes" clearly marked as water pathways, but they are optional, not mandatory.
What can your fleets expect to encounter out at sea? Well, other fleets of course! You can engage in open sea battles with these, playing out in neat dioramas; turrets rotating, shells flying... Fleet-vs-fleet, although satisfying, is not the only thing your navy is good at. Fleets stationed off an enemy coastline can bombard inland, softening defenses before your ground troops make their push. If you remember from our previous blog and the concept of frontlines, a coastal border can also be a frontline, your troops just enter it from the sea. You can organize a nice D-day event anywhere in the world. Oh, I almost forgot, that there are also entirely new sea regions being introduced to the game too. Controlling those can create perfect chokepoints, but we can leave that li'l tidbit for another dev log entry.
Even with all that, we felt that naval combat and the importance of a well established navy, was still "not quite there yet", so we added 2 specialist vessels. Aircraft carriers are no longer a conceptually awkward naval base upgrade, but an actual unit that you build and train the same way as any other unit. Carriers are your mobile airbases. Transfer a couple of fighter-bomber squadrons onto it and you're one step closer to projecting air supremacy in the middle of the Pacific if you so wish, somewhere where no land-based airfield could ever reach. Just make sure the carrier goes around protected by other ships because if *it* goes down, the squadrons on it go down as well.
Submarines are all about the things your enemy can't see. An all-submarine fleet is invisible to the enemy until they get close enough to detect it or until combat starts. Submarines, even though by pure stats aren't that different from let's say destroyers, get a big first hit bonus. "Shadow strike" if you wish. And if you're running a purely submarine-filled fleet, they get a nice "Wolfpack" synergy. Of course, your opponents can counter this with destroyers, which get a hefty attack bonus against subs. This is also one of the examples where higher tier units are not just about "my stats are bigger than yours"...
In case you're wondering what happened to the transport ships upgrade for naval bases, it's completely gone. You don't need to build it. Land divisions (battalions) can move across water from the get-go, but while in that "transport" state, they are very vulnerable, so it's a good idea to keep them escorted with some proper navy ;)
Ruling the skies
Air divisions (squadrons) work completely differently from fleets and battalions, and that's by design. You don't march planes to the front. You station them at airfields and send them on missions. Their start is the same as any other division: you train them in an airbase and they appear near your capital as a separate division. But before you can do anything useful with them, you have to transfer the squadron to a suitable airfield from which they'll operate. Airfields are region upgrades, as in the current live version of Kaiserpunk. Once stationed, your squadrons can be sent on different mission types, each covering a different strategic need.
"Front support" sends your aircrafts to reinforce an active frontline. Bombers add raw attack power to your ground troops, while fighters contest air superiority. If you win the air battle going on overhead, then your bombers will be free to operate at peak efficiency. If you lose air supremacy (the enemy can answer with additional air units), your bombers get suppressed.
"Strategic strike" lets you hit an enemy region or a regional upgrade directly. You can blow up their supply depots, wreck their fortifications or knock out their airfield. It's rather expensive and your planes are vulnerable during the flight, but crippling the enemy's infrastructure before a full invasion can save you a lot of casualties on the ground.
"Ground attack" is your direct attack option. Pick an enemy division anywhere on the map within range and hit it. It works against battalions, fleets and even other squadrons (time for a proper dogfight). It's a flexible system and more importantly, it makes leaving a division undefended in an open field a really bad idea.
"Defensive intercept" is the squadron's default stance. Your fighters sit on standby and automatically scramble, when enemy aircraft enter the region. You don't need to micromanage it. Just keep your fighters stationed and they'll do their job when the time comes.
"Supply drop" is a more niche mission, but can be a lifesaver. If your division is cut off from your supply network, you can send in supplies directly. It won't win a war on its own, but it might keep a critical position alive long enough for reinforcements to arrive or until you clear that "supply bottleneck".
All air missions are visible on the map. Your squadrons physically fly from their airbase to the target and back and they (like the AI squadrons) are valid targets during their transit. Your enemy can see them coming and if they've got fighters on "intercept", there's going to be a fight before your bombers ever reach their destination.
And a key concept that you shouldn't forget: you can fake your intentions. Just like you don't have ALL the info on your enemy divisions and plans, neither does your enemy on you. Missions, even defensive intercept, take some time. It could be just the time that you need their fighters to be "occupied" so your bombers can swoop in from another direction…
Reading the battlefield
I won't go into details on the different terrain of each region. We've covered that before, and it's practically identical to how it is currently in Kaiserpunk. Instead let's touch some more on what is new: weather. There are changes even compared to what we've already said about the weather mechanic in the last dev log. We implemented it, we played around with it and we weren't satisfied. It felt too random and too hidden from sight, especially for the effect that it has. So we've done more work on it.
Weather isn't some hidden game of dice that comes around and slaps you when you least expect it. It is a visible element on the world map. You can watch a storm rolling across the Atlantic or a blizzard forming over Siberia. Rain slows your troops and reduces efficiency. Storms are worse. A blizzard seriously affects your tanks for example and a thick fog makes it smarter to keep your airforce on the ground for the time being. But because you can see the weather changing, you can plan around it and time your offensive for a clear window or even push through a storm knowing your enemy's reinforcements are slogging through the same weather to reach the front. In testing, this "visible element" made all the difference to us and we hope it will to you as well. In a nutshell, it’s now pretty hard to miss.
Putting it all together
So picture this: you're invading a mountainous region. You check the weather: clear skies for the next couple of days. You send a Strategic strike to knock out their fortifications, station fighters nearby on Intercept to keep their air force "honest" and push in with infantry and artillery. During that time, you keep a fleet bombarding the coast. Perhaps use tanks, that you split away from the main invading force, in an amphibious landing and force the enemy to defend on two fronts. Tanks suffer severe penalties in this terrain, but you do have your navy to support them. Three branches working together, timed around a weather window you could see coming.
That's our goal with the new Warfare: the game presents you with the "facts", the “playground” (this is the terrain, the weather, the units you have, and what the enemy has) and now it's up to you to creatively/strategically/however you want to call it, use that to your advantage.
Next time we’ll share more about the new AI that we only touched a bit on in the last dev log. We’ll dive into why it’ll work much better, what options it gives us and how it’ll impact your ability to adjust difficulty to fit your preferred experience.
We hope you’re as excited about this as we are!
All the best,
- The Overseer Team