When the crossing falls.
A real piece of the Passes falls away, taking its dressing with it and sending ground troops around another route.
The first terrain event is deliberately small: one optional crossing breaks during a match. It changes where an army can walk while keeping every altar and font reachable. The earlier sunny lighting and aiming correction remain in this separate playable build.
Five seconds to leave
The first minute is safe. After that, either wizard approaching the western crossing starts a five-second warning: cracks, dust, a rumble and a clear message. Ground creatures standing there receive an escape destination.
The ground then falls with its rocks, logs and foliage. Lights on the falling patch go dark. Collision disappears and navigation changes, so ground troops must take a surviving pass. Flying creatures can cross the gap.
Souls stay in play
A terrain spectacle cannot quietly destroy the finite soul economy. Loose souls move to a reachable bank, and a creature that falls leaves its soul there. A falling wizard returns home under the existing void rules, while carried souls stay on the bank.
Pause freezes the event. Restart restores the surface, dressing, lights and original route. This is one authored crossing with angular cut edges, not a general terrain-destruction system.
Checked in the app
The source game and exact packaged app pass 92 rule checks on the Passes and 67 on the open island. The checks use actual collision and navigation, including a longer surviving route, access to every objective, fall recovery and reset. The isolated native viewport input run passes all 19 checks; a preceding visible-window run failed its two mouse-axis assertions.
Three bounded automated matches restarted successfully with no soul-audit failures. The symmetric match exercised one complete collapse but remained unresolved at three minutes. Those checks establish behaviour and stability, not balance or human acceptance. A separate rendered performance sample on this Mac averaged 16–17 FPS at 1280 × 720 Balanced. The preserved previous app averaged 14–16 FPS under the same settings. Both are too slow for smooth play; uncontrolled background load and differing combat populations mean this is not evidence of a speed improvement. The transient collapse itself still needs a focused timing sample.
Visual review caught floating props, water beneath the hole and missing texture coordinates on the new cliffs. Those were corrected before the final captures. The geometry was extracted and fitted locally in Blender; no paid generation was used.
Next, the spell preview
The next milestone is the missing epic-spell card and isolated demonstrations of each patron’s five spells. Presentation refinement follows, then small selectable squads and a review of how the existing map supports separate objectives. Two-player LAN play and one campaign mission remain later slices.