Global Ordnance v1.18: Android 9 and Up

No new unit this time. Update v1.18 does two things: it gets Global Ordnance onto a lot more phones, and it makes the game run considerably better on the phones it already ran on.

That’s six public updates in seven weeks, all built from a van running on solar power.

One note on the number, before anyone goes hunting for the missing patches: 1.16 and 1.17 were internal builds that only ever went to testers. v1.18 is the next public update after 1.15, and everything below is what changed between the two. Nothing was skipped and you didn’t miss anything.

Let’s start with the embarrassing part.

The Setting That Was Hiding the Game From Most of Android

A build setting on our end meant Google Play was only offering Global Ordnance to devices running Android 15 or newer. Not a store rule, not a policy — our own configuration, quietly narrowing the audience to a sliver of Android.

That’s fixed. The game now installs on Android 9 and up.

If you went looking for it at some point and the store told you your device wasn’t compatible, try again. It almost certainly is now.

One honest caveat: this is still a demanding game. Opening the door to older hardware doesn’t magically make that hardware faster. If your phone is a few years old, start on Low. The rest of this devlog is largely about making Low and Medium worth playing on.

The Numbers

Test device is a Galaxy S20 FE, measured mid-match rather than sitting in a menu, because menu framerates are a lie.

Medium graphics: 15–18 fps → 44–51 fps.

Low graphics: 24–30 fps with the GPU pinned at 100% → a locked 30 fps with headroom to spare.

That second one matters more than it looks. Holding 30 while the graphics chip is maxed out means the phone is running hot, draining battery and about to throttle. Holding 30 with room left over means it can actually sustain it for a whole match.

Baked Lighting, and Other Things That Should Not Have Been Running

Here’s where the frames came from.

Both maps now use baked lighting. Before this update, every light in the game was being calculated live, every single frame, forever — including lights that never move, on objects that never move, in scenes that never change. That is an enormous amount of work to redo sixty times a second to arrive at exactly the same answer.

The sky was doing the same thing: re-capturing itself every frame. It does not need to. It does not now.

Beyond that:

• Shadow work cut down across the board.
• Textures resized on roughly 250 unit and scenery assets. A lot of them were carrying far more resolution than a phone screen can show.
• Around 35 units reworked so they stop constantly checking on themselves. They used to poll their own state every frame — health, status, effects — whether or not anything had happened. Now they sit still and react when something actually occurs. Multiply that by every unit on a busy battlefield and it adds up fast.

Loading

The next map now loads in the background, so restarting a match is noticeably faster.

Also: pressing the Home button during a load no longer freezes the game. That one was reported by players and it was as annoying as it sounds.

Graphics Settings Now Actually Mean Something

Low, Medium and High used to mostly swap textures and shadow quality. The gap between them was smaller than the labels suggested.

Now they control effects and lighting too:

• Low turns shadows and additional lights off entirely, and renders at a lower internal resolution.
• Explosion debris and sparks are now High only.
• New installs start on Medium instead of running a hardware benchmark at launch. The benchmark was guessing, it cost time on first boot, and it guessed wrong often enough that a sane default is simply better. Change it in settings whenever you like.

One trade-off you’ll notice: snowfall on the snow map is lighter than it was. Dense snowfall was expensive, and on a phone screen the difference in atmosphere is small while the difference in framerate is not.

Fixes

• Low-health smoke on armoured units now clears properly when the unit is repaired.
• Smoke no longer hangs in mid-air after aircraft and defences are destroyed.
• Health bars no longer appear while a unit is still spawning in.

Unit Changes

Recon SUV missiles are now bigger and leave a denser trail — easier to read at a glance in a crowded fight.

What’s Next

Drag-box selection. This has been on the roadmap since 1.14 and it hasn’t shipped yet, so rather than tease it again: it’s being built, and it’s next in the queue for control work. The multi-finger gestures cover a lot of ground, but drawing a box around a group is the one thing mobile players still ask for.

iOS. Still in progress, still the reason a chunk of engineering time disappears into plumbing rather than units. No date yet, and we’d rather say that than invent one.

See you in 1.19.

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist
Update v1.18

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist is a free-to-play mobile RTS for Android, with no in-app purchases. Get it on Google Play, or see every unit in the game.