Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist Is on iOS

iPhone players: it is your turn. Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist is on the App Store as of today. Free, no in-app purchases, same as it has always been on Android.

Get it on the App Store. It runs on iPhone with iOS 15 or later, and launches on version 1.19, the same version Android players have.

iPad is next. For now the game is iPhone-only, because the interface was laid out for phone screens. Resizing it for the bigger display is already on our list, and we think Global Ordnance will play amazingly on an iPad.

Ads work the same way as on Android. Never during a match, at most one after it, and none at all if you win. There is no store and nothing to buy. That has been true since day one and it stays true.

If you have been waiting since we first said “Android and iOS” back in May, thank you for the patience. What you are getting today is not the game that launched on Google Play in July. It is the game that seven public updates in eight weeks turned it into. Here is that story, because it explains what took so long.

July: what we launched with

Global Ordnance went live on Google Play in July with one idea behind it. A real-time strategy game that works on a phone screen instead of fighting it. No camera dragging, because the battlefield is fixed and fits the screen. No base building, because you research and deploy units straight from the UI onto your side of the field. Aircraft live in hangars off-screen and fly in on your orders. Push past the line, hit the enemy HQ, keep them off yours.

It already had most of what makes it the game it is now. 25 units across armour, unarmoured, defences and aircraft. Supply trucks that repair, rearm and lay mines. Units that rank up and run out of ammo. Over forty upgrades. Timed Blitz modes where only HQ damage counts, an Upkeep mode where every unit on the field costs you money, an Adaptive AI that watches how you play and pushes back, sixty-odd achievements, and a metal soundtrack written for it.

It also had problems we did not know about yet, and a couple we did. It ran well on flagship phones and struggled on everything else. The download was 746 MB. And, buried in the build settings, a mistake that hid the game from most Android phones entirely. We found that one in September.

The first fortnight: your hands are the keyboard

The two complaints that came in first were the same two we would have made ourselves. Selecting units was too slow for an RTS, and the ad button on the HQ felt wrong.

v1.11 on July 26 answered both. Two fingers on the screen selects every armoured unit. Three fingers grabs everything unarmoured. Four pulls your defences. Double-tap a unit, and you have every unit of that type. No keyboard, no problem. The HQ quick-fix ad went in the bin the same week, and the ad rule became one ad per match, never mid-battle. It has not moved since, except in your favour.

August: a tank with three barrels, and an AI that cheats like you do

v1.12 on August 4 added the Trident, a triple-barrel heavy tank based on an experimental Soviet design. It fires at artillery range while stationary, turns its whole body instead of a turret, tramples most of what it meets, and lays mines as it goes. Three barrels, triple the fun.

The same update taught the Adaptive AI a trick players had found: park a heavy unit on enemy ground to kill spawns while your main force goes elsewhere. The AI learned that behaviour from you, and started using it right back. For people who did not want to be studied, we added manual difficulty: Easy, Medium, Difficult, or Adaptive.

August: Vika said the UI was unsightly

She was right. v1.13 on August 11 was the third visual overhaul in the game’s life and the first one players saw. The camera went orthographic, the renderer moved to forward shading, and the landscape became a single flat plane with one material instead of a stack of them. Some units were sitting at around 50,000 faces, far too heavy for a phone, and came down to about 10,000 without looking any different from above.

It also brought the Plus selection mode for building custom groups, generators at the corners of the map that flash red or green when someone crosses the line, and a new rule: if you win the match, no ad for you.

Late August: thin ice

v1.14 on August 28 was the first new battlefield. A snow biome with patches of thin ice, where heavy units sink if they linger and the Trident and the Mammoth sink fastest. Every unit needed new logic for it and the AI had to learn not to drown. Half the fun is finding out where the ice breaks under you.

Aircraft got single-use upgrades chosen before each sortie: armour-piercing ammo, Chaff to confuse anti-air, Flash Bombs to stun everything in a radius, a Radar Scrambler, a Long Range Missile. Fly-By missions let you send a plane down a row with no target lock to hit whatever it finds. Load times dropped to almost nothing. The day after, on August 29, the game passed 1,000 downloads, with no marketing budget and no publisher.

September: the 30 fps we did not know about

v1.15 on September 5 was the update with nothing new to play and everything to feel. While going through the quality settings we found the game had been capped at 30 fps the whole time by our own configuration. Medium and High now run at 60.

Then the strange finds. A tutorial portrait was re-rendering a full HDR scene every single frame, forever, on a widget nobody was looking at. Achievement checks were reading the entire save file from disk every time they fired. Explosions were being spawned and destroyed constantly instead of reused. Around 140 textures were the wrong size, some of them 4K on units you only ever see from the sky. All of it fixed, and vibration came back after quietly going missing in 1.12.

September: Android 15 and up. Oops.

While preparing v1.18 on September 11 we found the build setting that had been telling Google Play the game needed Android 15. It needed Android 9. For two months, most Android phones on earth could not see the game in the store. That one hurt.

The same update baked the lighting on both maps instead of recalculating it every frame, resized about 250 textures to what a phone screen can actually show, and rewrote all 25 units to react to events instead of checking their own state every tick. On a Galaxy S20 FE, Medium went from 15 to 18 fps to 44 to 51. Low went from a maxed-out chip to a locked 30 with room to spare, which is the difference between a phone that stays cool for a full match and one that throttles halfway through. Low, Medium and High finally started meaning something.

September: half the download

v1.19 on September 14 cut the download from 746 MB to 376. Landscape textures had been stretched to 2048 by 4096 for no reason. The Apocalypse bomber was a million triangles seen from a kilometre up. The engine was shipping 62 plugins the game never used. The intro video alone was 23 MB and is now 3.

More importantly, it fixed the crash. On phones with 6 GB of memory or less, going back to the main menu after a match could kill the game, because the battlefield and the menu were both in memory at once. A short loading screen now fully releases one before loading the other, and peak memory on the way out dropped from 2.16 GB to 1.1. We found that crash on borrowed phones, because a van has room for about two of our own. Every one of the fourteen tracks stayed in.

1.16 and 1.17 never went public. They were internal builds, and a lot of the iOS work happened in them.

Where the game is now

So this is what lands on your iPhone today, against what landed on Android in July:

• Units: 25 air and ground units, with the Trident added since launch. Every one documented in the unit roster.
• Upgrades: 55 and counting, up from around 40, including single-use aircraft loadouts. All of them in the upgrade guide.
• Maps: two battlefields, the green map and the snow biome with thin ice, up from one.
• Controls: multi-finger selection, double-tap, Plus groups. Drag-box selection is next.
• Performance: 60 fps on Medium and High, a 376 MB download instead of 746, and no crash when you leave a match.
• AI: learns your exploits and uses them, or stays fixed at the difficulty you pick.
• Ads: none for the first month on iOS. After that, one per match at most, never mid-battle, none if you win.
• Soundtrack: 14 original metal tracks, all on YouTube too.
• Players: over 5,000 installs on Android in under two months, without a marketing budget.

What iOS players should know

This is a new platform for us, and we are still two people in a van. We tested on what we have – iPhone 13 Pro. If you hit something we did not, email us at support@awngames.com and it goes into the next update, the same way every Android bug in the story above did.

From today both platforms get every update on the same day. Drag-box selection is next on the list. See you on the battlefield, commanders.

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist
Now on iOS and Android

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