Global Ordnance v1.20: The Sniper and the Hammer

Two new tanks this time. On most weeks that would be the whole post. But 1.20 is the biggest update since launch. Armor and damage have been rebuilt from the ground up. The game now runs properly on foldables and tablets. The battlefield has a new look and, for the first time, shadows. Air combat and missiles have been reworked.

Everything you need to know as a player is right below. The exact numbers, and how it was all built, are in the collapsible Technical details section at the end, for those who like that part.

Let’s start with the tanks.

The Sniper Tank

It never misses. It has high damage and almost no armor, and it opens fire long before anything else on the field can answer. It’s a glass cannon in the exact sense of the phrase: it wins the fight it starts at range, and it loses every fight that reaches it.

It also brings an upgrade no other unit has: Shellbangs. With it, the Sniper stops killing and starts knocking out, and every hit puts the enemy out of the fight. Its Autofire won’t waste a shot on a target that is already down. It moves to the next one, or holds fire if everything nearby is knocked out.

Its reload runs on its own clock, so a Sniper that has been sitting idle fires the instant something enters range. It spawns loaded, too. Just don’t let anything get close. It has a minimum range, and up close it has no answer for you.

The Hammer Tank

A siege platform with one oversized gun, rare shots, and the highest HQ damage in the game, twice what the Mammoth does.

It started life as the Artillery but has neither of its limits. It has no minimum range, and no fixed firing arc: the Hammer’s whole body turns to face its target, so an enemy slipping in behind it gets a shell, not a free pass. It is also the slowest unit in the game, so plan where you put it.

It has its own engine growl and a shot that is cannon fire mixed with thunder, with a muzzle blast wide enough to match the gun. For now it shares the Artillery’s upgrades. Its own set is coming in the next update.

Play Well, Get Noticed

The enemy Adaptive AI has already noticed both new tanks. If you play well, your Sniper and Hammer tanks become priority targets for enemy airstrikes and V2 rockets. The better you do, the more the sky wants them gone so keep your anti-air close.

Damage and Armor, Rebuilt

This is the part we’re most pleased with, and you can’t see it in a screenshot.

Armor used to be two competing variables applied inconsistently. Some units multiplied incoming damage, others divided it, and nothing was comparable to anything else. If you ever tried to work out whether a Heavy Tank was twice as tough as a Medium Tank or four times, the honest answer is that the game couldn’t tell you either.

Every unit now has a single armor rating, shown on its info card as +35 or −39. Zero is baseline, positive is tougher, negative is more fragile. Upgrades stack simply on top: Sack Barricades and Top Armor each add a layer, and aircraft get their own Aircraft Armor layer. Player and enemy versions of every unit now carry matching values, and every info card has been updated.

Every unit was rebalanced alongside this. One consequence, stated plainly: because so much moved at once, every version before 1.20 has imbalances. Nothing game-breaking, but if something felt off in an older build, that’s why.

Foldables and Tablets

This one started when we got our hands on a Galaxy Z Fold 6. We launched the game on the unfolded screen and it looked, honestly, terrible. The layout was built for a long, narrow phone, and on a nearly square screen it fell apart.

So large screens now get their own layout. On tablets and unfolded phones:

• Unit categories and unit selection move to a new bottom panel.
• The aircraft queue becomes a vertical strip along the left edge.
• Options sits in the top left.
• The cameras on every map are re-framed for the wider view.
• The game renders at a much higher resolution, so the battlefield is sharp instead of stretched.

The main menu, pause menu and loading screen artwork were all extended to fit any screen shape. The game switches layouts live, so fold or unfold mid-match and it adapts. On the cover screen, the intro video now runs edge to edge. The phone layout stays exactly as you know it.

A side effect we didn’t plan for: Google Play now lists the game for about 60 more tablets and 37 more Chromebooks than before. And on regular phones, the UI now accounts for notches, so nothing hides under the cutout anymore.

The Unit Panel Scrolls

This is a bigger change than it sounds. The 4×4 grid was a hard ceiling on how many units the game could ever hold, and now it’s gone. Categories scroll, with the same subtle haptic buzz the main menu uses. Expect a lot of new units; two of them are in this update.

A New Look for the Battlefield

• Rebuilt green biome. A new landscape and new ground materials. The battlefield was also extended, so the edges never show on wider screens.
• Shadows. Trees, buildings, bunkers and fences now cast shadows on both the green and snow maps. This one had been bugging us for weeks: shadows showed in the editor and never on the phone. The culprit turned out to be the ground itself. The fix cost nothing in framerate on our Galaxy S20 test phone.

Air Combat and Missiles

• Dogfights reworked. Aircraft collide far less, flight behavior was updated, and targeting costs considerably less performance.
• The player Heavy Bomber can shoot down aircraft again. The enemy version always could. Ours was missing a single node that started its aiming loop, so it never aimed at all.
• The Interceptor’s collision body was standing vertically. We still have no idea how. It explains most of the strange Interceptor flying you’ve seen.
• The Strike Jet’s Radar Scrambler actually scrambles radars now.
• Missiles reworked. Trajectories and damage have been overhauled. If a missile’s target dies mid-flight, it now strikes where the target was instead of wandering off.
• Strike Jet missiles launch facing the right way and are bigger and easier to see.
• Flak guns on both sides fire a little faster.

Fixes

• Select All Armored now picks up every armored unit. The Mammoth had never been included at all.
• AP Shells and Shellbangs now cancel each other. Before, AP Shells applied a permanent damage bonus that Shellbangs never cleared, so swapping between them stacked it forever.
• The Sniper Tank has a muzzle flash. So, for the first time, does the Medium Tank it was built from.
• Smoke no longer lingers after a destroyed unit, and enemy tank barricades no longer smoke for no reason.
• Units no longer drive through each other.
• The achievement popup is now centered.
• Health and ammo bars cost a fraction of what they did, which you’ll feel in big battles.

Tested on a Mid-Range Phone

Flagships were never the question. The real test is the kind of phone most people actually carry, so we handed 1.20 to a mid-range Android phone and played full matches on it.

The specs: a MediaTek Dimensity 7300-class processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 6.7-inch 120 Hz AMOLED screen, running Android 15. Nothing exotic, and nowhere near flagship money.

It ran well. Smooth battles, no crashes, and the new shadows and landscape looked the way they do on our own phones. If your phone has similar specs, or anything better, you’re in good shape for 1.20.

What’s Next

The Hammer Tank’s own upgrades. Sharing the Artillery’s set is a stopgap, and we know it.

New levels. We held them back until the game ran the way we wanted it to. It does now.

More units. The grid was the reason the roster grew slowly, and it’s gone.

Drag-box selection. Still on the list, and still owed to you.

See you in 1.21.

Technical details: the numbers and how it was built

New units

Stat	Sniper Tank	Hammer Tank
Damage	0.75	1.0
Fire interval	15 s	10 s
Range	3000	2050
Minimum range	450	None
HQ damage	0.25	0.70
Armor	0	+100
Speed	76	50 (slowest in the game)
Build / Research	700 / 1000	1800 / 2500
Upgrades	Camouflage, AP Shells, Shellbangs (unique)	Artillery’s set, for now
Firing arc	Turret, 360°	Whole body turns, 360°

For comparison: the Mammoth does 0.30 damage every 2.5 s with 0.35 HQ damage. The Artillery has the same 2050 range as the Hammer, but a 900 minimum range and a limited firing arc.

Armor ratings

Formula: damage taken = damage ÷ (1 + max(armor + layers, −90) ÷ 100). The −90 floor stops a stack of negatives from producing absurd damage. Layers: Sack Barricades +50, Top Armor +50, Aircraft Armor +40. Old values were converted mechanically, as armor = (divisor − 1) × 100 or (1 ÷ multiplier − 1) × 100, so nothing changed in feel unless we meant it to. Enemy units use the same values as their player counterparts.

Unit	Armor
Recon SUV	−75
Supply Truck	−67
Radar Truck	−60
Artillery	−39
AA Truck	−33
Ferret	−23
Detonator	−23
Sniper Tank	0
Tank Barricade	+25
Cannon	+30
Medium Tank	+35
Rocket Bunker	+50
Anti-Air Gun	+70
Heavy Tank	+100
Hammer Tank	+100
Mammoth	+200
War Airship	+290

How it was built

• Armor. One Mitigated Damage function now lives on each unit base class, and every health subtraction in the project routes through it. The tutorial Ferrets were converted at exactly equivalent values, so tutorial difficulty is unchanged.
• Heavy Bomber. The player version was missing one AimAlignment loop call in BeginPlay. Firing is gated on being aimed, so it never fired at aircraft.
• Propellers. Ten aircraft were each running a rotation timer every 0.08 s (the Apocalypse every 0.02 s, 50 times a second). Now it runs every 0.2 s with a wider arc: identical on screen, a fraction of the work.
• Lingering smoke. A looping smoke effect on a unit that can be destroyed must not be pooled. A pooled looping emitter was what kept smoke alive after the unit died.
• Shadows. The ground mesh was baking its lighting into a 4×4 pixel lightmap, on the same UVs as its tiled textures, so no shadow could ever land on it. It now has a proper lightmap UV channel at 1024. Units still don’t cast shadows; that would need a fully dynamic sun, and we chose to spare mobile GPUs.
• Foldable resolution. Android caps the render height at 720 pixels. On a phone that’s fine; on the nearly square Fold screen it meant rendering at 838×720 and stretching 2.6×, fewer pixels than a phone. Wide screens now render at 1.6× that, around 1340×1150.
• Missiles. Each missile remembers its target’s position at launch. If the target is gone mid-flight, it flies to that spot and detonates there.
• Hammer Tank. Engine: the Heavy Tank loop pitched down to 0.7. Cannon: the Mammoth shot at 0.72, with a pitched-down War Airship explosion layered on for the thunder tail. The model imported at 17,944 triangles, 2.4× the Mammoth, so it got LODs at 17.9k / 6.3k / 2.2k and sits around 6k at normal zoom.
• Health bars. The per-unit health and ammo bar logic ran every frame. It went from 137 nodes to 31, and the ammo bar no longer re-lays out every frame.
• Tutorial camera. The scene capture that renders the tutorial’s picture-in-picture view now only runs during the tutorial. Before, it was rendering the whole scene a second time in every match.
• Memory. Measured on our Galaxy S20 through a heavy four-minute battle: steady at about 950 MB, no spikes, no kills.

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist
Update v1.20

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist is a free-to-play mobile RTS with no in-app purchases. Get it on Google Play, read about the iOS release, or see every unit in the game. Previous devlog: v1.19: Half the Download.