Global Ordnance v1.21: The Corsair and the Twin Bomber

Two new planes. Three new enemy tanks. A game that looks and feels brand new. Global Ordnance update 1.21 is a big one.

New here? Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist is a free mobile RTS: real-time strategy with tanks, aircraft and an enemy that adapts to you, built for your phone, with no in-app purchases.

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 planes.

New Aircraft: The Corsair

Four machine guns, a big growling engine, and a navy paint job. The Corsair is fast in the dive and forgiving in the turn. It does not fly intercept missions like the Interceptor. It is built to hit hard and get home.

Its signature upgrade is Twin Rockets. The Interceptor fires one rocket per pass. The Corsair fires two, one from under each wing. That is enough to destroy a light tank outright and do major damage to a medium tank.

Full numbers are on the Corsair unit card.

New Aircraft: The Twin Bomber

Two engines, a long reach, and a price tag to match. The Twin Bomber opens every attack with a long-range missile, fired from so far out that the target never sees it coming.

Buy 2x Missiles and it carries a second one under the other wing. What the first one cracks, the second one finishes.

It can also fight back against the things that hunt it. Chaff knocks enemy anti-air guns offline for a while, and the Radar Scrambler blinds enemy radars.

Just keep it away from anti-air guns when the Chaff runs out. It is fast, not tough.

Full numbers are on the Twin Bomber unit card, and every upgrade for both planes is on the aircraft upgrades list.

A Whole New Look and Feel

The look and feel of the game has been totally reworked. If you have been away for a couple of weeks, you will notice it the moment a match starts.

• Units are far more visible. Every tank, truck, plane and bunker now has a dark outline. Your army pops out of the battlefield instead of melting into it.
• Both maps were repainted. The green map has a warmer sun and new trees. The snow map is colder and bluer, with a whole army camp to fight around. Look for the snowman.
• Guns turn before they fire. Turrets used to snap onto a target instantly. Now they swing round, and the big guns swing slower. Sneaking up behind a heavy tank finally pays off.
• You can see every shot. Guns now draw tracers across the field: white for normal rounds, red for armor-piercing, acid green for the Heavy Tank’s uranium shells.

The Enemy Has Your Tanks

The last update gave you the Sniper and the Hammer. Now the enemy has them too, along with the Trident. They roll out where the Mammoth used to. You just never know which one is coming.

A Friendlier Adaptive AI

The Adaptive AI has been reworked. It is now much friendlier to beginners, while remaining as harsh as it was against experienced players.

New to the game? The enemy gives you room to learn. Smaller attacks, slower air raids, and the really scary stuff stays home. Start winning, and it stops being polite.

And it no longer waits for the match to end to make up its mind. The Adaptive AI now reads how you play in real time. Show it you know what you are doing, and it raises the stakes on the spot. What exactly does it watch? That is for you to find out.

It also learns from you. Shoot down two of its aircraft with your own V2, and it starts aiming V2s at your Strike Jets and Airships. You taught it that.

Three more things. The Anti-Air Gun hits 20% harder, the Airship is 65% tougher, and the Sniper Tank now fires every 10 seconds instead of 15. That goes for both sides.

A New Intro, and a Campaign on the Way

The game now opens with a new comic-style intro, and it shows a bit of Global Ordnance history. You can still skip it by tapping and holding the screen for a couple of seconds. Watch it once first, though.

It is only the beginning. We plan to make a campaign, so expect many more stories.

The Tutorial Is Paused

The tutorial from before v1.21 is very outdated, so we paused it for a while. You will notice the Tutorial button greyed out in the game.

We also got tons of complaints that the tutorial was slow. Well, fair enough… We will rework it and put it back.

Camera Effects is greyed out too. The filters worked until we switched off a costly graphics feature to make the game run faster. We’ll think of something.

Fixes

• Missiles and rockets now always blow up where their target stood, even if it dies first.
• Mammoths and Tridents crush almost anything smaller in their path, Tank Barricades included.
• Rocket Bunker missiles no longer explode twice.
• Strike Jet missiles take aircraft down on impact.
• Double-tapping to select every unit of a type is more forgiving.
• Cancelling Hammer Tank research now actually cancels it.
• Anti-air turrets hit by a Flash Bomb freeze instead of spinning.
• Explosion smoke no longer turns into squares.

Android 10 and Up

The game now needs Android 10 or newer. A few older phones could download the game but never start it. Google Play no longer offers it to them.

What’s Next for Global Ordnance

The Hammer Tank’s own upgrades. Yes, we said that last time. Two planes got in the way.

The reworked tutorial. Faster this time.

The campaign. The new intro is only the first story.

Enemy Corsairs and Twin Bombers. The other side does not have them yet. It will.

Drag-box selection. We found a way to implement it, but it wasn’t as straightforward as we anticipated. It’s already in the test version of the game, and it will reach the main version once we’re done testing. Thanks for your patience!

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist is free on Google Play. If you already have it, update 1.21 is waiting for you.

See you in 1.22.

Technical details: the numbers and how it was built

New aircraft

Stat	Corsair	Twin Bomber
Cost	$850	$1,550
Research cost	$1,100	$2,200
Research time	6.3 s	15 s
Build time	6.9 s	12 s
Air MG damage	30-55%	25-50%
Base airspeed	300 u/h	250 u/h
Built from	Interceptor	Light Bomber
Upgrades	AP Ammo (+15% damage), Chaff, Flash Bomb, Twin Rockets	2x Missiles, Chaff, Radar Scrambler

Research and build run 15% longer than the Interceptor’s for the Corsair, and 20% longer than the Light Bomber’s for the Twin Bomber. Both planes are brand new, and their balance is still settling. Expect these numbers to move in the next update.

Balance

• Anti-Air Gun. Damage 0.03 to 0.036, shown on its card as air damage 36%. Both sides.
• Sniper Tank. Fire interval 15 s to 10 s, shown on its card as fire rate 10s. Both sides.
• Airship. Armor +290 to +478. Both sides.
• Trampling. Mammoths and Tridents crush every ground unit except the Heavy Tank, the Hammer, the Rocket Bunker and each other. Tank Barricades can be crushed too.
• Enemy heavy slot. Each time the enemy’s Mammoth slot refills, it picks one of four at random: Mammoth, Hammer, Sniper or Trident. Heavy units arrive exactly as often as before.
• Enemy Tridents, Hammers and Artillery now stop to fire instead of shooting on the move.

How it was built

• Outlines. Every unit, defence and aircraft carries a dark outline. The ground texture on the green map was desaturated and darkened so units read against it.
• Maps. Green map: warmer sun, light haze, 31 new trees and bushes in place of the old ones. Snow map: bluer snow, colder haze, new spruces, pines, dead birches and boulders, plus an army camp with a watchtower, a tent, sandbags and the snowman.
• Turret rotation. Default turn speed is 8 for turrets and 4 for units that aim with the hull. Heavy Tank and Mammoth turrets run at 6.8, Hammer and Trident hulls at 3.2. A unit fires when its gun is within 10° of the target. Anti-air units are exempt, because they have to snap onto fast targets.
• Tracers. One ribbon effect with a slight wobble, on 24 unit types and 61 muzzle points. Every unit uses the same width, except the Hammer, whose tracer is four times thicker.
• Adaptive AI. The size and pace of the enemy ground force and of its air raids now follow how well you are doing, and its heaviest weapons unlock later for players who are still learning.
• V2 against aircraft. The enemy turns its V2 on your aircraft only after you score two aircraft kills with your own V2. The count is saved.
• Missiles. In 1.20 we said missiles strike where a dead target stood. Some did. A missile only remembered where its target was at launch. Now every missile and rocket updates that position each frame and flies to the last one if the target dies. That covers the Recon SUV, Interceptor, Corsair, Cremator and Rocket Bunker rockets and the long-range missiles.
• Intro. 74 seconds at 720p, about 9 MB. The old one was 20 seconds.
• Camera Effects. The filters are post-process colour grading. They worked until we turned off mobile HDR in favour of performance, which also switches off post-processing on phones. The setting is greyed out until we find another way.

Android 10, and a correction

In the 1.19 devlog we said that if your phone lacked Vulkan graphics, Google Play would simply not offer you the update. That was wrong. Play kept offering it, and on some older phones the game answered with an error box instead of a main menu. If that was you, we are sorry, m8.

1.21 fixes it properly. The app now declares Vulkan 1.1 as a requirement and Android 10 as the minimum, so Google Play filters those phones before the download instead of the game refusing them after it.

It also goes the other way. Phones with Adreno 600-series graphics on Android 10 and 11 were being turned away for no good reason, and they now run the game. We also changed how shaders are prepared in the background, aimed at a freeze some MediaTek phones hit when returning to the game.

Smaller fixes

• Category icons no longer stay dimmed after you cancel a research or a build.
• The Tank Barricade no longer has an ammo bar.
• The flash just before the main menu is gone, and the black screen on first launch is shorter.
• Double-tap select: the second tap can land on any unit of the same type.
• Strike Jet missiles used to take up to a second to destroy an aircraft they had already hit. Now it’s instant, since planes just don’t survive missile hits.

Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist
Update v1.21

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: v1.20: The Sniper and the Hammer.