(Releases 2026.03.21 – 2026.05.05)

Commanders! Unless you have been living under a rock, (and honestly if so, I envy you), you have probably already heard about the potential partnership with Hooded Horse that the Admin Team and I have been cooking up.

We plan to make some proper announcements about that soon, but for now, we have addressed what leaked from our internal comms with the contributors. We hope you can separate the wheat from the chaff when parsing the controversy.

Tim, Hooded Horse’s CEO, has also said hi in our subreddit and explained a bit more about the things we are cooking together. Give it a read and say hi too!

Now, in some actual gamer news, let’s see what we’ve got from the last month (and a bit) of BAR development!

✨ Visual Overhaul: New Effects

This period saw a major push on next-gen GL4 visual effects, bringing the game significantly closer to a modern visual standard:

• Build Particles – Are now energy cube shaped with varying size/speeds and noise/brightness. Particles now also home in towards the target when moved.
• Death Fire & Smoke – Exploding unit-pieces now burst into proper fire and smoke trails + using the same effect crashing aircraft trails.
• Beam Lasers – Beam lasers received a complete visual rework: traveling pulse effect. Handles moving origin/target fadeout better: no longer displays beams for each fadeout step.
• Plasma Cannon Projectiles – Plasma projectiles now use a new multi-billboard rendering approach with improved noise, size calculations
• Missile Thruster/Trails – Missiles now have their thrusters properly attached to their missile models, previously they were limited to 30 fps, trails are still limited but can be positioned more correctly instead of starting in front of the missile models!
• Shield Effects – Shields received visual enhancements and now only show when in (air) LoS (bugfix).
• SSAO – Improved quality, more pronounced and wont render on top of grass/particles! (+fix for AMD cards)
• Bloom Shader – Enhanced overall and wont overbright as easy
• Brakelights – Vehicles now have dynamic brake lights that illuminate when decelerating.
• Metal/Geothermal Spots - when under water these are no longer distorted
• Grass - bends when walking on top of it

Misc Visual Fixes

• FFA anonymouse team colors are now all the same when you are (becoming) spectator
• Commander name tags, healthbars, rank icons, group number, wait and energy icons are no longer affected by game lighting/effects
• LOS view remains the same after LuaUI reload
• Added measures to prevent white-outed ui elements

⚔️ Gameplay Changes

EasyTax 2.0

The Easy Sharing Tax modoption has been completely overhauled. Key changes:

• 30% tax applies when sending resources, overflowing resources, assisting ally construction, or inserting metal into partly reclaimed wrecks for resurrection.
• Combat unit transfers remain free.
• Economy buildings/factories given to allies are now stunned for 30 seconds instead of being blocked outright.
• Builder units (including commanders and rezbots) given to allies have their buildspeed set to 0 for 30 seconds — they can still move and start builds, just can't make progress unassisted.
• Commanders can now be shared.
• Partially built units still can't be given (except for mex/geo upgrades or taking over a dead ally).

General:

• Napalm & Acid on Water - Napalm and acid weapons now create damaging area effects when hitting water or lava (not void). Areas on water have half duration. Submarines are immune to area damage.
• Lab Reclaim Refund - When a factory is reclaimed by you or an ally while producing a unit, the metal already spent on that unit is now refunded. No more losing that partially-built Titan's worth of metal.
• Map Lava - Lava now damages aircraft inside it as well, and also damages features (wrecks/rocks) that have no metal value. Also when hit: lava no longer displays water splashes!
• Area Attack Limiter - Prevents excessive area-of-effect spam (lag) by limiting how many area-attack commands can be issued in a short period. Bombers are excluded.
• Bomber No Air Target - Prevents bombers from targeting air units, fixing an edge case where bombers could be ordered onto air in unexpected ways.
• Fixed turret re-aiming behavior for several units including Garp and Pincer, aligning turret rotation speeds with their actual body turn rates.
• Cluster plasma projectiles now use shield radius when calculating deflection, instead of using a fixed value.

Misc Fixes

• EMP units can now manually target floating labs.
• Reclaim/resurrect progress bars are now hidden under fog of war.
• Transport + transportees are killed on the same frame (preventing stragglers).
• Overpen no longer breaks early on a dead unit or invalid feature.
• Area DoTs now use the largest of the area radius or the target's collision radius for hit detection.
• Preventing some self-flanking bonus cases

⚖️ Balance

Universal Brakerate & Sightdistance Patch

• Brakerate set to a minimum of 90 elmos/s² for vehicles (helps artillery stop cleanly at firing range) and 180 for radar/jammer bots.
• Sightdistance minimum set to 330 for vehicles, 380 for bots (except crawling bombs at 260). This notably improves Centurions, Fiends, rocket bots, cons, and some artillery.
• Legion also received brakerate/sightdistance treatment in a follow-up patch, matching the same standards applied to Armada and Cortex. See dedicated post for details: https://discord.com/channels/549281623154229250/697141979892416512/1500902036625952828

Misc Balance news:

• The Community Balance Modoption has been updated! See the tweaks the players came up with!
• Legion Balance Patch - read the full breakdown.

🖥️ UI & Quality of Life

New Widgets

• Unit Repeat Icons – Displays icons on units that have Repeat mode active.
• Unit Fire State Icons – Displays icons indicating a unit's current fire state (for Hold Fire and Return Fire).

PiP Improvements

• All PiP (Picture-in-Picture Minimap) keybinds are now fully configurable
• ALT+scroll now required to zoom in PiP (configurable), preventing accidental zoom.
• Activity tracking: smoother zoom and less aggressive zoom-in.
• Multiple bug fixes: shift-queuing, command queue, camera move, radar wobble accuracy, unit taken/transferred events.

Home Grid Prioritizes Advanced Labs & Gantries

The build grid home screen now puts Advanced Labs and T3 Gantries in the priority first row for advanced constructors, hover cons, and seaplane cons — ensuring they're always accessible regardless of how many items are in the build list.

ETA Timer for Feature Reclaim/Resurrect

Units reclaiming or resurrecting features (wrecks, rocks) now display an ETA timer, matching the behavior already present for building construction.

Total Buildpower in Info Card

The unit info card now shows a unit's total buildpower for builders, formatted in shorthand (e.g., 18.5k).

Restructured Restriction Modoptions

• New modoption: No Sea Units – bans all sea units.
• "No Tech 2" no longer also removes Tech 3.
• Removed the broken "No Defenses" option (to be re-thought).

keybinds

• Open chat and type /set_camera_anchor [index] then move the camera and
• type /focus_camera_anchor [index] to recall the saved camera state.
• fov [number] - Set Field of View to [number] or 45 degrees
• fov_inc [number] - Increase Field of View [number] or 5 degrees
• fov_dec [number] - Decrease Field of View [number] or 5 degrees

🎵 Music

• Objective Unfurled by Leon Devereux (menu track)
• Three Raptor tracks from West Basinger: Bioweapon, Adaptation, Biomass Reclamation.
• April Fools 2026 – Community remix submissions from the last "Call to Arms" event were added to the game as special event music.

It came to our attention that the letter we sent to our contributor team about ongoing talks with a potential publisher partnership has been shared publicly without our authorisation. The document is real. We had been planning to make a proper public announcement if the contract is signed and we could coordinate the rollout with the publisher, but since excerpts are now making rounds, it makes sense to put the main facts on the record directly so the conversation can be based on accurate information instead of selective quoting.

Together with the other admins we have been working on negotiating a deal with Hooded Horse, a publisher specialising in strategy games. You probably have heard about them, their catalogue includes Manor Lords, Old World, Terra Invicta, Against the Storm, HOMM: Olden Era, and a long list of others in the genre. They have a strong reputation among developers for being hands-off on creative direction and unusually transparent about how they operate which is why we figured out it might be interesting to see what’s possible to build together. 

Why we wanted this

The partnership got real traction on our side because of what it actually unlocks. Parts of BAR have been hard to push forward under a fully volunteer setup. Some areas just struggle to attract volunteer interest because they aren't the most exciting work to do in your spare time. Others need a level of coordination, scheduling and team hierarchy that's extremely difficult to achieve in a hobbyist team, where everyone contributes on their own pace, on their own terms. Both categories have been very obvious bottlenecks for years.

Securing funding could help us alleviate these hurdles. We can hire dedicated people for the work that needs sustained focus, fill the gaps that volunteer enthusiasm doesn't naturally cover, and put proper full-time coordination on parts of the project where production milestones depend on it. The result is a Steam release with much bigger scope, on a shorter timeline, than we could realistically pull off ourselves.

This also opens up real job opportunities for our existing contributors. Many of the people who have been building BAR on evenings and weekends for years are exactly the right people for the paid roles that come out of this deal. We are committed to giving existing contributors hiring preference, and the goal is for as many of them as possible to be able to carry their careers forward with BAR rather than treat it as a permanent side project. For people who've poured serious time into this game, that's a meaningful shift.

The whole point of the partnership, on our side, is to push BAR much further than we've been able to so far, and to give as many of the people who built it the chance to keep building it, this time on a real budget. However, marrying the community-driven soul of this project with commercial incentives required serious work to make sure nothing about what makes BAR what it is today gets taken away. We have done that work. 

What's protected

• BAR remains available for free. BAR remains available for free. This has been our consistent promise through the years and we are keeping it. The free multiplayer experience you are enjoying today will be available both through the existing BAR website launcher (as it is today) and on Steam, with full feature parity and cross-play. Nothing currently free becomes paid. The monetisation is based on premium single-player content built on top of it, whose costs will be covered by the funding.
• No IP transfer. BAR's brand, trademarks and intellectual property stay with the BAR team and the contributors who built it. The publisher gets the licence to distribute the game on Steam and help with proper marketing to give the title the powerful launch it deserves.
• Off-ramp built in. If the partnership is ever terminated for whatever reason, the free version stays free and the community keeps developing it. The free version isn't tied to the publishing relationship continuing.
• Reinvestment commitment. A binding internal commitment makes sure most of what BAR receives flows back into the project (development, infrastructure, contributor support, content) rather than getting siphoned out as company profit.

 

Where we are

The contract isn't signed yet. We're discussing the offer with full disclosure to our contributor team, including a sentiment survey, before signing. The only way we see ourselves steering the project in this way is by making sure there is a strong mandate from our beloved team. 

What's next

If the mandate is clear we will proceed with the signing and then a full public announcement will follow. We are excited to share what we have been working on with the Hooded Horse team. We will make that announcement properly and will give it the treatment it deserves

If you have questions or concerns, bring them to us and try to not rely on third-party framing/potentially doctored versions aimed to cause harm. We will be reading and responding where we can, and a fuller picture will follow shortly.

Thank you for your attention and continued trust, 

The BAR Admin Team