Encounters and patrols

Two kinds of fight against the house, and both pay.

Encounters

Three encounters, five battles each. The roster of opponents is fixed per encounter, and which one you face is decided by how many you have already cleared, so an encounter is a ladder rather than a single fight repeated.

Each has three difficulties:

Hard is bought once per encounter with materials.

How the house is made easy

Not by lowering its numbers. By padding its deck.

Filler cards are added to the opponent's list, and a diluted deck draws its good cards less often. A hard opponent flies clean. It is the same mechanic that makes over-fitting your own aircraft a mistake, pointed the other way.

The resulting win-rate bands are locked automatically, so a change that makes normal unwinnable fails before release rather than reaching you.

Patrols

Free-roaming fights out on the world map, tiered easy through impossible, with the opponent matched to your current power. See The world map.

Everything about the reward is decided server side

The browser never reports an outcome. When a match ends, the match server posts the result to your player object server to server, behind a shared secret, guarded by a once-flag so a rejoin cannot bank a second payout.

The encounter context is latched write-once by the first JOIN that supplies it and is immutable afterward, and unknown difficulty or patrol values map to the non-paying or lowest tier deliberately. A typo must never become profitable.

There is no path by which a browser reports its own win.