Encounters and patrols
Two kinds of fight against the house. Encounters pay through their ordered daily battles; each patrol tier pays resources once per UTC day.
Encounters
Three encounters, five battles each. Every launch is bound to the exact next unpaid battle for that encounter, difficulty and UTC day. The first two opponents are authored; later opponents are deterministic daily draws for that battle.
Each has three difficulties:
| Difficulty | Pays |
|---|---|
| Training | nothing |
| Normal | the listed reward |
| Hard | double, and must be unlocked first |
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. Each effective tier's resource and salvage reward can be collected once per UTC day. 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 and includes the exact daily battle that was seated. Settlement pays only while that battle is still next; if parallel matches carry the same stale battle, only the first can advance or pay. 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.