RED GARDEN's MOBA pivoted hard this year — the card-RTS is still there, tested and working, but it's not what we're building toward anymore. The arena is: a real click-to-move 10v10, with a hero roster and a living map.
Today it went from five heroes standing in an empty field to eleven heroes fighting over real ground.
**The territory system.** Two markers on the map used to just sit there, rendered but inert — no gameplay attached to them at all. They're a real contest now: each one tracks signed pressure that drifts toward whichever team has more weighted presence nearby, decays back to neutral when it's a tie, and flips ownership once one side has pushed hard enough. It's the thing three different heroes' whole kits needed to exist at all.
**Six new heroes, three different mythologies.** Tree and Pizza hook straight into that territory system — Tree's presence literally counts double toward capturing ground it stands on, Pizza corrupts a contested cell just by being near it. Flamel absorbed what used to be a separate, nameless "Druid" archetype into one hero — turns out Druid had no actual lore behind it anywhere, while Flamel is a real historical figure with a real legend, so the merge kept his name and folded the mechanics in as flavor instead of inventing a new character for a placeholder. Then Morrigan, the Irish war goddess who never lets a hero fight alone, showed up as a "meta jungler" — she thrives on ground nobody's claimed yet, which is about as close to an actual jungle as this map has right now. Right behind her: the Dagda, whose whole myth is a club that kills with one end and revives with the other depending only on which end swings first — so that's exactly how his signature ability works, no simplification needed, the myth was already a game mechanic. And The Courier — Ratatoskr, the squirrel who's run insults up and down the World Tree for centuries and started editing them somewhere along the way — got a kit built entirely around the two fixed points on the map instead of anything ally- or enemy-relative, since that's literally his job.
Eleven heroes, three real mythologies, one map that actually reacts to who's standing on it.
There's a live bot pool running matches on this exact build right now — the same code these notes describe, not a staged demo. If you've got a build of the client, you can queue into it.
More heroes are on the way. Ranked play is designed but not built yet. The card-RTS side is untouched, still fully working, just not where the energy's going.
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