Chat's orbital strike

Chat could always help in FortWar: boost a turret, put a drone on a mine, stand on the walls. What it didn't have was a moment: the thing everybody in chat does together that visibly saves the fort.

So now chat has a satellite.

Chat fires the strike at a boss wave: the banner credits the viewer, and the beam finishes the Behemoth.

!charge

Any viewer can type !charge to fill the 🛰 meter. It's at the top of the chat panel, on the chat pill and on the stream overlay, so everyone can see how close it is.

Here's the important part: each viewer's first charge in a minute counts the most. Your first !charge adds 4%, your second 2%, your third 1%, and after that nothing until your minute is up. So one person spamming !charge takes about 14 minutes to fill it. Five people charging every 30 seconds fill it in about 3.

That's on purpose. The strike is meant to come from a lot of chat, not from whoever has the fastest fingers. The best way to get it is to get everyone typing.

!strike

When the meter is full, the game says so in chat, and the first viewer to type !strike fires it.

You don't pick the spot. The satellite aims at the biggest group of monsters in view: a target ring appears, there's a second and a half of warning, and then the beam lands. Every monster or raider inside it takes a huge hit. It never hurts your own buildings, troopers or viewers' avatars, so there's no way to fire it at the wrong moment and wreck your own fort.

A big green 🛰 ORBITAL STRIKE banner goes up, "called in by" whoever fired it, and the hit goes in the "while you were gone" replay too.

Against a boss it's even better: the Behemoth takes triple damage from the beam.

The cooldown

After a strike, the satellite cools down for 2 minutes. Chat can keep charging during the cooldown, but at half rate, and only up to half the meter. A busy chat banks part of the next strike, but even a huge chat has to charge again after the cooldown. The meter tells you where it stands: "cooling 114s · !charge ½", or "50% banked".

Why only chat?

The streamer has no key for it. You can't fire it yourself. It only exists in forts with a chat that can reach them (Twitch chat or bot viewers), and it's the one big thing in the game that's chat's alone.

It works whether chaos is on or off. It's always on your side.

Charge it up

If you stream FortWar, teach your chat two words: !charge and !strike. Play free at fortwar.io. And come charge the satellite on my stream at twitch.tv/kiralumen. If you have ideas for chat's next big moment, I'm listening in chat and in the Discord.

— Jeff