Portents

You can see it coming now. Two changes that are really one idea: a charged spell should be a thing both sides can read and play around, and the eidolon you called should actually arrive on the thing you called it onto.

Summons seek their target again

A summon committed onto a UNIT now follows that unit and lands on it wherever it has walked to, like every other magical charge in the game. Aiming at open ground still stays on the tile — that half never changed.

This reverses the ground-anchoring from two days ago, and the reason is worth stating because the anchor was not obviously wrong. It made the circle readable, and it also made the circle free to walk out of: the AI's move scorer treats any tile under a committed cast as disqualifying, whatever the detour costs, so it dodged perfectly and for nothing. A charged tile-anchored blast could therefore never land on anybody paying attention.

Measured over 20,000 AI-vs-AI 3v3 battles:

	before	after
Eidolon Caller win rate	36.1% (last of 18)	52.5% (7th)
damage per battle	40	202
kills per battle	0.21	1.10
never landed a hit	63.1%	31.7%
share of turns using its own kit	45%	68%

The usage table was the tell: it counts LANDED casts, so the collapse was the whiff count — and it graded by charge length exactly as the dodge explains. Odin (7 CT) went from 1127 landed casts to 87; Golem (2 CT) only halved. Everything else on the board comes down about a point, which is what a bottom-ranked job rejoining the fight looks like. The Iron Fist still leads at 67.4%.

Two AI-side fixes were tried first and are recorded in the commit so nobody retries them: leading the target (worth +0.4 on the summoner and −1.9 on the dragoon) and pricing the dodge instead of treating it as absolute (worth +5.1, and it let a caster walk into its own Meteor again). The rule was the problem, not the aim.

A damage summon still cannot hit its own summoner, and still can hit allies. That was already true and is now covered in both directions.

Pending casts light up the ground

A charge you cannot see is a charge you cannot play around. The cast queue has been public state in the engine for ages — the AI reads it to decide where to stand — and the battle log always announced it, but the board said nothing, so the human was the only participant in the match who could not see the circle.

Now the footprint is painted on the tiles while it charges, and the colour answers one question: what does this cast do to my team?

• RED — it will hurt, and one of yours is standing in it.
• YELLOW — something is charging there and nothing of yours is in it.
• GREEN — it will help, and it reaches one of yours.

Your own damaging cast turns red the moment one of your units wanders into it, which is the friendly-fire case this exists for. A single-target cast rings the unit it is aimed at instead of painting a square under its feet.

Because summons seek again, a unit-aimed circle now follows its target across the board while a ground-aimed one sits still — so the two ways of aiming are, for the first time, visibly different things.

Harm contracts inward and a boon blooms outward, so the reading survives without colour: red-versus-green is the worst possible pair for a colourblind player. The beat also quickens as the charge runs down.

Also in this build

• On-move auras reach one tile. Marching Ballad, Razor Pavane, Commanding Presence and Witherstep now touch the four tiles beside the mover instead of a twelve-tile diamond — the same footprint the two aura reactions already use, so the pair reads as one idea.
• The turn pointer bobs up and down around its rest height instead of hopping upward, and has the drop shadow it was missing.
• A whole battle, filmed — a 5v5 rendered from a saved replay, plus a YouTube channel to put it on: @playshatteredcrowns.