A turn is one decision, not two

You used to Invoke, and then separately work out which cards to spend on the Manifestation that came back at you.

Two actions. Except you were never actually deciding twice. Watch anyone play and you will see them count their hand before they commit, because the real question in Xenocide is not “what should I play” but “can I still cover this afterwards”. The payment was already decided before the play was made. The interface was just making you type it in.

What changed

• Select your cards and the ways to cover the counterattack appear beside the Invoke button. Pick one and both halves of the turn happen together.
• When nothing in your hand covers it, the game says so, loudly, before you commit. That is the single most common way to lose.
• Endure carries its payment the same way, so the cheaper option is not also the slower one.

Why I was confident enough to change it

I did not want to redesign the loop on a hunch, so I measured it across 120 games first.

• About half of every interaction in a game was settling a Manifestation. Forty-nine per cent at two players, forty-eight at three, fifty-one at four.
• Between two thirds and four fifths of those had exactly one cheapest way to settle them. You were not deciding. You were confirming arithmetic.
• Meanwhile, not one play decision in any of those games had only a single legal option. The median was six to eight.

So one half of the loop was genuinely interesting and the other half was ceremony, and I had been treating them as equals.

Two details worth knowing

The options are worked out exactly, not approximately. If you owe 10 and hold a 10, a 6 and a 5, reaching for the small cards first burns 11 to pay 10. The game solves it properly rather than being greedy about it.

And it works from the hand you are guaranteed to still be holding: your selection removed, nothing added. A Dream draw might hand you something better, but the server must never tell you what is on top of the Gathering, and a plan made from the guaranteed remainder is always still legal after the draw.