Here's the complaint I kept getting, and it was right: you pressed March, and then that army belonged to the map until it arrived. Wrong target, war ended, enemy moved — didn't matter. No cancel, no change of mind, every action button greyed out for the whole walk. That's not a hard decision, it's just a thing you can't do. Marching armies now take two new orders: Redirect and Halt.
All of them. This one shipped without a ruleset bump, so it's live on every world already running, not just new ones. That's unusual for this game and I'm saying it plainly: normally a world keeps the rules it was born with. I made an exception here because a fix for "I can't take this order back" is no fix at all if it only reaches worlds nobody has founded yet.
Redirect, and a confession
Select a marching army and the March button now reads Redirect. Click a new hex and the army turns for it from wherever it happens to be standing that day. Movement you'd already banked comes with it, because those days were walked and paid for.
Now the confession. The engine never stopped you doing this. March has always accepted an army that was already moving, and it has always worked out the route from the army's current hex rather than its starting one. The order was legal, the pathfinding was correct, the whole thing was sat there working. I just never drew the button. Y'all spent months being told no by a panel, and there was nothing behind the no.
Halt is the actually new part
Halt is a genuinely new order. It stops an army on the hex it has already entered — it doesn't move, doesn't retreat, doesn't cost gold. It just stands down and waits for you.
Two rules on it worth knowing. First, an army that's occupying a hex cannot halt. If I let it, every siege in the game would come with a free escape hatch, and sieges are supposed to commit you. Break off by marching somewhere else, like always. Second, Halt throws away that day's movement budget, while Redirect keeps it. That's deliberate: it means bouncing an army through a halt to reset it is strictly worse than just redirecting, so there's nothing clever to exploit.
One side effect I like more than I expected: halting a settler party mid-march is now how you found a colony short of where you were originally headed. Spot better ground three hexes in, stop, settle.
Known issues (still open, still mine)
There's still no proper "lift the occupation" order. Marching the army away is the only way off a siege, and it's been on my list a long time.
A capital left untouched runs its food to zero around day ninety and stays there. Idle villagers won't fill empty farm slots on their own. Staff the farms by hand and you're fine.
If you hit something else, note the game day and what you'd just done. That pair is almost always enough for me to reproduce it.
Peace,
Yadah