Walking scenes load on slow connections; elemental strain timing pulled in

Walking scenes used to wait on every hero's walk and idle animations before showing you anything, which on slow connections meant either the scene revealed with art still streaming in front of you, or it got stuck mid-load and revealed half-painted. Hero animations are now treated as an upgrade rather than a gate: the static pose has to load, but the animations stream in behind the scene and swap to animated once they're ready. On a slow connection, the library scene's cold load drops from around 50 seconds to about 6, and Ormron Street's first load reveals in 16-21 seconds with nothing popping in afterwards.

Elemental strain — the turn cap that ends a fight if it drags on too long — used to default to turn 10 unless an enemy in the fight had passive AI, in which case it was picked from a reach-based tier of 8, 7, or 6 turns. The passive-enemy gating comes out: strain is now always picked from the reach-based tier, so the fight's reach decides when strain kicks in, not whether the AI happens to include a passive. Battle fatigue's offset drops from 5 to 3, so fatigue now starts 3 turns after strain instead of 5, tightening the window between the soft and hard stop. Campaign and sandbox fights pick this up; arena fights ship their own explicit values and don't change.

A recent fix that hid the chain-change reveal behind the Victory popup also accidentally hid the participating-heroes chain panel — the elemental chain shown during playback — on any turn you won. That's fixed: the chain-change reveal stays suppressed on a winning turn, but the participating-heroes panel renders on every turn now, win or not.