Just picked up this game, and it's awesome!

I'm having trouble figuring out how to do some basic gameplay stuff, though, and can't handle sitting through a 45 minute tutorial. Hoping someone can answer some questions:

Is there a way to heal my base? If so, how?

How do you upgrade your walls and cannons? Is that doable at the start of the game, or is it a power-up I get later on?

Man oh man, that was frustrating.. turns out, the popup you get when you start the game isn't a broken scrollbox, it's a pair of checkboxes. Normal difficulty is not checking either of them

I REALLY didn't want to throw away a few hours' progress and start over to get off "corsair" mode, so I used a hex editor to tinker with the game's save files. First I used process explorer to find where the save files are (checked which handles the game process was accessing) and then I used vbindiff to find the generator health in the save file. It looks like there's a double starting at offset 0x8A with your generator health, I guess I'll just edit my health back to full occasionally.. D:

haha, uh oh.. I finally beat the game and it looks like I'm the only one who's beaten it on "Corsair" difficulty judging by the achievement numbers

I'd like to formally clarify that I did not earn that achievement by any means. I think "Corsair" difficulty is impossible, since the game involves so much grinding, there's no way to prevent your core from taking some damage here and there, and you heal for such a tiny amount when you get achievements (often less than the unpreventable damage involved in replaying the level)

Also the "Twin Destroyers" mission was literally impossible. The destroyers blow up 95% of the squares on the map every round even if you interrupt all their attacks. I set my walls to have 10x health and it was STILL hard, since the destroyers would clear out a good 20% of the map anyway

The last mission was pretty ridiculous too, but I think a really good player could beat it without cheating. The transition from the second to the third and final phase blows up the whole map, so you'd have to be ready to quickly throw together a new mini-base and figure out some way to interrupt the lasers that leave unbuildable squares. I worked at it for a few hours and never pulled it off, but I think I was close.

All in all, I think it's clear the game creator has been playing Rampart every day for 20 years, and tuned the difficulty level to her own skill, haha.

That said, the game was really excellent. GOG says I played 10 hours, but I could swear it was 20+, well worth the cost of entry

So I take it that this means there's no healing apart from maybe grinding earlier levels well enough that the healing at end of level exceeds the loss?

Oof, looks like I'm about to restart. Fought the first dragon in area 2, had a single round without power and now I'm at around 15% left.

Thank you for the heads up, and kudos for actually doing the investigative work :-)