Time travel is difficult -- who would have thought? I've made a number of improvements to the way that late-game timelines function, solving a number of edge cases that you could run into. Mind Annexes have also been rebalanced so that it's much more tempting to get some of the other options beyond just Coprocessors. Your worker androids are notably more intelligent and effective, but so are Slumlords and angry gangs and rebels. If youve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, thatd be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if youve been meaning to write one, Id be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.

Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. Its a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.

Thanks for reading and for playing.

Update 22 Changelog

Clarity

• Pressure Points That Are Also Deals: Water Supplier and Open Pantry are now properly categorized as both Pressure Points and Deals in the dropdown.

Balance

• Firestarter Sanity: The Firestarter perk has been nerfed to only do 0.95x the intensity of "set the target on fire" that Flamethrower does, rather than 2.5x the intensity. This was massively overpowered to a ludicrous degree rather than being minor little addition to an already cool gun.

• Mind Annex Options: The number of Mind Annexes that you get has been tripled. The cost of Coprocessors and Temples of Minds have also been tripled, so there is effectively zero change here. Android, Vehicle, and Mech extenders have had their costs stay where they were, which means that they are effectively 1/3 the price they used to be. This should help make them more competitive with Coprocessors, which otherwise dominate.

Timeline Shenanigans

• Timelines Kept Up To Date: Updated the game so that every time you save any savegame, and you're in the correct profile folder for it, AND you're in the most recent turn for that timeline, it updates the central timeline data for that timeline. It does this via a very simply file copy, making things really straightforward. This means that people who use quicksaves to jump between timelines are not going to run into stale older timelines. A very small number of people were doing this, but it was quite confusing.

• Remembering Chapter 4: Fixed an issue where if you loaded older savegames in a certain order, your central profile metadata could be overwritten such that it would forget that you were actually in chapter 4. It would get you back to chapter 3, but no further.

• Intelligence Class Crossloading: When you are directly loading or saving savegames, or diving into or our of timelines, it no longer plays the sound and shows the animation and message about your intelligence class going up or down.

• The Click Paradox: Fixed a complicated issue where some timelines were not properly accessible in the {redacted} if you merged savegames in a certain way. It now repairs the data so that they are properly clickable.

Unit Intelligence

• Better Worker Spawns: When you have a cyberocracy hub or similar, it will no longer spawn workers androids in locations that have a security clearance that is too high for them. This was causing needless conflict.

• Off Limits Areas: Your worker and bulk androids now make an extra effort to no longer take shortcuts through high-security locations.

• Reigning In Aggression: Fixed an issue where if Worker Androids didn't have anything better to do, they would go pick fights with non-alarmed enemy guards. They are meant to hunt enemies, but are only supposed to go after enemy guards if the alarm is one.

• increasing Aggression: Slumlords, and angry gang members or rebels, were being way too passive when thrust into a conflict with the player. They now appropriately take out their displeasure on players once more.

Bugfixes

• Post-Apocalyptic Stealth: Fixed an issue where if you were in the post-apocalypse, and you were playing a stealth network, then it was complaining about your lack of decoy tower.

• Wealth Volume Correction: Corrected the commentary about the amount of wealth in one of the private residences. It now says (of 500k wealth): Even amongst managers, it would take over 250 years to earn that much, and it was just lying around. For an average citizen, this is twelve thousand years' worth of income.

• Post-Apocalyptic Intelligence: Fixed an issue where your intelligence class could remain too high in the post-apocalypse if you had a deal with the NCOs, or possibly if you had sold a bunch of brainpals. Those no longer help you.

• Pocket Nuke Fix: Fixed an issue where if you had two or more of the same kind of pocket nuke, it would accidentally expend two of them whenever you used one of them.

Full notes here.

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