This major milestone unlocks another major part of the game's strategy layer as the New Boston underworld and its Contacts come alive in all new ways. It is great to see the roadmap design advancing with this - now your favored Contacts thrive while those you hate or work against wither. Up until now, most of your actions have focused on their inward impact - money for equipment, Experience for Training, new recruits. And while you've been able to meet new Contacts and alter their Traits and Services through storylines, all of your game decisions weren't also echoing into the wider underworld and into your network of Contacts. Now, your decisions regarding Contacts, running or ignoring their missions, selling them high Rarity Accounts and following their storylines all have [i[outward impact and will feed their dynamic evolution - changing their Traits, Services and more in ways unique to your game. Exciting times to be alive in New Boston! Let's check it out -
At the beginning of June, we threw down the gauntlet to ourselves to try to wrap up this ambitious set of roadmap milestones before the end of the quarter. We are smashing away now with the Agent EX recently out and the Contact Limit Breaks dropping today ... we're still in this fight with 10 days to go! If you like our style of Early Access and how hard our team is working to deliver improvements, gameplay depth, new features and content to you on a very regular basis, we hope you will say "Thank you" to the team by leaving a review! It doesn't have to be long, and you can always edit it later.

Contact Limit Breaks!

Contact Influence and Exposure Limit breaks work in similar ways to your merc's Hype and Stress Limit Breaks. Through your actions, story choices, relationships and changing Eras of the game, your Contacts will gain and lose Influence and Exposure and as their Influence and Exposure top 80%, they will have have a Limit Break and change for the better or the worse.

• Contacts can upgrade their services - like the Power Level of Weapons, Armor or Items - that they sell. With this update, a bunch of services can now be upgraded by Limit Breaks, with a sum total of over 30 new pieces of equipment coming into the game. This will be a rapidly expanding area as well with new upgradable services coming online for other disciplines as well.
• Contacts can upgrade their positive or negative Traits. Your Partnerships can deepen, their issues and hardpoints can grow and worsen.
• Contacts can get temporary positive or negative Traits, like the Hi-Priority Trait that adds +25% to all mission payments for 30 days.
• Exposed Contacts might duck into hiding for a while, disappearing off the scene for up to 30 days and unwilling to buy or sell anything.

Accruing Influence and Exposure

With LImit Breaks coming online, you'll naturally have more interest in the ways your Contacts gain Exposure and Influence. With this major milestone update, we've also plugged in some systems that were waiting for this day, so the new ways to get Exposure and Influence have come online:

• Completing missions for Contacts has always given Influence
• Mission secondary objectives have been expanded to include possible boosts to Influence (more on this below)
• Failing missions for Contacts now causes Exposure
• Ignoring a mission offered by a Contact now has a chance of causing Exposure
• Accounts of Rarity Epic or Legendary will grant a +1 Influence boost to the Contact you select
• More storylines include Influence and Exposure changes depending on how they play out
• Contact's Exposure Res Trait bonus directly reduces the % chance of gaining Exposure
• Contact's Influence Boost has been upgraded to be at % chance to double all Influence gains (huge!)

Contact Service Clarity

To help with making this clear, we've improved the Contact display of services to include their maximum level. This lets you compare, for example, Dr. Ashe to Dr. Knife to see who is selling higher level medical gear or that your recently upgraded Gun Runner who got a cool Limit Break for gun sales is now selling the best weapons on the street.
This also works well with the Sellers filter we added in the last update, so if you see a Limit Break from Origami Joe for Weapons, you can go check out specifically what he is selling today.

High Rarity Accounts

Consider carefully where your Epic and Legendary Accounts are sold these days as each one will add a +1 Influence bonus to the lucky Contact, whether sold for money or for favors.

High Power Level Mission Payments

As crafting is cresting the horizon (in June!?!?), the late game economy needs work. In order to begin to bring the late game economy into balance, we're cutting some of the mission payments to help bring them inline. The $2m and $5m missions in the late game throw things a bit out of whack. For missions at Power Level 5 and above (meaning, Team Power Level 5+ if you're on a balanced difficulty) the payments start to take a dip. Where you used to get $600K as the starting point for a Power Level 5 mission, you'll now start calculations at $500K. For PL 7, you've dropped from starting $2m to starting $1.2m and Power Level 10 went from a (whopping!) $25m to $4m. Storyline bonuses, conditions, secondary objectives, Contact Traits all still apply, so these are just the starting points of the negotiation :D

Secondary Objective Reward Update

With this major milestone update, we've improved the variety of secondary objective reward offerings, which previously only included extra money or extra XP. Now these secondary objectives can include gaining Favors from your Contact, additional boosts to their Influence or their Trust % with you. This extra variety is great to mix up the rewards, and it plays to the new Contact Limit Break feature that is rolling out with this update as well. The next set of updates for secondary objectives fill focus on expanding the types of goals you are asked to achieve beyond "go fast" and "go quiet" with a lot of exciting other options that will add cool complications.

Item Sales in the Underworld

For a little while, Item sales in the underworld have gotten pretty twisted around. Doctors were selling Grenades, Gun Runners were selling Bandages and no one was selling Bio-Recyclers or Dazzlers. In prep for the Limit Break update and the ability for these sellers to upgrade what they sell, we've cleaned house and straightened everything out nice. We've also cleanly split Street Military Gear (sold by Gun Runners, Gang Bosses, etc) and MilSec Military Gear (sold by Corrupt cops, security officers, etc). These distinctions are especially important as each service will evolve differently as the Contacts hit their limit breaks, and MilSec Military Gear heads off into more techy gear while Street Military Gear focuses on more boom-boom grenades.

Fixed "Kill All Enemies" Objectives

There has been a nagging issue with any objective that was to kill all of the enemies. Your victory was never registered until the end of the Turn which might mean you missed a secondary objective or just had to click End Turn a bunch of times. This is now resolved - your victory will be swift and it will be severe. Before the last ragdoll thumps on the floor, the game knows and is ready to award you victory.

v1.7.1 - 6/20/2024

- Contacts now achieve Influence Limit Breaks and suffer Exposure Limit Breaks (either at 80%+) - Contact Limit Breaks can increase levels of positive and negative Traits - Contact Limit breaks can grant Temporary Traits (+25% Mission Payment, +25% Price of buying Files) - Contact Influence Limit Breaks can upgrade services, like upgrading weapons sold or items sold - Limit Breaks can add 10 new weapons, 13 new weapon mods, 4 new Armors, 5 new/upgraded items - Contact Exposure Limit Breaks can send Contacts into hiding for up to a month - Selling Epic or Legendary Rarity Accounts to a Contact will increase their Influence by +1 - Complete Missions and Stories with Contacts to increase Influence, more options to feed Influence are coming - Failing missions or ignoring missions from Contact has chance of causing Exposure increase - Improved Contact Trait bonus Influence Boost to be % Chance to gain extra Influence - Expanded rewards possible for secondary objectives in proc-gen missions to Favors, Influence and Trust - Reduced money rewards for Missions at Power Level 5 or above - bringing late game economy toward balance - Fixed all Items Services to make a lot more sense and separated Street Military Gear from MilSec Military Gear - Fixed issue with battle missions with "Kill All Enemies" not immediately ending when last enemy is dead - Fixed issue with swapping weapons where second equipped weapon would not be shown - Fixed issues with Leverages Lazy Shift, Bribed Shift and Unexpected Fly-over showing that they buff enemies - Improved description of Legwork "Under our Thumb" to be more clear - +1 Favor per month - Removed useless Reo-Flexsuit Armor from sale