Sunday is a nice lazy day for an update! We're excited to be hitting a point in the balancing cycle to be coming back to some systems and giving them a second pass of improvements. Probably all of these major areas will get a few more passes before they've really settled, but this is great time to be really tweaking and tuning. In the last few updates, we've been hammering on loot and Blueprint distribution and Account selling for Influence and today it is time for Secondary Objective rewards. We've rebalanced the requirements (Sec Level or Turn count atm) and increased the rewards (more Favors, more Influence, more XP, etc) and tweaked the weighting for all the reward types (better Blueprint distribution, Influence more likely). It should be a nice upgrade to help make these stick out and be very attractive to work harder to get. Thanks to everyone stepping up to post an F10, post a thread on the Steam forums, join our Discord and especially for posting a review. We are a tiny indie studio, so your energy, your shares, and just talking to you goes a long way to keep us moving forward at this pace!

Secondary Objectives: Extended, Boosted, Re-weighted

We've hit a number of big points within the secondary objectives system. These are to help balance out the options, rewards and limits that are in place today but also to prep the system for new types of secondary objectives and rewards that will be coming online in the following month. First, we've increased the top range of all of the rewards. Where you could only get 10% extra payment or XP before, it can swing as high as 20% now. You can get +2 Favors instead of just +1, and the Influence Bonus can go as high as +30%. The variation in rewards is nice to see but when they hit high, it is great to put extra spotlight on the value of that objective. We've also adjusted the weighting when picking what reward should be paired with which objective. For Blueprint rewards, we've cut Item Blueprints completely out of the rollers (they were rare, but did exist) and put the priority on Weapons and Weapon Mods with Armor being a bit rarer now. Also, we've pushed the chances that Favor and Influence are picked as secondary objective rewards over Contact Trust. This dovetails nicely with other work to provide more paths to additional Influence - when you see a +30% extra Influence bonus on a secondary objective to stay under Sec Level 2 ... and the mission comes with a standard +10% Influence ... if you can pull this mission off in a stealthy style, you'll net basically half a Limit Break in one swing! Get the Vanguards!
We've also addressed a number of places where the map wasn't providing enough detail to the secondary objective system to help it adjust limits - like how many Turns you need to CPU Spike a matrix host in the Trucker HQ ... you need more Turns! Hopefully the adjustment will make these challenging but always within the envelope of possible. As mentioned above, the next time we return to secondary objectives will be to add more variation in the objective types which will be exciting to see other types of demands that can be side-loaded into mission for that extra spice and challenge.

Fixing Account Issues

There were a number of different issues with selling Accounts that could cause the Influence gains of +20% not to work. In Update #149, the full +20% only applied if you traded the Account for Favors and also if you sold repeatedly to the same Contact, the Influence boost could be erased. We've resolved all of these issues with #150 for a much smoother Account handling experience and also improved the UI so that the type of account you're selling is front and center on the sale window.

Better Job Expiration Logs

The event log for an expiring job now includes the Contact who offered it along with the name, making the log significantly more useful in tracking the action.

Looting Hack Missions

Some looting hack missions continued to reference CPU Spiking in their dialog even though there was no need to spike any CPUs. This is now resolved in Update #150.

v1.8.111 - 9/28/2024

- Improved secondary objective mission rewards - larger rewards, better variation, improved max Turn limits - Rewards for secondary objectives have more variation and can go higher (+10-20% XP/Profit, +10-30% Influence, or +1-2 Favors) - Chances of rolling bonus Favors or Influence for secondary objective reward higher than bonus Trust - Adjusted weighting for secondary objective mission reward Blueprints - Weapons and Weapon Mods most likely, Armors more rare, never Items - Improved/fixed some cases where Secondary Objective for Turn Limit was basically impossible on some maps - Sale offer for Epic/Legendary Account states which one it is, fixed bug where Influence boost might not be granted - Expired mission log event now includes name of the job and the contact, if there was one - Fixed dialog at end of Hacking for Loot mission that said you Spiked the CPU