Knights! We're here to wrap up the weekend and almost the year with Update #194 which includes a 9th weekly map release, major rebalance to Dead Drop Hit, a ton of improvements and critical fixes to Leverage, better UI for Contact buy and sell services, map fixes and more. Every week the game is growing, gaining features, improving balance and progression and getting a little more QoL polish. We hope you're enjoying the Early Access process we've got going - relentless updates, never invalidate a saved game. Please consider leaving a review - our small team needs your help to spread the word!

New Weekly Map: River Street Bridge

Here we are on our 9th week of our weekly map release goal with the new map - River Street Bridge. This new map has a central, large bridge splitting the street district. The river cutting the district, the central bridge and the other ways across it will play key roles in all of your missions. With the River Street Bridge, we are dedicated to supporting every single proc-gen objective (all 8) with absolute maximum variation inside each option (there are 32!! ways to play this level). The new 8 proc-gen combos offered with this map brings the total to 113 proc-gen combos and represents another 6% increase in map variety. River Street Bridge also includes support for the Assassinate VIP objective as well, which brings the mission maps supported for that objective type up to 9.

Dead Drop Hit Rebalance

The storyline where you attempt to recover some E-Rifles leads you to the Dead Drop Hit job which has become a bit infamous for being unbalanced and too hard for the point in the game it appears. We've made some helpful changes to get it where it needs to be - a nasty, fun fight instead of an unexpected and crushing spike in difficulty. The changes include upgrading the mission to allow 4 mercs to go, adjusting the starting area to give some more cover options for your defensive position and tweaking the starting spawn counts on enemies. Finally, we've pushed the minimum Team Power Level that this story will appear at up to 3. That is exciting because that also means we've pushed the E-Rifle rewards up to Power Level 3 E-Rifles instead of Power Level 2. This is a change that will benefit all saved games - new and old - so enjoy your bumped up E-Rifles, Knights!

Major Leverage Fixes

With Update #194, we've fixed a widespread set of issues with Leverage where they were often actually running for 1 Turn less than they promised. This hit a wide range of Leverages, including both passive and active Leverages. Now all the Leverages will run as long as they promise! We've cleaned up the language and game terms used throughout the set to really get consistency and be sure the Leverage is using all the right terms to match the rest of the game. In addition, we've improved Alarm Malfunction so that it simply removes an amount of Sec Tally equal to one Escalation and drops the Sec Level by 1, which means the next time the Sec AI would usually Escalate, it is skipped. This is equivalent to Spiking an APU in the Matrix, so its pretty powerful delay action. Finally, we've fixed an issue where a Leverage that disabled security systems might also cause the sleeping security devices to wake up when the duration ended. This was a big issue in some levels using sleeping devices, so this is a critical bug to fix to push Leverages to their most useful slot.

Contact Buys and Sells

With this update, we've split a Contact's services into two groups for clarity - what they Sell and what they are willing to Buy. This helps us cut down on repetitive words ("Buys ...") and also show the dual nature of some services (if a Contact sells any type of weapons, they always buy all used weapons back). As the services lists are getting more in depth and starting to change with Power Play options, it is important to make sure the UI helps clarify what you've got and what you might be working on. We'll keep improving these UIs to help cut down the amount of checking and screen transitions you need to get the most important info for strategic decisions.

Map Fixes Galore

With this update we fixed places in Slumroad Junction where doors in exterior buildings were blocking line of sight and we fixed and tuned up the rotation and placement of a ton of spawning locations for enemies and your merc team across a wide set of maps. Every release, we're improving, tweaking and tuning the map set so a huge thanks goes out to anyone sending in F10s that help us improve!

v1.9.69 - #194: New Map Release "River Street Bridge" - 12/29/2024

- Added new proc-gen map "River Street Bridge": a street region straddling a bridge soaked in blood of the last centuries battles that supports +8 new proc-gen combos (Heist a CPU, Steal 3 Files, Scavenger, Kill 3 Captains, Bodyguard, Assassinate, Siege and Battle Striker) - Improved Contact list and hover to separate Buys and Sells services more clearly - "Dead Drop Hit" mission now allows 4 mercs instead of 3 (it came from a simpler time...) - Improved cover positions and reduce enemy starting spawn counts in "Dead Drop Hit" to even its difficulty - Adjusted requirements for "Dead Drop Hit" (fetch E-Rifles) mission to not proc before Power Level 3 - Improved rewards - E-Rifles from "Dead Drop Hit" upgraded to Power Level 3 (all games, new and forever) - Further improved progression of maps via proc-gen to avoid harder maps on earlier Power Levels - Fixed Alarm Malfunction so that it correctly reduces Sec Level by 1 and prevents next Escalation - Fixed Leverage bug with disabling security devices that could result in sleeping devices being woken - Fixed duplicate dialogs at the end of Siege missions - Fixed tagging issue in Roster where damaged Cyberdeck ("Cyberdeck 90%") would cause "Loadout" to be shown as well - Fixed map issues in Slumroad Junction with doors blocking lines of sight from rooftops - Fixed typos in Hacking Tutorial

[ 2024-12-30 00:49:10 CET ] [ Original post ]