0.2.3 is Live! - Introducing Operations, New Units, Buildings, QoL and more

0.2.3 is now live! Thanks to everyone who helped to test it and offer suggestions while it was on the beta branch. As always, feel free to provide feedback and report any bugs you come across on Discord or the Steam forums.

0.2.3 (Content Update #8)

New Game Mode - Operations

Operations is a new game mode with some roguelike elements where you unlock a variety of upgrades of different rarities and play 3-5 wave games across 3 missions. There are currently two different kinds of operations, Colonization and Search and Destroy.

• Colonization – Play 3 missions with the same colony. Each mission involves defending the colony against 3 waves.

• Search and Destroy – Play 3 missions across different maps. These maps could be either horde defence or destroy all bases (Like in Elysium Mons)

This mode also includes some new perks and map mutators.

My aim with this mode is to provide a way for people to play shorter, higher intensity games. While also enabling some experimentation with playstyle and unit design like bosses.

Long term, the Survival and Campaign mode are my main priorities. But this mode offers a good opportunity for people to experience the game in a new way.

New Buildings

• Raised Platform (Human) – A tile that can be built under structures which lifts them increasing their health and range. Connectors inside them will become untargetable

• Skygarden (Human) – A Tier 3 habitat for your colony

Bosses and other new units

• Added 3 Goo bosses, one for each commander. Currently these will spawn on Endless Extreme mode and at the end of operations

• Added 3 new Goo units, one for each commander. These are available across all modes, for now on Survival they'll only spawn on the two higher difficulties.

• Added the Sentinel to the human roster, an alternative to the Skyranger. An unarmed drone with a large vision range

• Added the Lancer Team to the human roster, an alternative to the Mortar Team. A weapons team with a high damage and long range gun designed for taking down large units

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Laboratory

• Construction of the Laboratory is locked until research tier 3 is reached.

• Each laboratory gives a benefit from a pool of perks as well as giving research points.

• Can now be constructed by The Robots

Endless Extreme mode

• Past wave 10 enemy damage, health and speed will gradually increase with each wave

• Bosses will spawn from wave 10, gradually increasing in number

Battle of Illian verge

• The RFI have gained some buildings and turrets

QoL

• Walls can connect to each other in all directions. Making vertical and horizontal construction easier.

• Research can now be queued

• "Clone Building" now works for both moused over buildings and if nothing is under the mouse, any building you have selected

• The number of “Free” buildings available is now displayed on the building respective button

• You can now hide the unit counter

• Garden and thruster modules will highlight their relevant adjacent spaceship modules

• “Free” buildings will now be built immediately on placement

• Added some more tooltips to the robots to help explain heat and modules

Other

• New Volcanic biome tile-set

• Increased explosive force on corpses and improved their directional movement

• New enemy commander portraits

• Added an indicator if module choice is an upgrade

• Added names for each upgrade step of modules

• Unit command markers improved

• Units have kill counters

• Added debug command "out###". Give a number from 1-100 to change the thickness of unit outlines. Out25 is the default

• Stopped an indicator appearing if no effort is produced

• The show suppressed area button will now not include partially suppressed tiles

• The captain panel will now list all modifiers currently applied. Added a scrollbar to the captain stats panel

Balance

Humans

• Increased negative population penalty -150% → -250%

• Solar Panels provide +2 power when placed on Desert tiles

• Buildings won't use population until they receive their first construction resource

• Increased the population upkeep of some late game units

Robots

• Turbo Module - Base heat reduced 1.5 -> 1.2

• Industrial Module - Extra effort production from being boosted increased from 3/3 to 3/6

• Storage Tiles - Gain an extra +2 effort storage per connected module

• Mecha Tarantis - Attack Speed 0.2 -> 0.25

• Mecha Tarantis - can no longer shoot air targets

• Strike Barge - Drone attacks apply an armour debuff

• Strike Barge - Drones are released faster, move faster and both drones and the Barge now have firing SFX.

Performance

• Improved the performance of large robot colonies

• Fixed a memory leak relating to landmines that was causing performance to degrade

• Fixed Map Editor performance degrading over time

AI

Noise System

These changes are a bit experimental and may be changed if they are applying too much additional pressure on players.

• Enemies that detect noise will now move towards the source of noise rather than aggro directly to your Landing Pad.

• Increased the sensitivity of enemies to nearby noises

• Increased the amount of noise created by battles

• Fixed a bug causing explosions to trigger very far away enemies

Other

• Improved the enemy's avoidance of lava

• Player melee units will try to surround the enemies they're attacking

• Fixed units jumping in their previous direction when leaving combat and chasing a target

• Fixed some animation stuttering

Map Editor

• Added wreckage pickups and tribe placement

Modding

• Added "aiPathRadius" and "attackSounds" variables. aiPathRadius lets you change the pathfinding radius of the unit. This can be helpful for people creating unit sprites which are larger than normal. attackSounds lets you assign other attack sounds to units, for now only attack sounds already in the game can be used. See readme for more details

Bug Fixes

• Removed a tiny delay between explosions occurring and the explosion appearing

• Fixed voiceless units (Tribes) sometimes inheriting voices from other units

• Fixed spreader connection lines staying on if demolished

• Fixed a case where The Swarm captain's building assistant animation would stay on

• Fixed tutorial difficulty adjustments not carrying over on load

• Fixed Endless Extreme initially scaling horde size slowly

• Desert whirlpools should now blend in better with other desert tiles

• Fixed resource perks not increasing storage

• Fixed the wrong combat stat improving for captains if more than 1 unlock is waiting

• Fixed being able to drop units off the edge of the map

• Fixed some rounding issues with modules if they are impacted by heat

• Fixed Robot Outposts spawning on lava and into mountains