Hey! There’s a US national shutdown/strike today. From Josh: “If you’re able, today’s a great day to disconnect from the system: stopping/leaving work, not engaging in commerce, staying offline, etc.” I’m going to keep this post to the basics to just get it done & then go log off. The policing of borders is a pillar of colonial power, and ICE’s brutal murders in Minneapolis are examples of its violence being turned inwards towards the imperial core. It needs to be abolished.

New Stuff

• Added final PC-side talents: Siege Specialist, Skirmisher, and Leader.
• Added NPC optionals for: Demolisher, Assault, Ronin, Support, Cataphract, Priest, and Operator.
• Added several new maps designed by backers.

• More icons from Alicia! All licensed gear now has a unique icon.

• Added support for persistent shield fx

• Added support for “line” fx such as lasers and lightning bolts

• New teleport fx

Misc

• Through some experimentation, discovered that the exported game was +160mb biggger than it needed to be because the exclude filter isn’t working for raw audio assets, so can now start deleting that before exporting
• Added new setting for skipping fx delays; no longer have to wait and watch ability animations complete.
• Added “autozoom enabled” setting to stop the game from zooming in on the action
• Lancaster cable winch no longer allows you to climb freely; rules text is ambiguous if it was ever intended to give you infinite free climbs, or was a sort of simulationist appendix where you could lower your cables for other people/use them as a grappling hook. In any case, it was redundant with Death Head’s magnetic clamps so I’m making the call to drop it.

Bugs

• Fixed infinite spawns of the final enemy in a sitrep.
• Fix not being able to move the payload if you have any drones deployed
• Indicate when the payload is contested with the pointer text
• Moving payloads can be done regardless of height differences. It feels funny but helps prevent softlocks.
• Fix control sitrep not ending in defeat if you don’t have a higher score
• Fix holdout never ending in defeat

• Fixup pass on tutorial – a fair amount of details had broken or needed to be changed

• Can only take triggered free actions (e.g. disdainful blade) on your own turn

• Fix burst AOE not taking elevation into account (other AOE types still don’t… and I think it’ll likely stay that way to allow for airburst flexibility)

• Refactored how units are classified under the hood; should now have better rules adherence to the Characters vs Objects dichotomy and drones will stop being hit by abilities that hit objects.
• Also refactored how characters stack up e.g. mule harness, symbiosis, or moving a payload. Should be less likely to get snarled up when there’s also other attachements like grapples in the mix.

• Can climb off of mule harness as free action

• Orochi drones can fly if their hydra can
• Fix Agni protocol double-activation when you have deployables.
• Can’t give self overshield via invigorate
• Fix a number of missing ability triggers from displaying in tooltips
• Can overwatch with mjolnir
• Can hide within hive drone cover
• Intercede triggers before Brace
• Fix crash when a vorpal gun kills its target
• Take overshield into account when asking if you want to brace
• Technophile actually pays attention to you declining the reroll
• Walking armory is a normal system that you can destroy

• Fix Osiris not showing up as an AI system

• Orbital strikes don’t cancel on scout death
• Commander “press the attack” can’t be used on self
• Fix witch & rainmaker statblock typos
• Remove core-book accuracy from operator rifle
• Hound missile doesn’t roll saves against its own explosion
• Ultra does not ask player for permission to reroll structure/stress checks
• Veterans stop overcharging when they only have one stress left
• Fix size 2+ reinforcements from spawning on top of each other
• Don’t trigger sniper’s moving target if they already have a mark on another character
• Fix Ronin’s counter ballistic suite triggering multiplicatively for AOE attacks
• Seeder AI is better at hunkering down and just laying a buncha mines wherever it is; correctly limited to 3 mines deployed at a time

• Fix bombard cluster munitions bonus damage carrying over from one attack to the next

• Better nanobot placeholder fx; old one was mostly invisible
• Show “~100%” for near-certain hits instead of “100%”
• Talent title text for rank 3 nuc cav correctly displays “Here, catch!”

• Correctly show kits in recursive tooltips

• Filter for invalid lancers on campaign load (if you, say, broke them by loading and then unloading a mod)
• Automatically convert legacy color schemes forward when picking a new color/ramp
• Characters stand on top of exploding barrels instead of inside of them
• Better protections against hidden “marker” units from taking damage in odd situations (e.g. caltrops taking damage from dangerous terrain).

Editor

• Potentially breaking change for custom maps: For “ is within " trigger conditions, swapped their order so it actually checks that string A is within string B (previously reversed).
• Fix triggers failing if the conditions were set to “any” but no conditions were set
• Allow custom dialogues etc to work when launched via instant action.
• Did some cleanup to the conversation editor’s UI; made everything besides the speaker and the line more background-colored and reduced excess borders.
• Duplicate button works for conversations and characters
• Added button to view sitrep rules mid-battle
• Log the change in Control sitrep score each round
• Fix dialogue indents being lost when switching between code and blocks mode
• Can refer to lancers in dialogue text dynamically
• Drop the “no deploying within 8 tiles of the center” trigger from holdout; it’s up to the mapmaker to redirect zones
• add a “magic strings” list to the bottom of the trigger list that you can click to copy to clipboard
• Maps can now be played on sitreps even if they don’t have all the required zone IDs, if the required zone ID has been specified to point to a different zone.
• When capping NPC spawns due to activation, it looks at max lancer count on your side, not current (making it so enemies can spawn before the player deploys).
• When a trigger prematurely ends a unit’s turn, have their phase controller recognize that and not require an extra step to end their turn
• Toggled a setting to hopefully help with prematurely cut-off crash logs.
• Added ability for ai behaviors to modify their score against weaponless enemies
• Made event_unit_save available in the trigger system; can force a unit to make a save, and then check the result in a key stashed to the combat state

In solidarity, Olive