Knights of New Boston - last night we went fishing in the black soup with the latest update and we were able to catch and fix 1 of the 2 final bugs that can cause the game to freeze up. In order to keep fishing for the last case, we've got a new update out tonight with more debugging, the 1st case fixed and some new balance tweaks to help it go down easy. We've improved enemy Initiative stat to be a part of their progression, added Attribute bonuses to 2 Traits that were missing them, improved the value of XP and $$ secondary objectives, and started some improvements on the NanoFab help text.

Thanks for all the F10s and reviews - you're helping our small team keep up its pace of improvement. Please give us a shout and help share the game with a review if you're enjoying this Early Access period!

Enemy Initiative Progression

Many enemies - especially captains and drones - were being left behind in the Initiative department in their progression. This allows your merc team to basically "run the table" on Initiative and reduced the difficulty of the game and the power of some Talents, cybernetics, etc. With this update, we've brought the enemy forces back into it with boosted to Initiative throughout their progression. You'll find that especially mecha-soldier drones are going to now give a much more competitive run for first-to-act.

Secondary Objectives: XP and $$

For those secondary objectives offer money or Experience, we've boosted them by +5% each, now allowing them to roll from 15% to 25% of the regular reward total as a secondary. This is a healthy improvement and may end up taking another step upwards to 20% to 30% to ensure that these are competitive against staying to loot more, especially those in Security Level and Turn limits.

Traits without Attributes

A few very old Traits in the game - like Scrappy and Agile - were missing a progression of Attribute bonuses. We've addressed those in this release.

Starting on Crafting Guidance

We've got some really great threads going on our Discord at the moment and one is all about improving the NanoFab system, tweaking it and/or improving the help text in game. Our first set of improvements here are to make some nice text adjustments to the help text to make them more clear. The next set of improvements will be to clear up the UI, reduce unneeded text and let more elements be reactive (stating the % of Intrinsics when your crafting recipe prevents you from rolling an Intrinsic is not helpful, etc).

NanoFab Event History

We fixed a bug where NanoFab events in the history never showed the right icon for what was crafted.

Overwatch Lock Fixes: T-Position and Blades

We fixed the two game locks that result from Overwatch. First, some Talent validation code got broken sometime back with Agent EX and you could try to Overwatch with a blade now. That was not a good idea and the game locked up! Now, the Talent no longer allows melee Overwatching (it will re-appear with Cybersword Preempt).

Second, there were cases where you could end up a T-position when using Overwatch with a character who was just carrying and using a blade. This is now resolved.

If you get a game lock of any sort, please always send an F10. We're down to 1 final known lock where an enemy gets stuck in a running loop but goes nowhere and we're working on isolating it and finalizing the fix this week.

v1.9.31 - #179: Black Bay Fishing - 11/26/2024

- Enemies gain Initiative Bonus as part of their progression, running the Initiative tables is no longer guaranteed
- Added Attribute bonuses to Traits Scrappy and Agile
- Increased amount of secondary objective XP and $$ rewards by 5% (now +15% to +25% of regular mission reward)
- Fixed issue with NanoFab crafting not showing the equipment icon in the timeline history
- Fixed issue where character using sword and Overwatch could end up in T-position and lock game (thanks for F10s!)
- Fixed issue that allowed melee weapons to engage Overwatch (and then promptly lock the game)
- Fix issue with reinforcements freezing a new turn
- Fixed High-Stakes marker on missions being too widely applied
- Improved some of the help text for NanoFab armor and weapons