Update #98 follows up on 2 major milestone releases - DOMINION and GO FAST - to continue to press forward on other areas of the game. Tonight's focus is on new enemies, improved enemy weapons and armors, new armor setup for enemy corporate captains and new varieties of reinforcement groups arriving across the faction lines.

Thanks to everyone posting F10s, posting feedback to the community and to everyone who left a review to push us up and over 300!

We're short on days but we still have a busy June ahead of us as we try to close out our (self-inflicted) challenge to close all these major milestones by the end of the month. To be honest, we've already hit 4 milestones which is crazy and we should be able to get #5 but the other 2 are going to slip into July by a few days to a week.

New Enemy Types, Clearer VFX

Two new enemy types have been added, both armed with portable nano-capsules capable of releasing small fields of nanites that can form up to affect an incoming bullet just enough to alter its course from a hit to a miss. At the street and gang level, these Benders are cruder in their art, but the trained corporate Divergents boast a hi-tech and more expensive kit and are capable of putting up bigger Evasion buffs more often.

We're super excited to get on the track here of adding new enemies of all sorts - with new abilities, weapons and special moves. This is a great time for the enemy catalog to go from woefully shallow to something deep and much more exciting.

If an enemy uses an debuff against your team or a buff on their team, we've improved the VFX for these rarer and important events to be constant. They are light visual touches but they should help draw attention to the buff/debuff and can help prompt you to check the status pop up for the character or enemy to learn more about the specific effect in play.

Continued Improvement on Enemies

We've continued to press this week on better progression across the board for the enemies in all factions. We've rolled out upgraded armor and weapons for a number of enemies as they scale into higher Power Levels and most notably, corporate Captains can now get armor as high as 3 Protection Points, making them significantly harder targets to take down, especially in Kill 3 missions.

Also, we've rebuilt some of the reinforcement groups that can be rolled for different factions, so expect to see a more varied response teams, mixing the new enemy types, some snipers and other enemies in where they didn't previously appear.

Improved Attributes

In prep for the next major milestone of New Game V2 (Knight Creator) we've improved some of the effects of Attributes. You now gain +2% Dmg to Drones per point of Tech and +1% Dumpshock Res per Will instead of +1% to every 2 Will. Small changes, but helping to bring the Attributes into a tighter balance.

Improved Traits

A number of Contact and merc Traits got a lift with this update. Thanks to everyone reporting issues with Traits via F10 and for the balancing suggestions as well.

• Merc Traits Grit, Scrappy, Bouncer and Bull-Built all now give nicer HP bonuses
• Contact Trait Detailed Oriented has gained bonus for buying Files and big Exposure Res bonus
• Contact Trait Calculating has been reclassified as a positive Trait
• Fixed bugs in progression with the MilSec Merch Trait

Custom Difficulty: -1 Tally Rules

If you modified your custom difficulty setting to apply a -1 to the designed rate of Security Tally this did work except if the Security Tally was +1, in which case it was ignored. That was some silly nonsense which we have now fixed, it is always -1 unless it would force the Sec Tally negative and then time would start going backwards or something.

v1.7.7 - 6/24/2024

- Improved enemy buffs and debuffs to more commonly have a constant VFX so they are more noticeable
- New type of street and corporate enemy - Benders and Divergents
- Benders / Divergents employ fast moving and flanking tactics, start with bonus Evasion and can buff for even more
- Improved armor and weapon progression on corporate captains - now boasting 1-3 Armor Points
- Rebuilt some corp, syndicate and street reinforcement groups to have more exciting variations
- Improved Attribute effects - now +2% Drone Dmg per Tech (up from +1%) and +1% Dumpshock Res per Will (up from 0.5%)
- Improved merc Traits Grit, Scrappy, Bouncer and Bull-Built to have better HP bonuses
- Fixed issue with Security Tally modifier in Difficulty; when set to -1 will now set level with +1 to +0/Turn correctly
- Improved Detail Oriented Trait to have bonuses to buying Files and big Exposure Res bonuses
- Reclassified Contact Trait "Calculating" as a low positive Trait
- Fixed issues with progression in Contact Trait "Milsec Merch"