Update 42: Enemy Protocol

[p]Nothing all that large in this one, in the main -- just general housekeeping. This makes some things smoother and clearer, and resolves the bulk of the items reported or requested by players in the last little while. A couple of the bugs are rather humorous.

If you’ve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, that’d be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if you’ve been meaning to write one, I’d be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this — developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.[/p][p]Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. It’s a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.[/p][p]Thanks for reading and for playing.
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[h2]Update 42 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Clarity[/h3]

Understanding When It's World War 4: If you are in the part of the game where you have triggered the inevitability of WW4, but you have not yet actually gotten the goal completion for it yet, the game now shows a message in the task stack stating that this is "Early WW4" and how much longer you need to survive for it to be full-blown.
Analysis Lens Color Clarity: Fixed the Deterrence Coverage and Protection Coverage descriptions to be accurate to the current color scheme. The colors were adjusted in the past to be more clear, but the description did not match.
Decimal Feats: Fixed a visual issue where feats were not always shown as a decimal, but instead sometimes were shown as a rounded integer.
Nonplussed: Removed the plus sign in front of the feat number on equipment, so that it is more likely that players will realize that the highest value is taken rather than them being additively taken. That's a fairly minor detail most of the time, which the "Feats" entry in the "Status Effects" section of the handbook mentions.
Infinity War: If you are in the full WW4 scenario, it no longer shows a military invasion of 99 turns, but instead shows an infinity symbol and says WW4, with some other added notes for this.
Units Crying Wolf: Fixed an issue where if you hovered over a unit that you could select, it would show some random incoming damage predictions rather than what was actually planned against it for the moment. I can't believe nobody ever noticed this or said anything, as it's not new at all. Anyway, it's fixed now.
Knowing Their Fate At A Glance: Added the incoming damage to NPC/bulk units and structures, to match how it works (properly now) when you hover your own units.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

Setup Phase Generosity: During the setup phase of the game, you now are given a constant minimum of 5k Scandium, Alumina, and Neodymium rather than 2k. 2k was not enough to set up shell company buildings, which was annoying.
PMC Impostors Blend In: PMC Impostors now have the Blending In perk as well as their PMC-related ones. This makes it so that they can be used for things like Excuses and Justifications can be done by them.
So Do Basic Armor And Hoodies: MilStyle Armor now also grants the Blending In perk, as does Security Jacket, on top of the other perks they grant.
Extra Enemy Politeness During Setup Phase: Since this was confusing to people, vulnerable structures (those with insufficient protection or deterrence) don't cause any aggressive enemies to spawn during the setup phase. Same with vulnerable territory control flags. Originally it was meant to only be counter-attacks that were suppressed during this phase, but the distinction between those was not adequate.
Enemies More Punctual When Attacking You For Revenge: There are some intentionally-delayed "I hate you and want revenge" spawns, but those are now a lot less delayed than they were before. Also, in general, when countdowns finish to a revenge spawn, it now finishes the countdown earlier in the turn-change logic so that any enemies that should immediately spawn will now do so.
Enemies Not Showing Up For Revenge Mid-Turn Just Because You Visited A Shop: Adjusted things so that certain kinds of NPC managers (revenge spawns among them, but there were 56 spots in all that got this change) won't ever spawn new units except during turn-change. This prevents them from spawning when you force conversations, complete contemplations, interact with StreetSense, and so on.
Immediate Visibility When Equipping Scopes: After any of the stats of your units change (not your bulks and workers and converted, since those don't matter for this), it does a visibility recalculation pass. This is a big improvement for when you increase the attack range of a unit, you get vision from them right away rather than the vision not increasing until some unit moves.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Armored Executive Exclusive Discussions: Fixed a generalized issue where if a dialog was supposed to be between some third party and one of your armored executives, then it would actually allow any of your shell company units to do it.
My Great Shame: Fixed a surprising typo (they're instead of their) in the sheltered citizen tooltip.
Inability To Finish Breaking Into Prisons: Fixed an issue where the "Now What?" project could not progress properly, and did not register your investigations with Liquid Metal. The same problem was there with the Yinshi Umbilicals not giving you any umbilical cords after you snuck in.
Mimic Journey Deja Vu: Fixed an issue where you could send mimics out of the city twice (and have the same thing happen both times) if you sent them out without the thumper designs, and then got the thumper designs, and then sent them out again. It now properly blocks the second case if you already did the first case, as the two are meant to be different wordings for the same thing in slightly different circumstances, not two distinct events.
When Investigation Spots Get Nuked: In the event that an investigation target has been destroyed -- nuked, burned down, whatever -- that investigation target is now properly removed, rather than still being a place you can investigate as if it was still there.
404 Investigator Not Found: If you are in the "Now What?" project and trying to investigate more prisons, but the investigation is missing, it now self-corrects that. However, if it can't find any functional prisons after 12 seconds of you having loaded the game, then it fails the project with the note that somehow there are no more prisons on the map (this is usually because of them all being nuked or similar).
Enemy Status-itis Finally Cured: Fixed a longstanding issue where any unit afflicted by a status effect would randomly lose some health or morale. It was some sort of threading issue when calculating status intensities during initial load of a savegame. I solved this by having it recalculate the status intensity after all the other data is loaded and a one-second delay. In all of the existing cases now, except where savegames were saved-over, loading them should now have the original health and morale that was saved.
Ghosts Exploration Sites: Fixed an issue where exploration sites could be kind of there (but not really there) if you had completed them but they were still locked to a location. They were invisible on the map and in the listing, but would show up in the totals, being very confusing.

[/expand][p]Full notes here.

[/p][h3]Connect with the Machine[/h3][hr][/hr][p]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms:

💬 Discord – Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine.
📜 Reddit – Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community.[/p]