Heart of the Machine News

Heart of the Machine is a 4X game. It's also an RTS, an RPG, and a city builder. Combat is inspired by classics of the turn-based tactics genre like XCOM and Jagged Alliance, and the environment resembles Half-Life 2. Developer Chris McElligott Park says he originally got the idea from playing Stardew Valley. In the hands of anyone else, it might all sound a bit over designed; a bit messy. But McElligott Park, and his sometimes collaborators at Arcen Games, have been doing this for years. Between AI War, The Last Federation, and Starward Rogue, none of Arcen's work slots neatly into a single genre. Published by Hooded Horse, the ambitious label behind Manor Lords, Heart of the Machine feels like Park and Arcen's deepest game to date, a mechanics-heavy tesselation that gives new shape to 4X games. Speaking to PCGamesN exclusively, McElligott Park explains this new take on genre conventions.

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• The achievements all have icons now, and are uploaded to steam, and are prepped for being in the game, but you can't quite see them yet. That will be shortly.
  
• Liquid Metal dragons are now Innately Alarming, making them a lot more interesting and challenging to use, and not quite so OP, without making them actually physically any weaker. Thanks to folks on discord for the discussion on how to tackle this.
  
• This build has MAJOR localization updates.
  
• First of all, the translations are now fully in place for all of the languages.
  
• Secondly, I fixed a number of bugs with my code for importing those translations. One of them had to do with parsing Excel files, and I had to write my own stinking parser since the one I was using off the shelf just kept doing really wrong things. That was a deep dive into the guts of the Excel format in a way I haven't needed to do since about 2008, back in my business software days, before I even realized I would be a game developer the following year. Anyway, it was annoying, but took me back to old times in a vaguely fond way. And my code is also 4x faster than the off-the-shelf stuff, too, so changing languages is much faster.
  

• This is 14k of release notes on its own, summarized here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest
• Anyone who played the demo since July already has seen all this, but anyone who played at NextFest has seen none of it.
  
• Massive improvements to unit visibility, including the ability to see them through buildings, and a high-visibility mode.
  
• The entire nature of the machine network has been simplified and prettified, and it is so much clearer now.
  
• A unified lens system rather than having some lens-y things being on the hotbar. This makes investigations a ton easier to do.
  
• Build mode has been completely overhauled, and is now a sidebar on the left rather than the cramped thing at the bottom.
  
• A new UI tour when you start the game.
  
• A HUGE pass to usability and clarity based off of a lot of demo player feedback. This was just massive. It really made things a lot clearer.
  
• That said, all of that is the small set of changes, which is already present in the current demo (but is changed since, say, Splattercat last played).
  

• This is 70k words of release notes, summarized here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:Moving_To_Chapter_Two
• The demo is now in all of the languages that the store page actually says! Until now it was all English. Please excuse the WIP bits, but enjoy.
  
• An absolutely titanic overhaul of the UI has been made in partnership with Josh Atkinson from Hooded Horse. A professional UX designer has improved... just everything... everywhere.
  
• Several visual upgrades have been made, including to how antialiasing and edges are drawn.
  
• You can now play all the way to the end of chapter one in the demo, which includes several notable new events. It's another 15% or so of length to the prior demo, which was already large.
  
• The Raven unit is now available, and so is the ability to hack units to either disable them, or wololo them to your side.
  
• The entire system for the unit economy, and how units (regular and bulk) are deployed has been completely overhauled.
  
• This is now handled via a menu, rather than you having to find buildings and click an icon on the map.
  
• Bulk units now have variable costs to your unit cap for them, which makes for dramatically more options in how you use them.
  
• Resources are colored for higher visibility, and the economy itself has also been revised heavily to be clearer.
  
• The old color-matching system from combat has been removed, in favor of more equipment options, "feats" held by units (like the Technician's Taser), and more of an emphasis on various forms of combined arms.
  
• The way that you manage equipment has been completely changed as well, adding convenience and also allowing you to adapt on the fly right after you get into a new situation, rather than having to fail, adjust, and then come back. Aka, the equipment system has a cooldown after changes, rather than a warmup before changes apply.
  
• Lots more handbook entries for those who are curious, but also fewer handbook entries shoved in your face when they don't need to be.
  
• The research flow has been streamlined a lot, no longer requiring you to wait a bunch of time for things that don't matter.
  
• The entire prologue has been rewritten from scratch (after the initial intro), and now has three major paths through it with sub-variations, instead of being on-rails. It's much more engaging.
  
• There is a new debate system that allows you to convince some NPCs to do things they would not otherwise do
  
• There is a whole new morale system, and you can attack enemy morale either via fear-based or argument-based attacks.
  
• The nature of how buildings are constructed, and how their caps work, is entirely different. They are simpler to build, but you now have cross-building-type "internal robotics" caps that make for much more interesting choices. So tedium was reduced, and interesting decisions was increased.
  
• The way that vehicles load and unload has been dramatically improved, and a number of new vehicular abilities are now in place. Vehicles in general have a much more interesting role in combat in late chapter one.
  
• The control scheme has been heavily altered based on user feedback, so that left-click is always to select a thing, and right-click is always to give an order. RTS games mix this up with left-click being used differently in build mode and in "targeted abilities," and originally this game matched that. However, anyone coming from anywhere other than an RTS background was deeply confused by this. Options exist to restore those controls if you prefer them, but in general this is now more consistent with other tactics games and RPGs.
  
• The full music for the game is now in place, instead of just the main menu track!
  
• The most confusing parts of chapter one have had heavy alterations to guide players more, and to cut down on mental overload.
  
• Background conflicts are now present in the city, and you can engage with them to mess with enemies if you want.
  
• There are several new side-quest-y things that now start in chapter one and the demo, and which pay off later in chapter two. The two most notable ones are "Slum Cats" (which can allow you to adopt your first pet) and "The Girl With The Flower."
  
• You can now start your own shell company in the first chapter, although it doesn't have too many uses until chapter two. That said, starting a shell company in chapter one does allow you access to some new shops and some new wealth-generation options.
  
• The way that storage is handled has been absolutely and completely overhauled, and is much simpler. The old system wasted a lot of player time on choices that were not really interesting choices.
  
• So, so, so, many quality of life and balance improvements. Far too many to mention. It's like a whole other game.
  
• The above WAS the brief version...
  

• As you can see from the above, the entire economy and how all of your units function, and how the prologue AND chapter one flow have all been dramatically altered (for the better).
  
• You might expect this means that you can't use old demo saves -- but you can. However, when you do, expect to see a lot of warnings, and a lot of unfamiliar things that are guiding you into fixing those warnings so that you can get your economy fully set up for the new style. It only takes a couple of minutes, as most of the big changes are auto-fixed for you. It's just the things that we can't automate that are left to you.
  
• That said, even though older saves do work, the sheer scope of the changes make it worth starting fresh. After the intro, the prologue has almost nothing in common with what you experienced before. And there are new little surprises and cool moments all throughout chapter one, as well. So while you CAN use existing saves, there's a lot to be said for starting fresh this time.
  
• During early access, we won't need to go through this sort of titanic overhaul again, so no worries about this being something that comes up again. But as noted, even with this many changes, savegames are still compatible!
  

Arcen Games creators of AI War, AI War 2, The Last Federation and other games have announced their new sci-fi 4X RPG Heart of the Machine will launch January 31st, 2025. There's also a new demo available that you can try right now.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/12/4x-rpg-heart-of-the-machine-from-arcen-games-ai-war-releases-january-2025