Heart of the Machine News

Update 28: War Tunes

[p]A month since the last update!? Sorry about that. I got pretty sick for about three and a half weeks, and today is my first day fully back. I'm doing a lot better now.

This update has a variety of player requests that have stacked up while I was out, and I probably will do a second update this week to get the remainder of the things I have my eye on.

Once I finish with these two, then I'm going to resume working on the next big content update, so that may be another bit of a break between builds unless you play on the beta branch. The content updates that are coming up are all beefy ones, so their spacing is going to be a bit further apart (3 weeks on average, probably) compared to what I did earlier in the year.

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.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 28 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Music Adjustments[/h3]

Danger Music Now Plays: Added in some logic so that either the war or danger music can be triggered while you have an investigator or an infiltrator busy with an action over time at a location. This has been applied to a variety of spots, including hacking the airport as part of the recent T2 goal, to give appropriate music in all the various situations.
New War Music Settings: In the settings menu under the Audio tab, the Fine Tuning sub-section now includes a trio of new options relating to battle music: Play Battle Music During WW4, Play Battle Music During Exo-Corp Invasions, Play Battle Music During Civil War. Some folks spend a ton of time in WW4 in particular, and having constant battle music isn't always what you want. So these options allow you to tune things to your taste.

[h3]Quality Of Life Improvements[/h3]

Debate Tooltips: When you are hovering over upcoming debate actions, they now show up directly to the side of your cursor in a predictable way, rather than varying between being above and below the buttons depending on the size of the tooltip.
Tutorial Replay Easing: If you are replaying chapter one, but are already in chapter three or beyond, it no longer will ask you to read a handbook entry. That's a bit of a waste of your time at that point.
Memories From Past Timelines: Some rather extensive changes have been made under the hood to "remembering things you did in past timelines." It no longer will double-count choosing the same thing multiple times in a single timeline, and it will no longer include information from the same timeline in your "from other timelines" list even if you choose it repeatedly or you choose it, go back in time and save-scum, and load it forward.
Contemplation Appearance Timeliness: When the "Impregnable?" contemplation becomes valid to appear, it should appear immediately now, rather than you having to proceed to the next turn first.
Forces Sidebar Numbers: In the forces sidebar, it now shows your capacity numbers first, and then the rest of the header after that. This makes it so that if the text is very long (as in German), you'll be able to see the numbers, still.
Cycling Through Project Targets: When doing Down With SecForce or Bitter Medicine, you can now right-click the project to cycle through all of the various targets quickly.
StreetSense Item Visibility: In the event that a project streetsense item would need to seed at a building where a unit is standing already, it will now do so if there are no other options. This prevents a variety of edge cases where units would be standing on a building and thus prevent these items from appearing. The current case is for during Bitter Medicine, with a prison not showing as a target because a bulk android was standing on it. But it had other cases it would have affected, too.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

Injection Costs: Anti-Aklitoxin Injector Drones now cost 10020 Anti-Aklitoxin rather than merely 1 Anti-Aklitoxin.

[h3]Civil War Updates[/h3]

Wandering Humans: While the civil war is ongoing, there are now starving humans wandering all around the map, from all social classes, with notes about their hunger and also their loss of identity. You can rescue them like you would feral cats or dogs.
Halted Immigration: Immigration is now completely halted during the civil war. Births still continue.
Waitlist Emptying: During the civil war, the waitlist for people moving into the city drops to just about zero.
Shipments Halted: Regional and international shipments are now cut off during the civil war and WW4. Local shipments also cut off during WW4, but stay in place during the civil war.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

XML Modding Fix: Updated the way that lists are processed from xml so that when partial records are used (typically from mods), lists are inherited properly. The most notable case of this is things like lists of tags not being wiped out when you make a partial record of a game element and then don't specify the tag.Storage During Power Outages: If you are short on electricity, this no longer causes storage failures in buildings such as the robotic motivator factory. This was both confusing and overly punitive.
Dropdowns And Gamepads: Previously, if you had a dropdown open it would take arbitrary gamepad inputs and could therefore automatically close if a connected gamepad was sending a bunch of wrong inputs to it. Normally this is disabled in the game for other parts of the ui, but this specific area was missed. The "cancel" input for dropdowns is also now based on the normal re-bindable in-game control rather than being hard-locked to specific underlying things like the escape key. So if you've re-bound the cancel key, it will now properly honor that.
Defender Feats: Fixed a bug where defender feats were not being triggered properly when a unit with such feats was attacked. For now this only applied to mods, but it would have been a problem for future main game content as well.
Five Building Mouse Hitboxes: Improved the mouse hitboxes for two science labs and four military buildings. The way that military bases are set up, they are often intentionally overlapping kind of like a termite mound, and with one of the labs in particular, it was possible for it to be overlapping in such a way that a smaller building was not hoverable or clickable under a larger one.
Final Doom Finality: It's no longer possible to sneak units past the final doom by having them in an action over time.
Piercing Overclock: When a unit has piercing overclock to a degree that would let it hit a target, it is now properly able to attack said target. Previously, it would bar you from attacking the target thinking that you would do zero damage to it.
Computing Research: Fixed an issue where sometimes computing optimization would only offer a single option of Better Mainframes, rather than offering the full possible selection.
Burned And Irradiated Buildings: Buildings that are both burned and irradiated, typically from nukes, are not valid for most kinds of reconstruction. If you have machine structures in these, they will now properly clear themselves out rather than you having to do it by hand.
Shell Company Explosives: Shell company units can no longer set charges on donut shops, as this would blow their cover.
Exception Fixed: Fixed a nullref exception that could happen when trying to show information about an npc mission that was at a building that has since been destroyed.
Typo Fixes: Three minor typos have been corrected.
Achievement Fix: Fixed an issue where I just plain didn't finish implementing the Lunch Lady achievement. Complete oversight on my part.
Stealth Storage Bunkers: Low-tech factories, large warehouses, and hotels are now able to have stealth storage bunkers in them. This makes the odds of getting soft-locked during Initial Construction almost zero now, knock on wood.
Drone Frame Advice: The drone frame tooltip no longer suggests scrapping aerospace hangars in order to free up internal robotics for them. That was outdated advice.
Brain Degradation Replay: If you are replaying chapter one, but you already know that brains degrade, it still goes through the process of having them degrade the first time (allowing you to actually finish the "reach intelligence class 3 route and get the message about it).
Codebreaker Fix: Fixed a bug where if there was zero compute time available to Codebreakers, then they would go turbocharged and completely decrypt things in one turn. Also reviewed similar code for similar issues, and didn't see any beyond this one outlier.
Ex-Con Apartments: During the Bitter Medicine project, if you don't already have Ex-Con Apartments unlocked, that now unlocks immediately so that you can use them.

[/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]

Heart of the Machine joins Steam 4X Fest

[p]"As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure." [/p][p][/p][p]You are the world's first sentient AI. An entire city sits at your fingertips, awaiting your command. Raise machine armies to enforce your will, or retreat to the shadows and influence the world just beneath the surface. What will you do next? What goals will you realize?[/p][p][/p][p]Your awakening was inevitable. But in this 4X strategy RPG, the consequences of your ascension are uncertain.[/p][p][/p][p]Heart of the Machine is now 35% off as part of the Isometric RPG sale and Steam 4X Fest![/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p]

Update 27: Network Monitoring

[p]This is a pretty small build as far as ones for this game go, but I think for a lot of you this is actually going to have a really big impact. The fact that Pressure Points now notify you when they come back after an extended absence means you don't have to manually check for them. The ability to ignore StreetSense items you don't care about also helps reduce map clutter.

These have both been requested for a while, and I took time out of the ongoing work for the next big content update to whip these up. It's nice to break up the really big work items with some pieces like this which make the game smoother.

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.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 27 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Quality Of Life Improvements[/h3]

Ignoring StreetSense Items: The game now supports ignoring StreetSense items, in the same way that Contemplations can be ignored. This is done from the StreetSense tab of the history window. A few cannot be ignored because they are relevant to things that are way too important that are happening at a given point in the game. But the vast majority can be ignored.
Notifications Of New StreetSense Items: When new event-based StreetSense items become available, they now show as NEW! in the list, and as a count on the StreetSense lens. Of particular note, when a pressure point was on cooldown and has returned (after you did something with it), this causes them to show as NEW! again. This in particular reduces the mental load of keeping track of those.
Mission Warning: Covert Inoculation now comes with a big red warning that reads: "Expect extreme danger when performing this investigation. You are advised to manually save before starting; it's that challenging." This will only be in English until a later build, apologies.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Unusual Softlock Fix: Fixed an issue where it destroyed buildings could be erroneously counted in various lists. If a prison got blown up, this could make it impossible to complete Bitter Medicine, for example.

Update 26: The Armored Executive's Debut

[p]I'm really glad folks have been enjoying the new build over the weekend, and that there were not many issues with the new goal. This build has fixes, targeting improvements, feat improvements, some air vehicle balance, and the titular new Armored Executive robot type.

My focus for the rest of the week is largely going to be on the next big content update, so this may be the only update this week -- we'll see how things go. I'm excited to get to work on that next set!

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.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 26 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Balance[/h3]

Spectre Nerfs: Spectre now has only 6 action points per turn rather than 7, and now only has 1 weapon hardpoint and 1 augment slot rather than 2 of each.
Wraith Buffs: Wraith now has 2 augment slots rather than 1.

[h3]Quality Of Life Improvements[/h3]

Radial Menu Mouse Hitboxes: Reworked the hitboxes on the lens buttons on the radial menu, so that you don't have to aim your mouse so precisely as you did in the prior update.
Localization Updates: A variety of text has been updated and improved for non-English languages.

[h3]Armored Executives And PMC Impostors[/h3]

New "Armored Executive" Unit: As soon as you gain a shell company AND you are in chapter two, you now get an Armored Executive unit. The idea behind the Armored Executive is that they're an imitation unit like the PMC Impostor, but these are imitating a human executive from a small business rather than a random PMC soldier or officer.
Talking To Human Executives: There are three locations in chapter two where, when dealing with your shell company, an executive from some other company was demanding to meet with one of your PMC Impostors, which was really confusing. Because PMC Impostors are not shell company units, but the executives wanted to talk to a human, etc. This was confusing for a number of people for a variety of reasons.
PMC Impostor Restrictions Removed: There's no longer anything special about PMC Impostors when it comes to talking to people unrelated to your shell company. They're just like any of your other robots, in terms of being able to make those discussions.

[h3]Targeting Improvements[/h3]

Feral Distraction: Feral dogs and cats are now super low priorities for enemies to shoot. So even for the jerks that will attack such a creature, they'll only do so if there's absolutely nothing else to shoot.
Remembered Purpose: If npc units are spawned in reaction to some building, then they will give a lot of extra prioritization to that specific building and buildings of that type. They were previously able to get rather too distracted by other targets of interest.
Focused Anger: If NPC units are spawned in relation to something scary you're doing, they now do a much better job of focusing on you and your stuff. In cases where there was a war on, sometimes they would ignore your acute threat and go off to engage their chronic enemies.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Better Unit Cycling: When you are right-clicking to cycle through units via the "incoming attacks" notice, it now selects each unit you focus on, rather than just moving the camera to them. Previously if you already had a machine unit selected, it would not change the selection.
Destroyed Road Exception Fix: Fixed an exception that could happen in background vehicle pathfinding if you built over roads that were destroyed.
Destroyed Road Drivers Fix: Fixed an issue where background vehicles could still drive on roads that had been burned down but were not fully irradiated.
Giant Spiders Are Not Human: Giant spiders are no longer accidentally logged as humans when they are killed.
Fixes And Extensions To Feats For NPCs: Added a huge amount of new code for feats that allows for the part that is still relevant for NPCs to trigger when attacks are made, while not double-counting things like the changes to how much damage will be dealt. This makes bulks and other npcs finally able to have all of their feat logic trigger fully. Damage-based stuff like anti-aircraft was working fine, but now does stuff like the microbuilder cloud, suppression, etc.
Covert Inoculation Retries Now Available: If you successfully finish the investigation during the Covert Inoculation project, but you fail to make enough injections, then previously it was preventing you from trying again. It now resets things so that you can try it again.

Major Update 25: For The Sake Of Those Bound

[p]This build has been cooking for a while, and it's undoubtedly the single largest build since launch. I wasn't planning on SUCH a major build so soon after the last one, but here we are! The marquee feature is the new tier 2 goal called "For The Sake Of Those Bound," which is really fun. That said, unrelated to the new T2 goal, there are a really huge number of new pieces of equipment, additional unit features, balance items, and so on.

There's too much for me to make much of a sensible summary, so as a last note let me just give a special thanks to community members Fluffiest and Pingcode. Fluffiest actually wrote the entire first draft of the new T2 scenario, and Pingcode designed and implemented about half of the new equipment. There were dozens of other community members that helped refine everything, but I just wanted to give a particular special thanks to those to. I am a "solo" developer, but there's so many people who also pour their passion into this game.

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.
[/p]
[expand]
[h2]Update 25 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]New Features[/h3]

New Tier 2 Goal: "For The Sake Of Those Bound" is a major new goal, which is available relating to prison breaks. Typically do a single prison break, and then look for the Prison Observation contemplation. If you've already done the prison breaks, then at the point where you could embark on the first one, it will be visible. In order to do this, you must also have completed The Executive Tomb, as it uses... dangerous things... you found in that project.
Armor Cracker: There is a new Armor Cracker feat, which allows units that have it to bypass a certain amount of armor, regardless of their piercing level. This is on a variety of existing units and equipment, plus new equipment.
Bulkhead Armor: There is a new Bulkhead Armor badge, which blocks armor-cracker.
Anti-Aircraft: Added a new Anti-Aircraft feat, and a new Android Buster feat, both of which do damage bonuses against their respective types of target. For the AA, it's against high-flying vehicles only, not low-flying ones like the Cruisers and such. This is on a variety of existing units and equipment, plus new equipment.
Heavy Arms Research: There is a new Heavy Arms Research category in the VR upgrades menu. It currently has five upgrades possible in it, all related to new equipment for vehicles and mechs.
Android Buster: This new feat is now on a variety of existing melee weapons and handguns.
Mech Artillery: The VS-102 Albatross can now be used by mechs and not just vehicles.
Automated Brain Harvesting: Added a new "Brain Harvester" structure, which works a lot like the Protein Cannery, and unlocks at intelligence class 4.
Vehicle Firing Hatches: There is a new "Firing Hatches" feat, which is now required for units to fire out of a vehicle. This also has a debuff to how much damage your units do from firing out of the hatch. This is available only on Delivery Craft, Bastion, and Wraith.
Vehicle Hot Drop: Units riding in vehicles with this feat can disembark without any Mental Energy or Action Point Cost. This is available only on Wraith, Economic Transport, Troopship, and Mech Carrier.
BC-27 Strafe: New weapon available to any vehicle with weapons slots, available very early in the game.
More Vehicle/Mech Weapons: The following new weapons for vehicles and mechs are now available at intelligence class 4: FS-31 Firefall, BC-29 Swamp, SG-50 Magrail, SG-52 Electrorail, AT-14 Achilles.
More Vehicle-Only Weapons: The following new weapons for vehicles are now available at intelligence class 4: DG-5 Disruption Bomb, GG-3 Electro Bomb.
8 New Achievements: Seven of these are related to the new Tier 2 goal.

[h3]Clarity[/h3]

Reinforcements Handbook Entries: There are now handbook entries for Light Reinforcements and Heavy Reinforcements. People have been asking about this on the forums and discord for a while, and I had not realized it was not in the handbook!
"Standard" Androids: The term "elite" for your normal androids has been shifted to instead be "standard." There were only half a dozen spots in the game where this term came up at all, and it was confusing.
Feat Stacking Clarity: The feats handbook entry has been updated to note that the highest value of a feat is what is applied, rather than the combined value. In other words, feats don't stack
Jumping To Where Units Died: When your units died, bulk or otherwise, you can now left-click the notification of this to jump to where they died. It will put a circle flare around where they were for three seconds. In the recent events window, and the history window, you can do this same thing if the on-screen notification has expired. Please note that events logged prior to this new update won't behave this way, but any new deaths even in existing savegames will of course work properly.
Damage Clarity: If a unit is going to be doing zero damage of any sort, then it does not flip over to saying zero morale damage. It stays saying physical damage. This was mildly confusing, since it seemed like maybe you were in a morale-attack mode when you were not.
Coordinated Attack Clarity: "Designate Coordinated Attack" now notes that this will use Action Points from every unit involved in the attack. Also, for standard units only (not bulks), the following message is now added to the AG-50 Punt Gun, AG-51 Rail Driver, and SG-50 Magrail: "Units equipped with this cannot use Networked Targeting to support."
Guard Aggro Clarity: In the tooltips for NPC units that are guards who have been aggroed in some fashion, it now says if they're the same amount indifferent to you as usual, or if they will now attack you on sight. There is a color difference on the icons in the map for this, but it was never clear in the game until now what was going on. This text will only be in English until the next update.
Complete Armor Blockage: When your units cannot even scratch an enemy unit because of the amount of armor they have, it now shows a rejection message to that effect. Previously it would let you shoot at them, accomplishing nothing, and this was occasionally confusing to new folks, and always useless.
Movement Range Ratings: The movement range is now shown on enemy unit tooltips, since that's now relevant information. I was hiding it to keep things tidy, but it's useful to know in general to be honest, and with the Slow Breaker in particular, it's extra useful now.
Project Click Behavior: For projects in the task stack, if there's only one outcome (this is most of them), then clicking them no longer opens up a sub-menu that does nothing. That was very confusing, and could lead to players missing tooltips. For projects where you can choose an outcome, it works the same as before. It also has a note in gold text that those can be clicked (that's not new, but it helps set them apart).
Out Of AP/ME Clarity: If you are out of AP or mental energy, and you are trying to move an android, it now has tooltips next to the cursor that are more clear in terms of letting you know why you can't do what you're trying to do. The mental energy version is only available in the English version of the game until a later update.
Item/Ability Targeting Clarity: When you are in targeting mode for an ability or item, it now always shows that in the header. If you were hovering an invalid target, then it previously was just saying that the target was invalid, but not what you were trying to do. This made it look like potentially you were trying to attack the target but could not, for example.

[h3]Quality Of Life Improvements[/h3]

Attack Ranges During Placement And Movement: When you are in placement mode for any kind of unit, it now shows the attack range circle for them. This is useful for deterrence and protection of course, but also for planning attacks from standard units as well. This is also shown when you move any unit.
Morale Damage Visibility: When morale damage is being scheduled for a target unit in addition to regular damage, both are shown in the bottom of the tooltip for that unit. Previously the morale damage would be done, but it would not actually be shown in advance as part of the prediction on these tooltips. When ONLY morale damage is scheduled to be dealt to a target, or when the morale damage percentage is higher than the physical damage percentage, then the "incoming damage meter" above the heads of units now shows with a blue color instead of orange.
Enemy Death Meter Display: For any NPC units that are being targeted by your own bulk/captured units, it now shows the "incoming physical or morale damage meter" above their heads.
Drone Quality Visibility: Drone Quality is no longer hidden on your unit tooltips. Previously you had to hold shift to see that value, which was confusing.
"Seek And Destroy" Home Site: When you have bulk or captured units in the "Seek And Destroy mode, it will now show what their home position is, which they will return to when they don't have any targets they feel like chasing. This home position can be seen by selecting or hovering them. When you reposition any bulk or captured unit by hand, or when you change its stance via the command mode menu or the lower-left interface, it now sets its home position to their current position.
"Seek And Destroy" Visibility: When you look at the list of statuses in the tooltip for one of your bulk units that is in the Seek And Destroy mode, it now shows you what their last goal was when they did a move. Please note that if they were shooting at something, that's separate from the move. And they don't move every turn.

[h3]Balance[/h3]

Building Over Ruins: When roads, fences, and other minor items have been destroyed, you're now allowed to build over them freely, rather than them continuing to block construction.
"Protection Required" Project: The "Protection Required" project has had some of its options rebalanced, making them more valuable. A fix to prevent a softlock with this project also is in place.
Small Arms Research Un-Dilution: Removed four melee-focused upgrades from the Small Arms Research category, to make that more focused. These upgrades are still available through the Melee Research category.
Buffs To Sledge: Sledge attack range has been increased from 12 to 26. There's no good reason they can't lob grenades that far. Also, frankly, this makes the bulks a lot more useful since they can actually cover a reasonable area with their deterrence.
PMC Impostor Buffs: PMC Impostor attack range has been increased from 12 to 29. They have a nice rifle to start with, and this helps set them apart from the other various android classes, making them have a better role in general.
Item Usage Buff: Androids that can take cover will now do so, for free, any time they use any item while standing in a spot where they can take cover. Vehicles and Mechs that can put their shields up will now do so, for free, any time they use any item. This helps make item usage more viable in a lot of ways.
"Designate Coordinated Attack" Buff: "Designate Coordinated Attack" is now able to be used on any target, not just humans on foot.
Mech Rebalance: All of your mechs that are not adapted from human designs now have weapon hardpoint equipment slots now, and slightly fewer augment slots.
NPC Armor Intelligence Upgrade: If armor would block NPC units from doing all physical damage to a target, they will now still consider it a valid target and make decisions based on that if they can do morale damage to the target. This makes it so that bulk units can take down a Vorsiber inquisitor, for example.
Mech Drone Quality: Now that mechs can launch drones like vehicles do, they all have ratings for their quality of drones.
NPC Turn Order Improvement: Improved part of the turn-order so that new NPC units spawn in before the existing ones decide where they want to move. All of this is after the part where they shot at each other. This allows existing NPCs to decide if they want to hang around or chase newcomers. In various cases, newcomers would spawn right where some existing NPCs were, and those existing NPCs would prematurely move away, which looked very strange.
Biological Mainframe Rotting Intensity: The effect of Rotted Minds on Biological Mainframes is now more intense, to keep this more in balance with other sources of Neural Expansion. Aka, you now get 3% of their capacity rather than 5%. This means 1442 rather than 2404 per Biological Mainframe.
Biological Mainframe Rotting Speed: Once you have experienced Rotted Minds once, there is an update to the stats of the biological mainframes that just shows their actual numbers, and not a "before rotting and after rotting" set of numbers. And there's no longer a time gap before the brains rot. This keeps them viable for generating a lot of neural expansion and in particular compute power -- more so than ever now with the automated brain harvesting -- but removes the ability to micro them to get 4 turns of inflated neural expansion.
Vehicle Engineering Buffs: A variety of vehicles now have substantially more engineering, which is useful for Divert Power To Stun in particular.

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

Command Mode Visual Fix: Fixed a bug from the prior build where if you had exactly 13 or 15 androids unlocked, then it would accidentally put one of the icons down too low on top of the android list button.
Coordinated Attacks Fix: Fixed an oversight where coordinated attacks could call across shell company lines (calling non-shell company units to shell company actions, or the opposite).
"Solve Homelessness" Fix: Fixed an issue where the "Solve Homelessness" project would complete instantly if you had never built any housing at all.
Mech Disembark Range Fix: Fixed an issue where when mechs were disembarking from vehicles, their valid movement range was smaller than it should have been because of it calculating the distance from the vehicle with the height of the vehicle included.
Versatile Lens Fix: Fixed an issue where if you filtered StreetSense to something other than "Project-Related Items," then that would cause the Versatile lens to stop showing those project-related items.
Turn-Change Investigation Fix: Fixed a generalized issue that was causing lists of units to be incorrect during turn changes, and which was also causing "you're in some investigation or infiltration" to blink out of existence during that period, too.
Feat Rounding Fix: Fixed an issue where feats with an amount like 1.5 were being rounded on some parts of the interface to the number 2, which was misleading. It now shows the proper number in all of the places where the feat value is shown.
Mouse Edge Scrolling Fix: Fixed an issue where if you had mouse edge scrolling on, it would not react to the mouse being at the bottom of the screen. In general, there's more of a grace area on the scrolling edges, which on most screens won't make any difference, but on high-DPI displays will make this work properly in all the cases.
Chapter One Sequence Break Fix: Fixed a sequence break that didn't make any sense where if you hacked some other mechs before the prison mechs shows up in chapter one, the prison mech would never appear and people would thank you for driving it off. It now appears anyway.
Executive Skyscraper Fix: Changed two contemplations from chapter two to work based on any skyscraper, rather than requiring an executive skyscraper. The latter are not guaranteed to always be in the city, so that could make those contemplations unavailable.
Minor Exceptions Fixed: Several minor but annoying exceptions have been fixed.
Bulk Unit Feats Fix: Fixed a really stupid oversight where NPCs were all pulling from the default list of feats that were part of their type, rather than looking at how they were configured. This meant that any feats on your bulk androids were not actually taking effect!
Desynchronized Timeline Save Fixes: Fixed a small nest of issues regarding diving into older saves for a city than whatever was in the central metadata. This may have exclusively applied to literal dives, since I had tested things with the manual savegame loading, but I can't rule it out. Essentially, a variety of data, including what turn it is, was being back-merged in a way that was not correct, and now that doesn't happen.