Survivor Mercs News

Commanders, we just updated our roadmap outlining the next update(s) for Survivor Mercs:



We will be highlighting some of these upcoming features in more detail soon, especially the main content of the next major update, "Strike Force".

We are well-aware that there are still some rough edges in the current gameplay & meta. In order to tackle that, we call for your support! So please read on and help us make a better game by leaving your feedback:

[h2]Couch Co-Op[/h2]
We had this planned for quite some time and are happy to finally share that you will be able to squad-up with friends & family soon!

Other players will be able to join your squad and take control of any Merc to fight M.E.G.A. Corps' robot goons alongside with you. It is going to be a "hotseat"-like mode, so others can just join and leave your session on your local machine with an additional controller at any time.

Apart from playing locally, the game will support Steam Remote Play Together. So you can enjoy some looting & shooting even when your support is not sitting on the couch next to you.

[h2]Story Missions & Balancing[/h2]
We always wanted to feature the Mercs more prominently and at the same time improve the meta progression by tying new unlocks more tightly to certain achievements and milestones in the game.

With the upcoming Mission system, we're looking to reduce the grind and provide a smoother unlock progression while sprinkling in a bit more narrative flavor throughout the game.

The Story Missions will be tied into your Operations and impact your tactical choices when progressing through the map stages. Alongside your mission rewards, we want to adjust unlocks and potentially introduce some new items like Gear & Weapons.

[color]Here's where your feedback comes into play:[/color]

• We want to learn more about how you're playing the game and why you make certain choices.
  
• Which Mercs do you enjoy and why?
  
• What Gear and Weapons are you using regularly?
  
• Do you mainly play with random Commanders or prefer custom Trait configurations?
  
• Which meta upgrades and Rooms do you prefer?
  
• Where did you struggle with the meta progression and why?
  

We have a good idea where WE think things should be adjusted. But we want to understand better what YOU want. So please join our Discord server to share your ideas and feedback, or hop over to the Steam forums.



[h2]Custom Skins, more Settings, and other Improvements[/h2]
Ever wondered how Silverback would look like if he was a real gorilla?



Soon you'll be able to change and share much of the game's content. It's technically not a full modding support (yet), but we think you'll have as much fun with it as we do.

We're also looking to expand the Settings, specifically with Input Remapping and a few other options to adjust the game more to your liking. This will go hand-in-hand with some general input improvements and UI polishing. [color]What settings do you want to see in the game?[/color]

Overall, we're looking to polish the game experience as we're preparing for a v1.0 launch. That's the reason why we're also looking to offer a new demo for the game and recruit more Commanders for the fight against M.E.G.A. Corp. Some of the top items on our polishing list are:

• improving the meta progression & player experience
  
• crafting better VFX, sound and overall nicer visuals
  
• adjusting the map stages to offer variety and a nice balance between longer and shorter challenges
  
• tweaking or creating new Mercs, Gear, Weapons, Enemies, and Traits to foster fun synergies
  
• and, of course, fixing any remaining bugs.
  

[color]If you want us to focus on specific issues[/color] that you have with the game, join our Discord or post to the Steam forums to help us make a better game.

Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!

Commanders, it's time for another round of fixes and improvements to iron out the remaining kinks of the "Green Hell" update. With this patch, the new Weapon & UI systems are getting ready to power the next set of gameplay improvements and features.

A small change is already part of this patch: the Commander now retains its HP between stages, making it more important to look after your HP. In turn, you will encounter some enemy Medics earlier in each stage to refill your HP for the battle ahead of you.

We're working on a feature to allow you to refill your HP between stages - at a cost.

Some enemies are now also already showing a better visual guide for AoE attacks. This is a first part of improving the "readability" of the action and generally polishing the visual presentation. Some of you have noticed that we removed some UI animations from earlier versions - this is also something we're working on to make the game look and feel much nicer. So stay tuned for the next updates.

Here's the list of changes, fixes, and improvements in this patch:

• The Commander now retains its HP between stages.
  
• Medic enemies spawn more frequently at the beginning of the battle in a stage.
  
• Shooty enemies have been slightly reduced in early stages.
  
• Impact enemies show a subtle AoE indicator to better gauge their explosion radius.
  
• Added a (temporary) skill tree to the Nerd Glasses Gear.
  
• Pause menu & Stats Overview menu show much more information about your current squad, including detail views for Mercs & Gear to check upgrade trees. Some stats and windows are still WIP and may display some incomplete information.
  
• Improved the performance and reliability of the object pooling system to reduce micro-lags.
  
• Auto-scrolling UI elements are more reliable and no longer cause massive delays on upgrade popups or in menus.
  
• Fixed some rogue separator glyphs in the stats display containers.
  
• The skill trees in various popups should now be fully navigateable again.
  
• Adjusted the layouts of Merc skill trees to make it more obvious which upgrade trees are exclusive and which one holds the general upgrades.
  
• Fixed various typos or misleading/deprecated information in UI labels and descriptions.
  
• Fixed the "critical health" animation playing during stage intros.
  
• Fixed the Bunker menu scrolling up or down erratically when building rooms or entering the menu.
  
• Fixed various issues with scrollbars not appearing correctly or misbehaving.
  
• Fixed the issue with overlapping icons and text for map & operation modifiers.
  
• Fixed an issue with potentially overlapping panels for locked and unlockable equipment in the Armory.
  
• Fixed the modifiers for Complications showing both + and - icons.
  
• You can click the "back" button when viewing skill trees in upgrade cards again.
  
• Fixed some visual glitches with the screen distortion effect in various menus.
  
• Fixed an issue with grenade projectiles, e.g. Curveball & Nubetube, that caused erratic visual behavior.
  
• Armory, Genome Lab and Barracks now show the correct numbers for "unlocked / available" items.
  
• Fixed an issue that could display a Commander HP value greater than your max HP.
  
• Fixed the "sorted" Trait to give the correct loot bonus.
  
• Your settings now save more reliably also when adjusting something from the Pause menu.
  
• The unlocking of new rings should now work correctly at all times in the Genome Lab.
  
• Objective defense sentries are now correctly using the enemy base configuration and show correct damage numbers.
  
• Heavier enemies are slightly more resistant to knockback.
  
• Fixed an issue with directional melee attacks not always going into the aiming direction (e.g. Quaker Hammer weapon and Silverback's Bulldozer lane).
  
• Fixed an issue preventing the upgrades for Quaker Hammer to persist.
  
• Nubetube's reticles should show up again to indicate their target destination.
  
• Explosive Fire grenades and shells should show their explosion AoE correctly again.
  
• The Defender trait's "shatter dash" works as intended to spawn friendly shrapnel when dashing through enemy projectiles.
  
• In-game HUD now shows the 3 different loot types instead of the deprecated Carry Capacity & inventory weight.
  
• Fixed an issue with the bunker room building UI that sometimes built the wrong room when selecting a blueprint with mouse instead of keyboard or gamepad.
  
• Fixed various display issues with loot not being shown correctly in combat or in the end-of-run screens.
  
• Dying on or aborting an operation does no longer pay additional loot instead of dropping it for your grave.
  
• Tags for Mercs, Gear, and various upgrades have been improved and show the correct icons.
  

We continue working on these known issues:

• Some prior existing synergies have been disabled for the moment. We are looking to re-introduce these or similar ones soon alongside new and improved ones.
  
• The Armory & Barracks don't show the base stats for Gear and Mercs, so various synergy-related info is only available during an operation.
  
• The opening animation at the start of a stage is delayed (exiting the loading screen too early).
  
• Various UI animations are still deactivated and will be re-introduced to match the new UI system.
  
• Icons and some thin lines in the UI are not scaling nicely or disappear. We're working on that to ensure clean scaling across all resolutions and screen sizes.
  
• We're working on more balancing adjustments to create a smoother unlock experience, primarily for Mercs & Rooms, and more exciting challenge progression throughout the operations.
  
• The camera animations highlighting reward objectives and extraction points are too jarring and interrupt the gameplay flow. We're testing a different solution but are leaving that in until a better system in in place soon.
  
• Modifiers for Objective Capture Speed are inversely colored (positive = red, negative = green)
  

As always, join our Discord or post to the Steam forums if you encounter any issues or want to leave your feedback to help us improve the game.



Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!

Commanders, again sincere apologies for the issues after the latest major update 0.9.15 "Green Hell". With this patch we're fixing the remaining critical issues, so you can enjoy the game again without any major blockers.

We also made some good progress already on fixing the lag issues around level-up popups. But we still need to test some things before releasing these improvements, so please bear with us for some more days before we can ship these improvements, too.

Here's the list of the few but important fixes in this patch:

• Fixed an issue with Scorch's flamethrower configuration to make it behave again as intended.
  
• Operator is not longer showing a scrambled up stat description with multiple mixed languages.
  
• Chemtrail's Directed Dispenser specialization is working again as intended and no longer soft-locks the whole game due to a misconfigured weapon pattern.
  
• Fixed Nubetube's missing targeting pattern, although it may still need tweaking.
  
• Fixed a potential issue with Clank's damage scaling.
  
• Fixed a broken velocity calculation for the Singularity Launcher projectiles.
  
• Fixed an issue with Minidrone enemies not scaling and updating correctly like other enemies.
  
• Fixed the Defender trait's Shatter Dash to spawn the shrapnel as intended.
  
• Balancing tweaks to the enemy spawn patterns for the Farmine Inc. map.
  
• Gear and Merc hiring cards show their "category tag" icons again as intended.
  
• Fixed a memory leak caused by the Room upgrade trees.
  
• Map modifiers show up nicer.
  

Aside from the popup lag fixes, we are working on these known issues:

• Some prior existing synergies have been disabled for the moment. We are looking to introduce them again with the upcoming patches for this major update.
  
• The Armory & Barracks don't show the base stats information for Gear and Mercs, so various synergy-related info is only available during an operation.
  
• Related to this, the Pause menu and Operation Overview screen do not show a lot of info at the moment where the Gear, Mercs, and other panels should show some relevant info about your current squad. This has high priority but please allow us some time to fix it for good.
  
• The level-up & upgrade popups cause a notable delay/lag due to some rogue layouting code. We're also working on this with high priority.
  
• The opening animation at the start of a stage is delayed (exiting the loading screen too early).
  
• We're working on more balancing adjustments to create a smoother unlock experience, primarily for Mercs & Rooms, and more exciting challenge progression throughout the operations.
  

As always, join our Discord or post to the Steam forums if you encounter any issues or want to leave your feedback to help us improve the game.



Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!

Commanders, we're terribly sorry for some bugs that caused some annoying problems for some of you after the latest major update 0.9.15 "Green Hell".

This patch is solving many issues and brings some additional improvements:

• Fixed the Override Dongle causing the capture speed to slow to a crawl and breaking your run.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused an infinite loading screen for various players at game start.
  
• Fixed the effect for the shrapnel-on-crit-kill procs.
  
• Fixed the display of stats and modifiers for Gear, Traits, and the Commander stats list.
  
• Improved the formatting for many stats & modifiers that were showing unnecessary information.
  
• Added various "hidden" stats to the Commander stats list to continue surfacing information about how base stats and bonuses work. This is meant to be improved further in the future.
  
• Fixed some instances of Onslaught stages not spawning enough enemies to reach the kill threshold required to spawn the reward objective and extraction point in the new Farmine Inc. map.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented lv. 1 Mercs from being saved correctly during an operation.
  
• Fixed a scaling issue with some projectiles.
  
• Fixed an instance of the new "Knight" enemy units not de-spawning their shields upon dying.
  
• The grave objective is no longer generated if you didn't lose any salvageable loot in the previous operation.
  
• The pause menu can no longer be opened during various popups to prevent soft-locking the game during animations & transitions.
  
• Improved stat display for the generic level-up upgrades and fixed the Base Effect Duration upgrade to display the correct values.
  
• Re-enabled generic upgrades for attack speed and crit chance.
  
• The Decay status effect is now triggering always for Acid weapons and the Melter Beam but remains a crit proc for others, e.g. Spark's specialization.
  
• Fixed the description for the Storage room.
  

Thanks a lot for your reports and intel on bugs, we are working on fixing these known issues in the upcoming days:

• Some prior existing synergies have been disabled for the moment. We are looking to introduce them again with the upcoming patches for this major update.
  
• The Armory & Barracks don't show the base stats information for Gear and Mercs, so various synergy-related info is only available during an operation.
  
• Related to this, the Pause menu and Operation Overview screen do not show a lot of info at the moment where the Gear, Mercs, and other panels should show some relevant info about your current squad. This has high priority but please allow us some time to fix it for good.
  
• The level-up & upgrade popups cause a notable delay/lag due to some rogue layouting code. We're also working on this with high priority.
  
• The opening animation at the start of a stage is delayed (exiting the loading screen too early).
  
• We're working on more balancing adjustments to create a smoother unlock experience, primarily for Mercs & Rooms, and more exciting challenge progression throughout the operations.
  

As always, join our Discord or post to the Steam forums if you encounter any issues or want to leave your feedback to help us improve the game.



Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!

Commanders, the latest major update 0.9.15 "Green Hell" is receiving some important fixes & improvements for the new UI and game systems:

• Increased Knockback on various weapons to align better with the improved physics simulation.
  
• Added Knockback to the Commander SMG as originally intended.
  
• Fixed a major issue that prevented procs from showing up in the skill trees & upgrade UI.
  
• Added a 2nd starting Beacon to the initial stage for each map to reduce the challenge in the very beginning.
  
• Fixed an issue that added 2 Scrap Metal to your inventory for each loot item you picked up.
  
• Fixed an issue with rooms not showing all modified stats in UI, or showing unnecessary info.
  
• Reduced lag spikes from spawning objectives.
  
• Fixed "Base Crit Damage" showing up as an empty line for Mercs.
  
• Fixed a few skill trees configurations that were not granting the right bonuses.
  
• Fixed a layout issue with the "purchase" popups.
  
• Removed the end-of-run inventory overview screen that sneaked its way back into the game after the loot component gameplay overhaul.
  
• Fixed an issue with the "room construction" popup that caused erratic behavior when navigating the list of blueprints with the mouse and would often cause unintended construction of a room when you only wanted to select it.
  
• Removed an UI element from the HUD that was only meant for testing purposes.
  
• Fixed the display for "charges" on the active skill icons in the HUD.
  
• Fixed the Storage Limit for components still applying even though it was meant to store a larger amount of building components.
  
• Fixed an issue with erratic scrolling in the Bunker HQ.
  
• Fixed blurry icons in some upgrade cards.
  

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused with this update. We are working on fixes and are looking to release another patch in the upcoming days.

Currently known issues we are investigating or already working on:

• Some upgrades and stat modifiers, particularly Gear & Traits still show empty fields or incomplete information. We are working on this with high priority!
  
• The Commander stats in the Clone Bay also show incomplete information and missing icons. This is related to the issue above.
  
• Some prior existing synergies have been disabled for the moment. We are looking to introduce them again with the upcoming patches for this major update.
  
• The level-up popups cause a delay/lag, especially in the map overview.
  
• The opening animation at the start of a stage is delayed (exiting the loading screen too early).
  
• We're working on more balancing adjustments to create a smoother unlock experience and more exciting challenge progression throughout the operations.
  

As always, join our Discord or post to the Steam forums if you encounter any issues or want to leave your feedback to help us improve the game.



Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!