The Mid-Midway Mid-Update! (0.9.99.986)

[p]... And 2 months later, I come again to bring you all the most "recent" changes! As you can see by the subtitle, it's a very polish-intensive Update, rather than being content-focused this time. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure your experience when coming back to Endless Tactics to give it a check should be vastly better by now, more than ever, with this absolute amalgam of stacked up QOL, fixes, UI Reworks and improvements, for the 5th or so time in a row if I'm counting it right (which I'm probably not since it's literally 4am right now).[/p][p][/p][p]CHANGES [/p]

• [p]Online Scores - Check yours, your rivals', your friends' hyper-detailed (hopefully not getting rate-limited once more players are in) statistics! Waves, Nights, Turns endured, Units Bumped, Damage Taken (?), Surges Blocked, Spawns Denied/Blocked (yup these are all different things you can do now), Tiles Cleansed, etc etc...[/p]
• [p]Completely Reworked Operations Screen! - Juicy roulette-like selection for Planets, accompanied by a ton of Shaders and dynamic animations to make you truly feel like you're selecting planets or something (and basically lifted from 9 King's selection screen).[/p]
• [p]Cursor Overhaul - Dynamically switches back n forth from Hardware to in-game Cursor, for minimal delay and maximum responsiveness... Also included an Option to force the Hardware Cursor for all situations![/p]
• [p]Dual Player Colors - Turrets and Stations now come in a brand new palette! No more confused players trying to select Stations nonstop (I hope?).[/p]
• [p]Major Improvements to Readability - Unit selection, UI spacing, icons, highlighting, Shop UI, pathfinding logic, smart-selection improvements, and many more other seemingly minor but UX-changing tweaks for keeping you properly and aptly informed at all times![/p]
• [p]Several New Artifacts - Just added the absolute craziest Artifacts (Legendary, mostly) to the game! [/p][p][/p][p](pic related to illustrate my point above)[/p]
• [p]Proc-gen Reworks - Tons of innerwork to make (especially) SELKHET's terrain look much better and non nonsensical! [/p]
• [p]Tons of new Art and Audio![/p]
• [p]Endless QOL - Auto-restarts (for applying certain options), new menu Options, dynamic Resolution Scaling (to avoid visual inconsistencies on higher resolutions), Nest Surge panel, major improvements to Controller navigation, Cursor modifier indication, Selection modifier streamlining (holding its key now affects Unit-auto-reselection), etc... [/p]
• [p]Countless UI Improvements![/p]
• [p]Several bug fixes - Crash fixes, visual glitch fixes, multithreading fixes, all kinds of fixes...[/p]
• [p]More Optimizations - Enemy AI, Statistics-tracking, Selection overlay, UI logic, massively better performance on TV screens, and more![/p]
• [p]Balance reworks - Mechs, Self-destruct, Acid Rain, Enemy Scaling, initial Nests spawn...[/p]
• [p]No Player spawn fatigue! - Just cut it off altogether. Only affects Nest-spawns now. Because it was simply unfun.[/p]
• [p]Brand new Unit-Capturing mechanic - Already present via certain (secret) Artifacts... Soon to be accompanied with the fearsome Corruptor - a brand new tick-like Special Unit that wololo's (converts) your Units into its team... try using them with the Hacked Enemies Upgrade maybe?[/p]
• [p]Playable Apex Enemies - Yup, no debuffs, no typical "playable boss" limitations, nothing... Just straight up unfiltered OPness at your arsenal. Obtainable through multiple certain (secret) means.[/p]
• [p]Way too much to list here, so check the rest out by yourself and/or at our Discord dev server (linked below!)[/p]

[p] [/p][p]We also went to a local gaming expo/convention, PUDGames, and that has once again immensely helped us to gather even more crucial UX feedback, all of which (that was thoroughly taken note of while attending) included in the list above :)

Release window likely moved to Q1 2026 for even more polish and UI reworks, just so that we can launch Endless Tactics in the absolute best state possible. So, unless something drastically changes, expect tons of extra little tweaks... everywhere.
[/p][p] ... Exception being the brand new Codex (Units, Items, Buildings, etc) - view all their details from the menu - and discover each one of them for the first time to earn rewards! And should be implemented quite soon for all of you completionists out there.[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]
Most of the feedback gathered and addressed from our Reddit. [/p][p]Feedback Form [/p][p]Discord Server (Dev Updates)[/p][p]- the_procrastinator[/p]