Invasion Machine News

[h2]Minor update[/h2]
Before I continue working on the next updates to the high value targets system, I wanted to make some small fixes and very needed fixes to two areas of the game - the player vehicles and the AI responses in combat.

Player Vehicles will now be driving noticeably faster - I've tuned their engines to increase the acceleration and responsiveness, cause I always was finding myself sending the helicopter everywhere instead of the ground vehicles in playtests, since I didn't want to wait for the sluggish cars to arrive where I sent them. Every player car will now be (a little) snappier,

The enemy AI in combat was getting too confused in the latest builds, causing many of the enemy units not to shoot back at you at all, when engaged. This was caused by them trying to do multiple reactions too often, or eveb at once - trying to flank you, run away, shoot back, but find a better place for it, change their target (way too often), etc. This has now been reorganized a little, and should make the enemies much more reactive.

Also, in the previous build way too many enemies were showing up with RPGs to battle - this is now curbed a little.


[h2]Full changelog:[/h2]
version 0.13 (minor update):
* BALANCING of the player vehicles - all player-controlled cars will now be driving faster, and have better acceleration.
* BALANCING - reduced the number of RPGs that the enemy units deploy to the map. In the previous versions of the game, the enemy squads sometimes spawned on the map with nothing but the RPGs in hands, this will now be more balanced.
* BALANCING - the enemy AI will now be more active - spawning more kinetic missions (patrols and foot patrols) and being more aggressive on the battlefield. In the previous versions of the game, the enemy units were trying to do too many things at once - flanking, looking for better positions, shifting their targets, and in the end - it caused them not to fire back at all, at times. In this build, more focus is placed on just shooting back at you, when engaged.

[h2]Foreword[/h2]
The project hasn't had any updates for a long time, last year, so it's high time to explain what's going on. The delays were due to my health problems - I had been seriously ill in recent months, and it has completely halted any serious progress on the project for a while. Now, however, as my health is slowly returning to normal, I can start working again. The project's status has not changed - it is not canceled and new content will be introduced again, in the future.

[h2]Current update[/h2]
I released a new build of the game to all branches (since the main one was already rather outdated) - the new version 0.12 includes the first version of the "case building" game loop - from now on, villages on the map will sometimes house high-value targets - special enemy units that can directly trigger and spawn AI missions against your forces.

Your goal will be to identify and arrest these HVTs before the have a chance to gain more notoriety.
For now, the HVTs focus solely on planting IEDs, but in the future I plan to add many more missions for them (and more ways to identify and unmask them).

[h2]Annoying problems[/h2]
Some players reported that the game used to pause all AI actions after loading the savegames (which caused the player to get no more missions, no more traffic on the map), and I was able to identify a case of this happening and correct it - in the new version of the game this issue has been fixed.

[h2]What's next[/h2]
I need to finish a round of more bug fixing and then update the game logic and optimization.
Afterwards, I will finish working on the HVTs (make them more universal) and make some changes to the villages and the bazaar (which was supposed to be the center of legal and less than legal interactions in the province, but for now proves to be rather dead, most of the time).

[h2]Full changelog - version 0.12 (experimental):[/h2]
* NEW: High Value Targets - from time to time, enemies of special importance - leaders - will appear in local villages. Hidden among civilians, they will work to organize attacks on your forces, gaining experience and higher positions in the organization with each successful operation.
- your goal will of course be to find them and arrest them. An HVT poses as a civilian, and cannot be killed or arrested without first gathering evidence against him
- you can gather clues and evidence in various ways - sometimes people will gossip in the town meetings, sometimes the locals will get fed up with the guerrillas and give and HVT up. You can also send your EOD/investigators to former IED blast sites and check them for evidence.
- over time, you'll be able to locate the hideout of an HVT and raid the place.
- most of the IEDs appearing on the map are now ordered by and planted by people working directly for specific HVTs. If you want the IEDs to stop, you have to find the person ordering their construction.
- the HVTs gain notoriety for as long as they can keep eluding you - each one of them starts as an "ambitious amateur", and will keep gaining more experience with each successful op.
- this build of the game is EXPERIMENTAL - meaning the HVT functionality isn't yet finished - in the next builds, the more experienced HVTs will start spawning more types of missions. For now, all HVTs focus on planting the IEDs.
* FIX: for some of the players, the game would stop spawning traffic and new AI missions after the game loads. This is now corrected.
* FIX: the AI would previously not be aggressive enough when fighting your troops - too many of them would waste time trying to find non-existent cover, instead of shooting at you.
* FIX: mission spawning logic, where the game would try to send orders to units that have not appeared on the map, yet.
* FIX: cars stopping in traffic for no good reasons (getting stuck)
* FIX: multiple fixes for engagements logic (targetting something that is no longer there, running for cover and never stopping to shoot back, etc.)
* FIX: multiple fixes for the IED system - spawning, triggering. Also, IEDs would sometimes explode twice in the past
* FIX: units involved in IED facilitation are now marked by the game, and can later be arrested for it

[h2]Casevac - Bugs in the older versions[/h2]
It turns out the older builds of the game have a bug that prevents you from successfully evacuating your wounded. In almost all cases the game will just declare them DOA as your vehicle leaves the map.

In other cases, it will not register the wounded enemies or civilians evacuated from the map, and therefore will not reward you with Command Points, for your troubles.

[h2]Fix #1 - a new "bleed out" logic for the wounded[/h2]
The game will now tell you exactly how much time you have left for the evacuation of your wounded, before they perish. This should let you do proper triage, if you want to (leave those who'll never make it in time, and focus on those who still have a chance).
In previous builds the "bleeding out" mechanic was hidden from the player, and rather unpredictable (the wounded could just randomly die at any point in time), making the whole medic/evacuation process a little too obscure.
In most cases, your wounded have between 1 and 15 minutes before they bleed out.
Units stabilized by a medic can wait for their evacuation as long as you need them to.

[h2]Fix #2 - you get rewarded for your efforts at all times[/h2]
Even if the patients you ordered treatment for die in the process, you still get some Command Points for the effort. After all, it's not your fault they died.
You should always try to help all your wounded, and get them off the map while still alive (as in this scenario the game will reward you with the most points), but you will not be punished for the failures, as long as your try to do _something_ for the wounded.
As a bonus reward, any time you manage to evacuate a unit in time, the stress level of all your remaining units will get reduced by 5%.

[h2]Fix #3 - differences between "buddy aid" and medics[/h2]
You can use any of your units to render help in desperate situations, but it will never be as effective as assigning a medic to help your wounded.

Buddy aid - will spend one medikit (starting with the medikit of the fallen unit, if it has one in inventory). The unit performing the buddy aid has a chance of hurting the patient, especially if it has the "inexperienced medic" perk. The process takes a lot of time, and in the end has only a moderate chance of stabilizing the patient.
In most cases, performing buddy aid on your wounded will simply buy them more time for a successful evacuation.

Medic - will work faster, on any number of patients and with a much greater chance of fully stabilizing the patient.

[h2]Fix #4 - some patient just cannot be stabilized[/h2]
Not all wounds are treatable in the field, and a certain percentage of your wounded will require swift evacuation, even after a medic tries to stabilize their condition. The game will tell you when it's the case.

[h2]Fix #5 - most vehicles are not suitable for transporting the wounded[/h2]
If you decide to put your wounded in a regular vehicle, they will immediately become unstable again. At this point, not even your medic will be able to help stabilize them, and you need to evacuate them as soon as possible. This mechanic is meant to force you to use proper medical vehicles, whenever possible.

[h2]Fix #6 - you can casevac enemies and civilians[/h2]
You can "farm" extra Command Points by evacuating wounded and dead enemies, as well as civilians. This will also improve your relations with the locals (because you're being respectful to their fallen).

[h2]tl;dr;[/h2]
The older versions of the game had many issues related to how it treated the wounded units. All of these issues are now fixed in the newest build available on the test branches of the game.
The fixes will be made public in the main branch next week.

[h2]The 0.10 update is now live[/h2]
In this build, I've focused on fixing many of the small annoyances and long-standing bugs (engagements abruptly ending for no reason, units getting stuck in traffic, units being unable to leave the map), as well as merging the changes from the last two hotfixes (related mostly to the broken logic of arrests).

[h2]New features[/h2]
I'm in the process of reworking the Command Missions - this part of the game consists mostly of the oldest code in the entire project, and has been written in a way that didn't allow me much flexibility. Some of you may remember that at some point I've decided to completely disable the allied patrols, because their units were constantly getting lost on the map. In the future builds, I will gradually re-create the code needed for making these missions work more reliably, and will soon be able to add these patrol missions back in.



[h2]"Black Bird Down"[/h2]
This game has largely been inspired by the movie "Black Hawn Down" and I'm always looking to add more helicopter-based events into it. Using the new Command AI, I've now been able to add friendly helicopters onto the map. As they spawn, their only goal is to travel through the map, carrying a bunch of allies, and (of course) get shot down by the enemy, occasionally. If a helicopter is downed, the Command will ask you to scramble the usual casevac mission, most likely in areas where you didn't plan on going.



[h2]The future upcoming changes[/h2]
* I am now working on the previously mentioned "building the case" update. The idea is to create a new type of enemy in the game - insurgents who permanently reside on the map, live in the houses alongside the civilians, and plan and execute increasingly more complex attacks against you, becoming high value targets for your Command, in the process. Your goal will of course be to find them and destroy them.

[h2]Full changelog:[/h2]
version 0.10:
* NEW: the friendly AI will now spawn it's own helicopters into your airspace. For now, their only goal is to pass through the map, transporting it's own units. My idea is that it will create some "black hawk down" scenarios, any time the enemy AI manages to shoot one down. A downed helicopter will spawn the usual critical mission from your Command, demanding help and evacuation of all the wounded. Any survivors of these crashes will leave the map on their own.
* NEW: continued the re-work of the remaining AI missions from the old, rigid system into the new tree-based logic. This will fix a lot of the weird AI behaviors (like getting stuck on the map, ignoring everything around them), because it's now much easier for me to re-trigger the mission logic when something unexpected happens on the map. The old system would only wait for specific events once, and in just one scenario (like: a car reached it's destination, so it better be around the house I was trying to send it to, or else it's gonna get lost). This is the reason why for now all ground-based allied patrols are still disabled in the game - their missions are not yet completely rewritten to the new system, and they were getting stuck on the map all the time, because of this.
* (again) fixed the issue with insurgent units only getting a single type of weapon
* NEW: you can now ignore _some_ of the missions issued to you by the Command, if you want to do something else, instead. Any mission that isn't critical and doesn't have any of it's own actors assigned, can now be ignored (just click on the button in the mission details window) at a tiny cost to your relations with the Command.
* disabled the small extra window (the mission helper assistant) that used to pop up alongside the main command mission window (every single time you clicked it). You can still open it with the dedicated button, if you want to
* FIX: fixed the logic used to unspawn units that left the map. Now any unit that wanders too far from the bounds of the game map will reliably get unspawned.
* FIX: found and fixed another scenario where cars would be permanently waiting in traffic, for no good reason (getting stuck on the map)
* FIX: fixed the automatic camera movement (the script that's supposed to show you points of interest on the map, but instead was yanking your camera away from you violently)
* FIX: sometimes actors would prematurely get removed from their engagements, causing others to constantly enter and leave their "combat mode"
* added some FX for showing hits on vehicles (if a bullet damages a vehicle, some sparks will show up), cause it was never clear if the enemy was actually doing any damage. Will probably add something even more visible in the future.

In the previous post, I've promised to focus on a couple of game issues and start working on the next content updates for the game. The updates were supposed to start coming out before the end of (last) year, and clearly - that didn't happen.
I'm sorry about this delay. Because of a bunch of health issues, I've been unable to work on the game at all for the past couple of weeks, so no real progress has really been made recently.
The good news is, it seems that I'm now back to normal and was able to resume the development. I know this shouldn't be an excuse, but this game is a solo development project - when I'm down, the development plans always suffer.

For now, I've made two fixes that a lot of players complained about, and made them public in the default branch:
0.9 HOTFIX 2:
* FIX: it was previously no longer possible to manually control any cars (the input was being registered wrong)
* FIX: previously it _seemed_ like the process of building of the water wells could never finish - this was actually just an issue of a misleading icon, but it's now fixed either way

The more substantial updates should start becoming public again in the coming week, starting with another hotfix addressing issues some of you had with garrisonning the buildings.