Invasion Machine News

Invasion Machine is almost here. There's been delays, but every on of them meant more time for the crunch (yay) and more fixes.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The first build to be publicly available will feature a single game mode - the sandbox/freeplay, where you don't try to complete a specific mission, but rather keep your AO in check.

You can expect some major limitations at first, though:

• saving/ loading will be disabled
  
• the UI lacks many quality of life features, but I'm adding them one by one
  
• the AI is sometimes dumb, but also is getting improved with every patch
  
• the general roughness of interaction
  

In general, if you feel that an early access game isn't for you - that's fine. You can let it mature a bit before you get invested, just maybe wishlist if you haven't already. I'm not your usual gamedev studio - I've been here a while, and I'm not going anywhere. The project will be progressing.

What you can expect of me - is a lot of attention to realism, dillemas of a modern conflict and depth of the simulation, and I don't mean it as in marketing-talk. This isn't your usual RTS, will never be, and will look into areas probably no other game in the genre ever does.

I feel like I'm really testing everybody's patience with this, but the game needs to be delayed again - the build that I currently have as the alpha still just isn't ready to go to the early access, yet.



I have a number of issues that need addressing, among them:
1. Some major issues with pathfinding
2. Enemy AI tends to clump all together into one big easy target for you, on every engagement. This is boring, too simple and provides little tactical challenge. I'll be making some major adjustments here.
3. Any interactions with the locals (stopping vehicles, searching the houses) completely block the rest of your gameplay, and need reworking.
4. other, general look & feel things that will be very awkward for new players. In the past, this for example included no simple way of giving the move/ engage orders to your troops, but a recent update already fixed this. When I say look & feel, this is the sort of issues I'm trying to address.

So in the end, I could release the game already, but it wouldn't still be a good representation of the future finished products.

Sorry again, the game still gets updated daily, and

I've created some confusion with the release date. The store page states that the game launches tomorrow, but unfortunately this isn't the case. I've decided to delay the release for 4 weeks - till November 6th.



The reason for this is because lately more people started playing the open alpha version of the game - and pointed me to some still-prevailing bugs that I find unacceptable to launch the game with. You might have seen the recent coverage on Youtube, where the guys reviewing the game infallibly get overwhelmed with the chaos in the gameworld. And, although they're funny and chill about it - makes the game barely playable for them.

So - I will fix all that, while also adding more tutorial messages to the game and make the learning curve a bit less brutal, but I need a bit more time.

And because recent changes on Steam make it harder to adjust the already-published game release date, I'm still in the process of properly updating that, and this is why the page still shows the wrong date.

tl;dr; My steam store has a release date set for tomorrow, but I'm in the process of changing it to November 6th - this is the final and official date on which you can expect this game to come to Steam.

As some of you who joined Invasion's Discord server (you can too, by clicking here) know, I often advertise the game as having deep and complex gameplay.
To me, this means that if I add a something to the game - I want it to affect the game world in a similar way it's reallife counterpart would affect ours.

Let's take an example. Your main task in Invasion Machine is improving the quality of life in an occupied province and ultimately - recreating a working society. This means, among other things, rebuilding war-damaged infrastructure.
Our example of the local infrastructure needing our help will be a gas station:



By default, as you start a new campaign - this station is abandoned. Nobody works there, nobody stops there for gas.
The locals are unlikely to put effort into any reconstruction in a still war-torn province, so the burden of re-opening it falls onto your troops.
As long as the nearest vicinity of the station is clear from enemies, you can order your men to start reconstruction. After a longer wihle, when they're done (reconstruction will take a long time, cause I don't want these projects to be too easy of a fix), the station becomes operative, again.


1) We now have a new legitimate workplace for the locals. This means they won't all have to be working in the opium fields, and the local guerrilla druglords will have a little bit less power (and money) in your province. Over time, this should mean less opposition and less attacks on your forces.
2) A gas station needs fuel to operate (duh), so fuel trucks will start making deliveries to it. Normally, the fuel deliveries will be made by local contractors, but if the area is deemed to be too unstable - your Command will order you to send your own convoys (a local fuel truck plus some of your vehicles as security), instead.
3) Cars will occasionally stop for gas here, but only if the station actually has any gas left. The more customers it has, the more money the station makes (double duh).
4) A newly re-opened gas station means two things to the guerrillas. One - it can become a juicy shakedown target for them, so if you don't protect it with your troops - they might start collecting the earnings from it.
And two - any Social Project you complete makes your faction appear stronger and more effective (as your start winning some hearts and minds over) - and is sure to rub your enemies the wrong way. So, they might decide the best course of action is just to take your newly-operating project out of the picture - either by setting up ambushes on it's premises, attacking the staff, or simply blowing the place up (this last part is actually not yet implemented and will come as a future game update). Which again - forces you to place some security in the area.

In the end - with every completed Social Project you bring more stability to the province. But also - the more projects you have, the more troops you need to consistently deploy for security. And since your troops cannot patrol forever (they get tired, stressed out, and run out of resources) - you also need to rotate them.

If you've been following the development of this game, you know that about a month ago I've released a "proof of life" build of the game - a very barebones version, but intended only to prove that Invasion Machine is actually playable, and not just a bunch of screenshots and busted Steam release deadlines.



Since the day I released the first build I've gotten a ton of actionable feedback and for the past month have been putting it to use. So, today I'm ready to share a "public pre-alpha" (or a barely-even-alpha) version 0.2. This one addresses the biggest issues some of you had, and finally lays foundation for the unique features of Invasion Machine (like combat stress and war crimes).

The current build still is too incomplete for me to consider deploying it to Steam as a commercial, early access version of the project. So for now the only place you can get it - is the game's Discord server: Invasion Machine DIscord