Invasion Machine News

I've released all the changes mentioned in the previous update to the public branch. The simulation of the towns is now rebuilt, and supports much more extensive changes for the features I have planned for the future.

I have also added the water wells, as promised before. Each house on the map will now expect to have access to water from a well. You can select to build the wells from the "Build Structures" menu.

Full changelog:
* NEW: rebuilt the civilian life simulation. The villages will be becoming much more important in the future versions of the game, with the locals doing many more activities, and their attitudes to you affecting the game more.
* step one of this rebuild is making the locals care about their food and money levels, and allowing them to work in the stores in villages.
* Civilians will now buy food in the markets located in their villages
* Civilians might now start working in the markets located in their village
* There's a new map area, called the food market, confisting of many small food stalls. In the future, this will become a very active spot where new interactions will happen (gunrunners, trafficking, criminals meeting, etc.)
* fixed the bug where civilians would never be able to finish their AI assignment of going to work
* fixed the way village stats are calculated
* NEW: each house on the map now expects to have access to fresh water from a well. If you don't build the wells, the locals will complain about no access to water. Each well can supply the buildings in it's nearest vicinity (the affected houses will be marked with icons while the structure build menu is active).
* added more information to the house details UI (the menu showing up when you hover over a building)
* fixed multiple issues with loading the game
* started to rethink the cost of units in the game, would over time like to make it very cheap to acquire the basic transports and riflemen, but much harder to get any greater numbers of specialists on the map
* NEW: added an option for the medics to carry all available wounded to a single vehicle, without having the player issue the order more than once. Just use the "put this any any other wounded in this car" order for this.

[h2]New update in the public test branch[/h2]
I will be focusing more on making the villages (and the villagers) more important in the game. Their simulation is still very basic, and in the future having control over them should be the main focus of the game. Your goal should be to control the villages, build support in them, and to try and make the life better for the locals. So far it's not really working.

I've released the first update trying to address this in the test branch. The villages now have proper resources management, with the civilians buying food (and consuming it, which wasn't the case before), going to work more regularly (if they have work), and in general - being much more active.



In the future updates, I will also add basic utilities - water, electricity and telecommunications. The player will be responsible for reconnecting and maintaining them.

The update will go public in the main Steam branch after this week. I would just like to test it a bit more, first.

The logic that manages how households and civilians living in the AO behave has been rebuilt, and I again used a decision tree-like system for it. It will let me modify the AI reactions very easily in the future, and make the interactions more nuanced.


The villages now have a basic economy system, with the locals more actively looking for jobs. For now, they can only work in the stores (there's at least one new store in each village, now) or in drug farming, but this will be extended in the future updates of the game.


Because so many people asked for this feature, you can now order your units to automatically load all available killed/wounded units into a car, without having to issue the order manually, over and over. You just need to order the unit to carry all other wounded to the highlighted car. Note: only the units from the same faction will be picked up, so you can easily focus on helping your own men, first.


Changelog:
version 0.8.3:
* NEW: rebuilt the civilian life simulation. The villages will be becoming much more important in the future versions of the game, with the locals doing many more activities, and their attitudes to you affecting the game more.
* step one of this rebuild is making the locals care about their food and money levels, and allowing them to work in the stores in villages.
* Civilians will now buy food in the markets located in their villages
* Civilians might now start working in the markets located in their village
* There's a new map area, called the food market, confisting of many small food stalls. In the future, this will become a very active spot where new interactions will happen (gunrunners, trafficking, criminals meeting, etc.)
* fixed the bug where civilians would never be able to finish their AI assignment of going to work
* fixed the way village stats are calculated
* fixed multiple issues with loading the game
* started to rethink the cost of units in the game, would over time like to make it very cheap to acquire the basic transports and riflemen, but much harder to get any greater numbers of specialists on the map
* NEW: added an option for the medics to carry all available wounded to a single vehicle, without having the player issue the order more than once. Just use the "put this any any other wounded in this car" order for this.



[h2]General Plans for the rest of this year[/h2]

1. A complete overhaul of the unit dispatch window - nothing about the current one works as it should. The window is way too large, selecting the vehicles too slow and there's no templates (like - letting you dispatch a transporter with a simple rifle squad quickly)
2. Extending the Squads - each squad should have a team leader with special actions available. This is also related to the overhaul of the unit dispatch, because currently it's impossible to send a certain squad to the map in any easy way
3. Adding the buildable civilian structures, like wells and power generators
4. Adding telecommunications and I-Com - the civilians and your enemy should be using some sort of communication devices. This would let them organize attacks over the map, call for reinforcements, and in case of the civilians - telling the enemy about locations of your units. The player would get a special I-Com vehicle for listening in on these communications (with the help of a translator).
5. Adding a proper main game menu, and letting the player select options for the new game (Fow/ No Fow, enemy weapons, amount of enemies, etc.). This one is kind of obvious, but always took a back seat to more pressing developments.
6. "Building the case" - slowly gathering intel against more prominent criminal leaders living in your AO, as well as small-time guerrillas becoming more notorious over time, until you manage to stop them. I'd like to introduce some sort of a "kingpin" system, where a guerrilla would hide on your map, keep organizing ever-greater attacks against you, as long as you're not able to uncover him.

[h2]Released version 0.8.2 - including fixes and new content[/h2]

The fog of war
The biggest and most noticeable change, if you weren't playing on one of the test branches - is the fog of war. From now on, you will not be able to see enemy or civilian units, unless you have your own men positioned nearby. You can still see the details of the houses, events in the villages, and so on, but all the cars and men will remain hidden.

Enemy mortar teams
The enemy AI is now able to call in mortar strikes on your units.
The way this works, is if the AI spotter (some enemies on the map have a "spot any player units and report back to the AI commander" tasks assigned) finds your men, he'll now most likely call in a mortar strike on you. That is, a new (or an already pre-positioned) mortar team will head your way and open fire.
Mortar teams will remain firing for a set amount of time (or until engaged), and then try to change their position. They will keep attacking the known locations of your units, until found and destroyed.

[h2]Other fixes:[/h2]
There has always been an annoying issue with preselecting the units (you had to very strategically place your cursor in order for the blue preselection icon to appear). This is now greatly improved and should work much easier, and much faster.

There has been a pathfinding issue, where some of the units kept calling for new paths on every single frame, causing FPS dropouts.

There has been an issue, where for some players all enemy units only got equipped with the Dragunovs, in every single case. Issue found and fixed.

The full changelog:
* NEW: added enemy Mortar Teams to the game. They act similarly to foot patrols, but with some notable differences. 1) they will only target areas where other enemy spotters already found your units before. So, if an enemy spotter passes by your units undetected and manages to leave the map - the game creates a "known player locations" list, and might decide to send a mortar team your way. 2) they will stick to one area of attack for 2-3 minutes and later run away, if you can't find them. They can attack you from afar, usually they try to find the most concealed part of the map to post the mortar at 3) if no player units are known to the AI, the mortar team will just wait somewhere on the map.
* FIX: greatly improved the unit preselection system (the blue icon that shows up when you hover over a game unit). This makes it much easier and faster to target the units you actually wanted to.
* FIX: the Fog of War UI should be a little less overwhelming - it now takes much less space on the screen
* FIX: in some cases, after you loaded the game that included your wounded units on the map, it might have been causing errors with trying to carry them into vehicles
* FIX: fixed an annoying camera behavior, which made it change rotation when you requested it to move near one of the units (usually by pressing the space bar). From now on, the camera's rotation will always be preserved.
* OPTIMIZATION: fixed a bug where in some cases the paths for your units would get recalculated each frame, causing a huge and unnecessary CPU spike, especially when your camera has been pointed at a large section of the map (visible units got a repathing instruction on each frame. A bigger visible section of the map meant more visible units to update).
* fixed the areas near the main roads on the map, where units would sometimes get stuck when trying to cross the road

[h2]Testing a new feature - the fog of war[/h2]
The test branches of the game now feature the fog of war system. From now on, you'll only be able to see the enemy and civilian units on the map if you have your own men positioned near them.

How the system works:
If the camera is moved too far away from your nearest unit, the neutral and enemy units will disappear from the map. I've also added a slight visual effect to make this more obvious when it happens.
Any enemies that have already been confirmed (those with the red enemy icon active) will clear the fow the same way your units do (because otherwise it would be hard to target them).



Why:
I don't want the players to be able to find and destroy every single enemy unit on the map, as soon as it appears. The AI is always trying to issue some missions to it's units (like finding out where your units are, working on their relations with the locals in villages, and so on), and if you destroy every enemy on sight - none of their missions will ever affect the game.

For now I'm only keeping this update in the test branch. So far I've only seen it working exactly as expected, but I'd rather test it more before it goes fully public.

How to switch to a test branch:
In your Steam application, you can right-click on the game title to reveal the Preferences panel. Inside it, it's possible to switch the current game branch that you use. The public-testing branch of the game will always include the newest (but sometimes still incomplete) features, first.

In other news:
There's still some (sligher?) issues with the pathfinding, so I'll be hunting the issues related to it. The one issue I know is that some units tend to run in circles in more "complicated" parts of the map. This happens when they're unable to path to the exact point they were trying to reach, and will require some more patching.

In terms of new content, here's my nearest plans:
1. Mortars for the enemy, to again make them a little more dangerous
2. More buildable civilian structures, like wells (promised earlier, and I will finally add them)
3. Communications (cellphones for the civilians and enemies)
4. Making the traffic stops system less annoying.

Some of the players reported an issue where the vehicle dispatch would stop working for them, after the game's been left running for a longer while.

This was due to the dispatch script trying to find unit that should no longer actually be there (dead or otherwise gone from the map). Fixed now.

I will also push the fog of war update soon, but at first - I will only release it the test branches - I'm afraid it might still need some more testing, before it's safe to deliver it to the general public.