Squad Command Update
Hey everyone. This major update focuses on Squad mechanics, with some difficulty rebalancing, quality of life improvements, and the usual round of bug fixes. Read this one in detail because there's a lot to cover.
Command Wheel
Introducing the command wheel:
You can now issue orders to your squad.
Move: Tell units to move to a specific location. They'll hold off attacking until they reach the location unless an enemy is too close or in their path. Upon reaching their destination, your squad will fan out to the nearest cover point.
Search and Destroy: Similar to the Move command, but they go hunting in the direction you command them to. Useful for entering rooms. This command also permits allies to open doors. Try issuing a S&D command on a door and watch your allies breach.
Hold: Your squad will find their nearest bit of cover and hold a defensive position.
Follow: Allies will do their best to follow you, if they're not heavily engaged with the enemy.
Cover Positions Galore
A cover system did exist before, but now it's been greatly expanded. I have quadrupled the number of meaningful cover positions across the whole game.
When you issue a Move or Hold order, your squad will fan out and grab the nearest bit of cover. They'll naturally take up tactical positions rather than just standing about.
NPC Avoidance
Friendly NPCs will actively try to avoid shooting you in the back of the head. So much so that if you stand in front of their line of fire they'll look to reposition. Friendly fire is still enabled and you still need to be careful about how you position yourself… accidents still do happen.
I also reduced the amount of damage friendly NPCs deal to the player (25% of a normal shot) to make this less annoying when it does happen.
New Skill: Quartermaster
The previous Skill Tree skill 'Leadership' (it used to allow you to tell friendly rebels to halt) has been made redundant by the command wheel. So I have replaced it with the 'Quartermaster' skill, allowing you to make a one-time request of ammo from each marine in your squad, as well as the ability to heal injured allies to full health as long as you have an inventory item (food or medical) that can heal them.
I'm really enjoying trying to keep my squad members alive for the entire run.
This only applies to rebel marines currently. I'll look to extend it to the full ally roster in later updates.
New Equipment Flow
To celebrate this squad update, at the start of each run you'll be given 2 reinforcement beacons and 1 med kit. This is so you don't have to wait until you find a friendly marine. Instead you can test the squad command wheel from the moment you start your run.
What does this mean for future updates? Well now this flow is in place, I want to create custom starting inventories for each class. But that will have to wait until the next update.
New Equipment: Total Recall
Total Recall is a new piece of equipment found in equipment crates. It will teleport every member of your squad to your current location instantly. This is useful if you're surrounded, have lost your squad, or during the prison level where friendly marines are scattered about the level in prison cells.
Grenade Trajectory Indicator Overhaul
The previous grenade trajectory indicator was bad. It was, for some reason, offset from the centre crosshair. Which made throwing grenades inconvenient as you had to constantly re-adjust your aim, and throwing knives nearly impossible to use. Well now the Grenade Trajectory Indicator points at the centre of your crosshair. It feels so much better like this, I'm kinda embarrassed how long this one took me to fix.
Mini-Boss Overhaul
Mini-Boss health doubled
Mini-Boss damage output halved
I wanted to shift the role of the mini-bosses to be that of a tank, so the player actually has time to marvel in the danger they're in. Previous bosses were sometimes getting deleted too quickly. To balance their new tankyness, I've dropped their damage output by half.
Boss HP Buffs
In the same spirit as the mini-boss changes, Worm God and Skugz were going down too quickly, especially for late game players with most of the skill tree unlocked. Worm God's HP has been doubled, and Skugz has had a solid bump too. Both fights now feel more substantial.
Worm God HP 2500 → 5000
Skugz HP 5000 → 7000
Difficulty Curve Rebalance
I smoothed the overall difficulty curve of the game. Greenhouse (Chapter 1) and Scrappers (Chapter 2) had some characters with the same TTK as late game enemies, which made the early floors harsher than they needed to be.
I also toned down every enemy I'd identified as a 'run ender'. These were enemies with a TTK of less than a second, meaning if they got the drop on you, your run was over unfairly, without time to react. That's gone now.
If anything, this update has actually made the game harder on the whole. But I think it's also going to feel a lot fairer. I've changed the stats on over 30 enemies, so let me know how it's feeling.
Weapon Balancing
Buffs:
Pistols / Plasma Pistols are now crit specialists, making them more viable for end game. Crit chance 1–10% → 10–20%, flesh damage 14–24 → 15–25.
Heavy weapons max bullets in spread increased from 2 to 3.
Nerfs:
SMG rate of fire: 15–22 → 14–20.
Plasma SMG was over-performing on flesh and shields. Flesh damage 10–18 → 10–16, shield damage 12–16 → 8–12, rate of fire 15–22 → 14–20.
Plasma Shotgun was too overpowered against bosses. Shield damage 30–40 → 20–30.
Confessions
A couple of bugs I introduced in previous updates that needed owning up to.
Fire Rate Fix
So about 6 weeks ago, when I dropped the Steam Deck Improvements update, I introduced a bug so game-changing that it deserves its own title.
I accidentally reduced the fire rates of all NPCs in the game.
Many of you may have not even noticed. But essentially for the past 6 weeks the game has been on easy mode. Well this update has fixed that. Enemies are now firing at their normal, high-intensity fire rates. The game is now back to being as hard as I intended it to be.
Final Boss spawning 6000 warp crystals
So I forgot to set a flag on the final boss that ensured he stopped taking damage when dead. This wasn't such a problem in previous updates as he burst into pieces and fell off the map. But since the weapons update, the Varagnian Laser was introduced, and its shot was able to hit the final boss 60 times in 1 frame. Which resulted in you, the player, getting 60 times the amount of Warp Crystals dropped. A really broken reward… if your PC / Steam Deck didn't crash. Well, this has now been fixed.
Fixed Gamepad Aim Assist Regression
During the Steam Deck Performance update, one of my optimisations changed how I found the closest enemy to the player. This had the knock-on effect of breaking the Aim Assist on gamepad.
Happy to report this has now been fixed and plays better than ever on gamepad and Steam Deck.
Bug Fixes & QoL Improvements
Destroyed doors are now removed after 5 seconds because they had the potential to block paths and obstruct pathfinding
Warp Core can now be destroyed by rockets and grenades
Warp Crystals are now pooled in memory (performance win)
Fixed offset aim on SMG rebel
Fixed NavMeshSurface bug that broke pathfinding in a few rooms
Fixed losing health when starting boss floors, a rare edge case bug that really pissed me off, fixed now
Fixed walking animation playing while reloading; enemies and allies could potentially walk on the spot whilst reloading
Fixed flamethrowers and beam weapons firing while using the Gravity Hand
Fixed Gravity Hand / Power-held / player UI closing on drop
Fixed ally health not persisting between loads, this was exploitable through save scumming
Lowered Gravity Hand sounds by 20%
You can now find your confiscated guns during the Slaver Out of Fuel event
Throwing knives now trigger the 'Take Damage' animation on shielded opponents, and shield bars physically drain, there wasn't enough feedback that your throwing knife had done any damage
Rebel marines base HP increased from 600 to 1000, so they're more likely to survive a floor
Shadow Syndicate (allies) HP increased from 600 to 1000
Fixed character model swap bug at homebase that caused the player model to have multiple skins and accessories.
A final note
I haven't tutorialised the command wheel just yet. The game is already very tutorial heavy in the beginning and I didn't want to overwhelm the player. But expect this to come in future updates. Perhaps I can teach it in the Homebase as part of that flow.
As always, let me know your thoughts on the update and report any bugs you find on the Discord or Steam forums.
Cheers, James