Survivors,
Usually we release larger updates farther apart, but we're making an exception. There's been an issue that's been bugging many of you (and us) - which is the level up system.
So here we are with patch 15.1 in the beta branch, which improves several smaller issues, but the main change we want to test ASAP is the new level-up system for survivors.
The full patch notes of this update will be published when the update is released on the main branch.
Reminder: To play on the beta branch, right click the game in the steam client, select properties, and then select "beta" from the betas tab.
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German and Chinese translations have been added and the the latest build is fully translated to these languages.
New level-up system
The "choose one of 3" system that works rather well for X-com, was feeling a bit out of sync for us. Many of the skills are just stat improvements, and not game-changing abilities, plus we have so many different skills in our game, that it just doesn't work like that.
So we changed it. Now, every level you will get a skill point, that you can use to improve one of 8 skill categories. The more you improve in the same category, the better the rewards, and at tier 4 of each category you get some special skills, more than just stats in most cases. In some cases, you may even select one of several skills when improving a category, allowing for even more customization.
Which categories are available depend on the survivor's profession, and now you can choose any of those to improve, without any RNG limitations. But it was still important for us to have a random element, because part of the challenge is to make the best of what you get, and not just use the same winning strategy every time you play. For that reason, we kept the starting skills, which tend to have a very large impact, larger than most level up skills.
We left the level 6 limit for now, and will probably increase it in the full release, although levels 5 and 6 give you 2 skill points, for a total of 8 skills you can choose, allowing you to max out 2 categories per survivor.
We hope you like it, let us know what you think.
Previous Saves
We made the extra effort to support old saves, so you can load old saved games, however your survivors will lose all the level-up skills they had. Instead, they will get skill points according to their level which you can use to purchase skills using the new system.
Mod Support
The new level up system is fully supported and the Modding Guide was updated. However, older mods that define level-up skills using the old system will not work properly. We expect the game will still work, however, all the changes in this area will not affect the new system. See the Backwards-Compatibility breaking changes.