As usual following a major release, it's again time to review player stats from the previous Beta. The full summary is on the forums here, where you can read a breakdown of the 462 wins in recent months, how players fared with achievements (Beta 6's flagship feature), and check out some of the new stats recorded by score sheets.
Now that there are a number of ways to "change" your Cogmind, PlasticHeart has kindly put together an realtime graph showing which approaches players are taking leading up to a win, conveniently obfuscated with abbreviations so that you're not spoiled if you haven't made these discoveries yet :P
I've added links to both that graph and Ape3000's player progression graphs from the bottom of the leaderboards for easier access. (If you recall from earlier SITREPs, the latter graphs are a great way to see how your runs are changing over time.)
Beta 7 Aftermath
So the leaderboards were reset to go with the new version. New beginnings for all!
As expected, we immediately saw an increase in the number of Garrisons deaths, those being optional areas a majority of players avoided before whereas now at least one visit is now required for those seeking access to the best robot hacking potential.
Later Garrisons are quite challenging, but if you enter one of the lower ones around -8/-7 in good shape and having made preparations like having a full inventory, spare propulsion, and decent weapons (preferably backed by a launcher, too, especially EMPs), they'll fall pretty easily to a systematic attack.
Since the release I've streamed two runs on Twitch, both of which installed a RIF inside the -8/Materials Garrison. The first run last week was to get to know the potential of a full-on high-inventory robot hacker build. The latest one was more of a combat-oriented run with RIF for intel support by hacking non-combat bots (the mid-game relied mostly on allies, and propulsion was all over the place, sometimes using wheels, hover, and later treads). I'm looking forward to doing more streams during Beta 7; one of my plans I've yet to get to is a melee run.
A quick note about robot hacking (before it gets brought up too much :P): There are currently a number of duration-based hacking effects that having no reminders of their AOE or whether not a given robot is affected. I'm waiting on this until the hacking system is settled, and also until we have even more hacks, as other factors will affect how that is handled. As is it doesn't have a huge impact, but is definitely a QoL issue that needs to and will be addressed later, so yeah I'm aware of it!
It's been fun seeing players take advantage of other new features, including sharing a lot of neat map exports. Most would be spoilery so I can't share them here, but this one by Mojo in the Factory turned out pretty cool:
When he's not working on stats or doing hacking runs to the end game, PlasticHeart has been sharing some fun "cogmics" as he calls them. My favorite shows some of the main alignments and by extension ways to play Cogmind. The color of each panel is... fitting :)
In other recent news, Armchair Robotics discussions have been combined into a single pinned thread on both the forums and Steam, to avoid clutter since most of the replies are happening in the corresponding r/Cogmind threads anyway. Feel free to reply in any of these composite threads, though, with questions or anything else to add. New topics will keep coming.
Also, tamagotaso has updated Cogmind's Japanese manual translation to Beta 7. Many thanks for that!
Eight'll be Great
I can't get into the details of Beta 8 yet, since there are still a couple of fairly different routes it might take. Although I haven't made a final decision on that, the roadmap which lives on the FAQ is kept up-to-date and does publicly list some hints...
As always there are tons of plans. Yet more robot hacking will be coming eventually--the system is working nicely with its 65 hacks, and it's only going to get better with more options. (First the dust needs to settle on Beta 7, but already there are more plans for RIFfers, even outside pure hacking.) In any case, the next few releases will be working to add content to the first half of the game as well.
I really can't wait to get into working on Beta 8, but there are other plans for the near term. As mentioned before I'll be going to San Francisco for this year's Roguelike Celebration, where you can find me if you want to stop by and say hi :D. I'll also be giving a little talk there, for which I still need to do some preparation. Roguecel is a chance to meet lots of other well-known roguelike devs, too, so if you're in the area it's probably worth coming. I mean, you can actually meet other people who play roguelikes, actual people in the flesh! xD
I'll be pairing that with a trip to see family, so I'm heading out to the US next week and taking a bit of a break from development. That means a hiatus on SITREPs for probably a few weeks, until we're on the other side of the Celebration. Then I've gotta deal with mega jet lag while trying to get back into the swing of things, yay my favorite.
Have fun with Beta 7, and see you around!
A note about SITREPs: These are regular progress updates where I share features coming to the next release, but aren't actually in game yet. Public releases get their own dedicated news announcement and changelogs/release notes, for example with Beta 6 and Beta 7.
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums or r/Cogmind.