v0.702 - Battle Map Features and Combat Rebalance

This update focuses on improving combat visually and gameplay-wise, which was the most requested improvement from the in-game survey. Yes, I do read those!

The terrain generation has been tweaked so there should be more variation. You should see more hills and mountains grouped together between valleys and so forth. There are also more décor pieces like skulls, dead trees and more tree and building variety in general.

The different species of Evolved now have their own strengths and weaknesses. Before there was a linear increase in strength between all species, but now there's a stronger divide between "weak", "medium" and "strong" enemies and friends. This should add some tactical considerations to battles.

For example, the Wombat is slow-moving with very high health so you might want to avoid them and attack the Fox first, who has a high base accuracy and is more likely to hit you successfully. Of course, if the Wombat has a shotgun and the Fox only has its bare claws, that changes the calculation. Some species are even nocturnal, meaning they suffer less movement and accuracy penalties when fighting at night.

There's a hidden mechanic where the enemy's hideout strength is affected by factors such as distance from the starting position and terrain features. I never really explained this in the game, but now you can see in the tooltip what's affecting a hideout's strength.

I've also tweaked the algorithm that calculates this so super strong hideouts should be less common near the starting position. However since the map is procedurally generated, there can still be some strong enemies if everything lines up correctly, e.g. a bunch of tightly grouped villages will cause scavengers nearby to be more powerful than normal.

As a final note, you should see a lot more variety in species spawned during encounters, with feral species now added to spawn lists for bandits and scavengers.

What's next?

I want to clean up the late-game settlement building which has been added piecemeal up to this point. There's missing links in the chain, like having a sawmill to automatically process wood into wood boards instead of the player needing to create it all themselves. This should tie in nicely with the ration-making system in the previous update.

I'll also be spending a few weeks making a new trailer since the current one is about 8 months old now, and there's been a lot of improvements in that time.

Full change list

• Overhauled all combatants speed, accuracy, dodge and health stats
• Overhauled spawn costs and spawn pools of all types of encounters on world map
• Implement battlefield terrain can grant weapon abilities
• Implement spawn groups for battlefield terrain
• Changed battlefield terrain spawn rates for all map types
• Added lots of battlefield debris and decor types
• Adjusted lots of terrain images to be more consistent
• Redid all urban house images for battle maps
• Weapon ammo can now be taken from equipped items (in addition to taking from inventory)
• Rocks no longer provide change to dodge
• Rocks provide higher accuracy to ranged attacks
• Combined corpses spawned by defeated combatants into one type
• Changed animal corpse site images
• Removed Green Snake, now all snakes are Tiger Snakes
• Disable zoomie mode if player goes to sleep
• Emu's Sharp Claws replaced with Sharp Beak
• Thorny Devil's Sharp Claws replaced with Thorny Claws
• Added nocturnal ability for some combatants in battle, reducing impact of darkness on their speed and ranged accuracy (Possums, Bilbies, Echidna and Wombat)
• Added new battle tips for new combat mechanics
• Add tooltip for terrain effects on hideout sites
• Add tooltip for recent condition changes on hideout sites
• Rebalanced Inn spawns when hanging out
• Rebalanced gold cost of all mercs
• Reduced thrown molotov on fire time and increased drenching with water effect
• Combatants take into account adjacency penalty when deciding whether to use ranged weapons
• Removed longer ranged bias when choosing weapon to use for combatants
• Equipment on enemies starts with higher condition if it has protection stats
• Sand Deserts make lizard hideouts stronger now
• Removed redundant status sprites next to combatants in combat
• Display threat level of encounters on world map tooltip
• Changed most bleeding times from weapons to 2 hours
• Removed chance to bleed from crowbar, slightly increased chance to stun
• Changed Campsite image to be distinct from Campfire
• Battlefield tombstones now disappear when out of view
• Added more debris vfx for attacks during battles
• Increased impact of distance from map middle on hideout strengths
• Reduced impact of mountains on bandit hideout strength
• Reduced variability in chance to find items in sites
• Changed calculations to slightly reduce search chance of all sites
• Redid attack range terrain display so it looks nicer and fades in and out
• Fixed missing sound effect for drenching with water
• Fixed "dropped on world map" appearing incorrectly if trying to drop quest item
• Fixed survive X days Steam achievements not triggering after the first one (go past midnight ingame to trigger them)
• Fixed hideouts only recovering condition when player is close enough, not accounting for multi-day changes when player is too far away
• Fixed weapon sound effect still playing even if attack failed
• Fixed some gangs missing terrain influence effects from settlements
• Fixed combatant protection bar using health to display value
• Fixed mod issue where it was always overwriting first item in file