Hi all. I know I said I wasn't going to make any further changes to Build 52, but DOE was part of the excellent Bundle for Racial Equality and Justice over on itch.io and we had a massive influx of new players. As usual, this shook out a lot of new bugs plus some interesting suggestions.

As always, we'd love to get your feedback and bug reports. You can also join our Discord if you want to chat about the game with other players or the devs.

I'll summarize what's been updated since my last post below:

New Features

• Updated Nanite item descriptions to make it more clear that they only affect the equipped character. These are like auto injectors your character would place on their arms so they can't really be used on another character.
• Blitz Nanites now will add "Quick Draw" (firing doesn't end turn) for two turns and decrease hit chance. An upgraded version is available later in the game that also adds an extra action. I was never happy with the Blitz nanites as they seemed like a throwaway item and I finally had an idea how to make them more valuable by adding Quick Draw. If your character has Quick Draw from upgrading Speed all the way, then you won't get anything from the base level nanites except the hit chance debuff.
• Added Health Nanites as a tier 1 item that heals 5 HP and has 50% regen chance. The current Health Nanites are now a "mark II" and I also added a "mark III" version with more health for later in the game.
• Added an option to pause the game when in the background on your PC. Both ways have been requested a few times so adding a setting seemed like the easiest thing to do. It's called "Run In Background" and if you don't want the game to continue when you alt tab off then make sure it is unchecked.
• Clicking an enemy or cover with the mouse (or joystick cursor) will no longer move the camera. this was causing a lot of miss clicks and is a long time issue that i should have addressed long ago.

Balancing Changes

• Updated the Cultist skills to improve their difficulty a bit. Each Cultist skill is now a "Blessing" which I think fits their faction a bit better. The big changes are that Mend (Blessing of Life) and Combined Arms (Blessing of Attack) are added on higher level Cultists. Hopefully this should make the battles a bit more tense.
• Lowered the "hit" experience for characters with a multi shot weapon to balance down the Wildcat and Wrecker advantage (especially in early game)
• Shortened the objective length (number of maps) by 1 everywhere except the final area.
• Raised level up thresholds slightly for higher levels

Bug Fixes

• Removed the manual camera option because it was causing major lag during the turns. This will potentially be added back in a future update.
• Camera movements reduced and slowed down just slightly
• Enemies were not taking overwatch shots if they were not visible and also not firing on turrets if they were not visible
• Center Camera shortcut (C key) was not working
• Encounter options sometimes displaying as locked when you had the class on your team
• When retrying a hostage mission after adding the hostage to your team, they could only be targeted as an enemy
• Grenade launcher and any weapon with Piercing Ammo could fire through walls
• It was possible to interrupt an encounter when you were out of fuel by triggering the out of fuel beacon with the controller shortcut
• if aborting during a "final" mission in an objective it was always marking it failed on subsequent attempts so it was not possible to complete the objective
• Sometimes the game would soft lock during an enemy turn (you would see the movement arrow but enemy would never finish the movement). Its a fairly rare bug but i think this is the fix.
• Clicking the close button on game mode selector while creating a new game would create a broken save
• Selection circles on loot were not animating
• Poison Grenade not applying Poisoned status effect
• Some issues with animated enemy selection
• Enemies tab on menu was not changing if you loaded a new save after viewing it
• Updated Double Barrel skill description to better fit the in game behavior.
• Changed filled health dots to orange in color blind mode
• Changes to better handle corrupted saves (still not clear on what may be causing save corruption)
• Sub damage that occurs on a merchant encounter will now happen after you close the merchant

I'm still trying to decide how to handle the AI updates I mentioned in the last post. I've not really been able to dig in on those just yet but I'll post again if I have an update there. It might need to be held for a future "Build 53" if that happens