GLOBAL MODE BETA UPDATE (7 June 2018)
Global
is the brand new game mode. We've designed it to meet many of your suggestions regarding the game's length and to negate the confusion that some of you occasionally experienced with the current campaign mode.
We absolutely expect the game to still need some tweaks (bug-fixing and balance) but we wanted to give roll out the Global mode as soon as possible so we can get your opinions, criticism and suggestions.
As you can guess, balancing the game is not an easy task. Now it takes us almost a full day to play the whole of Global mode with both rioters and police – and we know how to win!
What is the GLOBAL MODE
Global mode is a single player game mode where every level is connected. If you use violence with no purpose, you'll pay the consequences in later the levels. Global mode often challenges you to try different strategies within levels in order to discover a way to progress.
What's new?
- Global mode has its own save system, unlockable items and customization of all teams
- New items (coloured eggs, taser, pepperspray and a lot more. FYI they're currently overpowered, so enjoy them at maximum effect, while you can – for the definitive release we will balance them and probably reduce their power)
- New weapons and easter egg weapons (flamethrower, railgun, knight armour, swords, holy bomb)
- New loadout menu which allows you to quickly choose objects, equipment and special characters to use
- A new system for public opinion. The total public opinion will be the difference between your own political score and the adversary's. Using violence against a pacifist adversary will have a huge negative result; while using violence to defend your units or groups from a violent adversary attack should give you a bonus.
- You will be able to replay every already played level with new equipment unlocked, to improve the global political score.
What is missing (what we're working on)?
- New victory screens, different to the current screens in the other game modes
- New cutscenes
- Interlude events which will tell you what's happening in the world thanks to your actions
- New special characters for the police
- A new exclusive game ending for Global mode
- Peace and love all over the world
- 19373258909280337 (almost) small finishing touches
Update 0.983 (06th February 2018)
- Fixed hint texts cut from the screen during the game
- Fixed text formattation in loadout / custom menu.
- Added the total score at the end of the match, to to highlight who has lost and why
- Fixed some graphical effects that did not disappear during the game, creating confusion (for example, the visualization that shows the time left to complete the goal)
- Fixed bug that allows rebels to launch powerful columns of divine fire against the police
- Review of all levels in progress (many have small wrong physical collisions that make the characters get stuck, and we are also reviewing all the lights and backgrounds to optimize the performance of each level)
Update 0.982 (30th January 2018)
- Fixed physics bug that incorrectly pushed cops inside crowds
- Lowered the time it takes for the demonstrators to sit down or to raise their hands
- Fixed a bug that shows the cool-down of the skills delayed by a few seconds
- Added in-game icon to the smoke grenade, when used and launched
- Fixed the launch of giant objects by rebels (even if it was fun)
- Levels no longer load until all atlas' have been loaded, avoiding the "ghost" characters when the level starts
- Temporarily removed the launch prompt to play the tutorial
OPTIMIZATION
- We have decreased the update time per second of physics calculations (As you can imagine, we had to adapt a lot of things, so you may notice some minor glitches - we're working on them).
- Now all the interactive street objects are drawn in a single draw call while remaining illuminated.
- Fixed memory leak and frame rate drop for journalist photos.
- Optimized memory management for spawned objects.
- Optimization in the drawing function of the characters.
- A lot of script optimization.
- Optimized INDIGNADOS_2 level (To be applied to all others maps).
POLICE
- Fixed offset of the police formations that was bugged when surrounded by the crowd.
- Fixed spam error in the log when the police could not correctly calculate a formation.
- Fixed a bug that allowed cops to do more attacks per second in some circumstances.
VIOLENCE
We refined the violence and public opinion level in order to make it an integral part of the gameplay.
The main changes are:
- The political score now affects the winner of the match
- In the gui you'll find text that indicates the behaviour of the faction in progress. It's only in English for now, but we'll translate this too.
Possible status (for now) are:
-
- PEACEFUL when you're not using violence at all,
-
- PROVOKING when you're using a small amount of violence according to the situation,
-
- VIOLENT when the violence used is much higher than the opponent,
-
- PAYBACK when you use violence to defend yourself from a violent adversary;
- All these situations have a different influence on public opinion, as you can imagine during the payback status the violence inflicted has much less weight than those who attack peaceful people in VIOLENT status.
- Now it's possible to use all this mechanics to peacefully win each level, or to use subtle strategies such as provoking the adversary until it becomes violent in the eyes of the public, and then attack him.
- Violence now scales non-linearly, so the first violent actions, the first casualties, or even deaths have a much greater weight. The player must be careful who starts being violent first
- We have completely reworked and rebalanced the values of public opinion and violence to make them more sensible and realistic
Patch 0.981 (16th January 2018)
bug fixing and improvements
- All police teams could be eliminated by leaving the faction with zero teams
- Sometimes adding a new team created an invisible card
- Sometimes by clicking "Edit" an assault team would open even if you were editing a balistic or tactical
- The "Cancel" button editing a police team saved the changes anyway
- The ballistic weapons inside the "Edit" menu had different indices than the main police menu, so sometimes the correspondence between the weapon in the team card and the one in the Edit card was lost.
- Police item icons were not displayed correctly
- Clicking on the "None" object did not exit the object selection menu
- Opening the object selection menu for the police does not show correctly the selected object
- Vehicle in- game icon sometimes disappeared: FIXED
- When a vehicle is destroyed, the side icon becomes grey.
- When a vehicle is destroyed, player is adviced by a in- game popup.
- Fixed bug which made run police men X- flipped.
- Zago is trying to find (then fix) the bug of in- game popup which remains on screen (stretched)
- By editing a police team the level of armor appeared always written in caps and not translated
- By deleting all the teams and adding only ballistic teams sometimes they were created with non- ballistic weapons and with a wrong background colour
- Increased the cost of police items
- We removed 1.5 seconds of delay before starting the animation of the leader using the radio (just before the police charge – but we kept the sound).
- Fixed a bug which blocked police units for all gameplay.
- We added a safe timer which unblocks units that used to stay panicked for too long.
- Initial cooldowns for skills at “too easy” and “challenging” difficulty have been removed.
- M16 now has the correct text in the loadout menu
- It is now impossible to have all units or groups panicked simultaneously – you’ll always have at least one to control.
- We changed the “aggressive icon” from rocks to a red circle icon
- The defensive icon has also changed to a blue circle icon too.
- We have removed a bug which sometimes showed cooldowns as still active on weapons even if you were not aggressive.
Difficulty rebalance
All difficulty levels
- Police controlled by the player - police units now try to get the selected (by the player) point for 10 seconds + x seconds depending on leader discipline.
- They won’t flee every time they are subjected to rocks or other rebel actions.
- Input and actions depending by psychological parameters (i.e. fear) are well separated; so, it is easier (under our dev-point of view) to manage them.
- Damage is halved in single player (compared to previous version) in “too easy” difficulty; this is a bit less in “challenging” difficulty.
- Police units now recover from “fear” more quickly.
Too easy difficulty level
Rebels controlled by the player:
- When moving have a stronger push.
- When idle have greater resistance to police units.
- Have more resistance while they are pushing of more than one police unit.
- Ignore panic.
Rebels controlled by AI:
- Don’t use barricades.
- Can’t ignore police repulsion in conditions when normally they’d be immune.
Police controlled by the player:
- Ignore panic.
- When a police officer is on fire (i.e. after been hit by a Molotov), his unit won’t retire.
Normal difficulty level
- In single player, teams won’t get panicked while they are selected. But you still can’t select a unit/group that is panicked or running away.
- When a police officer gets hit with a Molotov, the unit won’t automatically become panicked but gets large reduction in morale.
EASTER EGG
By unlocking all levels, you can now unlock INTIFADA level (CGA 4 colours)
Taking place in the first intifada, your goal (as an israeli soldier) is to stop the rioting (avoiding unnecessary casualties) and to stay alive.
Click on the floppy disk in the custom menu, and you’ll play INTIFADA level!
Patch 0.97 (05th January 2018)
Features
- "Like" points where you take a picture with camera (rebels)
- Money earned is shown when you take a picture as journalist (in journalist mode)
- M16 authomatic rifle: easter egg! You will find it in the police item list when you'll have unlocked doing this and that... guess it!
Balance
- Flags now have less weight in total people count
- adding items to units or groups influences the total number of people expected (if you add as police, you will have more rioters; if you add items as rioters, you'll have less rioters)
- overally improved police courage... hope that now they're not too much brave!
Fixes
- Pozo Soton fixed: now all police units have more than only one member, rifles cooldown time is 1/2. And we add grenades. (In the next weeks, we'll cut completely the initial cooldown on rifles, but now it would modify too much things, so we need to do it structurally). Please note that the level is still hard!
- Battle of the Camel: fixed. Now police is not so easy to unsaddle.
- a crash fixed
- updated compression for graphical atlas, so loading times are a bit shorter. (sometimes, still some ghosts on the screen if you begin playing when still graphics is not totally loaded - we'll fix it soon)
- loadout menu problem solved
- total count of rebel groups: it happened that sometimes you have on screen a group less then how many expected.
Patch 0.96 (13th December 2017)
- Function keys now directly select groups - press the corresponding F-Key to quickly select units.
- New PANIC icons. You will see these exclamation marks if the unit you are controlling panics. The unit icon will grey out and the unit will be unresponsive.
- New UNCONTROLLABLE icon status. A red disc will appear over the unit and the UI icons will turn red.
- Radio. Players will find the radio equipped as an available item automatically in the first level of campaigns when playing as the Police. To use it in later levels it will have to be selected in the load-out menu.
- Megaphone: Players will find the megaphone equipped as an available item automatically in the first level of campaigns when playing as the Police.To use it in later levels it will have to be selected in the load-out menu.
- A green border has been added to the selected unit to make it clearer which unit is being controlled
- The LOG file has been removed. This will remove pauses and stuttering gameplay as the system won't stop to open & write the log file.
- Police now enter a state of panic correctly (previously they only became panicked when being burnt by a Molotov).
- Police now remain controllable when they are attacking (previously, when hitting the crowd, they became uncontrollable).
