Do you ever wonder what life would be like, if instead of blowing up aliens on a forsaken planet you instead connected and worked together with a with a team of highly skilled professionals to break into a super secret base with highly advanced tracking and discovery technology to steal all the intel you can get its hands on?

Keep in mind that there might be some annoying and pesky guards around the corner, super laser beams blocking your way, highly intelligent AI, Big Brother on Overwatch, and locked doors between you and your target. So put together a plan, and some careful movement and deceptive trickery, and you just might be able to survive and escape with your trophy in tow.

This update focuses on new depth for agents in the form of augments while creating greater challenges by forcing the agents to be more careful in their play. Guards are tougher, but you have more options to deal with them.

Augments
A new kind of toy has arrived! As part of our design to make agent progression deep and meaningful, we've created Augments. Augments, like skills, are permanent improvements to your agents and will build your agents into masters of espionage and infiltration.

As well, like items, they can be found and bought in the world. They create an important choice though, as INSTALLING an Augment permanently uses an inventory slot. They provide ways to get boost of speed or multiple actions within a turn allowing your agents to pull off some sweet combos. 

Tier 2 Guards
The corporations decided to protect their more precious items with more skilled personnel. Beyond the corporate special units, tougher guards will show up at the higher levels. Currently, they have more health and higher weapon damage. In the future we will be adding different types of tier 2 guards that present new challenges.

Guard stat balance
In conjunction with the Tier 2 Guards, all guards have had a stat boost. Combat has still been far too accessible a solution to most of the games challenges. We increased the guards health to allow only the best combat units the ability to take them down quickly. 

Guard patrols contained 
Guards have become tougher, but on the other hand, we've continued to provide more ways to make stealth easier. Guards patrol paths are now contained to two points, each point one turn of movement away. When you observe a guard on patrol, you can see his whole story at a glance. Where he is, where he will be, and where he'll be 2 turns from now. You'll be able to make plans that don't involve killing or even KOing guards more securely.

Hide action
Further enhancing the stealth options is a new HIDE action. When standing next to cover, an agent can HIDE behind it. Guards who would normally get cover penalties to hit the agent will not even see your agent, but guards who have cover-less sight to the agent will still be able to see them as normal.

Tutorial
A tutorial has been started to help lower the insane learning curve we've built up. For many of you seasoned players, it will just reveal what you've already sweat blood for, but for a few of you it may have a nugget here or there that you didn't know about because we just hadn't done a good job explaining it yet.

360° Vision
As many of you have discovered, the line of sight on agents is sometimes inconsistent while spending movement points. In addition, double-clicking on each movement had the effect of slowing the whole experience down. Because of this, we've decided to implement 360 degree field of view, and have single-click movement. Guards will continue to have 90 degree vision. The fictional conceit is that our agents are always looking around for danger, and from a design stand point we think it feels a lot better. 

In general we want the games to go faster to improve the iterative play cycle and this certainly helps. (Note: Currently, sound traveling while moving is not implemented in this new method of movement and will be in a later update).

Compass
As a minor improvement we've added a compass indicator on the HUD to help players orient themselves in the world.

Change list notes:

• Augments
• Tier 2 guards
• Guard stat balance
• Guard limited patrol
• hide action
• Tutorial
• 360°[/size] vision
• compass

Hot fixes

12/03/2014 2:00

• tutorial shopping bug
• signup bug
• AI bug