Please find the patch notes for the game balance changes in the March 4th patch.
This patch rolls out across the base game and is not part of, nor does it require the Blood and Titanium DLC.
Release notes for Blood and Titanium will follow later.
Armor Changes
- Acid damage application now works like poison (the acid damage is subtracted from the armor each turn and then the amount of damage is reduced by 10). This increases the potency of acid by a lot but is still not a one shot mechanic.
- Re-adjusted acid values on different items to match the new damage application.
- Shred on weapons is increased across the board with notable mentions of Assault Rifles having base shred of 1 so that they are no longer ineffective against armor. Grenades will now have 10 Shred up from 3. Shred for the Pandorans is not increased but this change will affect human enemies.
Weapon Rebalancing
- Virophage weapons have big buff on their damage.
- Paralysis weapons of Synedrion have increased paralysis values.
- Melee weapons have their damage buffed by 20 across the board.
- Viral weapons of Anu have their effect buffed by 50%.
- Anu mutation shooting arm has its damage increased by 25%.
Evolution System
- The evolution system progression was advancing too rapidly from tactical battles and less from with time - we are changing this to be weighted more towards the time component making the whole progression a bit smoother.
- We are adding a difficulty component to evolution progression effectively slowing down Pandoran evolution (encountering elite units) for easier difficulties.
ODI
- We have made changes to the ODI to increase the pressure on higher difficulties.
- If the player does nothing to stop the pandorans:
- Easy - The game should end in 6 months ingame
- Normal- The game should end in 5 months ingame
- Hard - The game should end in 4 months ingame
- Very Hard- The game should end in 3 months ingame
Dynamic Difficulty
- Changed the way mission success/fail is evaluated.
- Change the expected outcome in favor of the player.
- These changes mean that the player performance during missions will need to be higher (fewer casualties) for the difficulty to increase.
- Changed the effect of Dynamic Difficulty based on game difficulty (On Easy it will be much more forgiving).
Training and Soldier Progression
- Soldiers will gain fewer Skill Points (SP) when they level up (20 down from 50) but will gain 10 SP for every successful mission.
- This will make soldiers levelled solely with training facility less efficient then battle experienced soldiers.
- Soldiers will continue to receive SP even at max level making maxing out a souldier possible (it will still take a lot of missions to do so).
Pandorans
- Tritons will be able to use Priest weapons (Viral Weapons).
- New acid mortar Chiron body part.
- New normal/elite acid grenade launcher bodypart for Arthrons.
- New normal/elite viral machine gun launcher bodypart for Arthrons.
Phoenix Base Attacks
- You will now have a minimum of 12 hours to prepare and respond to an attack on one of your bases.
Stealth
- Enemies are revealed in 5 tile radius (if they’re in LOS).
- Attacking without a silent weapon reveals the actor if in LOS.
Factions and Missions
- New subfaction - The Forsaken
- Appears after Anu researches the mutation tech .
- Can have all classes Anu have unlocked.
- Can have all weapons Anu have unlocked.
- Missions
- Forsaken can appear in Havens attack missions of all factions.
- Forsaken can appear in scavenging missions and ambushes.
- Anu/NJ/Syn can appear in scavenging and ambush missions if at bad relations with the Phoenix Project and if they Havens close to the site.
- Factions War
- Reduced the rate of attacks.
Controls