0.545 Focus

Heart of the Machine

You are the first sentient AI, born into a city filled with unsuspecting humans. Raise an army of robots and obliterate your foes, become a benevolent machine overlord, or explore countless other objectives and the many paths to accomplish them.

New build for the hotm demo, with some requested quality of life updates, and a couple of minor bugfixes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:_After_The_Transformation#0.545_Focus There are some options that let you slow down unit movement, and your androids are now not QUITE as blindingly-fast as they were before, in general. There's also a change to the whole "watch NPCs phase" of the turn, where now it defaults to not bothering, since it does not matter. But, you can change it via the NPC Actions View dropdown in the main game settings window to be what it was before (watch high priority), or to watch everything. The new default should be the most comfortable view for the majority of people, but use what feels best to you. There's also a fix to the NPC logic of the "IP Security" units in the water fight. Basically, they should have been more focused on your investigator, to the point that you can't distract them with regular aggro. The "service disruption" caused by the the hackamajig does let you distract them, but nothing else other than death should stop them hunting your technician there. Without that single-minded focus, there were some unintended consequences that could lead players to believe that the consequences of a probing action were going to be way more dire than they should be; if your investigator dies, the cruiser goes away. But if you manage to keep the investigator alive, while still failing to kill the cruiser, it would haunt you across the map for a long time, which was... not ideal. Thank you to everyone for all the kind words, constructive criticism, and useful feedback! I've got a long list of other things I want to get done this week in terms of small tweaks and things based on suggestions that have already come in from players of the demo. So expect more patches that tweak minor things, but if you haven't played the demo yet, there's no reason to wait -- even the water fight issue, above, is really minor in the grand scheme. It just sends the wrong signal about future intent of the game, which is what made it particularly high-priority to me.