HotM: Initial Tester Groups

Reporting Bugs

• Any bugs or requests should go to our mantis bugtracker
  • If you need to submit log files, those can generally be found under your PlayerData/Logs folder in the folder your game is installed in. The most relevant one is called HeartoftheMachineLog.txt. You can send us the whole thing, or just strip out relevant parts.
  • In rare cases, mainly if your entire game crashes (that almost never happens), we will need your unity player log. That gets overwritten the next time you run the game after a crash, unlike the other log. These can be found here:
    • Windows: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Arcen Games, LLC\Heart of the Machine\Player.log
    • macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log
    • Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log

0.301

(Not Yet Released)

Early Game Adjustments

• First Encounters:
  • These are encounters that are eligible to spawn in the starting tile. Skipped including the details here for spoiler reasons.

• Starting Encounters:
  • So these encounters are different from "first encounters." These will spawn in neighboring tiles, after the player scouts with a lair. These encounters are essentially "Negative Mutators" - if you "fight" the encounter, you are opting to make the game more difficult. The encounters themselves vary in terms of what specific ways the game gets harder, but essentially it will aggro the cohort/faction that initiated the encounter.
  • These won't show up in the game yet since this is just scaffolding while the logic of these are still being set up. The details of them are being skipped from the release notes for spoiler reasons.

• You now start with 0 of every kind of tech tree research type.

• There are now two new internal city story flags: HasSolvedFirstCell and HasSolvedAdjacentCells.
  • These will be used for gating a variety of things.
    • Gates have been added, suppressing UI and encounter spawning as appropriate

• Some more metadata added to encounters, but it's not used just yet.

UI Improvements

• The last of the direct shell company services logic is now in place, at least as an initial version!

• Add in proper view of the difficulty increases in a game, and their effects

• Added details to the lair building tooltip to indicate what benefits a lair provides.

• Found and fixed a number of issues with encounters and their tooltips, tooltips for encounters now display what they do when they succeed
  • And also, you know, actually do those things

Balancing Changes to Tech Tree Second Column

• Split the commercial goods tech in Materials Science from one group of 6 to two techs of 3 each
• MindFarm improvements moved from Philosophy to Computing
• DataGathering improvements moved from Robotics to Computing.
  • These make the affected categories more balanced in terms of the variety of tech benefits available in each one, and also more balanced between categories.
• Paired the commercial Cloaking Tech Production with HumanScaleCloaking, because duh why didn't I just do it that way in the first place.
• Some tech names, descriptions, and icons added.
• Requirements for unlocking the second column in Material Science & Psychology reduced to 2 unlocks instead of 3 due to them having fewer available techs to research than the other categories in the early game. This may be temporary.
• All unwritten tech descriptions everywhere changed from 'TBD' to '.' to avoid confusion per Chris.

Tech Costs Scaling

• Rough tech cost scaling adjustment; later techs in a series escalate somewhat faster, and later columns escalate faster as well. More changes will be made as warranted.
  • Thanks to Mac for utterly breaking the tree to microscopic smithereens within hours.

General Additions

• Added 2 additional citizen sub-cohorts.
  • The Middle Class, such as it is.
  • The "Collaborators": Citizens actively opposing resistance movements by reporting to MegaCorp secret police

• Added Military Troops and Security Forces as two district-level resources that are now tracked, and which grow based on which buildings are in them.
  • We had previously been trying to pull this sort of thing from the regular populace, but that really just doesn't make thematic sense, and also has gameplay issues, both of which were made clear from the first day of testers.

• Using the district resource view, we can now see the details of the forces posted at all of the districts. First glance passes the smell test so far.

• Added the internal CompanyContractsByCategory data for shell company contracts, so we have a place to put that data.

Technical Improvements

• Added a new set of MapEncounterSpot entries that we calculate on game start, or when older saves are loaded that do not have these, which provide a list of safe spots at which encounters can seed away from buildings and away from one another, so that we don't have them clustering in tile centers and overlapping in ways that we can't interact with.

• Systemic encounters now only spawn on the non-building encounter spots, and thus look a lot more correct, are never hidden inside a building, and so on.
  • We'll also be using this for certain other kinds of imminent encounters that are not tied to a specific building.

• There is now a new blocks_encounters_not_specifically_targeting_this_building_tag="true" available on building types which prevent encounters from casually spawning at buildings of those types. Essentially they must be explicitly targeted by things that are meant for them. No more homeless hunting wildlife in underground detainment centers, for example.

Bugfixes

• Fixed issues with all resources, including things like AIP, AI Level, and the machine materials, being wiped on load of a savegame.

• Put in a couple of pieces of logic to prevent some errors that could happen when encounters were missing or malformed when you were trying to dispatch against them.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting.

• Fixed lair provided computing resources being off by a factor of 10.

• Fixed shell company rentals not being saved/loaded.

• Fix to make AI level only add to machine hearts instead of all computing resource types.

• Fixed being able to build infinitely many lairs without consuming machine hearts.

• Fixed some more issues with exceptions after removing a machine lair.
  • Thanks to The Gerbilest for reporting.