Steam Marines v0.7.8a, 24 April 2019

Hello all.

This is a reasonably large update!

Talents

Steam Marines 2 now has talent trees for each marine class! When marines level up they'll unlock a new tier level of the talent tree and be able to pick one of two newly available talents. Icons are not in yet, but will probably start coming in starting with the next build. Right now choosing a talent is free once a marine has ranked up, but in the future there will likely be an associated cost, credits and/or some other resource.

Since skills are activated abilities, talents are designed primarily to be passives, to either enhance or otherwise alter existing actions marines can take. Specific skill use, attacking, Guarding, opening doors, et cetera can all be affected by talents so that marines can be specialized further. Tooltips should be updated to reflect changes where appropriate.

There wasn't as much tie-in with marine stats (aggression, initiative, et cetera) as I would have liked, and I'm still working on fine tuning talents and how they fit into the entire combat system.

Game Modes

Right now there are four modes: Blitz, Wary, Tactical, Brutal, in order of rough ascending difficulty. These modes change things like starting unit health, armor, action, and attacks, but also shake up the composition of enemy spawns, quantity, how credits are obtained, and other details like that. The mode is selectable at Commander Creation. As of right now you cannot change the mode past the start of the game.

Originally conceived as purely difficulty levels, I've kept the language loose so that in the future I can add in more mechanical changes into additional modes.

Portraits

Out portrait artist, Jen Pattison, is back on the case, so we've added a few more to the marine roster! There are quite a few more coming down the pipe, as well as portraits for enemy units.

v0.7.8a Changelog

• Talent trees for each of the five marine classes.
• Game modes for difficulty options.
• More marine portraits.
• Added a confirmation menu for ordering a ship strafe.
• Changed some planet descriptions to have more consistent language.
• Various performance changes for Mac and Linux and low end Windows machines.
• Various gameplay progression andbalance tweaks due to the new game modes.
• Added an actually helpful "help" command to the developer console; most commands are now exposed to players in release builds.
• Changed Grenadier door opening trigger to +1 Attack for that Grenadier marine only.
• Changed Engineer door opening trigger to +1 Armor to all marines.
• Changed Guard mode to mitigate all incoming damage by 1 and no longer floors at 1 damage.
• Bugfix: Fixed a possible crash in the ship interior when trying to recruit a marine with credits.