Merry MerX-mas, Commanders!
Although our squad was struck by Covid, we still managed to finish the latest update for Survivor Mercs for the holiday season.
Conduit decorated your bunker and your Commander clones dress up for the season. Even M.E.G.A. Corp. is feeling festive!
But you aren't here just for the joy but the loot! We dug through your feedback and tried to get you all the nice things from your wishlist.
Your scientists improved the neural interfaces of your clones, resulting in an improved system to pick upgrades for your squad. Now you'll immediately get various upgrades with every level-up during battle and improve your Mercs & equipment between the battle stages.
Conduit has been busy enhancing the navigation computer on her Choppa. Your Operations now offer more interesting paths - never let the enemy know where you strike next.
She was also tinkering with the scanner unit, revealing new Encounter stages on the map, alongside more intel on which types of objectives and rewards you can expect in each stage.
Meanwhile, M.E.G.A. Corp. deployed new Elite units to the battlefield. These massive enemies replace the previous generation but don't seem to have a whole lot of new tricks up their sleeves apart from looking more scary. But you shouldn't be too confident that these machines won't receive some armament upgrades in the future.
Your Mercs are already preparing for this: they re-classified your equipment and trained to utilize it more effectively, coming up with new ways to work together to slay robo-trash even faster!
This update comes with a whole lot of adjustments to how various systems interlock. Read on for all the details since you may need to rethink some strategies if you're a veteran.
⚠ SAVEGAME NOTICE ⚠
Savegame Reset: OPTIONAL - NOT REQUIRED
This update adds some new content and adjusts a few unlock requirements and dialogues. If you continue playing with your existing savegame, you are potentially not experiencing all of the new content.
We offer you to reset your savegame in the Settings menu.
By doing so, you will start fresh and a backup of your last savegame is created in your local game folder.
You can find a guide on how to restore savegames from older game versions here:
How to access & restore savegame backups (Steam Forums)
Time for the detailed breakdown of Update 0.9.14 "Merry MerX-mas":
Improved In-run Progression
Upgrades during battles are back!
When you level-up with your Commander, you'll automatically and immediately get to choose your next upgrade. The upgrades are separated, though.
During battle you will only receive Generic Upgrades and Weapon Upgrades. Between each stage, you will upgrade your Mercs and - in the future - your Abilities.
The Merc Upgrades require you to find and collect a new resource - Skill Points.
You can find these in Supply Drops or loot them off of mini-bosses. Supply Drops also no longer hold Powerups like the Minefield, Doomsday Ray, or Banananades. These "combat powerups" are now found at Weapon Crates.
Gear is no longer rewarded from Beacons and can no longer be upgraded. Instead, Gear is now a special reward for completing mission goals in certain stages. In return, you no longer have to purchase Gear in the Armory - instead it unlocks automatically once you fulfill the conditions. Your Commander clones have 5 Gear slots by default, some Traits may change this number.
All of these changes are part of a bigger overhaul for what we call "Synergies 2.0" and "Weapon System 2.0". The balancing has some rough edges and not every item or upgrade is synergizing as nicely as we would like it to do. We still hope you'll enjoy this iteration and provide feedback to us so we can improve it!
Improved Map & Ops Structure
The last update, Pathfinder (0.9.13), introduced the new Maps & Ops structure with stages instead of one continuous run.
This update iterates on this system, increasing variety and tactical choice.
A new stage type is available, Encounter. It offers a tougher challenge against certain types of enemies for a better reward than the normal Time Attack stages.
Regular stages now offer a Reward Objective that drops once you accomplish the mission goal for that stage:
- Time Attack & Encounter - survive for a certain time to get a Supply Drop containing the new Skill Points
- Onslaught - reach the kill threshold to get a Gear Crate with a selection of Gear in different rarities
You no longer have to sacrifice a Merc for Gear at a Beacon, or spend valuable level-ups on them. Instead, Gear now serves as a reward to potentially super-charge your current squad build, or provide some additional utility.
In turn, Skill Points are an extremely valuable resource to unleash your Mercs' full potential. You're challenged to pick your route on the map to go for the items you want, potentially making some sacrifices or tough decisions along the way.
In order to support you in planning out your route, you'll get additional info for each stage about the objective types and potential rewards you can get there. There's a tiny element of randomness to how much of each reward you may get, but in general the intel is reliable.
We want to further add to the variety and choices you can make during operations. Our goal is to give you more control over planning and executing your squad build while introducing some unknowns in the map you need to explore and react to, making every run feel unique and interesting.
New Synergies
The Mercs and some of your weapons offer some new options to dynamically scale their stats with the Generic Upgrades. Most Mercs, Gear, Weapons, and Abilities were re-classified to work with these new synergy stats.
Each Commander comes with 3 new types of base stats that can be adjusted via clone Traits or upgraded during battle with Generic Upgrades:
- Weapon Proficiency - your different proficiencies with certain weapon types, e.g. guns, melee, or beam weapons, will directly influence the damage and performance of various Mercs. Companions and Aura weapons are currently categorized into Auxiliary Weapons.
- Combat Prowess - your skill in close-quarters or long-range combat will influence some Mercs.
- Tech Bias - Gear, Weapons and Mercs, are classified as either high-tech or low-tech equipment that may benefit from your Commander's bias towards these tech grades.
The Merc Upgrade Trees have been more streamlined, offering more distinct choices with unique scaling modifiers. Mercs still get progressively better with every upgrade, but only by combining them with your Generic Upgrades, Weapons, and Gear you're unleashing their full potential.
With the "Synergies 2.0" and "Weapons System 2.0" the Mercs will see more impactful changes. This is just a first iteration as part of the improved in-run progression. We are working on making your Commander Weapons scale more with other parameters, and we're looking to introduce more and different base stats with clearly defined influence on certain parameters.
Massive Mini-Bosses
Mini-Bosses were long meant to be more epic fights, breaking up the horde slaying to temporarily fight one special enemy in preparation for the final boss fight.
In this update, the mini-bosses transformed into more massive war machines, providing an outlook on what's to come. They use mostly their existing attack patterns but the new sizes already change the encounter to have more oomph.
The mini-bosses will receive further updates in the future to stand out even more as a fun, interesting challenge. We are also testing some new enemies which are scheduled for the next update(s) as parts of new stages and new maps.
UI Overhaul Pt. 1.5
The UI is still improving and this update brings mostly more under-the-hood improvements to power the full UI Overhaul 2.0.
Stage Rewards Objectives and the Extraction Point are now shown with a short animation to direct your attention towards them, hopefully preventing you from losing track of time until the barrage is wiping you out because you're hunting for this one last objective.
Some popups received a facelift and the navigation should behave more smoothly, particularly preventing "ghost frames" from becoming visible during menu transitions. The next stage in this ongoing work in progress is more transition animations and more polished in-run and in-bunker interfaces.
You can toggle the new "auto-levelup" feature on and off in the Settings, more options will follow soon to adjust the game and controls to your liking.
More Additions, Fixes, Adjustments, Improvements & Details
- Added various new "base stats" from which most Mercs derive their individual stats.
- Adjusted various Traits to modify the new "base stats".
- Fixed various issues with wrong or misleading stats being shown in the popups for level-ups or recruiting new Gear & Mercs.
- Elite Operations are now unlocked individually for each Map once you defeat the Boss in a Standard Op in preparation for new, upcoming operation difficulties.
- Objectives spawn slightly more randomized but still in a pattern that is semi-predictable depending on the type of stage you have selected.
- Simplified some Merc skill trees to remove unpopular choices & specializations and make it easier to plan ahead.
- Removed most attack speed upgrades from Merc skill trees. Instead 2 new Generic Upgrades to modify RoF for Mercs and Commander Weapons based on their tech grade are available.
- Gear automatically unlocks without requiring a purchase. In turn, some room upgrade costs were increased to align with the new progression allowing you to save more loot by retreating from Ops.
- Some generic upgrades, e.g. "typed damage", are unlocked after building certain rooms like the Weapons Lab.
- Carry Capacity is no longer shown per Merc. This system will be overhauled in an upcoming update and is currently less important, but you can still see the Carry Capacity in your overall stats list in the Pause Menu.
- Updated the font atlas to display all glyphs for all languages.
- Texts in Dialogues now appear with an animation.
- Various description boxes and text blocks now scroll automatically if they would be cut off due to overflow.
- Fixed an issue where Mercs or enemies would teleport around the map.
- Fixed an issue with certain audio files not adjusting their volume according to your settings.
- Reduced the difficulty for the "Bootcamp" tutorial operation and the GLXY Std Op.
- Fixed an issue where buttons could trigger twice, causing input lags or potential crashes.
- Beacon objectives now spawn Skill Points instead of regular XP as "fallback loot" when your squad is already full.
- Fixed an issue where your Commander was rendered with other game elements in the end-of-run screen.
- Fixed an issue where certain VFX were abruptly stopping when capturing an objective, but objective "decorations" stay around for a bit longer (to be fixed soon).
- Luck makes "rare" and "legendary" upgrades appear more reliably.
- Various UI icons were updated to improve readability (more to come in UI Overhaul 2.0).
- Pickup sizes were slightly adjusted to make important pickups more visible in the action.
- Fixed an instance of environmental obstacles in the Fraxxoil map not showing up correctly (partially invisible).
- Added new Weapon Crate objective, removing powerups from Supply Drops.
- Added a 2nd timer to the HUD indicating the "win condition" for Time Attack stages.
Known Issues
- You cannot quit the current operation and resume from your last stage. Instead your operation will be aborted. We are working on a fix for this with high priority.
- The new auto-levelup feature may sometimes interrupt the "pause" just before dialogues, forcing the game to continue in the background. Please disable "auto-levelup" in the Settings until we have a fix for this.
- Auto-Levelups may still be triggered right when you die, causing you to pick some upgrades even though your Commander is already KIA. Please disable "auto-levelup" in the Settings until we have a fix for this.
- Some synergies and stats are hard to comprehend since various tooltips, hints, and UI elements are not present yet. This will be improved in the next update(s) to make it as transparent as possible how stats & attributes are interacting.
- The game's performance can potentially degrade heavily when playing at very high screen resolutions (UHD+), please lower the resolution to a maximum of 1440p if you encounter this. We are still trying to find the root cause of this problem.
- Menus may sometimes scroll erratically when the game falsely selects a UI element at the top or bottom, e.g. in the Bunker menu or the Awards room (anywhere you have scrolling lists). We already identified the root cause within the automatic input device detection and fixed some cases of that, but few occasions remain erratic.
What's Next?
"Merry MerX-mas" marks our 8th major Early Access update for Survivor Mercs.
We are now taking a short winter break over the holidays. In January we want to release the next major update, primarily focusing on the "Synergies 2.0", "Weapon System 2.0" and "UI Overhaul 2.0".
There are a lot of other things in the making, like offering a demo for the game again, hopefully convincing more Commanders to join the fight against M.E.G.A. Corp.
2025 is going to be exciting, so "Follow" the game to be notified when the next Early Access Roadmap Update drops Soon™.
Our plans for these upcoming updates include:
⏩ doubling-down on the new Map & Operations structure to provide even more varied runs, new Objectives, and less random tactical squad-building
⏩ further refinements for UI & HUD to improve readability of the action and immersion in the game, including high-fidelity illustrations for more characters and more nicely animated screens
⏩ more Story Missions framing your battle against M.E.G.A. Corp. goons and highlight the Mercs' personalities
⏩ deeper gameplay and improved replayability by refining squad-builds & synergies and expanding the number of challenges and procedural generators for the maps & operations
⏩ better performance while improving enemy & Merc AI behavior
⏩ settings for input mapping and other accessibility options.
And, of course, we're really close to adding new maps & bosses, enemies, Mercs, and other content along with these features.
Commanders, we are truly grateful for every one of you who supports us with feedback and input during Early Access.
Please don't forget that the game is still under development. All your feedback helps us make a better game and iron out some of the remaining rough edges, imbalance, and bugs!
We hope this update gets you as excited as we are for the future. We are dedicated to listening to you and building Survivor Mercs into an outstanding game. Please, help us grow the community with a positive review and get involved in the development by participating in our community projects, and sharing your feedback, insights, and ideas on our Discord server (or the game's Steam forums).
Let's continue making a great game, together ❤
Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!