In today's dev diary, we take a first look at the next Early Access update: The Squad Leaders update 1.
As the update is really big, we split the diary into two parts, with the second following next week. As the name of the update suggests, it will include the next batch of 3 completely new SLs; two of them being infantry leaders and one a pilot.
Today, we are looking at all the other changes and improvements that will also be released with that update.
Estimated release date for the “SL Update 1”: Thursday, 25th of June 2026
AI Improvements
One of the biggest topics for us is improving the enemies' AI in the game. While they are working decently well, there are still a lot of instances in which it reacts too passively, avoids players, or misses opportunities to cause damage.
We tried to improve all these aspects, and our main goal was to make the AI more aggressive in general and be more opportunistic and less risk-averse. It should now rate hurting player units a lot higher and will more likely opt for attacking instead of shuffling around or bypassing player units for mission objectives. It should be more aggressive in general from now on.
⚠️ Special Warning: The pirate boarding commandos are now especially aggressive and reckless, handle with care!
Custom Difficulty Options
On game start, you are now presented with a plethora of new difficulty options to tailor the next playthrough exactly to your personal preference and playstyle!
Do you like respeccing SLs? No problem, just increase demotion refunds. Or do you like to start out with more Squad Leaders? We got you! Getting caught in the wrong moment by SL exhaustion? Just disable it. Do you like armor a lot? Just slash armor supply costs and have everybody wear class 6 suits.
There are many more options to explore and play around with.
We highly recommend starting a new campaign to check out all the custom options.
New Alien Wildlife Operation
For this all-new Alien operation, a major colony is under threat from the multi-legged crawlers. Tight roads, alleyways, and large buildings make it hard to effectively use long-range weapons, ordnance, or slow-turning tanks. These maps also help the aliens to hide and find cover among the many obstacles, and find good opportunities to jump unsuspecting or out of position player units.
It comes with a whopping 15 missions to fight through and will hopefully breathe some fresh air into fighting the Waybacks' alien wildlife.
UI: Nested Tooltips
With the new update, you will be able to pin tooltips with the middle mouse button (of course, you can change the controls) and then hover over items to open up the next nested tooltip. These can be stacked on top of each other to quickly go through connected keywords and items.
This is just one UI improvement on our long list, but it will make navigating the game's complex info much faster and easier.
Also, you can now finally examine the skills of accessories like grenades and see their characteristics like damage and armor penetration!
New 3D Weapon Models
As always, new 3D weapon models make their way into the game.
This time, the long-awaited laser rifle, among others!
- M320 SSW SOC
- HM MK7MOD1 - SDMR
- Kruger CTMP 45
- XL1A14 Laser Rifle
Black Market Restocks
Based on player feedback, we added a way to restock or reroll the black market between operations. This, of course, comes at a cost that increases with every use as well:
Signal Jammer:
Tired of getting blown up by Rogue Army ATGM teams? You can now get a signal jammer from the black market and some faction reward lists that remove enemy target designations on your units:
Enemy Army Point Calculation
This is more of an internal topic, but it is still important that we let you know about it, as it took a lot of time and effort on our end. The calculations for enemy army points and how things like mission setups, campaign progress, or strategy assets affected it had to be reworked by us.
The new system now gives us full control while being much easier to understand and predict on every level. This is essential to balancing the game in the long run and helps us developers to even out bumps in the difficulty and game progression.
Due to the rework, we had to change enemy army points for all missions and throughout all campaign progress levels. Although we think it is very close to where it was originally, the new system might create some outliers here and there. Just be patient, we will find and fix them!
Fixes, Improvements, and Balancing
Of course, this update will include lots of bug fixes and other improvements. These will all be listed in the full changelog in the patch release post.
Stay tuned for preview part 2, which is dedicated to the three new characters that will join the fray with the next Early Access update!
Engage, Explore, and Stay Informed
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