Update v0.9.803 - The One About the Missing Patch Notes

Hey Commanders,

Confession time. The last proper patch note I posted was v0.9.714, and we're now on v0.9.803. If you noticed builds landing on Steam with no notes attached, you weren't imagining things. I kept sitting on the changelog, telling myself I'd bundle it all with the Zombies update. That was the wrong call, and a few of you rightfully called it out. So here it is: everything that shipped since v0.9.714, in one big post. Grab a coffee, this one's chunky.

Before the guns, a quick word on where I've been. Since the push towards 1.0 started I've had a streak of bad luck. I wrote about part of it in the v0.9.700 notes, and then in June I suddenly lost my grandma. We were close, and it hit me hard, so I stepped away for a while to mourn and rearm. My back injury is also still in effect, I can't sit upright for more than 2 hours, so these patches got built in whatever windows my spine allowed. I'm not telling you this for sympathy, just so the silence makes sense. The work never stopped, just not at the blazing fast speeds as before

Right. To the guns.

🃏 Cards & Run Modifiers, Tripled

• Run modifiers went from 11 to 39, across Player / Enemy / Mission / Combat / Pacing / Reward categories. Ammo Starved, Solo, No Card Rerolls, Sudden Death, Sprint Mission, Double XP, Dense Waves, you name it. Each one moves your reward multiplier, all localized in 30 languages.
• The upgrade card pool grew from ~28 to ~47 card types: Tactic cards (Anti-Tank, Anti-Air, Chain Reaction...), Squad cards (ally buffs, Veteran, Field Medic, reinforcement drips), Special cards (Critical Strike, Resupply), and Meta cards (Extra Reroll, XP Boost). Artillery joined as a 5th ally type, and 22 new card icons and banners went in so Meta and cursed cards no longer share a generic padlock.
• Level-up now truly freezes the game while you pick. Combat, enemy AI, DoT ticks, the mission timer, everything. No more getting shot mid-decision.
• Reroll can't offer you the exact cards you just rejected, and single-weapon upgrades appear ~3x more often than generic ones, so weapon builds feel like builds again.
• Achievements are no longer disabled by modifiers that make the game HARDER. Playing Solo with Ammo Starved and earning nothing never made sense. Only the cheaty ones (God Mode, Double Damage etc.) block achievements now.
• A few reward multipliers had their sign flipped. Sprint Mission was paying you MORE for a shorter mission, and more weapons somehow meant more reward. Fixed, farm exploit closed.
• Card previews are honest now: they account for your active run modifiers, so a Half Damage run shows the number you'll actually get instead of a fantasy. Same for Last Stand, which used to preview a damage DOWNGRADE. Thanks Vinny1961 for the reports.
• Run modifiers turning themselves off when the run started: fixed. And if you lost your No-Reload setting in an old update, it's been migrated back.

🎯 New: Identify Targets

For those of you who wanted the sim experience: a realistic ROE modifier. Enemies need about a second of reticle lock (or a spotter ally sweep) before their indicator appears, friendly fire is ON, and 5 collateral kills abort the mission. Comes with a Collateral HUD counter, its own radio chatter, and a dedicated amber "Collateral" sortie outcome tracked in your stats. No pressure.

🚀 Weapons & Balance

• Smart targeting for Maverick and JDAM: ripple-fired missiles now each lock the hardest target near your reticle (helis and tanks over infantry) and spread across different victims instead of all piling into one poor APC. Toggleable per weapon. Came straight from a player suggestion.
• Hellfire actually homes now. It flies to your aim point, stopped weaving like a drunk fish, and moves smoothly. Three separate bugs, all gone.
• Penetration finally matters. A pierced hit treats the target as one armor class lighter, so +60% pen turns a small-caliber weapon into a real threat against tanks. It used to add about 11% damage. Yes, really.
• Gatling reworked into a dedicated infantry shredder: base damage more than doubled vs soft targets, but a new small-arms penalty means it no longer melts tanks. Pick your tool.
• Maverick pulled off the throne. It was the answer to everything, so splash and fire rate came down. Hellfire is now the DPS king vs armor, JDAM the per-shot fortress breaker, and 105MM/Hellfire punch through heavy armor the way AP/HEAT should (105MM vs heavy tank is now a one-shot).
• Enemy rifle fire can no longer shred armored vehicles by attrition, yours or theirs. Small arms do zero to heavy armor. RPG infantry(Coming) are the anti-armor threat, as they should be.
• Allied APC autocannons one-shot enemy infantry on direct hits again (a stealth bug had them dealing literally nothing on most hits).
• Burst weapons stopped lying about accuracy: one trigger pull counts as one shot, and anything over 100% (looking at you, "101.59% accuracy" report) is clamped, including old saved stats.

🧠 Your Squad Actually Fights Now

• Allies open fire at their weapon's FULL range the moment they acquire a target, instead of strolling on top of it first.
• Allies holding a position now defend themselves properly: they engage threats in detection range, chase up to a short leash distance, then return to their post. No more statues watching the base burn. This addresses the whole "allies don't shoot / only go to one spot" report cluster.
• Artillery spawn cards now actually spawn artillery. The prefab list was empty, and the radio would confirm a spawn that never happened. I'm sorry.
• Troops deployed from allied APCs finally receive your ally upgrade buffs.
• The "enemies stop for 7 seconds, shuffle forward, stop again" crowd behavior is gone, along with units freezing at spawn, freezing forever inside napalm zones, sliding sideways like they're on ice, and MLRS units "floating and teleporting" over rocks.
• And the big one: a refactor back in March had silently disconnected the difficulty speed ramp, so every ground enemy has been crawling at base speed for months. That's restored, and it also fixes the "enemies completely frozen" reports (slow enemies were clogging the spawn zones into gridlock). Mid and late game enemies actually advance on you now. Consider yourselves warned.
• Wave and convoy enemies were skipping the difficulty and modifier scaling entirely, staying soft on high-modifier runs. They scale properly now, and so do helicopters and drones.

⚡ Performance (Steam Deck Crowd, This Is For You)

• Infantry now come from a unit pool instead of constant create/destroy, and every death effect, explosion, wreck decal and vehicle fire is pooled too.
• Late-game pack: an absolute cap on alive units (difficulty keeps ramping through HP instead of raw numbers), a global per-frame effects budget, and a pile of per-frame cost reductions in pathfinding and unit queries. The 30-minute endless FPS collapse should be dramatically better.
• New Effect Density setting (Low/Medium/High) if you want to trade sparks for frames. Your own bullets, hitmarkers and impacts are never dropped, only the background noise.
• Issuing a move order to a huge army no longer causes a one-frame pathfinding storm stutter.

🕹️ Input & QoL

• Flight stick support: if you own a HOTAS, you can now aim, fire and zoom with it. Fitting, for a gunship game.
• Fixed menus scrolling on their own and fighting your selection when a throttle or stick was plugged in. That one was fun to track down.
• Controller glyphs no longer flicker or show gamepad icons when no controller is connected.
• Prestige got player control: new per-stat toggles in the Armory let you opt individual stats out of the prestige multiplier while keeping your upgrade levels. Your earned peak is always safe.
• Black-Hot thermal joined the vision modes, and vision cycling cooldown dropped from 2s to 0.5s, so flipping through views is snappy now.
• The main menu now transforms per game mode: picking SURVIVAL, CAMPAIGN or ZOMBIES swaps the whole scene look, and it remembers your last pick.
• Survival now correctly starts with your chosen Armory starter weapon. It was always handing you the 30MM and pretending it didn't hear you.
• Modern weapon audio is now the one and only sound set, the legacy toggle is gone. And the survival drone got retired, the AC-130 is the star of the show.
• Endless runs: extracting after the win timer now counts as a proper WIN with achievements, instead of the only "victory" being death.

🌍 Localization

• Repaired ~80 broken strings that rendered as raw escape codes in Russian, Greek, Bulgarian and Ukrainian.
• Fixed English terms getting mangled on Turkish systems (the infamous dotted İ problem).
• Every new feature in this post shipped localized in all 30 languages.

🐛 Bug Blast (the greatest hits)

• The hitmarker that slowly grew until it ate your screen: dead. Both root causes found, one was AoE stacking 20 hitmarkers on one spot, the other a gnarly UI scale bug that only hit 1440p and above. Thanks dacop for the reports and the patience on this one.
• Red lock-on markers sticking to your screen and following your aim: fixed, same family of bugs.
• Infantry vanishing into thin air when armor showed up: fixed.
• Swapping weapons to skip the fire cooldown: patched. Mashing Enter to apply one upgrade five times: also patched. You know who you are.
• JDAM and Napalm locking into an infinite reload loop with Ammo Starved: fixed.
• Follow-up shots aiming at your own previous missile mid-air and falling short: fixed. Your ordnance no longer targets your other ordnance.
• Picking a lower Chain Reaction tier after Legendary no longer SHRINKS your explosion radius.
• Discord Rich Presence claiming you'd been playing for 15,000 hours: as much as I appreciated the flex, fixed. Thanks Vinny1961.
• Display settings no longer sync wrongly between Steam Deck and desktop through Steam Cloud.
• Plus a new save-protection layer: if your save ever fails to load, the game refuses to overwrite the file for that session instead of clobbering it. Your data stays recoverable.

🧟 And Yes, Zombies

The Zombies preview is in the menu, and the systems behind it have been getting constant work all through these patches. I know I said a month, and every time I've given a timeline something really unexpected has happened, so I'm not giving another one. It's still in testing, it's very much alive (well, you know what I mean), and it gets its own full patch note when it lands.

That's the recap. If you read this far, you're a legend. This stretch of patches was powered almost entirely by your Steam and Discord reports, so appreciate all the feedback, keep 'em coming!

All my energy is going into getting this game to 1.0, and what I can say confidently is that we're at least 85% of the way there. More patches are on the way.

Thanks for sticking with me.

See you in the skies,
-- Tolga ⚡