Hello everyone - hope you all had a great Christmas and a happy new year. January is now over, so it's time for an update on what we worked on!

Work is continuing on Milestone 5 over on our Experimental branch. This month we released three stability hotfixes for Milestone 5, and we've spent the last three weeks working on a major gameplay update. Our initial plan was to release this a couple of weeks ago, but some of the changes we're making break existing campaigns and we wanted to avoid doing that more than once. We've therefore rolled the changes into one big patch which should be coming out on the Experimental branch in the next few days.

Our goal is to lock down Milestone 5 so the translators can begin work translating all the new text later this month, which will allow us to plan the final public release of Milestone 5.

The first new addition is the alien psionic ability Mind Control, which has been granted to Psyon Officers, Psyon Leaders, and Eternals. This formula takes into account the psionic strength of the alien versus the Bravery and Morale of the defending soldier, with greater distance making the attack easier to defend against. This should make alien Eternals a bit more intimidating than before, as they have very high psi-strength!

As we've experimented with several iterations of Mind Control since our original Kickstarter, for clarity -- the older alien "Mind War" ability has been removed, and the Psyon Mesmerise ability no longer has a chance to Mind Control the attacker on a critical fail. The new Mind Control ability is the only way the aliens can take control of your soldiers.

We've also expanded the Strategic Operations and Supporters systems to address feedback about the choices becoming predictable after a few hours of play. Strategic Operations now become more effective each day they are not used - for example, the Raise Funds operation usually grants $500,000, but this increases by $10,000 for each day the operation is not used (once used, the value resets back to the default value).

Supporters have also been tweaked slightly. Each supporter now has a "protection level" value that controls how expensive it is to interact with them - if they have high protection the cost of recruiting / eliminating them is increased by 30%, whereas if they have low protection then the cost is reduced by 30%. This value changes every 10 days, with supporters having a 50% chance of being in a normal state and 25% each for high / low protection.

The purpose of these changes is to make these systems less static. Instead of just waiting until you have 150 Operations Points so you can recruit a new Supporter, the player might now want to evaluate which Supporters are lightly protected and which Strategic Operations look good value.

Over the past week or two I've been working on the plot-related writing, which has become a bit disjointed since the introduction of the plot-related missions and the Phase system in Milestone 5. We have added several new early-game research projects to ensure that the player is better informed about why the aliens are acting the way they are with regards to the invasion (mostly better explaining the limits within which they are operating), and also who the Cleaners are and why they acting the way they do.

Later in the game, I've added research text to the various projects related to UOO-1 and we've also added little intro conversations to those missions as well. I'm currently working on the research text and intro conversations for Phase 5 and Operation ENDGAME, which are the last remaining placeholder research reports in the game. I'm hoping to have that completed this week.

Finally, we spent a fair bit of time this month fixing some of the balance issues reported by people in the feedback threads we provided, so thanks to anyone who contributed to those whether on Steam, Discord or our official forums. One of the most common pieces of feedback was that the early game (i.e. Phase 1) felt too compressed, so we have extended this by an additional month (up to three months) and moved the Cleaner Base mission forward from early Phase 2 to the end of Phase 1.

We'll be doing another pass on game balance after we release the next beta patch, as it's quite likely that the additions from earlier in the post will affect the balance. Please keep the feedback coming and we'll do our best to improve the gameplay as we finish up Milestone 5 for general release!

That's it for this month - I'll write another update next month!

This update is also only accessible by switching to our Experimental branches (instructions on how to do so here) - although please be aware they have slower load times and worse performance than normal builds due to the extra logging they contain!

I would not recommend starting a new campaign playthrough on this update, as I'll be releasing a more significant balance update later this week that will require starting a new campaign to see the changes. If you're thinking about starting a new playthrough, probably best just to wait for that one!

• Fixed another example of the 90% loading hang / crash bug, again linked to specific jungle maps.
  
• Fixed another example of the AI turn hang, this time related to Symbiotes spawning on tiles with other units.
  
• If you hover over a soldier minitab at the top of the tactical UI, pressing C to crouch will now correctly cause the selected soldier to crouch (not the one you're hovering over).

• Soviet Union region bonus is now a -25% Upkeep reduction (down from -30%)
  
• North America region bonus is now +10 Soldier Starting Experience (up from +5)
  
• Failing a terror site now causes -35 Panic, not -20 Panic

• Wraith cloaking is now inactive by default, and activates if the Wraith takes damage. The defence bonus per tile has increased to 3 per tile (from 1.5 per tile). This should make Wraiths a bit easier to deal with - but more importantly, it should now be possible to distinguish between different ranks of Wraith on the battlefield.
  
• The Cyberdrone weapon is once again a direct-fire weapon rather than an arc weapon, which means it will lose accuracy if fired through smoke. The weapon is also now not capable of performing reaction fire.
  
• All thrown grenades now have -2 tiles of range.
  
• Smoke grenades of all types now generate a substantially larger cloud of smoke.
  
• Fixed Cleaners attacking civilians on the Rescue Soldiers mission.
  
• Added updated movement sounds and attack sounds for the Symbiote.