Phantom Brigade Update 2: Hit and Run

19th January 2021

PATCH HIGHLIGHTS:

  • TRICK OR RETREAT: New Tactical Retreat Zones in most Combat Scenarios.
  • SMASH AND GRAB: The first new type of scenario!
  • DEFECTOR DETECTED: New “Defector” Narrative Event.
  • OUTNUMBERED: New “outnumbered” track variant by Riley Koenig!

Phantom Brigade is in Early Access, which means we are actively updating and adding new content based on our roadmap and your wonderful feedback. We update Phantom Brigade on the third Tuesday of every month. You can expect the next major update on Tuesday, February 16th. See the full patch notes below!

Changes in 0.3.0-b1093

🦾 indicates changes due to community feedback!

Those who fight and run away can live to fight another day!

  • A fight to the death is no longer required – there are now Tactical Retreat Zones in most Combat Scenarios
  • After several turns a retreat zone will appear somewhere along the edge of the map. If things are going south, get into a zone by the end of your turn and that unit will escape from the battle 
    • You must move all your units to the zone to retreat from battle successfully
  • Depending on the Scenario, retreating will yield different results:
    • Elimination: a retreat is a defeat, but you escape with your lives and units intact(ish). Lick your wounds and try again to gain control of the site
    • Smash and Grab: As long as you’ve secured the supplies you came for, a retreat counts as a win for you! Wait for the retreat zone to turn blue and then escape to end the encounter
    • There’s a chance of gaining some supplies even if you don’t gain control of a site, regardless of the type of Scenario

Guerilla Warfare

  • We’re introducing different Scenario types! Up until now, every encounter has been an Elimination Scenario.
  • Our first new scenario: Smash and Grab
    • Certain combat encounters with particularly strong enemies (Convoys, Outposts and Caches) no longer require total elimination of the enemy
    • Move your units into the Loot Zones to secure supplies using your base’s drones and maybe even a part or two and beat a hasty retreat using the Tactical Retreat Zone

Defector Detected

  • New “Defector” Narrative Event – can you rescue the defector before they’re captured by the enemy? There might be something in it for you…

Outnumbered, but not outplanned

  • New “outnumbered” music track variant in combat

New Civilian Map

  • Liberate yet another idyllic village

Community Requested Features

  • 🦾 Repairs are queued automatically after combat
  • 🦾 Repair time scales based on damage done to a unit

Backwards Compatibility Continuity

  • Due to adding scenarios, we’ve had to make changes to the way the overworld handles changes:
    • Any provinces that you previously owned will still belong to you
    • Any provinces that you didn’t own will be reset to 0 hope, and all their sites will be returned to the enemy
  • This will enable you to enjoy new scenarios without having to start a new campaign. We plan on iterating on this system throughout Early Access. Please keep this in mind when saving your game and going from one version to the next.

Experimental Saves – what you need to know

  • Experimental saves now live in their own folder beside Stable saves in `Documents/My Games/Phantom Brigade/`
  • You can load saves from Stable in Experimental, but you can’t load saves from Experimental in Stable. It’s also not possible to load a save from a more recent version in a older version
  • If you are a player on Experimental and you want to move your saves over to Stable after a monthly release, you can copy your files from the `Saves (Experimental)` folder to the regular `Saves` folder and they will then show up. We recommend only doing this when you know Stable has caught up to Experimental (otherwise, you might run into bugs)

Miscellaneous

  • Forts are now called Camps
  • Updated the game credits
  • A fancy new background for your Results screen
  • More bug fixes!
  • More adjustments to balance!

Changes since last experimental build (0.2.2)

  • Barracks have been renamed to Reserves Bases
  • Operations Centers are now Specops Bases
  • Adjustments to loot zones and retreat zones
  • We now automatically reset integrity and barrier health when regenerating the overworld as part of backwards compatibility continuity
  • Updated various scenario descriptions

Fixed issues in 0.3.0-b1093

  • Bug fixes for our new features!
  • Various fixes to text issues and typos
  • Tentative fix to a softlock caused by only having a unit without sufficient equipment to enter combat, and not enough supplies to create a new unit and parts build
  • Fixed an issue where loading a save made on the second step of certain events would double-up the event
  • Fixed cramped areas in certain maps causing pathing issues
  • Fixed melee sword VFX playing on fallback kick melee, adjusted size for knife
  • Various fixes to the “Village Raid” event
  • Fixed an issue where workshop-created gear matches the last liberated province instead of the highest level liberated province
  • Fixed mechs generated from falling back to Felheim matching last liberated province instead of the highest level liberated province

Also, for folks on experimental – 

  • Fixed an issue where all Smash and Grab combat scenarios were being displayed as Elimination
  • Fixed an issue where the player could not engage the Broken Down Convoy once they’ve retreated
  • “Retreated” units can no longer plan actions and do damage while invincible
  • Fixed issues causing an automatic loss on the Defector event
  • Fixed a null reference exception after winning the capital battle
  • Fixed not being able to move the base if the base was in salvage mode prior to world regen

YOU CAN FIND THE FULL LIST OF KNOWN ISSUES HERE.