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0.25.0 is back again

It's usually possible to "grab" the small, small area between entry boxes and flick up or down from there. Precision work that is, though, and it can be distractingly fiddly.

Suggestion : As it is, it's consequence free to keep cycling mission phase options until you get the option you want. In my current cycle I'm focusing almost exclusively on Technical and Deception, and just respawning options until I get Guard Bypass or Secure Vault. There'd be a sense of risk and decision making if respawning options charged the player's Intel resource again.

The changes to how loot is handled was really well done! I had been ignoring loot for weeks, but it's now another factor I'm having to juggle to keep efficiency up. Is Merchant_2 supposed to be selling a single item of loot?

Feature request : "Declare War" option to automatically run consecutive Intel free territory ops with your gang.

Justification : It's easy, at least with a couple of TP boosts, to quickly get to the point in a cycle where you want to run ~25-40 extremely low risk operations against gangs in preparation to do some community building. That's a lot of clicking around with very little decision making during the process. 

You may be tracking on this, I know accessory mods are new/in development, but two of the three mods are "add tag" and "remove tag". It might just be too subtle for me, but I can't tell what they're doing. I tried miniaturize on an accessory with a tag, but it stayed around. The add tag mod didn't add any tags. Both are eligible for boosting up to higher levels, but the costs don't scale and I didn't notice any changes while leveling them up.

I think Guard Bypass may have an error. As is, there's a Stealth 3 test, followed, if the PC isn't obvious, with a Deception 2 check to blend in. It's punishing not carrying an obvious weapon by making sneaking past guards take roughly twice as long if you're not heavily armed. 

The implication is that being not -obvious should trigger the whistling stroll past security ala Deception instead of the harder sneaking check. A secondary approach, rather than an additional one.

You can see in the screenshot, if you pay careful attention to the spacing, that the optional Deception check is an alternate to the optional Combat check, not to the stealth bit.

Awww, no more -256 noise business suits for me, I guess.

Minor? Trivial? When the gang takes over 100% of the mission pay, and the extra debt would make the player insolvent, the launch button for the mission is disabled. Removing members until there's enough money reactivates the button (so far so good). However, earning the difference in Tasks, fighting or piloting or hacking until the player can afford the extra expense, does NOT reactivate the launch option. 

I'm running my Android phone with the developer options enabled. The filters are standard fare that come with the OS, they're just hidden in a 'secret' sub menu of the phone's settings, under "simulate color space".

It's been a while since I enabled Developer Mode, but I believe the trick is to find the kernel build number in the phone's 'about' menu and press it five times in rapid succession. They hide it behind a button that doesn't look like a button so people don't do it by accident- it'll void warranties, gives you options that will fry the OS, etc.

I played around with some color blindness simulating filters, and Idlepunk still looks amazing in straight up black and white, protoanomoly red/green, and tritanomoly blue/yellow modes of vision. (At least, so far as my software based filters can emulate them.) 

Deuteranomoly, the most common form of red/green colorblindness, is a little rough. The specific green and red most frequently used in the game are almost identical. 

I don't know if that's even a priority, but wanted you to know. I'd include screenshots, but (annoyingly) my screen capture ignores the filter.

Trivial 2 - Because Secure Territory operation names include the enemy force being acted against, the mid-mission Mission header always reads : "MISSION: Secure Territory: (Enemy A) vs (Enemy A)". Which makes it look like they're fighting themselves. "Meat heads vs meat heads" in the pictured example.

I enjoy the mental picture of a street full of Rob Reiners throwing down with each other, but I don't think that was the intent.

Trivial 3 - Same pic. "Bare hands" replaces melee weapons when outside of melee range, but doesn't get replaced when the player gets to melee range (until after an attack with their weapon? I usually win the fight in one blow, but I think that's what happens). So there's one "swing" of combat where they read as being unarmed but actively attacking with their melee weapon of choice.

I've got a few Trivials, but things are looking pretty solid atm!

Trivial 1 - This tutorial hint "(?)" icon doesn't depopulate after being read, permanently taking up tool page space

With one 'idle' action, my plans are swapping between the first two elements now and skipping everything else.

(I have tutor-everything plans put together for idling once I've got a decent amount of cash or income. I'm only seeing the top two getting actuated in practice though.)

I'm at my most creative when the flu has me, but yeah, code doesn't *get* the quasi transcendent qualities of fever induced productivity

The current iteration on the itch page reads 0.25.0. Features seem consistent with a version regression. (Simplified title, tab contents, etc)

Wrong file selected as the play in browser option on the dashboard entry for the game?

Executing a "plan" loadout, the preset sequences of tasks, now fires off the first task (or first two if there are two idle action slots), but no longer advances to consecutive steps in the plan. It's just repeating the initial task(s).

Test Steps : Build a 3+ step plan loadout. (Ex : Train-Tutor-Medical, Train-Tutor-Scare, Pretend to be HR.) Execute the load out. It should increment between tasks whose preconditions exist (enough money, task available, etc) but is instead running the first item (Train Tutor Medical in the example) over and over.

Thank you. I'm back in.

I left during a 2ndary cycling, at the 'distribute your just earned TP' stage. That's a really particular time to save, maybe something about being in that step conflicted with the name selection process? (I don't know from the coding end, but metaphysically "I" am not an actual person at that step, so there's something symbolically pleasing about the issue occuring right there.)

A quick test in the current version had 16 minutes without the buttons working.

I let it go between three and four minutes once, which I figured was due diligence. But I don't remember if that was post 39.4 release, so I'll try again

I am still freezing up as soon as the name select appears.  From the user side, it's functionally identical to the 39.3 update on DDG.

(I am personally willing to start over, which would make me more qualified to opine about the new progression and difficulty curves. If this is save game related, there's a non zero chance it's in nigh indiscoverable black swan event territory.)

I reinstalled DDG in an isolated instance, and launched Idlepunk with no save game or cache, and it works properly under those circumstances.

I swear I am not being intentionally difficult. The 39.3 setup loads the random name, but doesn't do anything when I select any of the options (in DDG). No button hover visual feedback either.

 Opera and Firefox are both working now, though! Progress!

As of 39.2, I have mixed news. Firefox Android browser works as expected! Keyboard pops up, field accepts data, etc etc. DuckDuckGo now locks up as soon as the name entry screen shows, no keyboard, not even accepting the random name button (like it's freezing when it tries to trigger the keyboard).

Wish I had a better report to give. Kicking myself for not backing up my export in the last few days, now.

Edit ; Opera behaves like I reported for DuckDuckGo in 39.1, before. Keyboard populates but does not fill the field.

As of 0.39.1, still a no go for the Android keyboard filling out the name tag.

Note the auto fill populating with data from my attempts to type something in, and the vacant field. Interestingly, hitting the carriage return/enter/downandleft arrow caused the red "Handle must contain" message to populate! So, it's seeing the submit command, at least?

You're REALLY on to something with this game. I'm glad to be able to contribute. 

As of 1608 EST 27APR / 0.39.1, the random name option does work on my phone, the virtual keyboard is triggered but is still not populating the text field on my phone. So, potential downgrade of the issue from Critical to Moderate?

This updates comes with a lock-out for Android-DuckDuckGo browser combinations. The name entry field doesn't populate with the user typed data, so it's impossible to get past that screen.

My phone's auto complete suggestion section is filling in normally, which suggests the text is going ~somewhere~, but it's not visibly entering the name field and the exception catch for leaving the field empty is triggered when I try to advance.

I want to reiterate how much I'm enjoying this game. 

In this update, the use of the 'gang' button to deselect all had become finicky. I found that it wouldn't allow me to unpick everyone if everyone were selected, or if some were deselected, but *would* let me use the gang button to deselect everyone if specific seemingly random combinations of members were pre-deselected. I'll try to find some unifying theme in which need to be inactive/active to allow it. 

Above : Deselect available after stumbling on 'magic' combination.

Deselect not available, despite all mercs being active.

Most combinations of active/inactive mercs leave the gang button in Select All mode, as anticipated.

I'm on the Duckduckgo browser for Android. I'll make an effort to swap over to my desktop when I get close to cycling again in order to test the platform theory.

Accessories are still called Tools in the Furniture section of the store-home tab. "+1 Tool Slot". A little confusing, since the word now refers to a whole different element.

The intel-per-minute community bonus is still active while the clock is paused (ie no tasks are active). I doubt anyone would have the patience to really exploit that, or if doing so would be worth the opportunity costs of, ya know, playing the game, so I'd suggest logging this one as Trivial

When prestiging (at the lowest layer) professional backgrounds can only be bought once. This used to be a stackable purchase, so it's unclear if that's a bug. The phrasing differences between it and Skill Speed upgrades (1 owned vs OWNED, the 'active' buy button vs the greened out one) suggest that stacking should still be possible.

It may just be an issue with the first three gangs you can take territory from in the new system, but it seems like the opposition's Merchant rating is always 1. "Buy Them Off", the slot that challenges merchant skill, just flies by. It takes maybe ten seconds to carve out a new chunk of the micronation.

In Character - Inventory - Accessories, upgrading an accessory doesn't increase the bonus displayed. It appears to be working, the numbers change elsewhere, it just doesn't populate the new values onto this particular screen.

For example, a level 2 Printed Circuitboard appears to be adding +3 to my Hack score during missions, but only displays the +2 on the character-inventory screen/tab. (The hover-tooltip on that page DOES show the increased value, however.) 

Possible bug? Or maybe a balance issue?

When burning Intel to plot out a mission, it's possible as of 36.1 to keep picking the same final Path Slot repeatedly. Picking a non-consecutive Path Slot fills in the next consecutive spot on the list, so the player can "exfil" over and over again to fill in the mandatory number of slots. 

All of which adds up to making it trivial to make "technical" the only stat checked. "Utility Tunnel" entrance followed by N-1 instances of "Leave through the sewers".

Given how valuable scrap and upgrades already are, this makes focusing nearly exclusively on Technical stat development either Nash or Nash-adjacent.

I dig the new title screen.

Feature request : All / None master selector for mercenaries once there are more than three retained. 

Justification : In the extreme late game where money becomes much less valuable than processing combat -assured missions rapidly, or if playing with an Intel Blind play style (sacrificing Schmoozing to focus more on other stats), or while doing community building where merc costs are zero, it's desirable to just haul in everyone. The list populates more than a whole screen on a phone browser, so it's a time consuming non-decision-related bit of UI management to go through them all one by one.

Not a complaint or a bug report, I'm just putting this here so you have another data point on the current balance :

In the late-game for a given cycle, I'm doing something like 1300-2300 damage per 'turn' in melee with the axe, with about 90 seconds of effective stealth remaining by the first time I swing it. Which is to say, combat is a Stamina Delay that I'm trying to avoid, but there's zero concern anymore about actually losing to the punks with silenced purse pistols I'm going up against.

Thank you for looking into it! Your turnaround time is to be admired.

I'm sorry, I know this sort of thing should go on the GitHub, but I don't have my login info with me on my phone.

I've done two lvl 99999 operations successfully without the Become Legend option showing up. Retiring doesn't increase TP either. Did I miss a change in the triggering event or is this a new bug? (I believe 0.27 or thereabouts was the last time I took down Hegemony Etc)

The rapid turnaround on these issues and balancing elements is not going unnoticed.

Thank you. It's a bit difficult at this early stage of the new mission style to tell if I'm doing it wrong or if the game is accidentally balanced in such a way that succeeding in mid stage ~Rep 80 missions is just off the table. The new structure is much more opaque from this side. 

With the removal of tools, the streamlining of almost everything into always-on boosts, Intel/mercenary/network access no longer presented, and the ability to tab out of the mission screen mid-op removed, it seemed clear that I was not supposed to be 'doing anything' once I've pulled the trigger on a mission, and I was losing with lvl 7/8 stats on lvl 5 missions.