INCURSION is the new mode: fifteen minutes to get set up, then thirty minutes of EAST infantry squads coming at the colony in waves on LV759, LV976 and LV376, then a ten minute extraction like Anomaly. The EAST are PAVN kit with AK-47s, they fight as squads with a leader, shout to each other in their own language, drill for cover when shot at, shoot at your Huey, and pay $20 a kill. Every kind of dead body gets a hostile crown, the health bar has a tooltip, the revive countdown is a pixel font that goes green yellow red, and zipped body bags don't leave a blood trail any more.
INCURSION
- New game mode INCURSION on LV759, LV976 and LV376. Fifteen minutes of preparation with a PA warning at the three minute mark (attention, enemy forces, defend the civilians), then an air raid siren and thirty minutes of EAST squads arriving in waves from the caves and landing zones and marching on the colony, then a ten minute extraction on the Anomaly schedule. Playable by the server mode command for now and in the vote at the end of an INCURSION round.
- Waves run at 30s, 60s, 120s, 180s, 300s and 360s, three squads each, then from seven minutes a new wave every minute until the phase ends. Nothing spawns within 20 tiles of a living player and a wave never puts a man on top of you or next to you.
- The EAST are the People's Army: PAVN fatigues, Type 4 helmet, Type 5 flak vest, Type 41 load rig, Type 3 combat pack, an AK-47 with a folding stock and a spare magazine. Their 10x24mm drops top up your M41A magazines by the handful but the magazine itself only fits the AK-47. They have Vietnamese names, a few hundred of them.
- The AK-47 has its own gunshot sound suite now instead of borrowing the M41A's, and it's called the AK-47 everywhere instead of the AK-4047.
- Every EAST kill pays $20 into your ID like a xeno kill.
- EAST soldiers are conscripts: half accuracy, wider scatter, half bullet damage. They were killing fifty marines at once in the first public round so this is where it sits for now.
- Grenadier is off the INCURSION loadout list until the EAST have medics of their own.
- No EAST spawn at the south east caves on LV759 any more, thirteen of them were stuck down there with no way out.
EAST infantry
- They fight as squads with a leader. A squad patrols between points, holds, assaults a contact and falls back when it's taken losses, and a squad that's lost men only falls back again when it loses more, then goes back to patrolling instead of standing in one spot barking forever. They never dwell anywhere longer than a second, the force is always doing something.
- They shout. Every bark is voiced in East, male and female voices, and you hear it as well as read it. The language is scrambled unless you speak it: the Executive and the Mercenary are Multilingual and read it straight, everyone else gets one syllable per word.
- Shot at, they drill: hit the deck, crawl to cover, hold prone behind it and fire from there, and get up only when it's calm or the leader moves off. A man on fire runs clear of the flames or rolls in place. They used to hold fire while pinned by doctrine and died without shooting, so now they fire while pinned and twice as often when suppressed.
- Getting hit tells a man exactly where the shooter is and his whole squad assaults that tile. Firing a gun reveals you for a few seconds and an EAST man with line of sight will lock a revealed shooter in the dark out to 24 tiles, past his normal 16 tile sight. Unrevealed you still have to be inside 16. Shot from the layer above, he investigates your column and climbs the ladder to you.
- They carry the rifle one handed on patrol and only wield it when locked on or firing, so they walk at full pace.
- Their rifles carry a sealed rail flashlight that never drains and the men switch it on when their tile is dark and off under lights. A downed man's light goes out, and a looted lit rifle goes dark in your hands too, so a dropped rifle isn't a permanent torch on the floor.
- They shoot at your Huey. Any hull at any altitude within rifle range, nearest threat wins, and the hull soaks it.
- Overkill dismembers them: a shot that takes a limb far past its limit severs it, a head shot that kills takes the head off, and enough damage on a body gibs it, alive or dead.
HUD
- Hostile crown, a red reticle over anyone on the EAST side so you can tell them from marines in the dark.
- HIDE DEAD NPC HUD, on by default in settings, so a field of EAST corpses doesn't wear crowns and health bars. Dead people keep theirs.
- The health bar has a tooltip now, hover it for the band (light, wounded, badly, failing, critical) in the same colour the bar fills with.
- The revive countdown is a pixel font that scales with the camera, tints green yellow red by how long is left and flashes with the ECG crown in the last band. A DNR corpse shows no countdown, the flatline crown is the whole message.
- The overhead block (countdown, bar, crowns) stacks up from a base above the head, two pixels clear of the helmet standing and inside the tile lying down, and there's a pixel between neighbouring crowns so two don't read as one shape.
Death
- Zipped body bags and cryobags leave no blood trail when you drag them, a bleeder inside was dripping on every tile the bag went over. Lockers still drip by design.
- The ghost follow camera glides with a dragged bag instead of stepping a tile at a time.
Vehicles
- Huey damage marks come on a curve now, a few specks early and the holes piling up toward wrecked. The fuel leak starts at level 4, the cabin drip at 5 and the damaged engine clatter at 7, so the first marks come alone and the clatter is the last warning.
Fixes
- A wave on LV376 was drawing a spawn set it couldn't route from and skipping the whole wave twice. It tries every spawn set before giving up.
- A prone shooter at twenty tiles was easier for an EAST man to see than one at ten; a revealed shooter past the sight mask is now seen through the rifleman's own sight.
- Two shooters inside a squad's radius no longer make the squad churn between them every tick.
Server
- east squad <tile> [layer] to <tile> [layer] births a squad and sends it at a tile, east order <patrol|hold|assault|fallback> <tile> [layer] [all|<index>] orders live squads, east squads lists them.
