INCURSION's EAST squads got a lot smarter this round. They now carry a corpsman who drags the wounded to cover and patches them up, riflemen throw Type 6 grenades and throw yours back, they shoot through windows, across z-levels, at sentry turrets and in the direction they got shot from even when they can't see you, and they run for two minutes after contact. Waves under open sky parachute in. Dead EAST bodies can't be stripped and a gibbed one takes its kit with it, dropped AK-47s get destroyed by stray rounds, and three new round honors count your headshots and EAST kills. Ghosts and spectators understand EAST speech now, and the fire rate got cut hard so a squad isn't a machine-gun wall.
EAST corpsman
- Every EAST squad now spawns with a corpsman, born last with a medic kit and no gun. When a rifleman goes down the corpsman drags him to the nearest full cover, patches him up there and goes back for the next one. Killing the corpsman changes the fight because NPC wounds never heal on their own, so a squad with only wounded men left crawls on slow until a corpsman reaches them.
- He goes prone the moment the squad takes fire and keeps working lying down, standing up again only after a few seconds of calm.
- The corpsman has his own crown above the health bar so you can spot him, and his own voiced lines when he grabs someone, treats them or gets one breathing again.
EAST grenades
- Some riflemen (one or two in every nine) now carry a Type 6 grenade. They throw at a metal cade with someone hiding behind it, at a manned M2, MK19 or sentry, or at a cluster of three or more of you, and they won't throw if the blast would reach themselves or a squadmate.
- Throw a grenade near a carrier and he picks it up and throws it back at you if there's enough fuse left. A cooking fuel cell is left alone.
EAST return fire and sight
- A rifleman shot from a tile he can't see now fires back at that tile for about three seconds, and the whole squad within earshot on the same floor joins in on the shooter's exact tile.
- Riflemen shoot through windows, framed glass and glass airlocks, breaking the pane to reach you. They won't crawl out to shoot through the pane they're using as cover.
- They fire across z-levels at anyone whose muzzle flash gave them away, the same way you can shoot down at them.
- Riflemen shoot active hostile sentry turrets. A switched-off or unpowered turret draws no fire, and a visible person or vehicle outranks the turret unless it's right on top of them.
- A squad withdrawing from a fight now keeps firing while it pulls back instead of running silent.
- NPCs couldn't see prone players who were firing. A shooter who fired in the last few seconds is now seen at standing range from any angle, because a muzzle flash is obvious behind you. A prone player who hasn't fired keeps the old lying reach.
- 292 of the tiles around every NPC were dead ground where it measured sight in a square but masked in a circle, so men got killed without answering. Every sight read uses the one circle now, which also fixes men standing up and freezing under fire.
- An EAST man hit by his own side drops prone in place instead of charging the shooter or calling the squad.
- Prone movers crawling in the light are easier to see; a still prone man or a crawler in the dark is as hard to spot as before.
EAST squads
- After contact the squad runs for 120 seconds, then walks. Prone men still crawl.
- A squadmate killed while the squad waits at its rally shocks it into an assault on the killer's tile.
- Squads lean their next patrol pick toward where anyone saw contact in the last 90 seconds, and spread across rooms rather than all piling into one, after sixty squads stacked up at the LV976 Engineering spawn. LV976 patrols now cover every set including CavesEast, CavesSouth, OldMine, DormitoryMaint, Kitchen, FlightControl and ResearchStation.
- EAST path around places where lots of their men died, the same memory the xenos have, except when retreating to the rally.
- EAST wave births under open sky parachute in over two seconds instead of appearing on the tile. A descending man can't fire but can be shot.
- EAST infantry never freeze out of player range the way zombies do.
- EAST soldiers pry open dead unpowered doors like every other AI, so a squad no longer stands pinned at one.
- Half the riflemen switch their rail light on, the rest stay dark.
- Rifle range came down from 24 to 18 tiles, fire rate halved to one round a second per man, a cap of twenty rounds a second into any one cell, and a squad's shots are spread over the second with jitter instead of nine men firing on nine ticks in a row then going silent.
- A wave that stalled for a minute because its spawn point was buried under corpses and parked squads now widens its spawn ring and re-rolls to another spawn set.
Bodies and loot
- An EAST body can't be stripped, dead or alive. The search row, the strip menu and the strip window don't open on them. Their own death drops are untouched.
- A gibbed EAST soldier loses his worn and stored kit with the body, so overkill stops spamming the floor with items. The rifle he dropped on the way down stays.
- Dropped AK-47s are destroyed by a rifle round out to 13 tiles or a blast within about five, loaded mag included, so the battlefield stops filling with rifle litter. A held rifle is safe and a rifle under its owner's body is shielded until the body is gone.
- Allied fire can no longer dismember or gib your own side, and only bullets and blasts count toward it; melee, falls, fire and crush never do.
Round honors
- Three new honors for INCURSION: Headhunter for the most headshots (at least 100), Body Count for the most EAST kills (at least 150), and Warlord at 500 EAST kills, which replaces Body Count.
- EAST kills were showing as zero in the end-of-round kills column, so Apex Predator and Reaper never fired on them. They count now.
Chat
- Ghosts, perma ghosts and spectators read EAST speech unscrambled.
- NPC speech is its own chat kind, NPC. It shows in the LOG tab by default and no longer clutters TALK; you can toggle it per tab in chat settings.
- A rifleman calling a bearing said one direction and the text showed another if he stepped on the same tick. They match now.
Fixes
- A pile of EAST soldiers and dropped lit rifles on a few tiles blew the scene out to white and the frame to 29 ms. Identical lights on one tile now draw once; a carried rifle light beats a dropped one and two men aiming different ways both keep their beams.
- The DNR crown is a line broken in the middle with a slash through it, so it reads as severed.
- A second prep-phase announcement at 500 seconds tells everyone enemy forces are incursion-bound and to defend the civilians.
- Adversity spawn counts in INCURSION were reduced.
