Beta 9 "Wizardry" Early Prerelease (X5)

Another prerelease! I'd like to say this'll be the last one before Beta 9 finally goes out, but it's still missing the leaderboards which we definitely need to test before release, so I guess there'll have to be one more after this. (X5 was going to be the last, but the dude helping with the leaderboard stuff hasn't been making progress for a while :/)

Anyway, X5 is good, and it's here now :)

Again, this is almost a complete Beta 9, so there are tons of fixes--all the stuff reported in previous months was resolved, and a bunch of other things added to the now longest-ever changelog. You can see the details in the included changelog, the state of which I've also attached for the heck of it. Some highlights:

• Siege tread mechanics, a powerful new tactic compatible with any multi-slot treads
• Some new superweapons
• About 10 new parts
• A couple new encounters
• Rebranded difficulty modes (you'll get the new menu once before startup)
• Adventurer/Explorer modes include quicksaving
• Assaults are more dangerous, and ramp up faster in high/max security
• More stuff I forgot

I'm not yet rolling back the crit changes from X4 which allow you to crit parts off of previously crit-immune targets. The original idea was that this might be OP, but there hasn't been enough feedback to support that possibility, and on the contrary it might not be far from balanced, so it'll stay in for now.

The main impetus behind the assault changes were that more people had started to farm assaults in Access, for example, and that is likely going to be more difficult now. Still more changes could come depending on the results of X5, but Johnson did some good research showing that the waves of assaults in Access were definitely underpowered before.

X5 saves are not compatible with previous releases, so consider first finishing up any in-progress run.

On Steam, Beta 9 X5 is located on the new beta branch "beta9wizardry5," or if you don't have Steam and need the DRM-free version, send me an email at gridsagegames@gmail.com.

For Steam players, remember that if you switch to the new branch to play, and then later switch back to an old/main branch to play again, you may lose some newer Beta 9 meta data that doesn't apply in an older version.