Very intriguing - will try it out now. :)

EDIT: Do you have a more complete changelog, so that we can know what to look out for?

Originally posted by Kasrkin84:

EDIT: Do you have a more complete changelog, so that we can know what to look out for?

Not at the moment, but there should be 5 new buildings in the planetary campaign:

• Triage - Tech station that saves marines from death
  
• Cloaking Field - Tech station that makes your squad invisible
  
• Toxic Bomb - Like Heli-Strike, but leaves a deadly chemical cloud
  
• Radio Pod - Draggable pod that buffs the owner
  
• Hologram Pad - Spawns holodgraphic marines to draw fire

There are also 2 new campaign tweaks:

• Limited Retreat - Prevents retreat "cheese" by making you choose between saving morale or killing hives
  
• Constant Fog of War - Turns on FoW for all the campaign missions

Yeah, I spotted those, I was thinking more in terms of the "Various Bugfixes and Improvements".

Ok, I've been through one Planetary Campaign (Huge, Veteran). Got Triage, Hologram Pad and Toxic Bomb as tech pickups. Played a couple of skirmishes after that (custom, Terminus preset, alternate weapons, no locked techs) to try out all the new kit. Here's my initial thoughts on the new buildings:

Triage: replaces the Reinforcement tech station. Not all that useful in skirmish mode, as your marines will go out of action and take time to respawn either way - this is primarily a morale saving device, and so is useful in planetary campaigns. I'll have to try a few more campaigns with it to really see how it stacks up against other items like healing and teleporters for this purpose though. Unlike other tech stations, placement is very important for this one - you will need to keep recycling and rebuilding it close to your front lines as you advance across a map.

Cloaking Field: replaces the Life Support tech station. I didn't really get a chance to use this. It wasn't availabe in the campaign I played, and in skirmishes it didn't work well with my chosen tactics (Radio Pods FTW!), as while the marines were made invisible the same can't be said for the Radio Pods they were dragging behind them (this would presumably also be a problem with Medical Pods). I can see this being very useful in other situations though - I'll need to try it out some more.

Toxic Bomb: replaces the Chopper Strike tech station. Serves pretty much the same purpose as minefields, although nowhere near as well. It only lasts 60 seconds, you can only have one at a time, it doesn't affect structures and your own marines can't advance through it safely. For the same cost in BP I could place two minefields in front of a hive, permanently and almost completely stopping the flow of aliens, removing carapace, destroying eggs and not harming my marines when they go in for the attack.

Radio Pod: replaces the Medical Pod building. I didn't get this in the campaign, but I fell instantly in love with it during skirmish. Gives a 200% rate of fire buff to any marine who happens to be dragging it along - give this to an expensive marine like a minigunner and get an insane amount of firepower for much cheaper than upgrading two marines (upgrading 1 Rifleman to a Minigunner with a Radio Pod will cost 17 BP, whereas upgrading 2 Riflemen to Minigunners will cost 26 BP). Very vulnerable to Mortars, Spitter Spawn/Guard, Rust and Deadly Barrage though, just the same as Medical Pods, so it's quite likely that you may have to retire them a few mutations into a mission.

Hologram Pad: replaces the Teleporter building. Serves a similar function to the Airdrop ability, in that it provides a distraction for your marines if you can't take afford to take too much damage. Good if you want to save ammo for other abilities, as Airdrop is very expensive. Doesn't actually do any damage against enemies, but is more reliable at what it does, as it operates on a fixed timer rather than relying on the limited health of the allied riflemen. I imagine I'd normally spend the BP on other things as it's not terribly impressive, but at the low, low price of just 4 BP it can be a good choice if you have some leftover BP that you can't spend on other stuff.

Triage: I'm not a big fan. I can spend 6 BP on Triage - or I can spend 6BP on Ammo Supply, use nine ammo to rescue three nearly-dead marines with Teleport, put them exactly where I want them, and not have to wait ten seconds for them to start healing up. In the campaign, or when faced with the Necrophage mutation, it's probably quite useful. I'd still rather have this than Reinforcements, but then, I think Reinforcements sucks.

Cloaking Field: Uh, I think there might be a balance issue here. Two cloaked grenadiers can kill a max level hive before the cloaking wears off. Aside from that, this requires a great deal of micro-management since your cloaked marines won't stop attacking (and breaking their own cloak). The main use of this is obviously the attack-while-cloaked trick, since if you just want to move marines around, you're better off a) teleporting them or b) turning them into Scouts for the duration.

Toxic Bomb: Sixty seconds is an awfully long time to spend without being able to reposition the effect, and there's an irritating gap between the cloudkill fading and the bomb becoming available again, so you can't actually completely defend a flank with this. Make it thirty seconds, make the cloud last for the *full* thirty seconds, and I think you're on to a winner.

As an aside, the cloud is a little too opaque, and I struggle to see what's happening under it.

Radio Pod: I think a 200% fire rate boost for one marine for only 4 BP might be a bit excessive when combined with snipers, grenadiers, or minigunners. The "squad must be over 50% health" requirement is interesting, but in practice, if the squad is below 50% health you'll probably scrap the pod to be able to afford another medic anyway. Personally, I'd rather this be a smaller boost to all marines in range, as long as the guy towing the pod is healthy.

Hologram pod: I LOVE this. Against vile tongues, it's perfect - they grab the hologram and leave the actual marines unmolested. Against bulwarks, guardians, or hives with a full complement of gun towers, it's excellent at drawing fire and allowing your other marines - particularly grenadiers, who love it when the aliens are all attacking something else - to do their jobs. But at the same time, it's not a no-brainer. There are situations where it's useless, such as when the swarm is so thick on the ground that the hologram will never get anywhere.

Originally posted by Self-rescuing Princess:

Triage: I'm not a big fan. I can spend 6 BP on Triage - or I can spend 6BP on Ammo Supply, use nine ammo to rescue three nearly-dead marines with Teleport, put them exactly where I want them, and not have to wait ten seconds for them to start healing up. In the campaign, or when faced with the Necrophage mutation, it's probably quite useful. I'd still rather have this than Reinforcements, but then, I think Reinforcements sucks.

Cloaking Field: Uh, I think there might be a balance issue here. Two cloaked grenadiers can kill a max level hive before the cloaking wears off. Aside from that, this requires a great deal of micro-management since your cloaked marines won't stop attacking (and breaking their own cloak). The main use of this is obviously the attack-while-cloaked trick, since if you just want to move marines around, you're better off a) teleporting them or b) turning them into Scouts for the duration.

Toxic Bomb: Sixty seconds is an awfully long time to spend without being able to reposition the effect, and there's an irritating gap between the cloudkill fading and the bomb becoming available again, so you can't actually completely defend a flank with this. Make it thirty seconds, make the cloud last for the *full* thirty seconds, and I think you're on to a winner.

As an aside, the cloud is a little too opaque, and I struggle to see what's happening under it.

Radio Pod: I think a 200% fire rate boost for one marine for only 4 BP might be a bit excessive when combined with snipers, grenadiers, or minigunners. The "squad must be over 50% health" requirement is interesting, but in practice, if the squad is below 50% health you'll probably scrap the pod to be able to afford another medic anyway. Personally, I'd rather this be a smaller boost to all marines in range, as long as the guy towing the pod is healthy.

Hologram pod: I LOVE this. Against vile tongues, it's perfect - they grab the hologram and leave the actual marines unmolested. Against bulwarks, guardians, or hives with a full complement of gun towers, it's excellent at drawing fire and allowing your other marines - particularly grenadiers, who love it when the aliens are all attacking something else - to do their jobs. But at the same time, it's not a no-brainer. There are situations where it's useless, such as when the swarm is so thick on the ground that the hologram will never get anywhere.

Thanks for your feedback.

You're welcome. I'm going to play a couple more planetary campaigns and focus on the new technologies, to get more experience with them.

Triage makes scouting the strongholds really easy. That's not a problem, though; lots of things make scouting the strongholds easy.

Hey Alex!
First of all, thanks again for showing your continued support for this lovely gem! (And really looking forward to hear see more details about the current secret project!) :D

Some initial thoughts after playing with the new toys:

TRIAGE
- Feels like a simply better version of Teleporter since its so much better to save guards rather than let them die and have a dumb AI replacement (kinda how Guardsmen feel like a straight up upgrade of Shotgunners)

- Suggestion: Have Triage as an actual T2 upgrade for Teleporter (ie you have to invest in a Teleporter first, then another cost to upgrade into Triage) since the ability to auto-save your unit (and your morale) is really huge in Planetary Campaign. I feel this is a better complement as well to Teleporter rather than a forced replacement (eg can have a Teleporter and Triage side-by-side to support the continued flow of attack)


CLOAKING FIELD
- Decent ability that helps with long ranged spitters or sneaking around annoying hives

- Auto-attack does feel abit problematic - maybe only attack when you force-attack?

- Replacing Life Support is a big question mark for me though - not too sure how I feel about that


TOXIC BOMB
- Cool idea but doesn't feel like a solid alternative to Heli-Strike since its cooldown is way too long and your marines can't go through

- Maybe make it so you can toggle between this and standard strike when selecting Heli-Strike?


RADIO POD
- A buff to Minigunner? That's an awesome thing to have, but I also love pairing this with Medic for really cheap swarm grenade

- The health condition is too easy to achieve - perhaps something more challenging like you need the tower's HP to be 70% or less for it to activate so the playstyle is that either you force the guy to go solo / reduce the amount of healing you're using to balance out the offensive capability


HOLOGRAM PAD
- Same problem with Teleporter in that you can't control the AIs but better because you don't have to wait for a dead marine

- Does a surprisingly decent job of drawing fire as long as you place the Pad inteligently

- I like it but I feel this makes Teleporter tech completely obselete


- Definitely needs an upkeep cost to it, and also need to differentiate from Teleporter better if both are to stay in the game


CAMPAIGN TWEAKS
- Limited Retreat fixes a very glaring cheese as you mentioned - very happy retreat now feels like about loss mitigation rather than straight up loss avoidance

- Constant FOW for non-stronghold maps is really awesome - even on maps with just 3 hives it forces you to play carefully. However, it does eliminate the initial 30-sec map review that you'd go through to strategize your plan of attack, which I think is a bit of a bummer. However, since this is a toggle-able option, I think this is fine and lets people choose their poison fairly.


SUMMARY
As you probably noticed, I really feel like with all the extra options above (and from those already in Planetary Campgin), we should actually be able to toggle between the primary and alt options for greater depth/flexibility since otherwise it feels like we lose quite some depth in strategic options by having 'permanent' replacements.

Noticed a bug - sometimes the icon in the 'Team' section at the top of the screen - icons for some of them occassionaly disappear?