Heroes of Science and Fiction - The 'Quick Battle' Update!

Hi everyone! As work on the game continues, we're happy to bring you yet another regular update of Heroes of Science and Fiction! What's included? New features including the quick battle dialog, some new music, more optimizations and quite a few fixes of issues that got reported here on Steam and on our discord.

Features and improvements

• Quick battle window that pops up before a combat encounter (can be disabled in options if you want to play all battles yourself)
• Start-turn dialog in singleplayer can be disabled in options
• Allowed setting escape as a keyboard shortcut (it doesn't cancel the shortcut selection anymore)
• When setting Enter as a keyboard shortcut, it counts both Enter and numpad Enter
• ♫ Custom win and loss music stingers for each race
• ♫ Three new start-of-a-cycle music jingles/stingers (normal cycle, positive, negative)
• ♫ Updated Children of the Source campaign music
• Added stripes to tiles within the areas highlighting a danger zone, changed color to darker orange
• Animated base panels zoom in from the correct positions matching building locations at each base
• Set all new map markers on planets in the skirmish screen to be enabled by default
• Lowered requirements for a few very time-consuming achievements
• Updated checkbox and radio button UI elements so they can be easily distinguished
• Optimization: safer handling of resource memory
• Optimization: significant AI turn time improvements

Fixes

• Fixed feint ability breaking the start of combat when added to fast cast
• Fixed a specific set of actions could cause unit number manipulation: pick an incompatible unit from army A, switch for a unit in army B, switch for another unit in army B, escape
• Fixed units could get picked up in hero card and hero meeting card while moving an item from the inventory & fixed items could get picked up in hero card and hero meeting card while moving a unit
• Fixed largest dialogs not fitting on the screens in Large UI, fixed UI scale not applied after the next game launch
• Added best fit to main cutscene text and limited its height to 400 px so objectives can't extend over difficulty
• Fixed neutral day-night transforming units in slave camps in Fossorian bases ... not transforming
• Fixed skill academy panel had random size when showing that a commander had learned something there already
• Fixed portrait shader for characters "talking over radio" on Linux+AMD (incl. Steam Deck)
• Fixed two instances where exploration move segments could be executed while AI is running
• Implemented neutral army changes from lure/scarecrow in quick battle, fixed these not applied in hazard in tooltips, fixed equipping or unequipping these items not causing hazard to be recalculated
• Fixed map editor erroring out because of missing autosaves folder if you start the game for the first time, go directly to editor and try to playtest or exit
• Fixed position of limited range icon in small unit tooltip panel used for unit icons next to building in the building catalog
• Fix AI can sometimes trigger a battle twice
• Sovereign Fleet campaign, mission 2 - False Mother disabled by day one
• Empire campaign, mission 4 - Unreachable Fusion Core UNSS IV - fixed
• Fossorian campaign, mission 3 - added safety step on trigger that removes the objects that can block Muff form the rest of the map
• Small text improvements, fixed a few typos

Hotfix #1 - version 6d600633

• Fixed quick combat would leave defeated commander in a base stuck in the garrisoned slot with no army

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