Game Beats
A lethal virus has infected Treasure Island, San Francisco. It is up to Captain Winter, a U.S. Army soldier working with the Center for Epidemic Research and Control (CERC), to stop the mysterious and deadly Pangu Virus from spreading to the mainland. The Cepheus Protocol is an independently developed top-down RTS inspired by XCOM, Company of Heroes, and Parasite Eve.
In Cepheus Protocol, you will make decisions that will force civilians to either rally behind you or attack you outright. How you decide to combat the virus is entirely up to you. You can fire bombs and leave no trace of human life behind or you can try and save everyone at the cost of your squad's safety. The game features a full day and night cycle and will adapt over time to make the Infected more dangerous as the days progress. The Infected will mutate and adapt to the player, creating a challenge at every turn.
You will control fully customizable teams that you will send into the infection zones to do CEDA Missions, help civilians, or just seek out Patient 0. You will lose men if you aren't careful and be forced to train and recruit from your player base. Each solider will be unique to a point with randomly generated traits and skills allowing you to tailor them with specific tactics.
You will have to use all the tools in your arsenal and research the plague to discover its origins. You will use your knowledge to cure it to stop the virus before it causes everything to spiral out of control. You will hunt Patient 0, a unique carrier with special abilities that gets stronger as the days progress. You will be confronting and fighting her over a span of main missions and side objectives riddled across the island.
Our Steam page is live! You can now wishlist us - click on the link below:
Want to be a playtester and help shape our game? Applications are now open!
Are you a content creator or streamer? In preparation of our Early Access release, we've opened up our Keymailer page so that you can request and have the opportunity to get chosen for a key to the game to use on your channel/stream.
What an absolutely amazing month! As some of you know, we released in Early Access on May 15. We've already released a ton of new content (and more on the way), worked closely with players like you to fix bugs and we listened to every piece of feedback that came our way.
Below, you'll find a summary of everything we've worked on this first month. Welcome to Treasure Island!
Tutorial
We will soon be adding a Mission based tutorial based on player feedback (think of it as an alternate start if you will). You can choose to do it or not and will be available in both Recruit and the Directors cut. We will be adding a basic run through of combat, base building, taking zones, and building fortifications.
Engineer Unit
The Engineer unit has now been added in and will now allow you to build Barracks, Walls, CERC building, etc. anywhere on the map as long as you own the zone!
Before, you were only able to do this at your base but we know this was a feature many of you had asked for!
1) Since the Engineer unit is brand new, you might run into more bugs than usual. Please ensure you're reporting these on our Discord here: Discord.gg
2) The Engineer can be bought from the CERC centre.
3) Little Bird to the rescue: In the off chance your whole team has been wiped (except for Cpt Winter of course), and all of your buildings have been destroyed, you will now be able to call in an Engineer anywhere on the map for no cost so that you can rebuild your team. It's not game over till its over!
Two New Guns Being Added
Two new guns are being added: The DP-12 and the Saiga-12! These will be specifically for the Engineer unit to use.
Doctrines
We're going to be introducing Doctrines into the game. This will allow players to play with even more specific play styles and add an additional layer to the strategy. You'll also see that each section has different vehicles that go along with each play style.
Armor Corps
Stryker – Troop carrier, Anti-Tank, 50 Cal and mortar (upgrades).
Apache
Osprey: Large troop transport that can be called in.
Modern hummer: Faster call in vehicle with more armour.
White Phosphorus: (special call-in – enemies burn but don’t die right away – 20-30 secs, fire spreads if burning infected touch, you or other infected).
Mobile Infantry
Javelin rocket: Weapon the units can be upgraded to.
Mini-Gun: Specialized heavy unit that can be called in and will drop in.
Grenade launcher: Weapon upgrade for Assault troopers.
Dog: Combat dog that can come in and be used to divert enemies.
M.U.L.E: Mobile ammo resupply and medical. Will follow units around.
Carpet Bombing (special call-in): Nothing changes as it's similar to the one we currently have in.
Engineering Corps
Mortars: Will be the same as the current mortars in the team except only the Engineer gets the drop in Mortars. Every other Doctrine doesn't get Mortars anymore.
Price Drop 40%: Anything Engineers can build will be at a reduced price. Like walls and defensive structures
Electric Fences: Upgrade for fences. Tier 3 fence level and infected will take a lot of damage when they come in contact with it.
Active Denial System: (mounted on tripod and requires energy. Recharge time and chance to overload system).
AC130 Attack: Special air support call in. Can only be used for close support.
Gas Attack: (special call-in – Spitter immune – Spitter will spread out in a defensive position after a gas attack – gas doesn’t hurt infection pods – gas mask has to be toggled).
Mortars
We have a few changes to the mortars thanks to feedback from players:
#1. Artillery can be manually fired at set locations similar to Wargames or set to automatic (see #3).
#2. Artillery will have a hotkey to switch between all current built ones.
#3. They will be configurable via the ROE of how you want them to go about targeting a location in terms of the safety bias you want to apply to them if they are set to auto fire if your units are close by. I.E They will fire only if they are further away then say 150 feet or if you just don't care you can turn this down to 0 if you decide to cut your losses on a retreat operation.
#4. Where they are about to fire will have a circle radius marker added as kind of a method to warn you of an incoming shell
Factions
There will be 2 factions: Natalie and Pierce's group.
WIP shot of Natalie:
WIP shot of Pierce:
Players can gain or lose reputation (will start at neutral).
Dynamic gameplay: If you go to help Pierce, then Natalie will attack you and vice versa.
Once you leave that neutral zone, it becomes a declaration of war. If you take one of their owned territory, then you're at war with that faction.
Only way to get back on their "good side", is to fight the enemy faction (i.e. Natalie or Pierce).
There will be random bounties for Natalie's people for example and you can find those that have ran away and kill them to gain reputation from her.
For Pierce, you have to save civilians that are in trouble in order to gain reputation from him.
When you play, they'll keep trying to take owned zone (including from Chelsey) at all times.
As this is going on, each faction has an active base. Natalie will be in the old military base and Pierce is in the marina area. If you kill a leader, they're out of the game. Once you kill their leader, their faction won't start deserting their zones till about 20 mins. At the end of 20 minutes, all territories they owned will begin to fall apart and be easier to capture (whether its you, the other faction, or Chelsey). So if a player assassinates the leader, you can wait for them to fall apart and then you can take over. Falling apart meaning their guards and military units will desert their outposts and bases.
Benefit of allying: they can be a retreat point if you're running into trouble in nearby zones. You can also resupply at their zones as well as heal up your units (you just won't get any money from the zones they own they will).
You don't have to kill other factions, but you still have the overall goal of defeating Patient Zero.
Each faction will have 3 attack units: Pierce (Police)-deputies, swat, and sniper units. Natalie (anarchists) that use molotov cocktails and the likes.
WIP shot of Pierce's units:
Away and Defense Teams
We heard you and we know you wanted to have more soldiers and more control!
We will be separating your teams into 4 squads: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.
All of these teams will be considered "Away" teams in that they can go anywhere on the map even if you don't own the areas.
Hotkeys: 1-4 Squad selection 5-9 is Custom groups 0 Select all units in the current active panel.
Here's a first look of what the new UI will look like:
Vehicles
These vehicles will be taking over the current fast travel points. Here are a couple of the vehicles we'll be adding in:
MRZR
Build-able from the CERC trailer, it'll be for early scouting and mobility (your first vehicle you'll get!).
Joint Light Tactical Vehicle
This will be a level up from MRZR that comes with the option to upgrade to have a .50 cal on top of the vehicle. These will be build-able from the Motor Pool.
Little bird
Everyone will be able to use it for insertions and getting your units out of tough situations. Your units will be able to shoot when they're on the side of it. These will be build-able from the Motor Pool.
Ultra Wide Screens
We heard from a few of you Ultra Wide Screen fans and we've been making adjustments to how the game looks. Although we're still testing it, we did release it for you to try so please let us know how it's working on your screen!
Environment Lighting Changes
Big environment light changes are coming! Different things like grass, buildings, vehicles, etc. will now interact differently with light. Lightning has been greatly improved so get those flashlights ready!
Gas Tower
Gas Towers are coming soon! Prepare yourselves! They will randomly pop up and will emit a poisonous gas and will make an area impossible to go into. You will need a gas mask and flamethower to defeat them. You will find these a bit deeper and into parts of the city where Chelsey is more established.
New Enemy: The Worm
If you looked closely, we teased a new giant worm enemy in the Year 1 roadmap and we have another awesome first look! Still a WIP (no textures yet) - what do you think? They will be like Chelsey's artillery unit, they will jump out, and start spitting out their "children" on you.
Auto Open Doors
We've heard your feedback and will be implementing automatic open doors. If someone walks near its radius, then the doors will open automatically. This will be an option that you can turn on and off!
Additional uses for DNA
Syringes, reduction to chance of being infected, and a reduction to how quickly the virus spreads can all be bought with DNA (only way to do so). From the medical post you can build at Control Points (as well as Medical Centre), you will only be able to buy syringes to protect you from the infection. You will have to watch the infection level and you will have to press a button for them to infect it manually when they need it. The other two can only be bought from the medical centre.
WIP of button for the infection chance reduction:
WIP button for increase of the effectiveness of the injection:
WIP of the button for the syringes:
ICYMI: Cepheus Protocol Year 1 Roadmap
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