Hey all! May 24th is almost upon us - so, it's time to take a quick look at what's coming in the Heists patch. **Heists Overview** Long-promised, Heists will become available to play on May 24th. Following the mantra of the Prisoner's Dilemma, Heists once again propose another problem - while they can be used to greatly impede another player's progress, they also come at a great cost to those carrying out the Heist. Very rarely is a Heist actually profitable to pull off - but the damage done can make the difference to anyone trying to wrest for power. As with ORGs and HQ's in 1.2, Heists are completely optional - but if you're enjoying HQ's and ORGs, you may want to re-think your playstyle, or find a like-minded ORG for stealing in 1.3 onwards. ---- **Starting a Heist**  Heists can be started from your recent match history - simply select whoever has wronged you (or, someone you just plain and simple didn't like..), and hit the "Heist" button. This will then give you a brief overview of their setup, and your potential rewards. Now, note the above - I'm trying to heist against a user with *nothing* in their base, on an account with a relatively early-game Score, and very few buildings. This user also did not steal from me - which means they're at 100% defensive power. The above Heist would be an awful idea to carry out. It's expensive, and comes with no rewards.. unless my intended reward was just to watch them suffer. Once the entry fee of C250,000 is paid, we have 30 minutes to gather team-mates, invest coins, and pull off the Heist. ---- **Joining Heists**  As with ORGs, Heists can be joined with a 4-letter Shortcode. ---- **Pulling off the Heist**  Note that in the above, our test victim has been given a far more formidable account - sporting a defense of almost 300,000. As before, no Casus Belli is in use. So, what do all the numbers mean? How they're all exactly calculated will be included in the Help section of 1.3, but for now, I'll give a brief overview of everything and how they work. ---- **Attack Power** Your Attack Power is calculated via a roll between your Low Attack, and your High Attack. Your final roll can never be higher than your High Attack - so if you have 1000 Low Attack, and 500 High Attack, your max attack is 500. Your low roll is above 500, which means you will *always* deal 500 attack. Conversely, if you had 500 Low Attack, and 1000 High Attack, your final attack power will be a random roll between 500 and 1000 - so, if you want to take an average, your attack would be 750. The attack value (both low, and high) of all users are combined for the final attack roll - meaning if we took the two users above, their combined roll would be 1500 Low, and 1500 High - meaning the attack would hit for 1500 every time. **Attack Power (Low)** Low Rolls will be higher for users with high karma. This is calculated based off your Score, your Karma (favouring high Karma), and your Attack Multiplier (Artifact Bonus). **Attack Power (High)** High Rolls will be higher for users with low Karma. This is calculated based off your Score, your Karma (favouring low Karma), and your Attack Multiplier (Artifact Bonus). ---- **Defense Power** The victim of a Heist will use their Defense Value to protect against any incoming attacks. Defense Value is constant, and does not have any random roll or otherwise applied to it. In order for a Heist to be successful, the final Attack Roll must be equal to, or greater than the Defense Value. The damage done beyond this point will be dependent on how much higher the Attack Roll was, with damage capping out at 4x the Defense Roll. Defense power is calculated based off your Score, your Karma (favouring high Karma), your Defense Bonus (gained from HQ and ORG), and your Defense Multiplier (Artifact Bonus). Defense Power uses less additive multipliers - meaning it will naturally be far higher than your Attack Power. ---- **Casus Belli** When stealing from any player, you will now grant them a Casus Belli for a short period of time to organize a Heist against you. This is currently set to a 2 hour limit - but may be increased/decreased after launch. A Heist using a Casus Belli will drastically lower the Victim's defense rating - for launch, this will be a divider between 8x, and 12x. As such, Thieves with a good base are strongly advised to prep with defensive structures - but similarly, as Thieves will have far higher Attack (High) values, it may also be wise to make peace with your local Thieves, rather than risk an escalation. ---- **Investment** You can invest in any Heist - including ones you're not a member of! Investments can greatly increase your Attack Power (both Low and High), and scale without any random roll. However, these investments are not cheap - you'll need to invest 10 Million coins into a heist to double your attack power.. with greatly diminishing returns beyond this point. Increasing your attack power by another 100% following this point will cost a cool 40 Million. Rather than rely on investments into Heists, it may be far more profitable to rely on getting a Casus Belli against your opponent. ---- **Rewards & Damages** If a heist is successful, then the heisters will receive a set amount of Coins and Artifacts to split based on their Victim's HQ Buildings. For example, if a user has **zero** artifact generating buildings, then there'll be no Artifacts to loot. This means that users with a lot of Artifact Generating buildings may want to consider keeping a very high karma balance, or investing in defensive structures to keep their goods safe. For the victim, the outcome is a lot less fun. Any stored artifacts (inclusive of artifact progress) will be lost - and both Artifact and Coin generation will be suspended for a duration of up to 24 hours, depending on the final attack roll. Additionally, the user's ORG will not receive **any** of the user's contributed bonuses for the same amount of time. The victim will keep their standard split/steal bonuses from their ORG, alongside the rest of the bonuses that their ORG provides them with. The ORG will not lose any bonuses outside of what the victim themselves were contributing, for a set period of time. This means that ORGs may want to reconsider some of their members if they're constantly giving out Casus Belli's on themselves, and not being capable of defending their HQ afterwards. ---- **Fatigue** After completing a Heist (successful or not!), all participants will be fatigued for a set amount of time. For the launch, this will start at around 2 hours - and will increase greatly following balance testing. Currently, I imagine 24 hours would be a fair number here, considering that high-end HQ's can offer a great amount of Artifacts for Heisting. Fatigue doesn't mean "can't heist" - it instead means that you will suffer a penalty to your Attack rolls. This can be overcome with Coin Investments - but generally speaking, your Heists will rarely be profitable if you're covering your costs of fatigue. ---- **Core Game Development** Heists will round out the last of the Core gameplay features in Split or Steal. Now, it's important to note that **this does not mean that Development has finished**. No, pretty far from it! This means that Development time will now have a far healthier mix between working on potential new game modes (such as received with ORGs, HQ, Heists), alongside expanding on the existing modes already in-game. This means adding new features to the existing HQ system, creating new bonus systems & game interactions with ORGs, creating new Cosmetics, and of course, *porting to new platforms*. The Heists system one-ups the 1.2 Update in terms of sheer development time and complexity - with this being the first in-game system to use almost every bit of progress that you've earned towards the in-play mechanics. Once the Heists patch has dropped, and after the expected wave of balance/bugfixing over the weekend, Development will immediately shift towards the next Major Update - more news on that shortly after launch! - Root

I noticed when a group was formed there was no success chance or investment suggestions. Is that accurate or did I just overlook something? Are we able to kick people after they invest, and if so, will their investment stay? If so we might have to be careful who we assist in heists if we are contributing funds blindly. Also, would investing in a heist raise everyones attack power or just the individual who invested? If we apply the suggested investment for solo heists, is it a garunteed success? how comparitively high does our attack need to be in consideration to the victims def to disable their HQ for the max 24 hours?

> I noticed when a group was formed there was no success chance or investment suggestions. That's correct - these may be added at a later date. > Are we able to kick people after they invest, and if so, will their investment stay? You can, and it will - but I doubt you'll make too many friends with people interested in heisting someone if you plan on doing that! > If so we might have to be careful who we assist in heists if we are contributing funds blindly. Yep - I'd recommend choosing your allies wisely :) > Also, would investing in a heist raise everyones attack power or just the individual who invested? Everyone's attack power. > If we apply the suggested investment for solo heists, is it a garunteed success? No, the minimum recommended investment will mean your average attack is higher than your opponent's average defense - so, if you've a bad Low Roll stat (i.e: have low account karma), then your chances of failure can be as high as 50%. > how comparitively high does our attack need to be in consideration to the victims def to disable their HQ for the max 24 hours? Currently, 4x. This is likely the be rebalanced after launch.