Autobattle, staggered portals, beer, health drops, and more!

Lots of big changes out today that make the game much more interesting, challenging, and fun. Major changes highlighted below, but there are many small tweaks and bug fixes as well. The only thing I really want to do after this is a few more weapons and mods, and maybe a new mode (speedrun or horde or something like that), and then I'll feel like this game is done. But I have some ideas for a new game and want to explore that, and free time is low right now. So this will probably be it for a while. Enjoy!

Major changes:

• Autobattle is now a pref instead of a mod, and it defaults to on. It's just too fun. It also now retargets to nearest NPC automatically, and only targets on-screen enemies (was too OP otherwise).
• Portals are now staggered instead of all spawning at once. This makes each wave longer and gives the player more of a chance to be involved in all the fights. This particularly makes a huge difference in early game, where before your mercs would take care of most of the zombies all over the map within 5-10 seconds. Now the shortest early game wave will generally be at least 30 seconds.
• Beer! There's always been an option to heal instead of picking a mod at the end of each wave. This has been replaced by "Beer", which still heals the same (20%), but it also reduces your gun accuracy for 60 seconds. Tradeoffs!
• Health drops - Healing was a semi-major problem before if you didn't get one of the healing mods early on. Now, 10-15% of NPCs (range varies with luck and difficulty) will drop one of four different health packs when they die (see below). This makes healing less dependent on mods, and hence mod heals have been reduced to balance it out.
  • Watermelon / Hot dog - 5% healing
  • Coffee - 2.5% healing, and you get 60 seconds of "trigger happy" so you can shoot faster. Stackable.
    
  • Beer - 10% healing, but your aim is worse for 60 seconds. Stackable. I wanted to make more pickups like this, where there's both a really good and really bad side, but that will need to wait for a future update.
• NPC retargetting - If NPCs are attacked by another NPC closer than their current target, they will now immediately retarget to the closer attacking NPC. Example: sometimes when there's just a few enemies left and you start shooting one but they're already chasing another target that's far away, it would just seem weird that they would ignore you and keep walking towards the other target. So now in that scenario, they will immediately retarget to you (or other attacking NPC).
• Mercs - Player used to start with 12 mercenaries, and how many were alive at the end of each map would be how many you started with the next map. If you needed more mercs, you had to manually recruit them (6 at a time) by choosing that option instead of a mod. But now, you start with 8 mercs, and they reset at the start of each map, and they respawn one per 30 seconds. The reinforcements mod changed as well so it doesn't recruit mercs immediately, but instead increases the base number you start with each map, and reduces the respawn interval. This is mainly to help address late game on harder modes, where often your mercs would die and you'd be all by yourself for the rest of the round.

And some smaller changes I want to highlight as well, mostly mod tweaks:

• New head sprites for scientist and cyborg. Really really happy with these ones compared to the old ones. Honestly the scientist is one of the best starting heroes because he gets lifesteal, but I never played him because he looked boring. Now he looks like Professor Farnsworth, which is hilarious, and hence I almost always play him. Superficial, sure, but there's a reason people pay $20 for skins in online games.
• Difficulty scaling vastly simplified. E.g. on harder difficulty, player used to get less HP, but enemies would also get more HP. Now instead, just enemies get more HP. There was just lots of unnecessary extra things like this that were removed/simplified.
  
• Turrets at level 2+ now have chance to spawn with a minigun or grenade launcher, instead of always having an uzi. The higher your turret level, the higher the chance. They also retarget to nearest NPC automatically.
  
• Splits mod now adds one extra bullet/projectile per level, instead of one extra GROUP of bullets per levels - which was way too OP for weapons that shot more than one bullet by default (shotgun and minigun). Splits used to reduce damage significantly as well, but that was mostly to prevent the weapons that shot groups of bullets already from being insanely OP, so now the damage reduction is much smaller.
• Trigger happy interval reduction now caps at 50% of base interval. Example: The Uzi shoots 15 bullets per second but could go up to 60 (limited just by the 60 frames/second that TIC-80 does). But now the fastest it can go is 30/second (twice as fast = half the interval)
• Elemental bullets are now colored appropriately, and rainbow bullets mod was changed so it boosts damage significantly for bullets that have more than one elemental property.
  
• Big Bertha mod now affects projectiles too (arrows and grenades). Originally I just scaled them up but they looked terrible since they were only like 4x4 pixels, so instead I just drew new icons for the bigger sizes.
• Senior Discount now works similarly to new Reinforcements mod, in terms of reducing golfer respawn interval.
• Healing particle effects.