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Update 1.1.4 is now available for ICBM: Escalation.
Alongside the latest gameplay improvements and fixes included in today's patch, we'd like to address an issue that has recently generated a lot of discussion within the community. Some players reported freezes that were initially believed to be related to the game's DRM implementation. After an extensive investigation, we can now confirm that this was not the case.
Before diving into the details, you can find the full 1.1.4 Patch Notes below.
1.1.4:
Over the past few weeks, we've seen a significant amount of misinformation regarding what has been described as a "new DRM" being introduced into the game. We'd like to officially clarify the situation.
First and foremost, there is no new DRM.
The DRM implementation has remained unchanged since the original ICBM. Nothing was introduced specifically for ICBM: Escalation and nothing has changed in the latest updates.
The system performs a single authentication check when the game starts. It does not continuously monitor the game, it does not require a permanent internet connection and it does not repeatedly communicate with external services while you play.
If you encounter a Steam connection error during startup, it simply means the initial authentication process could not be completed. This may happen because:
The game also does not collect telemetry or gameplay analytics. The only information used during authentication is your Steam authentication ticket, which is validated through Microsoft PlayFab against Steam's servers. Outside of that initial verification, PlayFab is only used for leaderboard updates.
For anyone experiencing startup issues, the exact error can always be found inside the Fatal.txt file.
From the very first diagnostic logs, it became apparent that the issue had nothing to do with DRM. Instead, it appeared to be a rare thread synchronization problem, one of the most difficult categories of bugs to reproduce and debug, especially when it only occurs on a specific machine.
Over multiple rounds of testing and more than a dozen experimental builds, gradually collecting larger diagnostic dumps until the exact source of the freezes was finally identified.
The freezes were actually caused by the AI.
During its planning phase, the AI determines where newly produced army divisions should be deployed by assigning them to military bases. Under normal circumstances, the AI plans roughly 30 to 50 divisions, making this calculation effectively instantaneous.
However, in the affected save file, the AI somehow concluded that it needed to plan more than 70,000 divisions.
Since this particular algorithm scales quadratically, the workload exploded from only a few thousand calculations to roughly 700 million operations, resulting in freezes lasting several seconds, or even much longer.
The obvious question then became:
Why did the AI suddenly believe it needed 70,000 divisions?
Additional diagnostic dumps eventually revealed the answer.
A third-party trainer was modifying the game's memory by continuously increasing the health values of the player's units. While the trainer was configured to provide only a modest health boost, it was unintentionally altering the internal values used by the AI.
Instead of the normal 150 HP, some units eventually reached internal values of 999,999 HP.
From the AI's perspective, these units had become virtually indestructible.
Naturally, it concluded that defeating a single enemy division would require thousands of its own units, causing its planning system to spiral into generating tens of thousands of divisions and overwhelming the planning algorithm.
Importantly, this was not intentional on the player's part. The trainer itself appeared to be modifying memory incorrectly, creating internal values that differed dramatically from those displayed in-game.
Update 1.1.4 introduces a permanent safeguard against this scenario.
The AI now ignores clearly invalid or abnormal HP values when evaluating enemy strength, and an additional hard cap has been introduced to prevent the AI from ever planning absurd numbers of divisions, even if future mods or trainers unexpectedly modify game data.
This not only resolves the reported freezing issue but also makes the AI considerably more robust against corrupted game states.
We would like to extend a sincere thank you to Vinland Is Art for the incredible amount of time spent helping us investigate this issue.
Without the logs, crash dumps and countless rounds of testing, identifying a bug this specific would have been virtually impossible.
Finally, we'd like to ask everyone experiencing crashes, freezes or unexpected behaviour to please send us your Fatal.txt, crash dumps and log files located in:
Documents > My Games > ICBM-Escalation
These reports are invaluable. The more information we receive, the faster we're able to identify, reproduce and resolve issues for everyone
